Barcelona: A Tale of Two Cities

´In Barcelona´, sings Rufus Wainwright, ´They dance you ’round a waltz confound´

I´ve been living in the city for six months now, and I´m still struggling to get to grips with it. Arriving in New York City for the first time, it was instantly familiar and recognisable – I felt like I was stepping into the screen of every film I´d ever seen set there.  Bratislava was ugly and grey, but exploding with youthful drive and ambition. Reykjavik was a coffee and alcohol-fueled mico-city, just as plugged in to high-speed broadband as to the natural wilderness that surrounded it. These were all cities that I got to know in a relatively short period of time, but even after so long, Barcelona remains something of a mystery.

I´m coming to the conclusion that it is really two cities - the international, outward facing city that sprang onto the world stage in the 90s and is most obvious to visitors today taking their first stroll down the Ramblas; and the local, inward-looking city of the Catalan people who have lived here for generations.

International Barcelona is comprised of a startlingly wide range of inhabitants, including some of the most and least privilaged people in the city. From American businesswomen, to Swedish Erasmus students, Peruvian shop assistants, and Pakistani beer sellers. I would also include in it, given Catalunya´s ´national´ character, immigrants from the rest of Spain – the Andalucian bar-owners and Madrileño web-programmers. What holds them together as a single group are their two primary languages - English and Castellano, and above what they are not – Catalan.

Catalan Barcelona is also no monolith – it has its rich and its poor, its old and its young, its hard-core nationalists and its apolitical bystanders, but it is united by the Catalan language and its historical experience of political and cultural subjugation.

These two cities often live parallel lives, unaware of each other´s existence, they occasionally clash, but most often they simply rub alongside each other as best they can – in my experience it is their uneasy co-existence that makes the city what it is.

For example, while Barcelona is cosmopolitan, it has little of the liberating anonymity of New York or London. In these cities you can never judge at first glance whether someone was born and raised there, is a recent immigrant, or on holiday. If you’re a tourist in London, as long as you don’t don hiking boots and strap a backback to your chest, you can blend in with the locals and no-one will blink an eye, even if you have a thick accent or speak less-than-fluent English. In Barcelona, everyone wants to know where you´re from – or thinks they can guess just by looking at you. If you´re not marked out as foreign by the way you look, your outsider status will be confirmed as soon as you open your mouth. My Japanese friends are usually assumed to be Chinese. I´m usually tagged as British or French – which can lead to great confusion, given my absolute ignorance of the French language.

I’ve also encountered more explicitly hostile behaviour that would be unacceptable in the UK. Here it is totally acceptable to pull the corners of your eyes back in order to refer to an asian person, and local Pakistani-owned shops are called ‘tiendas de paki’, something painful to my ears given the racist and bloody English history of the term. I´ve also heard data entry outsourcing casually described in my office as ´chinese work´ – apparently this is a compliment because the Chinese are ´so hard-working´.

Of course, the comparison with London is not entirely fair – Barcelona’s foreign-born population totals around 14%, whereas London has an ethic minority population of over 40%. Perhaps more important is how recent a phenomenon immigration is in Barcelona – the number has tripled in less than a decade whereas London has seen mass immigration for over 50 years.

But will time change anything? Both London and New York have absorbed huge immigrant populations through a common language – English. With its legal insistance that all education and official communication is in Catalan, the local government here is attempting to do the same.  Cheery adverts on the metro offer free Catalan lessons, and stress Catalan as the key to uniting the diverse communities of the city. Whether the strategy will work remains to be seen – after all, in reality the one language that everyone here can speak (or like me, is learning to speak) is Castellano, not Catalan. The desire to preserve and promote a language that has been surpressed for so long is understandable, but for newcomers to the city there is often little appeal in learning Catalan when both English and Castellano will not only get you by, but will be useful in other parts of the world.

But I don´t want to reduce Barcelona to its languages; the combination of its strong local communities and recent international influences make Barcelona a creative city like no other I have experienced.

It´s a place where everyone seems to be in a band, and where you´ll turn a corner one morning to find that a group of guerrilla artists have knit up a tree on an otherwise average suburban street.

Here, the cultural and arts scene is made by the people, for the people, not by a cultural elite for sale to the masses. This gives it a freshness and energy that it just doesn´t have in London where culture has been professionalised to the point where it can rarely shock or surprise any more. Here, the art finds you – when you cross a square and see octogenarians dancing on a Sunday afternoon, duck into a bar and hear the Catalan take on 80s indie-rock, or, like I said, take to the streets and bump headlong into a knitted tree.

It is this element of the unexpected – of never knowing what I´m going to see when I step out of my flat – which makes me unwilling to draw any firm conclusions about Barcelona. Is it deeply conservative, or constantly changing? Modern, or stuck in the Modernism of its glory days? I have no idea, but I´m enjoying finding out.

rafael behr on the politics of strictly come dancing

Rafael Behr has written a great post on how the dynamics the experts and the popular vote in reality TV competitions illustrates the inherent tensions within representative democracies. I’m becoming quite a fan – he was also one of the few people in the press to really investigate what the Cameron/Johnson oligarchy means for British society.

 I have a particular interest in the John Sergeant case because his wife attempted to teach me Latin at school (it was a valiant effort, but I’m no linguist). I say this to defend the Sergeant name against Behr’s accusations of brute popularism! Anyway, check it out, it illustrates exactly how I believe that popular culture and democratic politcs can illuminate one another, despite Behr’s contradictory disavowal of this in his concluding words (‘Well, I don’t care that much. It’s only TV.’)

two steps backwards with prop 8, an inch forward with boyzone

 November hasn’t been the greatest month for gay rights. The passing of Proposition 8 in California took the shine off Obama’s election victory for me and many others.

 However watching the new Boyzone video today made me smile, and not just because I’m a recovering boyzone fan (they were the primary focus of my teenage years). Because their video for ‘Better’ features a boyband member in a gay coupling for the first time:

The video seems to be getting a good reaction from fans and critics alike.

This is the second major First for Stephen Gately. He was the first openly gay boyband member in the UK in the 90s. Since then others have followed, but the sexuality of their sexuality (as it were), has always been discretely brushed to one side, much in the way that gay TV characters have often been sidekicks rather than romantic leads. Even in Will Young’s video for ‘Switch it On’, his gayness was only referenced with jokey innuendo. But in ‘Better’ two gay men are put side-by-side, seriously, and without comment, with straight couples.

 Against the backdrop of the crushing constitutional entrenchment of Prop 8, it is easy to feel that a Boyzone video is a drop in the ocean (and I admit that I have been known to overestimate the cultural significance of boyzone!). Nevertheless, it is the cultural drip drip of acceptance and inclusion that can end up eroding away even the biggest mountains of prejudice.

 So let’s celebrate every time anyone sends out the message ’some people are gay. get over it’.