Barcelona Mayor Jaume Colboni and El Pais newspaper director Jean Martínez Arens spoke on Saturday at the opening day of the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) about relations between the Catalan city and Latin America. “Barcelona has always had a strong function as a bridge with Latin America, for historical reasons, for reasons of migrations that have taken place from one place to another and in different stages. The bond is very deep,” Colboni summed up in a lecture that revolved around readings, personal anecdotes, politics, renewal, shared cultural wealth and debate about Mexico’s colonial heritage. “It is very exciting to see how a book-focused fair can mobilize so much emotion, so many people and so much economic activity as it does in Guadalajara,” Colbone said.
This is the third time as mayor of Barcelona Travel to Mexico. He had previously visited the country at the invitation of a friend to be his son’s godfather at baptism. He then returned as a tourist but admits that he intends to return in the future. “It’s a wonderful country, and I love it,” he said. Colbone stated that the idea to join FIL came several years ago while he was working on the city council, and before he assumed the position of mayor.
Martinez Arens has thought deeply about this cultural and social bridge between the two shores, starting with Boom Latin America, which in the 1960s and 1970s brought to Barcelona great names of regional literature who wrote, edited and created some of their greatest works while living in the city. Colboni wanted to establish temporal distance with the literary movement and insisted on the importance of displaying the ins and outs of contemporary Barcelona in the exhibition.
The director of EL PAÍS took the opportunity to ask the city mayor about the current political tensions in the Catalan capital. Regarding the legacies of the independence process, Colboni stated that this had “contributed to the conditioning of political and cultural history” and that he had discovered “a certain liberation of energy” because the issue was no longer central to the conversation. However, he also acknowledged that tensions between Spain and Catalonia “will not go away, the other thing is how to frame the debate,” said the mayor, who also stressed that his position, like that of his party, the Catalan Socialist Party, is a federalist model.
Regarding the Catalan language, which is a cause for concern in Barcelona due to its continuous decline, the Mayor highlighted the fact that the number of authors translated from Catalan continues to increase in FIL as a success. “We are a minority language coexisting with a great language, and in this sense we have to make an additional effort from the public authorities to protect and promote books in Catalan,” said Colboni, who listed the books he reads in both languages. “The book I’m reading, which the bookseller recommended to me, is… pedro paramo, Which I admit I did not read (…) either Crazy God at the end of the worldWritten by Javier Cercas and “Un cor furtiu: The life of Josep Pla, and the battles of Barcelona, by Jordi Amat.”
Martínez Arrens also drew parallels between the struggles over gentrification in Barcelona and Mexico City, and even more recently, in Guadalajara, the host country of the FIL. In the Catalan capital, unrest related to tourism and real estate speculation has unleashed great social discontent and political anxiety about ways to solve a problem that appears to be worsening.
Colboni spoke of “defending the right to reside in cities”, identifying specific policies such as intervening in rental prices, banning tourist apartments – “in 2028 there will be none,” he stressed – or promoting sheltered housing. “Improvement is not irreversible, it is not the law of gravity, otherwise we give up our right to decide about our lives.” In response to a question about the pressure exerted by companies such as Airbnb, Colboni said: “There are oligopolies that determine the way of living in the city, and it does not have to be this way, this is democracy.”
In addition to the political and social issues that worry both sides of the Atlantic, the conversation also touched on the issue of reconciliation between Spain and Mexico and the approaches that were made regarding the conquest and the request for forgiveness.
In this regard, Colboni noted: “I think there has to be an acknowledgment of the injustice, which is colonialism in general, and an acknowledgment and empathy for the pain that could have been caused to the people who inhabited these lands before the arrival of the Spanish. And I think that doing so naturally is also an acknowledgment of the illumination of history. I am very happy that this thoughtful diplomatic approach has happened, but it is very appropriate to walk together in this union that must happen.”