El charnego Manolo: la búsqueda de la identidad a través de la cocina en Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

Abstract

Manolo the Charnego: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and the Search of Identity through Cooking
Abstract: The different waves of immigrants from other parts of Spain from the beginning of the 20th century until the 1960s caused an enormous sociocultural complexity in Catalonia and some emotional wounds in those who experienced the stigma of being called charnegos. The differences between natives and newcomers became increasingly evident after the civil war, since emigrants were the cause and the victims of the urbanistic disorder of the city, the enrichment of some thanks to speculation, and the consequent economic and cultural gap. This abyss is also evident in an area as
seemingly harmless as that of food, a throwing weapon in the hands of Vázquez Montalbán, who reminded us that famines are homicidal conspiracies and cooking, a social marker of the first order.
From the working-class neighborhood of the early 1930s where the Vázquez Montalbán family stayed, to the suburban ghetto, the shabby and dehumanized Barcelona portrayed in Los mares del Sur (1979), there are a few decades in which different visions, antagonistic on occasions, are constructed of that future and yearned-for nation recovered after the first democratic elections. In the middle, like a bridge stretched between communities, appears the figure of the charnego Manolo and his sordid and lonely alter ego, the detective Carvalho.
In Vázquez Montalbán´s "memory of the palate" that stateless charnego is still hidden. It is in that multifaceted and changing identity, reasonably “mestizo,” where the charnego Manolo seeks his identity, his position in life, and social justice.