Food and the Everyday in Spain: Immigration and Culinary Renovation

Abstract

This article presents a reflection on two interrelated topics: the modification of eating habits in Spain, a key aspect of everyday life, through the presence of a substantial migration movement that started in the 1990s, and the intervention of migrant workers into the food economy, particularly in rural areas with heavy agriculture development such as seen in Lleida and its surrounding towns. It will provide a reading of two recent texts (a film and a book) that engage with issues of immigration and food. Both El próximo Oriente (2006) directed by Fernando Colomo, and La pell de la frontera (2014) authored by Francesc Serés offer evidence about contemporary Spain’s transformation through food. In these texts food is a powerful weapon of social and physical control, and encapsulates some of the many adjustments that have occurred in Spanish society. The kitchen, at home or in a restaurant, as a private or as a public space, becomes a setting to display the fine line between the familiar and the uncanny, between a domestic (safe) and a hostile environment.

Key Words:

• Food Studies
• Immigration
• Everyday Life
• El próximo Oriente (2006)
• Fernando Colomo
• La pell de la frontera
• Francesc Serés

Notes

1 Manuel Vázquez Montalbán published ‘De Portbou a Hendaya. La vuelta a la cazuela de España’ as a series of articles in El País in August 2000. The son of immigrants himself, Vázquez Montalbán demonstrated an awareness of the transformations occuring in Spain as a result of migration. However, he did not ruminate on the effects such demographic change had on Spain’s food culture, perhaps because there was little evidence of such transformation in the country’s restaurants at the time. This is confirmed in personal communications from two experts on Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (to whom I am most grateful)—José F. Colmeiro and José Saval. Araceli Masterson-Algar’s Ecuadorians in Madrid: Migrants’ Place in Urban History (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 3–5, offers a more recent review of Spain’s transformation.

2 See Krishnendu Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur (London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 1.

3 There has been very little research on this aspect. However, some sociological studies on the topic of Latin-American immigrants to Spain do exist; see, for example, Rodrigo Romo & José M. Gil, ‘Ethnic Identity and Dietary Habits among Hispanic Immigrants in Spain’, British Food Journal, 114:2 (2012), 206–23.

4 At the time of the 1992 Olympics many magazines devoted special issues to Spanish food, thus starting a craze for tapas restaurants.

5 There are very few studies devoted to the study of everyday life in Spain. Interestingly, however, there have been many more studies devoted to the study of the everyday during the early modern period. See, for example: Escritura y vida cotidiana de las mujeres de los siglos XVI y XVII: contexto mediterráneo, ed. Encarnación Medina Arjona & Paz Gómez Moreno (Sevilla: Ediciones Alfar, 2015). ‘Post Scriptum: A Digital Archive of Ordinary Writings (Early Modern Portugal and Spain)’ is a project that aims to collect and publish Portuguese and Spanish private letters written during the early modern age, see <https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/103300/factsheet/en> (last accessed 23 May 2019). The Project has collected together unpublished epistolary documents written by people from different social backgrounds. These documents survived largely by chance because the Inquisition and the civil courts used them as criminal evidence. These textual resources cover everyday issues related to past centuries. Everyday life has also been addressed from a philosophical point of view. See, for example, Marcelino Agís Villaverde, ‘Hermenéutica de la vida cotidiana’, in Pensar la vida cotidiana. Actas de los III Encuentros Internacionales de Filosofía en el Camino de Santiago, 1997, ed. Marcelino Agís Villaverde & Carlos Baliñas Fernández (Santiago de Compostela: Univ. de Santiago de Compostela, 2001), 11–24. Historians have studied the transformation of everyday life after Franco’s dictatorship. See for instance Mario Díaz Barrado, La España democrática (1975–2000): cultura y vida cotidiana (Madrid: Sintesis, 2014 [1^st ed. 2006]). Díaz Barrado argues that culture and daily life were radically altered in the last quarter of the twentieth century by the combined effect of technological change and the impact of mass media. He considers those aspects of everyday life which have been wiped out and those new habits that have set Spain on its journey into the twenty-first century. Rafael Abella, La vida cotidiana en España bajo el régimen de Franco (Barcelona: Argos Vergara, 1985) and Agustín Sánchez Vidal, Sol y sombra: de cómo los españoles se apearon de las mayúsculas de la historia dotándose de vida cotidiana (Barcelona: Planeta, 1990) are two of the few examples available of defining everyday life from a theoretical perspective, though there is no unity of method of approach. Both authors tackle the issue in very different ways. The latter tries to solve the riddle of several coincidences such as the simultaneous arrival in Spain of The Beatles’ album Sergeant Pepper and the use of credit cards. Sánchez Vidal is willing to emphasize the consequences brought about by these and other minor events, giving them preference over the great historical event, with the aim of reaching a convincing interpretive synthesis of the past.

6 Louise Edwards, Stefano Occhipinti & Simon Ryan, ‘Food and Immigration: The Indigestion Trope Contests the Sophistication Narrative’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 21:3 (2000), 297–308.

7 Edwards, Occhipinti & Ryan, ‘Food and Immigration’, 298.

8 Tabea Alexa Linhard, ‘Between Hostility and Hospitality: Immigration in Contemporary Spain’, MLN, 122:2 (2007), 400–22 (p. 404).

9 As shown by Masterson-Algar, Ecuadorian immigrants have been ‘expelled’ from central areas of Madrid thus offering a sanitized and uniform vision of the capital city (Ecuadorians in Madrid, 88–122).

10 Michael Ugarte, ‘ “Soy tú. Soy él”: African Immigration and Otherness in the Spanish Collective Conscience’, Studies in 20^th & 21^st Century Literature, 30:1 (2006), 170–89 (p. 181).

11 Thomas G. Deveny, Migration in Contemporary Hispanic Cinema (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 122–25.

12 ‘[E]staba en el centro de Madrid, en el kilometro cero, en el corazón mismo de España, y solo veía a su alrededor mendigos, tullidos, negros, marroquíes, indios de América del Sur que tocaban bombos y flautas, gente patibularia que trapicheaba en las esquinas, asesinos y salteadores en potencia’ (Antonio Muñoz Molina, Los misterios de Madrid [Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1992], 28). See Rocío Peñalta Catalán, ‘Dos espacios multiculturales de Madrid: Lavapiés y la Puerta del Sol’, Ángulo Recto. Revista de Estudios sobre la Ciudad Como Espacio Plural, 2:2 (2010), 111–17; available at <http://www.ucm.es/info/angulo/volumen/Volumen02-2/varia05.htm> (accessed 18 July 2018).

13 Ana Corbalán, ‘Encuentros transnacionales en el cine español: perpetuación del sujeto femenino silenciado en El próximo Oriente’, Romance Notes, 53:1 (2013), 105–15. See also Daniela Flesler, The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration (West Lafayette: Purdue U. P., 2008); Sandra Stickle Martín, ‘Moroccan Women and Immigration in Spanish Narrative and Film (1995–2008)’, Doctoral dissertation (University of Kentucky, 2010); or the opinion of Ricardo Arana Mariscal: ‘defiende … olvidar la postura “nosotros-ellos” y reemplazarla por un enriquecedor “todos” ’, in his La inmigracion en clave de comedia (Bilbao: Bakeaz, 2007), 40.

14 Pamela Goyan Kittler, Kathryn P. Sucher & Marcia Nahikian Nelms, Food and Culture (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2012), 4.

15 Deveny, Migration in Contemporary Hispanic Cinema, 123.

16 Deveny, Migration in Contemporary Hispanic Cinema, 125.

17 Francesc Serés, La pell de la frontera (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 2014), 141–56. Future references to this work will be given parenthetically in the text.

18 Georges Perec, L'Infra-ordinaire (Paris: Seuil, 1989).

19 Jordi Marrugat, Narrativa catalana de la postmodernitat: històries, formes i motius (Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Univ. de Barcelona, 2014), 171–74.

20 Francesc Serés, ‘Pilans i parets mestres’, El País. Quadern, 16 June 2005, p. 2.

21 Francesc Serés, De fems i de marbre (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 2007), 50.

22 According to Jordi Marrugat, the formula of this narrative trilogy—a recovery of a disappeared world from the consciousness of the individual and collective changes that have taken place—is similar to that of Spanish writer Julio Llamazares. In his second novel, La lluvia amarilla (1988), Llamazares describes the depopulation of a village in the Aragonese Pyrenees; in Escenas de cine mudo (1994) he shares with Serés’ De fems i de marbre the use of photographs as activators of long-faded memories.

23 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).

24 Serés, De fems i de marbre, 49.

25 Serés, De fems i de marbre, 80.

26 Serés, De fems i de marbre, 171–74. See also ‘l’abandó progressiu de les terres’ (244); a big Sunday meal with an open table ‘com si fos un llibre amb un faristol a sota’ (253).

27 Manel Ollé, ‘Societat anònima’, Avui Cultura, 5 April 2006, p. 13; available at <http://pandora.girona.cat/viewer.vm?id=0000904480&page=81&search=OLLÉ,%20Manel%202006&lang=ca&view=hemeroteca> (accessed 26 November 2019).

28 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore, 3 vols (London: Verso, 1991), I, 97.

29 Rosalia Cornejo-Parriego, ‘Espacios híbridos, iconos mestizos: imaginando la España global’, Letras Peninsulares, 15:2 (2002), 515–32 (p. 526).

30 Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur, 1.

31 Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur, 15.

32 Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur, 194.

* Disclosure Statement. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.