9/16-17: Barcelona

All stereotypes regarding the Spanish being warm, friendly, and enthusiastic were proven true within our first few hours in Barcelona. We met our host Ramon, at his apartment where he showed me that he’d had some friends of his translate my song explanations into Catalan. I’d sent them to him but hadn’t heard about their progress, so I assumed I wouldn’t have translations in Spain. But we quickly made copies and prepared for the show. “You need copies?” Ramon asked “OK! There’s a copy store around the corner!” We ran there and it was closed. “OK! There’s an internet cafe around the corner! OK! Now we catch the train to the show!” That about describes the pace of the evening.

The show was at a cool little hole in the wall ex-squatted bar, and I was surprised to meet some friends from the DC there. They were playing Catalan Rumba on the PA when we got there, which is a type of music completely local to Barcelona, like DC’s go-go. I was the only performer so I played a longer set, but everyone kept yelling at me to play until I didn’t have any songs left. I’d say “I have one more,” and Ramon would repeatedly yell back “five more!” Then after 3 Billy Bragg covers, a Local H<.a> song, and a Green Day/ The Cars medley I said, “ok, this is my last song.” To which Ramon yelled “five more!”

The next day we set out to do some squatter sightseeing, but although I’d found the names and addresses of 4 or 5 squats that were open, none opened until 7pm when we were headed off to Torello so we took pictures of the murals out front. One of the squats was called Ateneu Maig 37, which is in reference to May 1937, when during the Spanish Civil War when the Communists attacked the Anarchists. Ramon called it “the civil war within the civil war.” He told me most people in Spain have a less romantic attitude towards the Spanish Civil War than people from the outside. He said, “yes, what happened with the collectivized land was very beautiful, but many people were dying in this war. We all have grandparents who died or knew people who died, and many people were fighting for personal reasons, not political. Even some who fought with the anarchists would join because they wanted personal revenge against people they knew who were fighting with the Fascists.” He talked about the anarchist movement in the 20’s and how strong it was.

By most accounts, the anarchist squatter scene in Barcelona has quieted down in the past few years – Ramon even referred to it as a stereotype – but we did get to see several huge buildings that were completely squatted and had been defended for years. Just getting off the train we were greeted by a banner that said “We Can Live Without Capitalism” hung above an info table on alternative visions for collective economies. The people running the table declined to identify themselves as anarchists, socialists, or communists, just that they are part of a collective called Crisi (translated: crisis). The Crisi collective has published accessible materials addressing the economic crisis from an anti-capitalist perspective and distributed them widely in Spain. Apparently their newspapers were so well distributed that you’d see business men on the metro reading them. One of the people running the table was named Enric Duran and he’d funded much of their publications through an act of financial civil disobedience where he took out loans adding up to almost half a million euros, and gave away the money for social programs, and then publicly defaulted on his loans to make a statement. What was especially coincidental about running into them is that the Institute for Anarchist Studies just decided this summer to grant a translation of some of their materials and when we exchanged pamphlets, the person from Crisi collective already knew what the IAS was!

Walking around for the day we visited three radical book stores (one run by the CNT, one run by Crisi collective), walked past guerrilla gardens, and sites of recent university occupations. If I could have changed our schedule, I would spent several more days of anarchist tourism in Barcelona. I was especially bummed that we didn’t have time to visit Can Madeu, a rural squat outside of Barcelona where they took over an old leper colony and planted gardens, make their own bread, and publish materials for others interested in starting rural squats. Everyone who told us about it said it’s amazing!

Oh, and somewhere along the way, I stopped to play with a yappy dog and the old lady who was walking it started talking to me enthusiastically in Catalan. I told her sadly “no parlo Catalan,” but she laughed and explained (still in Catalan) “you don’t need a translation for ‘arf!’” Dogs speak a universal language.