Spain: Family Matters

Federico Carrasco faces the typical demands of a divorced father of two: what to do with his sons every other weekend; what to tell his own mother when she insists it's time he got remarried; how to explain to his childless partner that, for him, two kids are enough. What makes this 40-year-old different from millions of other hard-working Spanish fathers is that his partner is a man. One issue, at least, appears to be resolved: Carrasco says he and Javier Dorca, his boyfriend of eight years, plan to tie the knot next year under Spain's landmark 2005 gay-marriage legislation. "Javier has always wanted to get married," says the Barcelona hairdresser, who split up with his wife 10 years ago after finally acknowledging — to himself and others — that he's gay. "Emotionally I don't need marriage. But it's my right, so I will exercise it."

Carrasco represents a new twist on what family now means in this once rigidly traditional Catholic land. But gay marriage and adoption rights are only the most recent and controversial changes in a nation that has undergone an epochal shift since sloughing off the stifling certainties of dictatorship a mere generation ago. Under Francisco Franco's Catholic-inspired, military-enforced rule, which lasted until 1975, the Spanish family was the iconic, idealized centerpiece of society. That homogeneous model is now being supplanted by a mosaic of family types. Spanish families are ever more urban and transient, and ever less grounded in faith and marriage. In 1975, 10,895 Spanish children were born out of wedlock; by 2006, it was 137,041. "Spanish family patterns have changed beyond recognition," says María del Mar González, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Seville. "Spain came late to democracy, but we have lost no time catching up."

The effects of this new and evolving family structure are reshaping Spain's economic and social future. In the March 9 elections, Spanish voters will decide whether to give a second term to Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the unlikely revolutionary whose four-year overhaul of social legislation has made Spain a paragon of progressive family law. Popular Party challenger Mariano Rajoy has attempted to tap into what he sees as an underlying distrust of those rapid changes, but even he shies away from addressing them directly because he is aware that his allies in the Catholic Church hierarchy awaken distrust as well.

Both parties recognize that the Spanish family isn't easily harnessed to campaign rhetoric. Like architect Antoni Gaudí's signature Barcelona cathedral, the Sagrada Família — where the spires share space with cranes and scaffolding in a never-ending bid to complete the original 1883 design — the Spanish family is both sacred and a confounding work in progress.

The New and the Old
Certainly, Spain's next generation is less likely than any before to be reared within the traditional family structure. Noelia Posse, 29, says she always wanted to be a parent. But by the time her son Pablo was born two years ago, Posse's live-in boyfriend had already moved out. "We were in love, and decided to have a child. Sometimes things don't work out," says the city councilor in Móstoles, southwest of Madrid. "But I would have had a child even if I'd had to go to a sperm bank. My family is Pablo and me, and I don't feel like I'm missing anything."

José Francisco Romo Adanero, a sociologist at Madrid's Catholic University of San Carlos, would respectfully disagree. He worries that the rush to abandon Spain's established ways undermines its future. "There is a terrible hate for tradition," says Romo. "[Spaniards] today are taught that if you're a person of these times you must renounce the past. It's a big lie."

Gracia Sánchez has always been part of a large family. The oldest of eight siblings, she is now a mother of four, from José Maria, 13, to Quique, 15 months. "We're not standard," she says with a laugh, sitting in her central Madrid living room as her two middle ones, Jacobo, 9, and Gracita, 7, carry in a plate of home-baked cookies. "People at work say, 'There's no way you have four kids!' " Her half-day job as a youth counselor allows her to drop off the kids at school and pick them up, and she recently turned down a chance to become a partner in a start-up company. "I could earn more money but not see my kids as much," says the elegant and easygoing 42 year-old. "Why would I want to do that?"