Mieres Reborn: The Reinvention of a Catalan Community

Introduction

Introduction not long ago, Mieres, set in a valley in the lower reaches of the Pyrenees about an hour from the Mediterranean, was visibly in decline. Many of its houses were vacant, falling into disrepair and ruin. Its fields and meadows were neglected. the younger generation was moving to the towns and cities , and by the early 1990s their parents and grandparents had come to believe with the visceral certainty of their own aging bodies that life in the community as they had known it was coming to an end. their welfare in these times of drastic economic and political change was the focus of my projected study of intergenerational relations in the region. Mercifully for the village and for me, Mieres has not died, and its recovery has become the more cheerful focus of my research. soon after my arrival in 1989 there were some unexpected signs of life. In the middle of August a squad of young men with ladders worked their way through the village, zigzagging bunting between lampposts and window ledges. one of them popped his head up by the window where I was working and gave me a brisk, businesslike smile as he looped a string of little plastic Catalan flags over a nail, evidently driven into the sill for that purpose. For the three consecutive nights of the Festa Major the house trembled to super-amplified music from the main square down the hill. the old folk, having had their chance to dance the sedate sardanas earlier in the day, stayed a little while, smiling indulgently. For them the youthful racket, which would soon drive them off to bed, was a reassuring sign. the Festa was, and always had been, a civically guaranteed opportunity for young people from around the valley and beyond to get together, let off steam, seek out mates, and widen the gene pool. As the months and years passed, there were many other signs of vitality. For such a small community the festive activity is astonishing.the calendar 2 / Introduction is jammed with fiestas and fairs, kids’ parties and special days celebrating the elderly. there are communal street dinners and fireworks parties, a twentyfour -hour soccer competition,and even an amazing basketball-on-horseback tournament. the inventiveness is staggering, but the basic message always seems to be the same:We are alive, we care, we belong, and we will survive. Where, I soon began to wonder, does all this creative energy come from? A better question might be why I was so pessimistic in the first place.We have come to expect rural communities to die, steamrollered out of exisMap 1. northeastern Catalonia. Introduction / 3 tence by the historic forces of urbanism and industrialism. the fate of villages around the world seems to offer plenty of evidence of this,which makes the survival and revival of some of them very intriguing. but our attitudes toward rural communities are fraught with ambivalence:their demise in the face of urban expansion seems inevitable, but most of us wish this were not so. We yearn to get closer to nature but are dogged by a dismal stereotype of rural life that has been long in the making, and which goes something like this: Map 2. the Mieres valley. 4 / Introduction the countryside is boring. Left to their own devices rural communities are prone to stagnation and decay.they are sustained and changed from the outside rather than from within: by landlords, traders, politicians , and government officials, and by lines that reach into rather than out of the village: roads, electrical cables, phones, tV, and radio. Country folk are all pretty much the same (for Marx they were like “potatoes in a sack”—some bigger than others, but all the same boring Map 3. the barrios of the Mieres nucleus. Introduction / 5 vegetable).they are locked into the dull routines of planting and harvesting , of birth, copulation, and death, but all this activity doesn’t actually go anywhere new or interesting. towns and cities, not villages, are the crucibles of history, the vital players in the making of national and global progress. the best that can be said of the social life of the countryside is that it is “simple,” a sort of primordial soup from which our modern life-forms have evolved. Modern society is youthful, energetic , open, radical, and complicated; traditional community is inherently conservative, slow moving if not slow...