Lleida

Last month I went to Lleida (aka Lérida), a small city in Catalunya, the province where Barcelona is located. Every town in Spain has at least a couple days every year that are dedicated to celebrating that area´s gastronomy, traditional dances/sports/activities, and so on. It´s a little like the fourth of July, I guess, except that instead of being more or less the same everywhere, Spanish fiestas differ widely by region. You can encounter anything from bullfighting to snail races (like cockroach races, but with snails!) to solemn parades, complete with faithful churchgoers carrying an oversized statue of the virgin or saint from their parish.

Catalunya is an interesting province because depending on the area, it has the reputation of being either among the most traditional or among the most cutting-edge areas in Spain. Catalan people are fiercely proud of their regional language—in fact, many of the people I met during the weekend spoke Catalan among themselves by default, and only switched to Spanish out of deference to me. I've heard many people from Madrid say they feel unwelcome in Catalunya, I suspect mostly because of this linguistic issue. The Basque Country, Valencia and Galicia also have regional languages, but in those areas it's not common to walk down the street and hear only the regional language. But Catalunya is different. On the other hand, it's also the home of Barcelona, arguably the most cosmopolitan, international city in Spain. Its long history as a port probably helps, but even now Barcelona is known for cutting-edge medical treatments, delicious food, and innovative architecture.

The first part of the fiestas we attended were in the evening, and they were like nothing I've ever seen. A group of maybe 20-30 adults, dressed in flame-retardant red devil suits with hoods and horns, ran repeatedly through a crowded street setting off giant sparklers, most of which exploded with a huge "CRACK!" as they went off. Some of the "devils" had tridents spewing sparks, which they twirled menacingly through the crowd, chasing the spectators and making them duck and cower. None of the fire was real fire, per say, but there was a lot of smoke and most people were sporting hooded sweatshirts, cowboy hats, and bandannas over their mouths, Old West style. This whole crazy scene was backed by a growling heavy metal band playing loud, ominous music… and several fire trucks. When we arrived at this event, I assumed the fire trucks had been featured in a parade, but no, they were there in their functional capacity, just in case.

The following morning, we went to see the castellers. I had heard of this but never seen it—it's like a human pyramid, sort of, with a base of 15 people holding one or more people up by the legs. Gradually more people climb vertically on top of the first ones until they have created a a sort of human tower. (Castellers translates roughly to "castle-ers.")

We got there early enough to see the climbers getting ready. Everyone wears what look like normal khakis, a button-down shirt with a collar, and a wide, stretchy scarf that they wrap tightly around their waists (many people had a friend wrap them into it to make sure it was tight enough.) The scarf serves a double purpose—it serves as a kind of back brace, and also gives the climbers a foothold.

And then, with a little ceremonial trumpeting from some traditional clarinet-type instruments, it began. The plaza, which was jammed with people, fell totally silent as we watched a young woman clamor up the body of the man being supported in the center of the circle. She knelt on his shoulders, then braced herself as a little girl scrambled up both of them to crown the tower. It must be a tremendous physical strain for the people being climbed up, but although they were often trembling from the effort, no one fell. The only person who wears a helmet is the child who ascends to the top. This kind of tower, one person on another on another, is considered the most difficult and the most technically pure since the people have no side support. As if executing the formation weren't incredible enough, the bottom phalanx of people also turned the tower in a circle and even walked, very slowly, across the plaza.

The "castles", which have multiple layers of three or four people standing in a circle, are equally impressive. They begin with the group's trainer calling out people and formations like a football coach. Then the group asks for silence and the plaza obliges, watching more and more climbers scramble up the lower layers of people to create new "stories." Because the climbers create stability by interlacing their arms for support, castles can be much taller than towers of just one person atop another. I think the tallest one we saw was eight "stories" of people, crowned by two ten-year-old girls (wearing helmets) and a smaller girl kneeling on top of them.

The coolest thing for me, besides the sheer physical force of these people, was the diversity of members among the groups of castellers. They included children as young as six and continued all the way up to men who appeared to be in their seventies. The younger, stronger men and women are typically climbing or serving as the inner circle of people supporting the tower's base. The older people are on the outer edges of the circle at the base, supporting those closer to the middle. And the smallest children climb up to the very top. It was really neat seeing whole families participate in the castellers and realizing that for some people, it can be a lifelong hobby. I took a pamphlet about how to become a casteller from the group's information booth group after the performance… I live in Madrid and I don´t speak a word of Catalan, but you never know where you might end up!

Vallecas

My school this year is in a part of Madrid with a bad reputation. Decades ago, Vallecas was a separate village, or pueblo, and the original town center is still there, complete with a brick church towering over the square and round white fountains between a line of ferny green trees. But now the neighborhood is home to immigrants, working-class Spaniards, and a lot of bad publicity. My school is in the "new" part of town, so I had never seen the Vallecas of stereotype. Sure, I had seen some vacant lots and young men hanging out on the street corner with too much time on their hands, but it didn't seem as bad as the stories. Then one day at lunch I took a walk and discovered the gypsy settlement.

If you walk past the outlet mall and circle the roundabout crowned with a giant fountain, you enter an older neighborhood. On one side of the street are groups of modest apartment buildings, many with green vinyl awnings extended to protect the occupants from the sun. On the other side of the street is a strange, litter-strewn field that houses a small complex of eight or ten-story apartment buildings. It's clear that no one lives there; most of the windows and doors are completely filled in with red brick, and the doorless ground floor entrances gape like toothless mouths. Some of the balconies are full of rusty detritus from the last residents, heedless piles as if the people left in a hurry: children´s toys, frying pans, flower pots. But other balconies have green plants perched on the railings and fresh laundry hanging out to dry. And if you wait long enough, you can sometimes see the dim face of a woman or child in the gloom, flitting past like a shadow.

It´s hard to separate generalizations from prejudice about gypsies, or as they prefer to be called, Roma. Many people here have negative ideas they aren´t shy about expressing: gypsies deal drugs, they have too many children, they are "conflictive" neighbors, they subject themselves and their families to intolerable living conditions, most of the men are in jail, they´re not to be trusted, and so on. It´s true that in many respects, Roma tradition (at least as far as I've been able to observe) is starkly at odds from Western culture. Girls do often marry young, at 16 or 17, and it's true that many Roma are visibly not involved in the traditional economy. In my neighborhood, I often see Roma men trolling the dumpsters for scrap metal to sell or furniture to fix up or use. When people clean out their apartments, they usually leave potentially useful items next to the dumpster, rather than throwing them in: a tennis racket, a pile of neatly-folded clothes, a stack of pots and pans. Such items nearly always vanish within a day. Several of my Roma students attend school very sporadically. I can´t pretend to understand or explain it, but it´s clear that something is going on in portions of the Roma community that is very different from the way most Spaniards live.

According to an article in El Mundo, the European Union´s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) recently conducted a study of 25,000 Roma about the situation of nomadic Roma communities in the EU. The study concluded that the Roma are the most discriminated-against ethnic group in Europe, ahead of both Jews and Arabs. One in four Roma who participated in the study had suffered threats, attacks, or severe harassment in the previous 12 months. 75% of those surveyed had experienced some type of discrimination over the past year in areas like housing, health care, employment, and education.

Such a study in Spain would likely uncover similar stories, although it's important to note the country has received praise from the EU for the success of its efforts to integrate the Roma. In 2009, the FRA conducted an in-depth study about the access the estimated 600,000 Spain-dwelling Roma have to housing. The final report, titled “Housing Conditions of Roma and Travellers, concluded that:

• “Access to decent and quality housing appears impaired by economic difficulties, different cultural patterns, and extensive discrimination and prejudices. These different causes many times have a cumulative effect on housing exclusion.”

• “The Roma continue to be the main inhabitants of shanty towns and substandard forms of housing in Spain, a situation which currently appears to affect around 12 per cent of the Roma population in Spain. This represents a decrease of 19 points from 1991. The most extreme examples of housing exclusion seem to be currently affecting around 4.6 per cent of the Roma population in Spain, a percentage much lower than the one provided in 2002 by the same source, which estimated it to be between 12 and 14 per cent. These changes are obvious signs of a positive evolution.” (p. 4)

Those final statistics are hopeful, but it's still hard for me to walk past the abandoned-but-lived-in apartment buildings where the gypsies live. The town of Vallecas has recently decided to put a park on that land, so for the past few months there have been roaring bulldozers and yellow Bobcats skittering over the bare dirt. Some of the older, freestanding houses have already been torn down, but for the moment, the abandoned apartment buildings still stand. So too does one ramshackle house, now surrounded on all sides by a tidy brick bicycle path. It's a strange sight: the pristine park is encroaching on its spot, but the house fairly shouts resistance, a long string of laundry fluttering in the breeze like so many battle flags.

On libraries

I’ve lived in Madrid for several years now, and the city still continues to surprise me. Sometimes it’s in wonderful ways, like discovering acorn liqueur, and others times it’s in horrible ways, like the other week when I tried to return a library book. I should start by saying that I briefly worked in what is supposedly one of America’s best public library systems, so maybe my expectations were a little high. But surely a city the size of Madrid could do better. The library branches here are quite small, with a collection that would easily fit in, say, a large two-story house. You can only take three books at a time and they're due three weeks later. You cannot ask to place a hold on a book or renew it after its due date. To return a book, you have to stand in line at the circulation desk until a librarian physically takes the book from your hand and checks it back into the system. If you return a book overdue, there's no fine; however, your library card is suspended for the amount of time you had the book past the due date, and there is nothing you can do about it. I was informed of these rules one by one until I slowly began to suspect that... psssst..... maybe they don’t really want you to use the library...

But back to my adventure. I woke up early one recent Sunday and hopped on the metro to return my books, all three of them. The libraries normally aren’t open on Sundays, but I had read in the newspaper that there would be special hours to accommodate high school students who needed to study for a college entrance exam. I tiptoed through the open door to find two stocky security guards sitting idly at the circulation desk. The rest of the library was dark and silent, the hallways cordoned off with velvet ropes. “You wanna study for the college entrance exam?” the younger guard asked me, jerking his head toward the chairs in the reading room.

“No, I just wanted to return these books,” I answered. He shook his head.

“The library’s not really open. It’s only open for study.”

“The door’s open and you’re sitting at the circulation desk,” I protested. “Can’t you just take these books and put them in the return box?”

The guard shook his head complacently. “I told you, the library’s closed.”

With Herculean self-control, I managed to nod calmly, as though this were a perfectly reasonable response. “Okay then, I guess I’ll just leave them in the book drop.”

The guard shook his head again. “There is no book drop.”

And that's when I lost it. I snatched my books off the counter, staring at the guards as if perhaps they were joking. “What do you mean, there’s NO BOOK DROP?!" I heard myself screech. "What kind of library IS this?!”

The young guard pursed his lips, while his companion fixed me with a stern glare. “It’s a library with a fixed timetable, which is clearly posted on the outside of the building,” he informed me icily. “You can return the book sometime during opening hours.”

And that was that. As I stalked furiously back to the metro, books in hand, I thought about the library in my hometown, easily four times the size of the one I had just left. I thought about the neighborhood branches of the Indianapolis library system, where you can borrow up to 75 items and renew them indefinitely, unless another patron requests them. If that’s not enough choice, you can request that an item from another branch be sent to your neighborhood library, free of charge. Most of all, I thought of Andrew Carnegie and the hundreds of public libraries he financed across the United States. “There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library,” he is supposed to have said, “this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.” It’s a noble idea, one that can only be realized by a public library system that tries to make its patrons' experience easier, not harder. Madrid's public transit is outstanding. Its public health system is enviable. But its public libraries could stand to take a page (ha, sorry!) from Andrew Carnegie's book.