The Mosque Conflict in Catalonia by Martin Lundsteen;

Author:Martin Lundsteen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Image of a New Neighborhood

A longer-term historical view gives us insight into the neighborhood ‘s character through its name changes over the last decade. As Pedro says, Maresme did not come to be until the early 1980s when the need for neighborhood associations was raised from “above”:

There was a year, I can’t remember when, I think it was when the government of the Socialists [PSC-PSOE], with José Maria Molina, a friend of mine who died recently, that they began to create the neighborhood associations because until then there had been no such thing here. Then they said, to help the city council, because by having more influence in the neighborhoods and capturing the problems there, they began to generate, talk with people so that they could make their association, collect or collaborate, ok? It started then, that should have been around 1984, or around 1983, that ‘s when the neighborhoods were named. There had never been neighborhoods here, so one day, I found out that I lived in Maresme. How come I live in the neighborhood of Maresme? No, no, now this here is called the Maresme. No, first it was called Barri de les Verges, the Neighborhood of the Virgins . . . Virgen del Pilar, Virgen de Montserrat . . . the Neighborhood of the Virgins. Then some considered that it was no longer the time for this and named it Maresme. (Pedro fifty-seven years old and a former resident in Maresme)

So, as we see, the neighborhood is produced socially and politically. In this case, the construction and the social perception of the inhabitants are subject to a political instrumentalization at the hands of the PSC-PSOE party of Premià de Mar.7 Thus the neighborhood went from being the Neighborhood of the Virgins (named by the inhabitants) to becoming Maresme (named by the institution). During the mosque conflict, the neighborhood association presented itself as the AAVV of Tarter-Maresme. In the same way, it is very curious that in the meetings of the Coordinator of Neighborhood Associations, it always appears as AAVV of Can Tarter. Furthermore, today, the neighborhood is officially called the Tarter-Maresme neighborhood.

In this sense, there can be no doubt that this second name change had to do with the urban transformation in the neighborhood and, perhaps more clearly, with the Can Tarter urban project. In the end, the name of Tarter-Maresme is the union of the residential project, Can Tarter, with the name of the old quarter, Maresme. An informant interprets the changes produced in the neighborhood:

Two neighborhoods are born. What was previously a small neighborhood with immigrant people from the rest of Spain becomes a neighborhood where these original immigrants acquire a different status and constitute, through an urban change, a neighborhood of a certain quality. However, that coexists with the rest of the neighborhood, now totally degraded and where the [new] immigrants live, which is a parallel process . . . Look, they were building the new neighborhood, so to speak, [and] each time more African people were moving into the upstairs blocks next to the soccer field.

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