Word: spanishness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Mancha begins with Cervantes (Raul Julia), imprisoned during the Spanish Inquisition, on "trial" before his cellmates. The soon-to-be-major-Spanish-novelist sets out to dramatize the tale of Don Quixote and his romantic quest for the "Impossible Dream...
...Cervantes, Barcelona was a "refuge of foreigners, school of chivalry, and epitome of all that a civilized and inquisitive taste could ask for." For less quixotic souls, however, the Spanish city has always been something quite other, a contentious, raffish, yeasty place of shopkeepers. Catalans, as Robert Hughes sympathetically calls them, pride themselves on their pragmatism and their independent-mindedne ss: two of their sovereign virtues are mesura and ironia. And at the heart of their idealized self-image is seny, or "a natural level-headedness." The patron saint of Barcelona, St. Eulalia, is also the patron saint of stonecutters...
...rebels and craftsmen would appeal to Hughes, the longtime art critic for TIME and the epic chronicler of his native Australia (in the best-selling Fatal Shore). In Barcelona Hughes shows, in magisterial detail, how the brash province has always been as distinct from Spain as Catalan is from Spanish (derived as it is not from early Latin but from later). At the same time he notes, with affectionate irony, how Catalans have sometimes sung the praises of their unique tongue in Spanish. Some Catalans, he remarks, feel homesick even while at home...
...Postmodernist affectations of today's Catalan renaissance (the Olympic Village for this summer's Games, Hughes notes, was named after a Utopian socialist scheme of the last century that fizzled disastrously). In the Middle Ages, Catalan was probably more spoken around the Mediterranean than French, Italian or Spanish, and the Catalan empire had consulates in 126 places; later Barcelona was the home of the first submarine and the world capital of anarchism. Discoursing with authority on such arcana as bourgeois hairstyles of the 19th century, and spicing up his narrative with his own juicily vernacular translations of Catalan poetry, Hughes...
...habit that needs to be formed and until Hispanics establish the habit they will not have a national voice. The Hispanic community and this year's political candidates should start to work together to get more of the Hispanic population registered to vote. A public service campaign in the Spanish media, as well as information in the schools, would help to instruct and inform this constituency about the benefits of having people that understand their problems in public office. Without this voice politicians will not address their concerns and the New York Times will continue to put their stories...