"Barcelona behaves like a new rich"

Enric Canet is director of Citizen Relations at Casal dels Infants del Raval, but above all he is a friend. Sometimes you sit down to talk with him thinking that you have already talked about everything, about the sex of angels and about the sursumcorda, but whenever you start you end up wishing that the coffee would last until night. He is more than a social activist, more than a priest, with a degree in Biology and a Master's in Social Policies and Community Action, but also a researcher in the Department of Contemporary History at the UB and is about to get his doctorate in this discipline. Now he has just publishedThe sky has freckles, a story about the origins of the Casal dels Infants del Raval. I catch him just as he's about to go inland to help with some summer camps. Whenever I imagine him, he's walking and smiling. And whenever I meet him, he is too.--- "Does the sky have freckles?" --- It's the title of my new book, yes. --- Does the sky have freckles? --- If you have the opportunity to look up, and at night, yes. --- And Heaven, with a capital H? --- To explain this to you, I have to go back to the beginning. --- How does it all begin? --- This is the key, clarifying the genesis. --- In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. And who created the Casal? --- El Raval had always been a neighborhood with very activist people, with a strong anarchist dimension, people who had wanted to change the neighborhood for many years. Pitu Cunillera was a social leader among them all, but without ceasing to be a shoemaker, without political intentions or a desire for prominence. He, in fact, disappears from the Board of the association when the parties arrive. --- But leader of what? What was he looking for? --- He came from a family from Santes Creus, who came to Barcelona with nothing and settled on Sant Pacià street. His mother bought two liters of milk from a cousin who had a dairy nearby, and with that, she and her three children lived. She also did sewing to survive. Pitu didn't like going to school and found a shoemaker to apprentice for. Afterward, he went to the shoemaking school on Princesa street and ended up opening his own shoe store. This led him to observe that a good way to get children who wandered lost through the streets of Raval was to link them to a trade, putting them as apprentices. --- An activist. --- Immediately after, he was made president of the Neighborhood Association in 1974, and even then he had in mind to create a center for children and one for the elderly. In '77, they found a carpentry shop on Sant Martí street that had been expropriated by the City Council, and Antoni Solans, who was the urban planning delegate for Mayor Socias Humbert, liked the idea of recovering the premises. They managed to get the Comediants to perform a performance and occupy the carpentry building as part of the entertainment series, paid for by the City Council. After this, they went to see the mayor, who said no to everything, except to cede them the carpentry shop to develop a project aimed at children or the elderly. --- The paths of Our Lord… --- When you know which way you are going, all winds are favorable. "Luck" had it that some young people from well-to-do families (from Sant Ignasi, Sagrat Cor…) who were studying to be economists or lawyers or doctors, and who met to study, had the urge to undertake an educational project abroad. They went to see the Franciscans on Santaló street, who were precisely looking to set up a children's center in a developing country, but they denied them collaboration because "this is like Barça: you have to be part of the club."

---Believer, that is to say. --- Believer and practitioner. --- We are doing well. --- This gang of non-believers or non-practitioners are left hanging, but one of them knows Pitu directly and he exclaims "Let them come! Don't let them go to Africa!". And they picked him up. --- And they bring it forward. --- May '78, the Casal dels Infants del Raval. A house "of the" children and "for the" children, legally dependent on the Neighborhood Association. The first summer they dedicate to fixing up the entire building, with the involvement of the whole neighborhood and under Pitu's great mobilization. Then they meet in Llançà and devise the project, the statutes, the strategy… It will not be a pedagogical project in the first place, but mainly social. Sociological. It is not an educational triumph, it is a triumph of the neighborhood. --- We are talking about the "Chinatown" of that time, of course. --- In fact, the name "barrio chino" (Chinatown) does not refer to any Chinese community that had lived there, but rather to an assimilation to Chinatown, to the lawless city, to the ghetto. And I doubt the name was given by Francesc Madrid, but it doesn't matter: the point was that from Nou de la Rambla upwards there were, to understand each other, those of Salvador Seguí, and from Nou de la Rambla downwards it was already the "barrio chino", a dangerous and inscrutable place. The Civil War ends and the Raval is completely devastated, and under Franco's government, Mayor Mateu i Pla has the idea of extending Muntaner to the sea as a kind of second Via Laietana (with the name of García Morato, precisely the fascist aviator who bombed the city). --- Goodness. --- This project was halted in '42, but in '62 Porcioles tried to revive it. What happened is that the neighborhood opposed it. Because of all the expropriations it entailed. Maragall and Clos tried to oxygenate the neighborhood with the Rambla del Raval and by opening dispersed centralities, but it was no longer that project. --- And in the 70s, what was it like, the Raval? --- Prostitution, drugs, delinquency, and above all a lot of street life. Why? Because there were many shops, many workshops with housing on the first floor, many choral societies and football associations… In fact, it is this fabric, this street life, that provides a certain spontaneous protection to children. What happens is that this gets out of control later with heroin and AIDS, and it's a good time for children to have their Casal. --- How were the beginnings? --- At first very few came in, because many children didn't want to. And the Casal operated with a very assembly-based, very complex system. When everything changes is in the 1979 summer camps, which is when the monitors (those "posh" medical and architecture students, Ignasi Carreras, etc.), who were quite unmotivated, spend fifteen consecutive days with the children and realize that they have formed a community. A family. --- And this is where the sky turns out to have freckles? --- This is where the sky turns out to have freckles. Angelito, one of the children from those colonies in Sant Boi del Lluçanès, one night tells the monitor (Vicky Fumadó): "look! The sky has freckles!". And it's because in the Raval, being so narrow, the night sky was almost never seen. --- Oysters. --- The children looked up for the first time. This is exactly what the promoters of the story were looking for, not so much a pedagogical theme, as a social and spiritual one.

--- The rest just rolled in. --- The City Council threw itself into the project with the first municipal elections, and the Casal became a model in Spain and Europe. --- The thing becomes professionalized. --- And the misunderstanding that I want to debunk in the book is created. In '83, a hired director came in, who founded his own Casal association and imposed his own identity. So the Casal broke into two, and the myth was created that it was founded in '83, when in truth it started much earlier. --- In the midst of Francoism. --- In the midst of Francoism, but also without creating borders between believers and practitioners and non-believers or practitioners! Now what would most resemble it would be the Pare Manel Foundation, which frankly, is not very much about mass either. --- And are you a churchgoer, Father Enric? --- I believe in God, but not in the same God as Rouco Varela. I come from Liberation Theology, from the Panikkar school, et cetera, I don't need to explain it to you. I am Catholic, yes, because I understand that I have a role in that specific community of Christianity. And in the eighties, I got involved in the Rocieras Brotherhoods of L'Hospitalet, which Catalonia or Catalanism had overlooked too much. Now I understand that it has already been recovered, and that there is no longer that rupture. --- What is Barcelona now? --- Barcelona is not uniform, first of all. That is its great virtue: the Pla Cerdà does not end up homogenizing, as it perhaps intended, but rather neighborhoods like Horta or Sant Andreu or Sants maintain their deep identity and, above all, their associative fabric. Secondly, it is a city of very progressive values, but, and this as a third element, it is a city that behaves like a "new rich".

--- A "pijoprogre". --- A beautiful girl of humble origin, who abuses her attractiveness and forgets her roots. --- And the fourth element? --- Geography. The sea, proximity to Europe. But I insist, Barcelona exploits its privileged position as a nouveau riche: it already happened with the bourgeoisie of Modernism and the Liceu, which grew so rapidly that it created too much social inequality. Did you know that in the 60s the richest people in the United States paid 95% in taxes? --- Frankly, it doesn't ring a bell. --- With guaranteed education for all! This is the case up to 70-80, and it's something that Europe has managed to preserve, but, the truth is, people don't want to live on handouts. --- What did we decide? --- In which it is not valid for the council to say "don't worry, I'll do it". Neither with the Casal nor with any sector, the business and associative fabric is basic. In fact, the Casal is a public project, even if the Administration does not provide it! We don't live off public money, we don't. And I'll tell you more: the poor are not rogues, they don't want to abuse the system, they want to get smart and get ahead. The number one rogue is called Juan Carlos I, and no one crosses the Mediterranean in a dinghy to sell fake handbags. --- And how to live in Barcelona now? People cannot afford it. --- Barcelona is making everything go up too much. It is also the new rich syndrome, and it will take its toll. Because we can be new rich, but what about our children? The elections should have been about that, and not about Superblocks.