My colleague and alter ego Baltasar Lotroyo has just posted a review of José Saramago's political fable Ensayo sobre la lucidez (available in English as Seeing), in which the government of an unnamed country punishes its citizens for exercising their constitutional right contrary to the desires of the government. At first you may think Saramago's premise is absurd, and it is, as absurd as that of another Saramago novel that Balta reviewed, La balsa de piedra (The Stone Raft), where the entire Iberian Peninsula breaks off from Europe and floats off into the Atlantic.
But as our daily perusal of the newspapers and viewing of newscasts reminds us every day, nothing Saramago made up is more absurd than the things politicans really do while pretending to be defending our citizens' rights. Balta offers several examples in his reviews of both books (you may enjoy them if you read Spanish). The self-sabotage of the governor of Arizona, pretending to deal with the problem of "illegal" immigration by not dealing with it, is yet another.
Governor’s Conference to Move - NYTimes.com
Recommended for those of you who read Spanish: Balta Lotroyo's review of Ensayo sobre la lucidez and his review of La balsa de piedra.
2010/07/15
The Spanish civil war in foreign eyes
Many of Spain's current problems stem from the fact that the Spanish civil war set back the country's evolution toward modernity and democracy by at least 40 years, from the outbreak of the army insurrection in 1936 to the death of Franco in 1975, and the distortions of justice and other institutions still persist. It was not an exclusively Spanish conflict, but a global one, acted out in Spain not just by Spaniards but by all the fascist, socialist, liberal and conservative capitalist forces in Europe and the Americas—and thus we need the outsiders' views for a full perspective.We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War, by Paul Preston. London: Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2008. 443 pp. + notes, bibliography, index
"Spain" did not die, but it was badly wounded and still has not recovered fully. The Second Republic did die in that terribly brutal war, 1936-39, killed by a coalition of the Church, the old oligarchy and crazed ideologues who feared the power of ordinary men and women—especially of the women—to decide for themselves how to live and whom to love. Paul Preston has done a tremendous job digging up details of the lives and work of more than a dozen journalists from half a dozen or more countries who managed to reveal, and in some cases horribly distort, how that massacre was unfolding, and the hundreds of thousands of more particular murders it required. And Preston has done much more than that: He has pulled together a coherent story from notes, archives, published reports and oral reminiscences by and about those journalists, with their various languages and their diverse political views.
Of the Americans, Herbert Matthews and Louis Fischer earn Preston's greatest appreciation, for their personal courage and their insistence on getting the facts right, regardless of pressures from their respective sponsors to slant their stories. Matthews, writing for The New York Times, was expected by his editors to be more favorable to the "Nationals" (as the Franco-led insurgents called themselves) than to the forces defending the Republic. Matthews was a moral Protestant indignant at fascist abuses, but not ideologically committed to socialism, and he exposed himself to considerable danger to report personally on such horrors as the bombing and strafing of civilian refugees fleeing from Málaga (which had just fallen to the insurgents) along the coastal road to Almería, or the fighting in Valencia, even though he
was convinced that [his dogmatically conservative editors in New York] treated his copy with 'suspicion, anger, and, at times, disbelief', tampered with his wording and buried entire stories because they were perceived to favour the Republican side. In contrast, they printed unashamedly partisan material from William P. Carney, his counterpart in the rebel zone, despite knowing that it was someties faked. [p. 22]Fischer was under different political pressures. A fluent Russian- and German-speaker and with a wife and child in Moscow, he was committed to socialism and felt comradeship to (though he never accepted the discipline of) the Communist Party. Whether he ever learned to speak Spanish fluently is unclear, though he must have managed: he had excellent personal relationships with prominent Republican (i.e., Spanish Republic) politicians, even including Juan Negrín. But despite his commitment, he perceived and reported on what he saw as gross failures in political and military policy—for example, the lackadaisical defenseworks supposedly protecting Madrid. He was especially indignant with the aged trade-unionist and prime minister Largo Caballero who was afraid to alienate his trade union supporters by ordering idle construction workers in Madrid to go out to Toledo and build serviceable trenches and breastworks.
After the fall of the Republic, Fischer had the good sense to get his family out of Russia before Stalin's paranoia could destroy them. His subsequent career included works on Gandhi and professorship at Princeton. Matthews continued with the NYT and achieved notoriety again years later for his reports from Cuba proving that Fidel Castro was still alive and his guerrilla movement going strong. Both Fischer and Matthews wrote many books, not only on Spain, that merit attention.
Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, and John Dos Passos are also here, interesting mostly for what they had to say about one another and less interesting for any insight into the Spanish struggle. Hemingway was boisterous and outrageous and having a great testosterone-charged time, at one point firing off a machinegun to no purpose but with dangerous consequences (it drew return fire), but you've got to love the big brute because in a jam, he could pull his buddies through—on at least one occasion, by sheer muscular force, rowing a little boat across the mined Ebro river with Robert Capa, Matthews and Henry Buckley aboard.
Another reporter who deserves and gets major attention from Preston is the audacious and hyperenergetic little Russian Jew Mikhail Koltsov, whose extremely vivid reports for Pravda would be his undoing when he returned to the USSR. He not only wrote rapidly, succinctly and dramatically, he also carried a pistol and didn't hesitate to intervene and give military orders (for which he had no authority) when he saw it necessary to avoid disaster. When required to do so by his party bosses, however, he was quite capable of writing outrageous lies condemning the leaders of the POUM as Trotskyists and traitors to the revolution. As Koltsov surely knew, the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista had broken with Trotsky long before and was one of the main defenders of the socialist Republic in Catalonia, but because it did not follow the dictates of Moscow Stalin ordered his operatives in Spain to destroy it—as George Orwell has famously recounted in Hommage to Catalonia.
Stalin was suspicious of all the Russians who had served in Spain, whether as journalists or military officers, probably (in Preston's interpretation, which is persuasive) because they returned with a more revolutionary, more participatory and much freer vision of socialist revolution than Stalin's democratic centralism could tolerate. Koltsov, like others who had been acclaimed as heroes in Spain, was at first praised and then arrested and ultimately executed by Stalin's forces.
Oddly, Preston makes only passing mention of Orwell, mostly regarding his impressions of Koltsov and his grudging review of another reporter's book, South African-born George Lowther Steer's report on the ruins of Guernica, from observations made as soon as Steer could get there after the devastating German bombardment of that quiet and undefended little Basque town. The book was essential to counter the massive disinformation campaign by Franco-ist propagandists and their allies in the Catholic Church in the U.S. and other countries, who were claiming that there had been no bombardment but that the destruction was the work of leftist incendiaries. (Orwell recognized the value of the eye-witness report but took issue with Steer exaggerated and emotional bias for the heroic Basques as contasted to the supposedly less noble Spaniards elsewhere.) Of the other British reporters mentioned here, we learn that Claud Cockburn was an imaginative Communist who, it seems, would write anything to support the cause, even if he had to make it up, and Tom Wintringham, Commander of the British Batallion of the International Brigades. Wintringham got in trouble with the CP back home because of his defense of his latest lover, American journalist Kitty Bowler, who was absurdly accused of being a fascist infiltrator (apparently because she was much better looking than most of the Communist women in party HQ in London and so aroused the suspicion of those others, including Wintringham's wife).
The brazen Swedish nurse-turned-reporter Kajsa Rothman, a courageous and physically impressive women (much taller than most Spaniards and with bright reddish-blonde hair) also deserves mention, more for her presence than for her reporting—though she (fluent in several languages) must have been important to Swedish short-wave enthusiasts for her broadcasts from Spain. We also learn of the Spaniards on both sides of the propaganda war: Luis Bolín, the cruel and pompous chief of the foreign press in the "national" (Franco-ist rebel) zone who tried to control every word and didn't hesitate to order executions of reporters who strayed to close to the truth of the rebel massacres. On the Republican side, the chief concern of Arturo Barea and later the redoubtable Constancia Mora was to facilitate the reporters demands for access—in the belief that the truth could only help the republic—without letting them reveal military secrets (gun emplacements, etc.) which could serve enemy.
Preston ends the book with a tribute to his former professor Herbert Southworth, who got to Spain after the fighting was over but contributed mightily to undoing the myths of Franco propagandists.
Photo: The destroyed center of the Basque town of Guernica after it was carpet-bombed by Germany and Italy, from Nicholas Shakespeare's review of the book in the Telegraph.
The Trouble with Arizona | The New York Review of Books
The Trouble with Arizona | The New York Review of Books
Sad, sensitive reporting by Larry McMurtry, who knows the scene well.
Sad, sensitive reporting by Larry McMurtry, who knows the scene well.
2010/07/14
World Cup Live: Netherlands vs. Spain - Goal Blog - NYTimes.com
In case you hadn't heard. Boy, Spain needed that! Some good news at last.
World Cup Live: Netherlands vs. Spain - Goal Blog - NYTimes.com
As you might expect, people are going wild here. Not only massing in the streets to cheer the players, but even going to restaurants and stores and buying things! Nobody had been buying much of anything for months. It's the "Yes we can!" fever. Though I must confess, after the fireworks and horn-tooting on Sunday night, Carboneras has been pretty quiet.
World Cup Live: Netherlands vs. Spain - Goal Blog - NYTimes.com
As you might expect, people are going wild here. Not only massing in the streets to cheer the players, but even going to restaurants and stores and buying things! Nobody had been buying much of anything for months. It's the "Yes we can!" fever. Though I must confess, after the fireworks and horn-tooting on Sunday night, Carboneras has been pretty quiet.
Community Response Saves Beaver Statue
Too funny for outrage.
Community Response Saves Beaver Statue — Blogging Censorship
Anybody who looks at this beaver's belly and sees "a depiction of two hands praying" is blinded by saintliness—or has never experienced an intimate encounter with a woman.
Community Response Saves Beaver Statue — Blogging Censorship
Anybody who looks at this beaver's belly and sees "a depiction of two hands praying" is blinded by saintliness—or has never experienced an intimate encounter with a woman.
2010/07/11
"The Red!"
One reason that natives and the rest of us who live in and love Spain are so wildly enthusiastic about "La Roja"—"The Red," so called for the usual color of their uniforms—is that our fútbol champions seem to be the only Spaniards who know how to work as a team. If only the políticos could try that, instead of constantly sabotaging one another maybe this country could climb faster out of its recession, or the 17 autonomous communities each scrambling for more rights than its neighbors, or the judges, so anxious when one of their number is a star player that they have to gang up to disqualify him (see my earlier notes on the disgraceful actions against Judge Baltasar Garzón, but he's not the only victim).And the other reason is that those 11+ players (11 on the field plus the guys on the bench) and their trainer and support staff are—mirabile dictu—famous but with not even a whiff of suspicion of corruption. How rare in Spain, where the idea of the rich and powerful is that winning is everything, todo vale—that is, "anything goes"—in pursuit of political or other victory or money or sexual conquest.
And they are so good!
Oh, and I just discovered that Eduardo Galeano's magnificent book (cited in a recent blog) is available in English: Soccer in Sun and Shadow. (Now, why do Americans call fútbol "soccer"? It's played with the feet, which is why the English (who invented it) called it football. And why do we Americans give the name "football" to that other game, where the ball is not advanced exclusively by kicking but by throwing or carrying it while crashing bodily through opponents, instead of calling it, say, "war"?)
In about half an hour we'll be joining our buddies in the Asociación Cultural Levantisca to cheer on la roja and see just how good they are. ¡A por ellos, España!
(Not that I have anything against the Dutch. But it would be immensely satisfying to see a victory of "the Red" over "the Orange.")
Photo from as.com/futbol
2010/07/05
Personal update
A friend I hadn't heard from for a while asked me what I was up to. Lots of things, really, too many to keep track of. There's the approximately-weekly essay on Spain (I try to post every Sunday, but sometimes life gets too complicated and, like today, it comes in late). There's guitar practice, flamenco and classical; maybe some day I'll be good enough to play for you. There's that overdue book we're writing for Norton on the history of architecture and urbanism in Latin America (the pre-Columbian section is done and now my co-author Susana & I have jumped all the way to the 20th century). And there's the novel I'm in the process of publishing and which should be available by fall. And ideas for two other novels that I've barely started. Travel, most recently to Paris, then Barcelona, then Madrid (see my blog entries on Paris, 2010/06/10, and "Barcelona or Madrid?"2010/06/23).
And something else that will no doubt surprise my old friend, and anybody else who has known me over the years: I've been seduced by fútbol. Me, who since a grade school flirtation with baseball (obligatory in a suburb of Chicago, with two major league teams), me who had never paid any attention to any professional sport. Until now.
In Spain, fútbol is a collective passion that I finally couldn't ignore. At first I had no idea what those 22 guys were doing on the field. Well, 20 of them, anyway—it was pretty obvious what the portero or arquero guarding the net was up to, but the maneuvers of the other guys as they scurried up and downfield were a mystery. I've now watched enough (on the tele) and read enough to enjoy a really good pass, or a steal of the ball, or—more rarely—¡gol! We've been reading Eduardo Galeano's marvelous Fútbol a sol y sombra, and like him, my enthusiasm isn't limited to any particular team. I'm glad that Spain has been doing so well, since I live in Spain, and I was disappointed that Argentina got so thoroughly wiped out by Germany, since we have a strong Argentinian attachment in our house, but I can root for a good play by Germany or Ghana (which started out well) or even Paraguay ("even," I say, because those boys were playing rough and playing not to win, but not to lose—and an all-defensive game is much less fun to watch). And it gives me something to talk about with folks in town here in Carboneras.
Actually everything's going pretty well for us here in southern Spain, better than for a lot of people we know here. By a combination of luck and smart decisions by the smarter half of this couple, we got ourselves cushioned just in time before the "crisis"—as this deep economic recession is mislabeled. (A "crisis" is supposed to be a turning point, but so far the bankers and economics ministers haven't agreed on where to turn and seem to be hoping for a miraculous return to the old system. But I digress.)
My only problem is that I've fallen a few decades behind in my schedule. I was supposed to become a famous novelist by the time I was 45, and a good guitar-player in my 20's. I was also supposed to be fluent in French (I'm part way there) and German (long way to go still) and a couple of other languages by now. (I hadn't really planned to learn Spanish; it just happened.) And to have written more books. I haven't abandoned any of these projects, but it looks like I'll be obliged to live a little longer than I had expected to get them all done.
And something else that will no doubt surprise my old friend, and anybody else who has known me over the years: I've been seduced by fútbol. Me, who since a grade school flirtation with baseball (obligatory in a suburb of Chicago, with two major league teams), me who had never paid any attention to any professional sport. Until now.
In Spain, fútbol is a collective passion that I finally couldn't ignore. At first I had no idea what those 22 guys were doing on the field. Well, 20 of them, anyway—it was pretty obvious what the portero or arquero guarding the net was up to, but the maneuvers of the other guys as they scurried up and downfield were a mystery. I've now watched enough (on the tele) and read enough to enjoy a really good pass, or a steal of the ball, or—more rarely—¡gol! We've been reading Eduardo Galeano's marvelous Fútbol a sol y sombra, and like him, my enthusiasm isn't limited to any particular team. I'm glad that Spain has been doing so well, since I live in Spain, and I was disappointed that Argentina got so thoroughly wiped out by Germany, since we have a strong Argentinian attachment in our house, but I can root for a good play by Germany or Ghana (which started out well) or even Paraguay ("even," I say, because those boys were playing rough and playing not to win, but not to lose—and an all-defensive game is much less fun to watch). And it gives me something to talk about with folks in town here in Carboneras.
Actually everything's going pretty well for us here in southern Spain, better than for a lot of people we know here. By a combination of luck and smart decisions by the smarter half of this couple, we got ourselves cushioned just in time before the "crisis"—as this deep economic recession is mislabeled. (A "crisis" is supposed to be a turning point, but so far the bankers and economics ministers haven't agreed on where to turn and seem to be hoping for a miraculous return to the old system. But I digress.)
My only problem is that I've fallen a few decades behind in my schedule. I was supposed to become a famous novelist by the time I was 45, and a good guitar-player in my 20's. I was also supposed to be fluent in French (I'm part way there) and German (long way to go still) and a couple of other languages by now. (I hadn't really planned to learn Spanish; it just happened.) And to have written more books. I haven't abandoned any of these projects, but it looks like I'll be obliged to live a little longer than I had expected to get them all done.
Insult to Catalonia?
The rhetoric around the new estatut of Catalonia has become so heated that you might get the impression that something momentous was underway. And really, something is, but not what you might think from the blizzard of verbiage.
For those who haven't been tuned in: In 2006 Catalonia (Catalunya, in their language, català), one of Spain's 17 "autonomous communities", submitted a proposed reform of its 1979 governing charter (estatut) for approval by the Spanish parliament (las Cortes) and courts, with great fanfare and mobilization of Catalan public opinion. Now, after four years of confused and heated debate, Spain's Constitutional Court has voted to accept most of the clauses but not all of them, and has re-interpreted the most controversial statements in a way that at least some Catalans find deeply offensive.
This wordy and detailed document (several times longer than the U.S. Constitution, for example) included several provisions and rhetorical flourishes which excited opponents to paroxysm, resulting in a major anti-estatut and anti-Catalan campaign orchestrated mainly by the Partido Popular. What they objected to mostly were the declaration that Catalonia is a "nation" (nació), the priority of català over castellano (the main language of Spain) in government dealings and public education, and the arrogation of exclusive rights over certain waterways that also serve neighboring autonomous communities. The Partido Popular's campaign involved a demand for an all-Spanish plebiscite on Catalonia's estatut (something that hadn't be required of any of the other autonomous regions which were also reforming their charters), the collection of signatures against it, and even an attempted boycott by other Spaniards of Catalonian products, especially the bubbly wine known here as cava (essential for New Year's Eve and other celebrations).
This anti-estatut campaign stimulated the Generalitat—the Catalan government, currently a tripartite coalition headed by the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC)—to intensify its opinion-mobilization campaign in favor of the new charter, which was also supported by the main opposition parties in Catalonia. This near-unanimity within the autonomous community can be explained by some of those rhetorical flourishes, inserted to appeal to Catalan nationalists. Some Catalans celebrated their own non-binding plebiscites, a political stunt which drew few voters, almost all of them pro-estatut, proving nothing. More impressively, supporters mobilized virtually the entire press of Catalonia, including "progressive" and "conservative" newspapers, whether printed in castellano or català, to demand "respect" for Catalonia from other Spaniards, namely by approving the estatut. Meanwhile, as the Constitutional Court dithered and debated, the president of the Generalitat challenged the legitimacy of the Court to pronounce on this issue at all—since several judges whose terms had long expired were still sitting on the court (due to a stalemate between the Partido Socialista and Partido Popular, which had to agree on the replacements).
Nobody's happy with the court's final decision, but probably not much will happen. The Generalitat got most of what it wanted, except that they cannot demand that all their citizens speak català in order to get services, and instead of describing themselves as a "nation" they have to settle for being a "nationality". What will happen with the dispute over who controls the waterways is still to be resolved. The present government of the Generalitat may fall in the next elections (the economic crisis is even more important to voters than the handling of the estatut), but even if the right-wing Catalan nationalists return to power, Catalonia is not about to secede. Spain needs its 7 million+ people (almost one-sixth of the total Spanish population) and its industry and commerce, and Catalonia needs Spain, which is its principal market.
This whole brouhaha has been just one more of the symptoms of the difficult and continuing transition from the centralist and authoritarian government of Francisco Franco to the decentralized and democratic Spain that is still emerging. The original, 1979 charters of autonomy left many issues ambiguous and (of course) failed to anticipate new social and political needs of 30 years later. The revisions of most of those charters have gone fairly smoothly, but the particular histories of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and to some extent Galicia, each with its own language and national aspirations, make negotiations more delicate.
The Spanish system of "autonomous communities" is unique, neither completely centralist nor completely federalist. Areas that will continue to be subject to intense and sometimes acrimonious negotiation include (not just for Catalonia but for all 17 communities): control over rivers that flow through more than one "community"; the content and language of public education; distribution of tax revenue both internally (to provinces and municipalities) and externally (to the central government); access to and regulation of public health facilities (for example, until very recently the community of Navarra refused to accept the legalization of abortion, though this had been made Spanish law by the Cortes), and telecommunications, immigration policy, and so on. But Spain is not "breaking apart" (as the alarmists in the Partido Popular like to claim). It is evolving.
Comunidad autónoma - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Catalonia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For those who haven't been tuned in: In 2006 Catalonia (Catalunya, in their language, català), one of Spain's 17 "autonomous communities", submitted a proposed reform of its 1979 governing charter (estatut) for approval by the Spanish parliament (las Cortes) and courts, with great fanfare and mobilization of Catalan public opinion. Now, after four years of confused and heated debate, Spain's Constitutional Court has voted to accept most of the clauses but not all of them, and has re-interpreted the most controversial statements in a way that at least some Catalans find deeply offensive.
This wordy and detailed document (several times longer than the U.S. Constitution, for example) included several provisions and rhetorical flourishes which excited opponents to paroxysm, resulting in a major anti-estatut and anti-Catalan campaign orchestrated mainly by the Partido Popular. What they objected to mostly were the declaration that Catalonia is a "nation" (nació), the priority of català over castellano (the main language of Spain) in government dealings and public education, and the arrogation of exclusive rights over certain waterways that also serve neighboring autonomous communities. The Partido Popular's campaign involved a demand for an all-Spanish plebiscite on Catalonia's estatut (something that hadn't be required of any of the other autonomous regions which were also reforming their charters), the collection of signatures against it, and even an attempted boycott by other Spaniards of Catalonian products, especially the bubbly wine known here as cava (essential for New Year's Eve and other celebrations).
This anti-estatut campaign stimulated the Generalitat—the Catalan government, currently a tripartite coalition headed by the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC)—to intensify its opinion-mobilization campaign in favor of the new charter, which was also supported by the main opposition parties in Catalonia. This near-unanimity within the autonomous community can be explained by some of those rhetorical flourishes, inserted to appeal to Catalan nationalists. Some Catalans celebrated their own non-binding plebiscites, a political stunt which drew few voters, almost all of them pro-estatut, proving nothing. More impressively, supporters mobilized virtually the entire press of Catalonia, including "progressive" and "conservative" newspapers, whether printed in castellano or català, to demand "respect" for Catalonia from other Spaniards, namely by approving the estatut. Meanwhile, as the Constitutional Court dithered and debated, the president of the Generalitat challenged the legitimacy of the Court to pronounce on this issue at all—since several judges whose terms had long expired were still sitting on the court (due to a stalemate between the Partido Socialista and Partido Popular, which had to agree on the replacements).
Nobody's happy with the court's final decision, but probably not much will happen. The Generalitat got most of what it wanted, except that they cannot demand that all their citizens speak català in order to get services, and instead of describing themselves as a "nation" they have to settle for being a "nationality". What will happen with the dispute over who controls the waterways is still to be resolved. The present government of the Generalitat may fall in the next elections (the economic crisis is even more important to voters than the handling of the estatut), but even if the right-wing Catalan nationalists return to power, Catalonia is not about to secede. Spain needs its 7 million+ people (almost one-sixth of the total Spanish population) and its industry and commerce, and Catalonia needs Spain, which is its principal market.
This whole brouhaha has been just one more of the symptoms of the difficult and continuing transition from the centralist and authoritarian government of Francisco Franco to the decentralized and democratic Spain that is still emerging. The original, 1979 charters of autonomy left many issues ambiguous and (of course) failed to anticipate new social and political needs of 30 years later. The revisions of most of those charters have gone fairly smoothly, but the particular histories of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and to some extent Galicia, each with its own language and national aspirations, make negotiations more delicate.
The Spanish system of "autonomous communities" is unique, neither completely centralist nor completely federalist. Areas that will continue to be subject to intense and sometimes acrimonious negotiation include (not just for Catalonia but for all 17 communities): control over rivers that flow through more than one "community"; the content and language of public education; distribution of tax revenue both internally (to provinces and municipalities) and externally (to the central government); access to and regulation of public health facilities (for example, until very recently the community of Navarra refused to accept the legalization of abortion, though this had been made Spanish law by the Cortes), and telecommunications, immigration policy, and so on. But Spain is not "breaking apart" (as the alarmists in the Partido Popular like to claim). It is evolving.
Comunidad autónoma - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Catalonia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
2010/06/25
Potosí and us
It is the premise of this multimedia, multinational, multiartist, intensively interactive show—it comes with a roadmap inviting the conscientious viewer to cross and recross the big exhibition space many times, to pause before videos or graphics or installations, and even to climb platforms and ladders to view everything in proper sequence—that it was the silver of the Cerro Rico ("Rich Mountain") of Potosí in the Bolivian Andes that made it all possible. That's the mountain, disguised as the Virgin Mary, or rather fused with her (silver made sacred) in an anonymous 1720 painting reproduced in the show. This high Andean mountain with its seam of silver (now in Bolivia) was sacred to the community there, but to the Spanish conquerors all that was sacred was the wealth they could extract from it, and raping and ravaging the mountain was of no concern.
The Reina Sofía show traces how the rich silver lodes of Potosí financed the global spread of the then new "system in which goods and services, down to the most basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchange, where even human labor power is a commodity for sale in the market, and where, because all economic actors are dependent on the market, the requirements of competition and profit maximization are the fundamental rules of life"—as Marxist scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood defines capitalism in her indispensable little book, The Origin of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).
This was radical break from pre-capitalist market, trade or pillage economies, which were often brutal and violent but did not buy and sell human labor (there were lots of slaves, but not organized slave markets) nor regard profit as the highest goal. Those pre-capitalist exploiters were far more intent on glory and immortality (as a tour of the ruins of ancient Egypt recently reminded us).
For Wood, the shift began with the enclosures in England in the 15th century or earlier, and she doesn't mention Potosí. But what gave it a big boost, and expanded London's force as a market vortex, was the wealth sucked out of new colonies in América, especially Potosí. As the curators of the Reina Sofía show (Alice Creisher, Max Jorge Hinderer, Andreas Siekmann) write in the exhibition guide, the king of Spain had so many debts that as soon as the treasure galleons reached the Port of Cádiz, bags of silver were transferred directly to the ships belonging to his creditors elsewhere in Europe—England chiefly.
Another narrative strain is about the superexploitation of Chinese workers, and their communal resistance efforts, including songs and workshops with artifacts made by children. And there are videos of performance pieces by indigenous women in La Paz, subverting the whole colonial concept of Christian submission in a dance by a rebellious virgin and the stripping naked of the colonial rulers in familiar old portraits. And graphs and documents on workers in Dubai, along with a heavy critique of Seville's Dubai-financed art biennial.
And repeated denunciations of the Catholic Church's complicity in exploitation, not only in colonial America, but in the Spanish civil war and the Franco regime. And let's not forget The Karl Marx School of the English Language, another Chto Delat production from Russia, where you can hear Russians trying to enunciate in English Karl Marx's famous description of "the rosy dawn of capital"—the primitive accumulation from places like Potosí. It's a strange thing to hear in an art museum in Madrid, where you can't expect everyone to follow Russian-accented English, but in the complex context of the whole show, for those of us who can follow the text, it was a welcome reminder of a powerful and extremely relevant text.
2010/06/23
Barcelona or Madrid?
Back to Spain (Madrid right now) and a familiar Spanish keyboard. We left Paris (Beauvais, the little airport an hour's busride from Porte Maillot), for Barcelona on Saturday. Our Ryanair flight to Reus (another little airport for low-cost airlines about an hour and a half from the city) was so long delayed that we were too late for the bus and had to wait 3 hours, until after midnight, for a trip to the city. Plaça de Catalunya was still hopping at 2 in the morning, mostly noisily drunk young foreigners.
We like Barcelona, and even thought of buying a little apartment there for when we need a dose of urban life. But we didn't. One reason was that the prices for what we thought were attractive spots, in the Ciutat Vella and the Born, were prohibitive, and most required long climbs up flights of narrow stairs. The other reason was that, as charming as the city is to visit, you wouldn't want to live there. Not if want to be more than a tourist, but a participant in the society. That at least was our impression, from the tone of political debates and what we could learn of cultural events. So we opted for Madrid, a much bigger city (3,256,000 pop. vs. Barcelona's 1,621,537), less charming but lots more active.
Our impression was confirmed by friends, none of them Catalan-born but all long-time residents of Barcelona (20 years or more) and fluent in Catalan. (Fortunately they were also fluent in "Spanish", i.e., Castilian, so we could communicate.) As they could tell us from their own experience, cultural and professional opportunities (a stage for your theater production, a publisher for your magazine or book, advancement in a government office or private company) are (with rare exceptions) tightly controlled by networks of old boys (and maybe some old girls) from established Catalan families. It's so bad that some of the most creative Catalan artists have chosen to make their careers in other parts of Spain and/or in that other language—most noisily, the irreverent playwright and producer Albert Boadella (that's he, sitting on the toilet). And if a Catalan artist such as Joan Manuel Serrat or writer (Javier Cercas, Ana María Matute, Carlos Ruiz-Zafón and many, many others) wants to perform/publish in Spanish (the only way to reach a far larger and international audience), he or she must be prepared to face hostility from the Barcelona intellectual elite.
As Susana points out, all cities are run by coteries of little clans or "mafias" (in Argentina we call them camadas) trying to advance only their own. But in bigger, more diverse cities, like Madrid or New York, their are too many of them for any one to hold a monopoly. Beautiful Barcelona has a lot to offer, but there's an awful lot it withholds.
Boadella photo from Don't Disturb Magazine
Catalan writers in Spanish (article in Spanish)
We like Barcelona, and even thought of buying a little apartment there for when we need a dose of urban life. But we didn't. One reason was that the prices for what we thought were attractive spots, in the Ciutat Vella and the Born, were prohibitive, and most required long climbs up flights of narrow stairs. The other reason was that, as charming as the city is to visit, you wouldn't want to live there. Not if want to be more than a tourist, but a participant in the society. That at least was our impression, from the tone of political debates and what we could learn of cultural events. So we opted for Madrid, a much bigger city (3,256,000 pop. vs. Barcelona's 1,621,537), less charming but lots more active.
As Susana points out, all cities are run by coteries of little clans or "mafias" (in Argentina we call them camadas) trying to advance only their own. But in bigger, more diverse cities, like Madrid or New York, their are too many of them for any one to hold a monopoly. Beautiful Barcelona has a lot to offer, but there's an awful lot it withholds.
Boadella photo from Don't Disturb Magazine
Catalan writers in Spanish (article in Spanish)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)