Diasporas in the New Media Age: Identity, Politics, and Community

17 Migrate Like a Galician

317 17 Migrate Like a Galician The Graphic Identity of the Galician Diaspora on the Internet xabier cid and iolanda ogando In autumn 2006 an advertising campaign featuring the slogan “v ivamos como galegos” (Live like the Galicians) was broadcast across all Galician t v stations and cinemas. This campaign had a great impact not only on the physical region of Galicia but also through Web sites and virtual communities . The commercial,1 commissioned by a Galician supermarket chain, makes use of a series of clichés, which Galicians should—supposedly—be proud of when inciting people to consume local products. The commercial therefore commences in an airport car park, where a family picks up a traveler in his thirties: the very first cliché presented on the idea of being a Galician is that of emigration. galicia and emigration Galicia is a region on the Atlantic European coast, which has belonged to the Kingdom of Spain and its predecessors, the Kingdoms of Castile and León, for the past eight hundred years at least. Galician is widely spoken there (Monteagudo 1999,2001), a language that is different from Spanish, and shares a common root with Portuguese. It is in the language and in other more or less endemic features that Galicians have grounded their feeling of identity, a feeling that has had clear and steady political translation since the 318 d i a s p o r a s i n t h e n e w m e d i a a g e latter years of the nineteenth century (Beramendi and Núñez Seixas 1996; Beramendi 2007). Today, Galicia is an autonomous region in Spain enjoying a certain degree of self-government. Most Galicians identify themselves with both Galicia and Spain (70 percent), even though 30 percent consider themselves more Galician than Spanish.2 As suggested by the cliché in “v ivamos como galegos,” Galicia has been traditionally an emigrant country. The extensive bibliography written on this particular subject alternates between the negative aspects of emigration—especially from the point of view of its effects on people but also on the economy3 —and a more balanced view, aware of the fact that Galician emigration has contributed to the economical, political, social, and cultural modernization of Galicia.4 Nevertheless, the migratory phenomenon has been so wide and intense that it has become impossible to understand Galician identity without its being mentioned. Galician emigration, the “Great Galician Emigration” to Latin America, took place only from 1870onward, and it replaced other communities of emigrants, such as Italians, who had arrived earlier. It can therefore be considered a relatively late phenomenon in the wider European context. However , from 1870on, emigration remains constant, and between 1860 and 1960almost 2 million Galicians left their country temporarily or definitively. More than half of these 2 million emigrated between 1900and 1930. 5 Just to provide a point of reference, the population of Galicia in 1900was nearly 2 million habitants, and it currently does not come up to 2.8 million.6 In fact, it is purported that a third of Uruguayans have Galician blood running through their veins or that Buenos Aires is the fifth Galician province (apart from the other four existing within the metropolitan territory). Forty percent of all Spaniards who have left the Peninsula during the past two centuries were Galicians (Eiras Roel 1991;Emigración 2002), even though Galicians made up only between 9 and 10percent of the total population of Spain (v illares 1997a; see figure 17.1). Galician emigrants have been mostly men, particularly during the emigration to Latin America at the beginning of the twentieth century. Women remained behind, taking charge of the domestic economy and supporting large families. The women’s situation was so desperate that they were denominated viúvas dos vivos (widows of the living) by Rosalía de Castro7 (1837–1885)—the enigmatic poet and indisputable reference for an axial identity within Galicia. In addition, it is interesting to point out that when these men left the country they usually settled in much bigger cities than those in Galicia—La Havana, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, or Mexico City t h e g a l i c i a n d i a s p o r a 319 and later Frankfurt, Zurich, or Paris. As a result, they learned how to move around a Big City and inside the associative, cultural, and economic tissue...