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6 Conviviality Communities are creatures in time and space. In the simplest terms, Mieres today consists of natives and newcomers: people whose roots have been tangled together in the valley for generations, and people who have arrived recently from many different places. but time and space also distinguish resident and expatriate Mierencs;and among the newcomers there are those who are firmly based in the village, those who commute daily out of it, and those who come in on weekends and holidays.these differences can be the stuff of resentment and hostility that may take more than a generation to dissipate. but staking a claim in Mieres depends on there being something resembling a community to belong to, and this is not simply a natural endowment; it is a laborious and protracted social enterprise. such is family life and the creation of a fabric of neighborly relations. energetic festivals like the Dolors and the Intercanvi weave together activities, symbols, and sentiments , but in Mieres there is another very sensuous instrument of social engagement: food and drink are the vital ingredients of virtually every public event. Communal suppers draw the intimacy of the family board out into the streets and squares, involving young and old, native and newcomer in a viscerally gratifying sense of neighborhood. Insiders and outsiders small communities are well known for their social closure,the idea that newcomers must serve long probationary periods—maybe even a generation or two—before they are admitted as insiders. Recent settlers in Mieres sometimes complain about this, and there are some natives who openly resent the intrusion of outsiders. but Catalans have been peripatetic for centuries, and 126 / Chapter 6 Mieres is no exception. emigration and the influx of newcomers have redefined the processes of community regeneration, which even the most redoubtable Mierenc families know they cannot resist forever. the primeval distinctions of kin, kith, and stranger are not permanent obstacles to community but rather the resources from which it is perpetually remade. It has always been my ambition to understand better how this actually happens. From the perspective of born-and-bred Mierencs, the most basic distinction is between someone who is simply “from here” (d’aquí), and a foraster or forastera, a visitor, stranger, or foreigner.1 Xarnego is an older, pejorative category, based on language and custom rather than race. In their dictionary, oliva and buxton gloss it as a “spanish speaking person living in Catalonia, not adapted linguistically,” but in conversation I have heard it defined as anyone from within spain living in Catalonia, whether he or she speaks Catalan or not.2 Fishing for pejorative terms for someone like myself, the best I have been offered is guiri, a Castilian word referring loosely and unflatteringly to a foreigner, and today typically a tourist.3 As someone whose identity falls within the shadow of these epithets, I am unsure how widely they are used in Mieres—more,I should say,by newcomers than natives.In 2006 the Ajuntament reckoned that 23 of the 352 Mieres residents were non-spaniards: 16 from the european Union, 5 from south America (a family from Argentina ), and 2 from the United states (we assume we are the “American” pair, the cue taken from our Californian forwarding address). I would guess that around half of these non-spaniards were full-time residents. Language is the most obvious marker of a stranger like myself. My way of coping has been to listen in either Catalan or spanish and to reply in spanish. this turns out to be quite a normal tactic in a region where more than half the population are not native speakers of Catalan. Language is at the core of national sentiments in Catalonia, but linguistic politics are much more complicated than a face-off between two languages,the suppressed and the hegemonic. the promotion of Catalan in recent years has had to contend with pulling regional variations into some sort of official conformity, while Castilian spanish has the advantage of a high degree of standardization and international intelligibility.the linguistic fragmentation of spoken Catalan is often attributed to geography, the interruptions of mountains and sea, and the seclusion of the valleys, which gives each comarca its distinctive character. this variation is a matter of local pride, and the Garrotxa is among several comarcas reputed to have the “purest” form of Catalan. but of course, well-traveled Mierencs have fun mimicking the accents of other parts of Catalonia. When I was on...

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