My 3 cents on the article of the Barcelona Reporter on Bullfighting in Catalonia

Deveras, que tiene que ver las corridas de toros con la independencia o nacionalidad o lo que hizo Franco hace 50 anos? Digo yo. Ver articulo que sigue que copie del “Barcelona Reporter”




Catalonia’s Independence from Spain drives bullfighting ban


Catalonia’s decision on Wednesday to ban bullfighting in 2012 is akin to Quebec banning hockey or California banning fireworks on the Fourth of July.


Catalonia’s Independence from Spain drives bullfighting ban


Seneca, the Roman playwright, cast the Iberian Peninsula as a stretched bull’s hide — la piel de toro — more than 2,000 years ago. Cave paintings discovered in Spain depict men staring down bulls. Bulls and bullfighting are icons of Spanish self-identify, and as such, are interwoven in the culture’s pageantry and sense of patrimony.

It is part of the country’s pageantry, but it’s more than that, and b.

On the surface, banning bullfights is about animal welfare, but more than anything, it’s about politics and age-old tensions being played out in the bullfighting ring.

“In this case, banning the bullfight has a lot to do with Catalonia saying, ‘Look, we are not Spanish,’ ” says Carrie Douglass, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Virginia who specializes in Spain and is married to a Spaniard from Madrid. “Because if Spain is associated with or equal to the symbol of the bull and the bullfight, and the Catalans are prohibiting it then they are saying: ‘We can’t be Spanish. And we should be separate.’ ”

Originally, the Catalans were separate, a kingdom unto themselves known as Aragon, with a distinct language, governing institutions and customs that persisted long after the birth of the Kingdom of Spain in 1469.


By the end of the 18th-century bullfighting, as we picture it today, was already fully developed as a commercial enterprise. It was the first form of mass entertainment in Western society. Arenas dotted the Spanish landscape. Stars were worshipped like matinee idols. Festivals would end with a bullfight, followed by a feast. People loved it, even in Catalonia, the first region in Spain to industrialize and, by the 1850s, the wealthiest.


“A Catalan nationalist movement emerged in the 1850s,” says Adrian Shubert, a historian at York University in Toronto. “The Catalans saw themselves as more sophisticated, more European, more advanced economically than the rest of the country.”

And the future, to the Catalans, was to be European, and being European meant no more bullfights. Bullfighting was a symbol of Spanish backwardness, of barbarity, a tradition unbecoming a progressive people. To the rest of Spain, bullfighting was the people; it was Castilian virility, artistry and bravery in the face of death.


Goya celebrated it in paintings. Federico Lorca, the poet, embraced it with verse.

“Perhaps little children cannot imagine the shape of Spain, but we adults know – our teachers told us so – that Spain stretches out like a bull’s hide,” he wrote. “In this geographical symbol lies the deepest, most dazzling and complex part of the Spanish character.”


Lorca was executed during the Spanish Civil War, a bloody conflict that ended with the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.

“Franco detested the Catalans,” Mr. Shubert says. “He saw them as separatists and a threat to the unity of the Fatherland.”

Under Franco, the Catalan language was banned in public, and banished from media. Nationalism went underground, and wouldn’t emerge again until after the general’s death in 1975.

Almost four decades later, a new civil war is being waged in Spain, and the first casualty is bullfighting. The debate that ended the blood sport played out in Catalonia’s legislature for several months. Biologists, veterinarians, philosophers, writers — bullfighters — all were invited to address the politicians before the crucial ballot was cast. And when the votes were tallied, bullfighting, and the Spain behind it, was defeated 68-55.


“Can you have a fiesta in Spain that claims antiquity — a patron saint festival — without a bullfight?” Ms. Douglass wonders. “In Spain, you can hate the bulls. But your fiesta — like the Fourth of July — is more than just corn on the cob and a band and some watermelon.”


There has to be fireworks and a rocket’s red glare. Being opposed to the bullfight is like being a supporter of the National Rifle Association in the United States: it says something about a person’s politics.


And to the Catalans, it says that we are the modern ones, the progressives and, most of all, that we are different. And they are different, even though the region has a rich bullfighting tradition and a reputation for producing some of the finest matadors in the land.


“It is not a cruel show,” renowned Catalan bullfighter Serafin Marin said this week. “It is a show that creates art.”




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