91: Laura García Lorca

Laura García Lorca grew up between two worlds. She spent her childhood in New York City, and to this day she considers herself to be a New Yorker. But America was always meant to be a temporary home for her parents, an exile from the Franco dictatorship that drove her family out of Spain. So when her family moved back to Madrid in 1967, the 13 year old Laura left her cosmopolitan New York life behind with a few LPs tucked in her suitcase and a lifelong identity crisis ahead.

As she says, over time “things become natural even though they aren’t”.

Laura has dedicated much of her adult life to preserving and honoring the legacy of her uncle, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. He was one of the first victims of the Spanish Civil War. In the mid 1990s Laura moved to Granada, Federico’s home town, to run La Huerta de San Vicente, a museum dedicated to Lorca’s work, located in his family home in the center of town.

I first met Laura shortly after she moved to Granada to set up the Huerta, and I’ve always found her to be extremely creative and open with her work. Here she talks about her ongoing negotiation between American and Spanish identities, the way exile operates in her life, and what it means to manage a legacy.

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