"Manuel Martínez is an exceptional character with a hectic life in which the "primitive rebel" and the anarchist militant follow one another like the worm and the butterfly in a chrysalis."—Santiago Alba Rico

The life of Manuel Martínez (Madrid, 1951) can be read as the underground history of a whole generation of social misfits; neighborhood youth who faced a repressive machinery that did not stop with the death of the dictator. Its vicissitudes of life can be read as a counter-history of the Spain —of that wild Spain— of the second half of the 20th century, which went from late Francoism to a democracy of consumers.

Manuel will enter the bag as a sausage, as a neighborhood quinqui, as one of the thousands who suffered the application of the Law of Vagrants and Crooks -later on Social Dangerousness-, and he will leave prison converted into an expropriator.

Neither is this another prison book nor is the story of Manuel Martínez the story of a hero (sometimes it is rather that of an anti-hero). It is the narration of life in the Madrid neighborhoods before and during Franco's development, Manuel's imprisonment for a decade and a half in all kinds of confinement institutions and his participation in the Coordinadora de Presos en Lucha (copel).

This testimony is also the story of the mothers who could not care for their children because they worked as inmates, of those women who would become "mothers of prisoners" and who would organize before them to fight for their rights. It is the story of internal migration and breakneck urbanization, of shantytowns and apartment blocks, of hippies and junkies, of "hurry-hurry" life. The story, too, of exile, since Manuel Martínez will have to go to Latin America, where, especially in Brazil, he will experience some of the happiest moments of his life in a small community of escapees from Spain and Portugal.