Juan Escamilla He speaks with Bujalance accent and has never been in Bujalance. 64 years, retired bricklay … They hang from the mountain in an impossible balance. They rely on each other on a revolt of walls and stairs with almost childish shapes as if a child or that man who built a cathedral with his own hands had projected them.
For the climb and under the rain the reporter is panting as an alpinist a disorder of orchards, corralillos made with pallets in which a goat and chamizos covered with plates are saved on which they walk in circles some restless and self -absorbed dogs. On the sound of breathing, a brown bird is heard and sounds raised as if an egg is fried. All that universe could only be illuminated as the son of the need and the rush with which Andalusian and Extremaduran immigrants raised him who in the late 50s found a refuge of poverty in the rich Catalonia.
All that epic Charnega has returned to the present because the movie ‘The 47’ has portrayed it, in which Marcel Barrena tells the story of Manolo Vital, the driver who kidnapped a bus to take services to his neighborhood, image of the working fighting They carried out to achieve minimum living conditions.
The scriptwriters put a young Pasqual Maragall on that bus who, if he was not there in reality, did have a good relationship with vital and serves to portray how the PSC and the Catalan Spanish left defended the rights of those people and made their own their obvious needs. Today there is a bus on demand in the neighborhood that is requested through an ‘app’, but the wind of the neighborhood with the lowest rent of Barcelona Rola to the right. Although the PSC remains the dominant force at the polls, from 2019 to 2023, the vote to the PP and Vox grew 32% and this part of the political arch obtained 25% more support than the average of Barcelona.
“Baró Torre has always been left, but now it is fashionable to vote for Vox”. Juan explains it with a accent that is an echo of a world inside, but has not lived. Because only once in Córdoba capital with his wife, a couple of days. His parents brought him, with the penalty and hunger, in search of work in the prosperous Barcelona of Franco. Pushed by poverty, for repression or both, they came in search of a wages and raised the neighborhood between the braces of the upper area of the capital, so distant that it looked like another city. There he had only built a castle in the 16th century.
Current 47 line (Barcelona)
Current 47 line (Barcelona)
In the 50s of the last century, given the uncontrolled growth of the city, the area was parcel and the most disadvantaged could be made with a small land to start a new life.
There was no house
As the film tells, the Housing Law of that time commanded that, if the house had a roof at dawn, it was consolidated as legal. To get it, at night, the improvised crews of neighbors raised a house among all in a few hours. They made their home of that impossible and steep world of dirt roads, potholes, puddles and very long trips to work in the basements of the society of that time. They helped each other, the lives of masons, painters and workers were sought or in the factories and learned Catalan out of necessity, others for love and others because The identity is a luxury that only rich can be allowed.
If one is fixed, for those slopes are still the visual traces of proud identities that have not yet been of a house. In the upper part of the neighborhood they wave four Spanish flags. One of them belongs to Jesús Méndez, which they call ‘the Basque’ because he was born in Bilbao of Extremaduran parents, ‘the ancients’, as the first settlers are known.
A natural miner from Hernán-Pérez also maintains his father in Cáceres. «Manolo Vital entered this street with the bus. Jaleo was rode a lot. When we got here, there was neither light nor water. A truck with drums came. All this was a way. At first, we lived in the lower part of the neighborhood and washed the clothes in a ditch of a mine on the Besós river, ”he recalls, and extends to the Valley Cujado de Blocks his 64 -year -old retired formwork mana and the wide wrist with bracelet with a bracelet of the Spanish Legion. His is the fifth flag that hangs since 2017. He put him to a mast. Before, he was one of two meters, but he touched him with his awning and had to replace it with this, smaller.
“Is it true that there are more and more right -wing people in the neighborhood?”
“I am not interested in politics.” I am Spanish and if you ask me in Catalan, I answer in Spanish. But I defend Vox, yes.
—How is explained that you being immigrants vote for a party that does not want immigrants?
—Because we came to work, not to buy a scooter of one thousand euros with the payments that give us nothing. If immigrants come to face and win the bread as we came, welcome. We brought the bus here, which cost us to put it. It cannot be that now come to get on it without paying and give them pay while there are people from the neighborhood going hungry. They have left us lying.
“Are they a pride Charnego?”
“That’s political, I don’t want to enter there.”
Outside arrivals
Charnego, which is as they referred to in Catalonia to immigrants from the rest of Spain, has two meanings in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Language Academy. The first definition is “immigrant from a Spanish -speaking Spanish region”; and the second, “son born in Catalonia of a Catalan parent and a non -Catalan parent.” Etymologically, its origin is located in the Gascón ‘Charnego’, stranger or misfit and is considered a derogatory and xenophobic term, although in recent years, some charnegos have claimed the insult they received as a symbol of pride of their origin and occurs An investment of the term.
Before they did not want to listen to the non -Catalans and now, nationalism intends that it is not used because, they say, creates borders. This is that he remembers all that discrimination and the scheme of rich Catalans in front of poor Andalusians that was not always true, since there were, naturally, Catalans workers.
Since the film was projected, the controversy over the term and in the press it is remembered that the charnegos “integrated very well”, as if they came from a very far culture and alien to the Catalan, foreign, after all, and after all, and after all, and after all, and after all, and after all, and after all, and after all, after all, and after all, after all As if, instead of the Vera, they were native to a Pacific and non -compatriots island.
At the 187th stop, Torre Baró Nord, a man with his dog in his arms complains of bad weather in a speech that distracts an orange mustache of nicotine. Sailor hat, so cooled that your clothes look like another. That accent is from Huétor Tájar, in Granada, where it came from Julio Trujillo Because he heard that there was work here. He and his fifteen brothers arrived in 1979. He spent his whole life working in a grocery store. «As I am not going to have an accent. I am Andalusian, even if I live in Barcelona. They have treated me well and I have no complaint of this land that welcomed me very well, but I throw that one.
He travels to Granada once a year and hopes to finish his days there. If asked about the right and the left, change his face as if they meant a ghost. «In politics I don’t want to enter. I’m leaving, it’s raining, and my dog is going to wet, ”he protests.
The stop at which the interview takes place is named after Manolo Vital, the hero of Torre Baró and protagonist of the film whose right paper Eduard Fernández. In the photograph printed at the stop and remembers that feat, people appear raising their arms in the algarabía of the victories.
«They force us that our children cannot study in Spanish. The left has abandoned us »
Rubén Couceiro
Driver, Orensano
The street paved and the bus arrives at demand. You can call it with a mobile application if you are a neighbor, you will look for you and go up or lower you as you come or go. The slopes and curves are such that one does not imagine the Pegasus of Manolo Vital. The driver is now called Rubén Couceiroit comes from an Orense family and says that, in the movie, Vital puts the bus along a road that could not upload a R9 and that, in reality, entered the high zone. Rubén, like the others, recalls with love a time that was very hard and when he thinks about it, he hinders his eyes as if connected with another dimension. «For these forests we built the sardine that we painted and there was a day of the tortilla where everyone brought their sandwich. We played in the collapsed castle ».
“The left failed us”
In the past, the Galician driver, who now does not vote, was left left “like all.” «But he left me aside. They force us that our children cannot study in Spanish. The left has abandoned us. Those ideals are now defended by the right. Not even those of the PSOE then agree with those now. The equal speech that the socialists promulgated here, now the right says.
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