When I was six and my sister was four, our parents, on holiday in Andalusia, bought us postcards of flamenco dancers. Mine had a yellow dress, and came wearing a real skirt made of lace-edged satin that you could lift up to see the printed version underneath—a talisman of exotic femininity, to the mind of a six-year old boy. When the journalist and filmmaker Ana González was growing up near Madrid, in the nineteen-nineties, flamenco seemed both ubiquitous and retrograde. For González, this exuberant style of dance and music, which emerged in southern Spain, represented a cloying brand of nationalism. “I used to reject the conventional flamenco story, because I associated it with a very conservative tradition,” she said. {Article continues here}