Hello. I'm Maruxa's father. My name is Antonio. Before anything, let me tell you something about the place we are originally from. So, for for example, I could tell you that Galicia is one of the 17 Autonomous Regions of Spain. This status was granted in 1978, after the rule of Franco (who won the Spanish Civil War and ruled from 1939 until 1975 when he died) There are three of these regions which are also considered to be 'historical communities', so they have a special status, and so do their languages, which are not the same as Spanish. Galicia is one of these, the Basque country is another, and Catalonian is the other.

The city of Santiago de Compostela is the capital of Galicia, and has been a place pilgrims have come to from around Europe for centuries. I guess this has made it multicultural in a way for a long time. Like most Galicians, we have relatives in South and Central America, in our case in Cuba and Argentina. Maruxa has met her cousins from Argentina in person; the ones from Cuba she only knows via photos and letters.

Both my wife's parents and me are what you'd call working class. We don't have lots of money. My parents were farmers, and a farmer in Galicia has little in common with farmers in other parts of Spain or other countries. Since the land is fertile it's been divided up over the years into smaller and smaller pieces (the system is called 'minifundismo'). In the past you could make a living from these, or a least feed a family, but now we have to compete with other farmers. These days people tend to try to combine pieces of land to be able to compete better, so we have lots of co-operatives (for wine, vegetables, seafood).

I'm a car mechanic and I work in a car repair shop. My wife (Eva) comes from a fishing background. She takes care of Maruxa and his brother Breixo. She earns a bit from doing some sewing now and then, and we have a small piece of land where we plant potatoes, lettuces and tomatoes. Maruxa and Breixo do their bit by eating the vegetables. No, no, that's not fair. In Spring Maruxa and Breixo really help by visiting the land practically every day to see whether the strawberries are ready or not. My wife and I tell them they'll get ripe sooner if they're not being watched all the time, but they go all the same.