An introduction to the memoir of Vivian Gordon (a.k.a. la choferesa) and her pivotal role in Camilo José Cela’s Nuevo viaje a la Alcarria (1986)

This brief essay introduces and provides context for Vivian Gordon’s memoir “Driving don Camilo” published in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 27.3 (2026). Gordon was nicknamed “la choferesa” by Camilo José Cela and the Spanish press in 1985, when she was featured prominently in news outlets covering the story of Cela’s recreation of the journey he took when he was a young man that resulted in his first travelogue, Viaje a la Alcarria, published in 1948; this second viaje occurred forty years later and from the back of a Rolls-Royce instead of on foot. Gordon’s memoir is a rich travel narrative of its own that allows us to get a more complete account of the complexity of not just Cela’s late career, but the great variety of people from all parts of the world whose work and experiences are woven tightly into Spain’s cultural politics in the 1980s.