Montserrat Miller - Feeding Barcelona, 1714-1975: Public Market Halls, Social Networks, and Consumer Culture

Public Market Halls, Social Networks, and Consumer Culture

MONTSERRAT MILLER

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BATON ROUGE

Publication of this book is made possible in part by support from the John Deaver Drinko Academy at Marshall University.

Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright 2015 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
LSU Press Paperback Original
FIRST PRINTING

DESIGNER: Mandy McDonald Scallan
TYPEFACE: Whitman
PRINTER AND BINDER: Maple Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available at the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8071-5646-9 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8071-5647-6 (pdf) ISBN 978-0-8071-5648-3 (epub) ISBN 978-0-8071-5649-0 (mobi)

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

CHAPTER 1
There Were Royals among Them
A 1930 Market Queen Vignette

CHAPTER 2
City of Markets
The Pre-Industrial Backdrop

CHAPTER 3
Mirrors of Urban Growth
Market Building through the Long Nineteenth Century

CHAPTER 4
For the Love of Food
Consumer Culture in the City and Its Markets

CHAPTER 5
New Political Economies
Municipal Control and Associationalism in the Markets before the Civil War

CHAPTER 6
Layered Networks
Quotidian Life in the Markets before and during the Civil War

CHAPTER 7
And Time Goes On
Market Vendor Life and Work under Franco

If the Sagrada Famlia, for all its contradictory significance, does its best to play the part of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, or the Empire State Building, it is not, by any means, the site foremost in the minds of the citys residents. For the residents, such places as markets, schools, churches, cafs, bars, shops, and parks, sites for everyday life and its practices, tend to overshadow more recognizably monumental structures, whose role in everyday life should not be discounted either.
BRAD EPPS, Space in Motion: Barcelona and the Stages of (In)visibility

Public food markets in Spain, as in some other Mediterranean countries, remained crucial urban shopping venues throughout the twentieth century. With respect to Barcelona specifically, there were forty-one municipally operated food market halls open six days a week on the eve of the 1992 Summer Olympic Games. With one for every 44,000 inhabitants, Barcelona had more markets per capita than any other city in Europe. The social body is represented by the city as a concept that is cast as rational and improvable through planning and design. The structures of authority, religious and secular, have their central place, but so too do buildings that provide public services, here embodied in their most basic form through schools, where minds were to be developed, and markets from which food supplies would flow to feed the population of the ideal city. Jimnez-Landis little book testifies to the ongoing presumption in twentieth-century Spain that market halls remained the most appropriate public institutions for the regulation of food retailing. It also helps to explain the thinking that underpinned the ongoing municipal construction of markets in Barcelona over the long run, where the city council inaugurated seventeen new food market halls in the century leading up to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Then during the nearly four decades of Francos rule, it inaugurated twenty-two additional structures. Since the transition to democracy, a handful more have opened and a couple of markets have closed. But the vitality of the system remained remarkable. Commitment to public market-hall construction and municipal management in Barcelona thus constitutes important twentieth-century continuities that were seemingly immune to regime change.

The geographically dispersed, or polynuclear model of market-hall location designed to serve individual neighborhoods, the ongoing commitment to municipal management and regulation, and the tenacity and adaptability of food vendors in the face of changing circumstances all contributed to the development of an urban system in Barcelona that has allowed consumers in what Joan Busquets calls the compact city to continue shopping for food on foot. As such, Barcelona did not experience the emergence of the food deserts that have all too often characterized late-twentieth-century cities in other parts of the world. Because Barcelona is broadly recognized as a premier market city, it is worth examining what made that system work in a period when other cities were abandoning the model as the basis for provisioning their populations. The premise of this book is that how, where, and from whom we buy our food matters. It has been so in the past, and it remains today a quality-of-life issue.

There is no question that the ongoing resilience of Barcelonas food markets has shaped the nature of everyday life in the city, particularly for women. As Manuel Gurdia and Jos Luis Oyn assert, market halls were more than just viable economic institutions; they were also extraordinarily ebullient in terms of neighborhood-based sociability. These habits of sociability were deeply intertwined with the dissemination of consumerist values. When women stopped to talk in markets, they exchanged pleasantries and various bits of information but also could observe the purchases that their neighbors were making. In my fieldwork, I overheard thousands of such conversations. They would often tell one another, Since its Thursday, Im making rice. I have to get the shellfish from Enrics stall, or Yesterday I made an estofat [stew] that turned out so well my husband almost licked his fingers! The sharing of recipes and assertions of pride in cooking and in consumer acumen were as much a part of the neighborhood sociability taking place in markets as was the exchange of gossip, humor, and discussions of family fortunes.

One of the first things that I learned about Barcelona when I began to visit as a child was the importance that women of my mothers generation accorded to their daily trips to the neighborhood market. Anar a la plaa (going to the plaza), as they called it, was both duty and pleasure; it was an opportunity to chat with neighbors while fulfilling basic domestic responsibilities. My grandmother, I was told, typically stopped at least ten times to talk with neighbors along the block and a half trajectory from her flat on the top floor of a modernist building located on the corner of Bailn and Valncia streets to the cavernous La Concepci metal market hall where she shopped six days a week. My grandfather never set foot there, except during the Civil War, when exigencies demanded as much. In terms of consumers, the neighborhood market was mainly a feminized consumer space. The routines I observed thirty years later when I first became familiar with La Concepci still bore scant relevance to the supermarket-based shopping patterns that dominated back home in the United States. Rather,