Between the peripheral ‘Ciutat rotida’ to which La Banda Trapera del Río sang and ‘La millor botiga del món’ that was promulgated by a municipal government, between the rubble of Rosa de Foc on the Ramblas and the shouts of ‘Els carrers seran semper nostres’ at the height of the La Caixa building on Diagonal, between powerful Barcelona (because it has power) and that of catanas and bollards, a guy walks around with a one-liter bottle of Font Vella.
He also wears a two-piece suit. The lapels of the jacket are the open curtain for a pop t-shirt, starring Roberto Bolaño or Naranjito. He insists on pointing out those Indians with a plume on the friezes of that building on the Ramblas, that bomb embedded ‘a posteriori’ in a facade of Sant Andreu and that Starbucks where a long time ago there was an overseas bank. That is, it insists on doing what few do: read a city. Read it while walking.
Stepping on the newspaper library and every corner of the city
The guy who walks those streets is Jordi Corominas. They will know him for his books, his television programs and his guided tours. And his work is important, because he has a mania for critically document the history of a city often bent on ‘amnesiating’ its past. And to do it stepping on the newspaper library but also every corner of Barcelona.
Now has published the book ‘La ciudad violenta. A walk through the criminal and revolutionary history of Barcelona ‘ (Peninsula). A helpful approach, because violence is a rash and a rash can be a symptom.
The first bullangas of 1835
Corominas walks here in the dark to shed light on issues of the present. It dates back to the first noise of 1835, outbreaks of violence that Josep Pla said had the function of freeing up space occupied by convents. He goes through the Liceu bomb in 1893, and then narrates the Tragic Week of 1909 or the achievements of the La Canadiense strike in 1919. He analyzes in depth that “Chicago ‘avant la lettre'” that was the gunmen of the bosses against the anarchism, but it does not rest until it reaches post-Franco precariousness or the ‘procés’.
For each historical moment choose a crime, whether that of Enriqueta Martí (‘the vampire of the Raval’, in 1912) or that of Maremagnum in 2003. And this is what is valuable, because while the yellow explodes and fuels the fire as if it were generated spontaneously, the historian analyzes the culture and socioeconomic conditions to find out the cause of the fire. To understand each other, given the image of Barcelona on fire in Tragic Week, he points out that the Count of Güell was a shareholder in the Rif mines where the conflict started. Where others see vampires, he sees a proletarian lumpen woman used as a scapegoat by the elites to stigmatize an entire social class.
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One can, like me, buy any book about his city (from the analysis of gun fighting by Jaume Passarell to Carandell’s ‘Secret Guide to Barcelona’ or Sempronio’s ‘Sonata a la Rambla’) or you can just read this work as meticulous as it is ambitious.
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Furthermore, Corominas seems to have spoken with Nicomedes Méndez, the titular executioner of the Audiencia of Barcelona. Or with Ramón Clemente García, that coal-waiter who danced wildly with a mummy in front of the Palau Moja, residence of the Marquis of Comillas. But it is not difficult to find him having a drink in those Galician bars handed over to Chinese families. Ask him about the city and congratulate him on this work.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com