"I always thought I would do better than my parents," she says. "But now that seems like an impossible dream."

Lorena Dominguez, 23, is a former automobile worker who lost her job when the local Peugeot-Citroen car plant shut down in her home town of Vigo, Spain.

Not long ago, Lorena Dominguez looked forward to the future. She had a well-paid job at the Citroën automobile factory in Vigo, the town in northern Spain where she had grown up.

She had recently moved in with her boyfriend Oscar, and had put her own apartment on the market.

Then came la crisis. Domínguez first began to feel the effects of the recession when she was unable to sell her apartment, despite lowering the price several times.

Right before Christmas, Citroën let go 3,000 workers — 90% of them below the age of 35 —

Since then, she's had to rely on her parents to make her mortgage. "I always thought I would do better than my parents," she says. "But now that seems like an impossible dream."

Call it Generation Disappointment. As the recession tightens across Europe, the young are hurting disproportionately. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Spain where unemployment in the general population runs to more than 17% and one in three people younger than 25 is out of work.

Many have no frame of reference for what is happening; they grew up with two decades of strong economic growth and the optimistic assumption that they would be better off than their parents, just as their parents did better than the generation before them.

The realization that Nikes, Wiis and cell phones are not their birthright comes as a hard lesson.With credit tight, young Spaniards are finding it virtually impossible to buy their own homes.

Many have been forced to move back in with their parents or put off plans to move out. "A whole generation is having its ambitions thwarted," says Daniel Lostao, president of the Youth Council of Spain.

Until recently, Spain was one of the European Union's great success stories. In 1992, Spain's per capita GDP was 70% of the E.U. average; by 2006 it was 90% of that of the 15 pre-2004 members. Growth helped cut unemployment, which had hovered near 20% for decades, to 8.3% in 2007, and drew hundreds of thousands of immigrants to a country that had, in the '50s and '60s, sent its own desperate citizens abroad.
(Read: "Bitter Harvest in Spain's Olive Country.")

As the hardships of the Franco dictatorship receded, new generations born under democracy embraced rising expectations, both material (by 2007, 81% of families owned their own home and 21% had a second one)

and professional.

"That was the major social change of the transition," says Cristina Bermejo, director of youth issues for the Workers' Commission, Spain's largest union. "Illiteracy had been a big problem in Spain since the civil war. But in the '70s and '80s, there was a reaction against it. Suddenly everyone, even factory workers, expected their kids to go to university and do better than they had."

Iniciado por Algernon

La imagen de Lorena mirando al futuro.