{"id":1054,"date":"2015-06-01T13:39:15","date_gmt":"2015-06-01T11:39:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=1054"},"modified":"2015-06-01T13:39:15","modified_gmt":"2015-06-01T11:39:15","slug":"the-others-and-the-new-ones-examining-migration-in-catalonia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2015\/06\/01\/the-others-and-the-new-ones-examining-migration-in-catalonia\/","title":{"rendered":"THE OTHERS AND THE NEW ONES: EXAMINING MIGRATION (IN CATALONIA) <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Next October we\u2019ll hold in Santiago de Compostela the twentieth, and possibly final, \u2018Culture & Power\u2019 conference. This is a series started in 1995 at my own university, UAB, with the aim of disseminating Cultural Studies in Spain, a much necessary enterprise then as it is still now. This, I know, sounds paradoxical as the series is, as I hint, winding down with two final contradictory messages: Cultural Studies still does not exist in Spain either as a discipline or, much less, a degree, yet at the same time we are strong enough within English Studies in Spain not to need anymore the scaffolding of the \u2018Culture & Power\u2019 seminar to hold us together (many of us have moved onto diverse, more specific branches like post-colonialism, popular fictions, media studies, etc.).<\/p>\n

This new conference will deal with migration and I have finally decided to write about a long-overdue topic in my academic career\u2026 but not as part of it. I am not going to suddenly immerse myself into post-colonial methodologies, nor see how migration fits the many SF novels on colonization. No. I am going to use this excuse for an exploration of my own personal roots as a child of a series of migrant waves to Catalonia. I am using the blog post today, then, to draft the first part of my planned paper, which will deal with the representation of Spanish immigrants in the Museu d\u2019Hist\u00f2ria de Catalunya and the Museu d\u2019Hist\u00f2ria de la Inmigraci\u00f3 de Catalunya. This may not be English Studies at all but, then, without what I have learned from migration to an from Anglophone countries I might not be aware at all about my own identity issues (also as an English Studies specialist\u2026).<\/p>\n

In the course of the recent electoral campaign to elect town council representatives, Esquerra Republicana\u2019s number two, actor Juanjo Puigcorb\u00e9, blundered pathetically when he proposed building a museum devoted to the Spanish migration to Catalonia. The blunder exposed his ignorance of the existence of such museum since 2004\u2026 at the same time it is completely understandable since very few people know that MHIC exists. There are, you can check, no comments on MHIC in TripAdvisor. I myself have never been there, daunted by the long metro trip I need to take for, yes, MHIC is not in Barcelona but in the adjacent town of Sant Adri\u00e0 del Bes\u00f2s, which received many thousands of migrants from all over Spain between the 1950s and 1980s. I have, then, finally found an excuse to visit MHIC and check what is bothering me: that the official Catalan discourse of immigrant integration is burying the memory of Spanish migration under a triumphal discourse focused on the new (1990s onwards) foreign migration. The \u2018new Catalans\u2019 are ousting the \u2018other Catalans\u2019 from public view.<\/p>\n

The \u2018other Catalans\u2019 is an expression famously coined by Paco Candel, the man who explained to \u2018proper\u2019 Catalans from the fringes of the city of Barcelona who the migrants from all over Spain were. His book Els altres catalans<\/em> (1964) was published in the middle of a social phenomenon that peaked, precisely, in the mid-1960s and that brought to Catalan territory more than one million migrants (in 1970 only 62% of the population were Catalan-born\u2026). In 1980 Generalitat\u2019s President Jordi Pujol appropriated Candel\u2019s discourse to proclaim that anyone living and working in Catalonia was a Catalan, a much necessary proclamation to end the insidious discrimination and marginalization I recall from my childhood (I was never called \u2018xarnega\u2019 but other kids of recently arrived parents were). The gigantic waves of Spanish migrants stopped in the 1980s and less than one decade later the new foreign wave started\u2026 which clearly shows there has been no time for Spanish migration to be fully assimilated, and I don\u2019t mean \u2018disappeared into Catalonia,\u2019 I mean \u2018understood,\u2019 even by the protagonists themselves. A number of recent books and a documentary have unearthed a little bit of that past, with attention narrowly focused on the shanty towns built all over Barcelona up to the 1980s. But little else\u2026<\/p>\n

The Museu d\u2019Hist\u00f2ria de Catalunya offers, as I feared, no substantial comment on Spanish migration. I know that for some the label is offensive for, if you consider that Spain is a national territory and you identify migration with moving to foreign lands, then there is no reason to speak of migration at all within Spanish borders. The truth is that there is much need as, most importantly, migration to Catalonia meant coming across another language and a local culture very much fixed on it as an identity marker (clearly much more so today than under Franco\u2019s regime, indeed). Well\u2026 out of the hundreds of linear metres of exhibits that MHC offers, only 5 are devoted to Spanish migration. <\/p>\n

The first metre-long exhibit is occupied by panel 31.j \u2018La Inmigraci\u00f3\u2019 which explains that the first migrants arrived from Pa\u00eds Valenci\u00e0 and Arag\u00f3n to make up for the rural population deficit\u2013it doesn\u2019t say when. The 1920s public works, I\u2019ll add \u2018for the 1929 Universal Exhibition,\u2019 increased the arrival of migrants, mainly from Murcia and Eastern Andaluc\u00eda, each contributing about 80,000 souls (it seems they colonized l\u2019Hospitalet de Llobregat). The next panel, 39, \u2018L\u2019onada inmigrat\u00f2ria\u2019 is a bit longer at two metres but very confusing as it refers to 1936-1980 without examining what happened to the first wave, nor in which ways they settled down. A funny thing I noticed is that even though visitors are told that life was not easy for the newly arrived there is no comment on the fact that Catalan businessmen were responsible for their exploitation. Very cheerfully, the panel concludes that low salaries and poor housing were soon overcome by \u201ceconomic expansion and an open social structure which allowed to prosper. The migrant wave was replaced by a baby-boom.\u201d Deep sigh… now, I wonder how many of these baby-boomers and their descendants are bearing the brunt of the current crisis… still stuck in their neighbourhoods… The MHC also claims that Catalan society welcomed all the migrants, despite its own difficulties to express its own identity and that \u201cSoon the \u2018other Catalans\u2019 identified themselves with the country and contributed to the construction of a \u2018common future\u2019.\u201d Not what I have seen. <\/p>\n

The final segment in the museum, \u2018Catalunya.cat: Un retrat de la Catalunya contempor\u00e0nia 1980-2007\u2019 exhibits a collection of photos showing nicely dressed, smiling people intended to represent current multicultural Catalonia. The places and dates of birth are supposed to show that the 7 millions living here do so in total harmony and content. I will not argue that the tensions are grave, for this is not at all the case\u2013everything considered, Catalonia works well. But what I do not accept is the plainly false statement that according to recent statistics \u201cthe \u2018new Catalans\u2019 have progressively integrated Catalan as their own language at home and the numbers considering it their own language is growing.\u201d Well, I might accept the second part but by no means the first one \u2013do you really think that migrants from Ecuador (the third biggest community) are switching to Catalan?? Come on… The complicated linguistic practices in my own family would occupy several research papers… <\/p>\n

Precisely, I started thinking of these matters when an Ecuadorian friend of mine told me we in Spain are totally homogeneous (I think he meant in comparison to the mixed ethnicity of his homeland, of which he is\u2013handsome\u2013living proof). Not at all!! I exclaimed. Look at my family: I have counted at least 4 migratory waves, my paternal great-great-grandmother in the 1900s, my paternal great-grandmother in the 1910s, my paternal grand-mother in the 1930s, my paternal uncle in the 1970s… and all my mother\u2019s parents in the 1940s, with her, born outside Catalonia, in tow. What I have seen in my family, besides, is a series of conflicts based on, shall we say?, migrant seniority and the matter of how Catalan you are if your mom or dad is from elsewhere. This is the story I am trying to reconstruct now and, believe me, it is not easy.<\/p>\n

Particularly because it is nowhere to be seen, or heard. Not at MHC. I\u2019ll see what MHIC shows me…<\/p>\n

Comments are very welcome! (Thanks!) Just remember that I check them for spam; it might take a few days for yours to be available. Follow on Twitter the blog updates: @SaraMartinUAB. See my publications and activities on my personal web http:\/\/gent.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Next October we\u2019ll hold in Santiago de Compostela the twentieth, and possibly final, \u2018Culture & Power\u2019 conference. This is a series started in 1995 at my own university, UAB, with the aim of disseminating Cultural Studies in Spain, a much necessary enterprise then as it is still now. This, I know, sounds paradoxical as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}