Spain's Lost Generation Looks Abroad

Ester Artells’s mother told her that if she worked hard she would go a long way. Growing up in Reus in northern Spain, Artells got the message: A good education would give her the career denied her mother in the straitened economy of General Francisco Franco’s regime. Now, Spain is in an economic slump as severe as anything experienced since the earliest days of Franco. Battered by the sovereign debt crisis, the government has cut deep into its spending—so deep that the economy likely will contract 1.3 percent this year.

And Artells? The 35-year-old biologist has had to move north to France for work she couldn’t find at home. “It was clear to me as soon as I finished my thesis I’d be packing my bags,” says Artells, who found a research post at the University of Aix-Marseille after completing her doctorate last year. “For my mother, it’s very difficult. Everything we’ve fought for since the dictatorship is being wrecked.”