Friday, March 29

Ana Rosa receives the Madrid medal: “I grew up in Usera, a working-class and hard-working neighborhood, before it was Chinatown”


The Madrid City Council held this Monday the usual ceremony to award the capital’s medals on the occasion of the San Isidro festival. In the ceremony, held in the Galería de Cristales of the Palacio de Cibeles, the Medals of Honor were awarded to the journalist Ana Rosa Quintana, the singer Alaska and, posthumously, to the anarchist Melchor Rodríguez García, known as the red angel.

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“I grew up in Usera, a working-class and hard-working neighborhood before it was Chinatown,” said the journalist from the stage after receiving the award from the mayor, José Luis Martínez Almeida. Quintana has alluded to her Madrid family origins, although she has stated that Madrid “is the home of the whole world.” “A foster family that opens its doors to everyone who comes here, wherever the paths cross”, she has asserted. She has affirmed, in this sense, that it is the “land” of more than fifty workers from her program who “were not born here.”

And, then, he has cited almost a dozen male personalities from the field of culture born elsewhere in Spain but with ties to the capital: “Madrid is the land of a Canarian named Galdós, of a Sevillian named Velázquez, of a Basque called Baroja, a man from La Mancha called Almodóvar, a man from Zaragoza called Goya, a man from Granada called Lorca, a Catalan man called Dalí, an Aragonese man called Buñuel, a man from Jaén called Sabina”. “Madrid is the land of thousands of Spaniards who come here to earn a living and live life because Madrid is all of Spain,” Quintana insisted.

The singer Alaska, for her part, has praised the capital as a place “where no one asks you where you are from, what neighborhood you are from” and has stated that, for her, it has been a “welcoming” city that has allowed her to develop ” as a person and as an artist.

In addition to these distinctions, the Governing Board chaired by José Luis Martínez-Almeida has also decided to award the Medals of Madrid —a title on a smaller scale— to the following names: the sculptor Augusto Ferrer Dalmau, the bullfighter Julián López the julyBlanca Rey, the designer Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada, Antonio Pau, Clemente González Soler and the associations or institutions, Leaders of Villaverde, the Full Inclusion entity, the Cristo de Medinacelli brotherhood and the Casa del Libro bookstore for its centenary.



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