In 1932 a report was published under the title ‘El Barrio Chino de Barcelona (Distrito V)’ amongst the pages of the magazine A.C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea.2 The condemnation was radical indeed, on both an architectural and urban level, denouncing the deplorable state of the streets and dwellings of this infamous part of the city. Symptomatically, the unsigned text was written shot through with medico-sanitary terms and metaphors: ‘prophylaxis’, ‘the cancer of Barcelona’, ‘a focus of infection’, ‘degenerated populace’ and so on. The article climaxed in a less-than-subtle hint to the authorities of the city that they would do well to ‘find interesting the suggestions that, for this preventative purpose, resulted from the Architect’s Congress which had taken place in Barcelona’.3 Indeed, as the same magazine had announced in its previous issue, Barcelona had hosted the preparatory meeting of the congress on urbanism that was to be held in Moscow.4
One of the pictures published on the occasion of this conference (see Figure 8.1, left) shows the President of Catalonia giving an official reception, in one of the Gothic halls of the Palau de la Generalitat, to the members of the Comité international pour la réalisation de l’architecture contemporaine (CIRPAC) and its Spanish offspring, the aforementioned GATEPAC (see Figure 8.1, left). Francesc Macià (1859–1933), the elderly gentleman in the centre of the photograph, was then the venerable and respected figure who embodied the republican Catalan government, after years of frequently clandestine political struggle. Macià had many years before been a military engineer and active in the building sector.5
Sixth from the left is the mayor of Barcelona: Dr Jaume Aiguader (1882–1943). Since the beginning of the century – the doctor had shifted from the libertarian sympathies of his student years towards Catalanist republicanism – Aiguader had emerged as an advocate of social medicine, the post-hygienist medical paradigm which would be adopted by many Catalan doctors.6 The successful support for social medicine was due, among other things, to the media effort his supporters made to spread their doctrine, beginning with the doctors themselves.7 In fact, Aiguader had already been a leading advocate of social medicine for decades, through articles in the daily press, conferences in cultural associations and societies and especially through the direction and writing of the series Monografies Mèdiques.8 This social medicine advocated, among other things, direct political commitment by physicians themselves for the solution of hygienic, health and medical issues of social groups and of the most deprived or needy urban areas.9
Shifting our attention to the left corner of the photograph we can see several young Barcelona architects, with Josep Lluís Sert (1902–1983) in the front row alongside Charles Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887–1965), better known as Le Corbusier. These young architects, mostly belonging to educated bourgeois Catalan families, considered him their mentor and enthusiastically adhered to the tenets of his rationalist beliefs on architecture and urban planning. Together, they would soon convince the authorities in the photograph to sponsor an urban reform plan for Barcelona, inspired by the Swiss master. This would be a radical plan which would raise fierce social and professional opposition and that would be only poorly applied, but which for some of them would provide an excellent springboard for their brilliant careers.
Indeed, a few months after this meeting, the so-called ‘Macià Plan’, an ambitious urban planning project for the city of Barcelona and its metropolitan area, was presented. The plan was a declaration of the result of planning principles, fruit of the strange – or not – alliance between the elderly President Macià, the doctor Mayor Aiguader and young architects from well-to-do families, dazzled by Le Corbusier.10 The idea that drove the project was to transform Barcelona, which for half a century had been an industrial city, into a modern capital, equipped with a port, an airport and other communication channels which would rationalize entrepreneurial activity and open up the city for residents by enhancing facility of movement, modern dwellings and communications in the city in line with the rationalistic and utopian vision of ‘modern life’ so characteristic of the interwar period in Europe and North America.11
This conception of urbanism had a special plan for what was then, from an administrative point of view, the Fifth District of the city (see Figure 8.2). It was a densely populated sector, with some neighbourhoods that constituted an archetype of houses, streets and ‘unhealthy’ people from portuary zones.12 But the Fifth District also contained, close to the port, a neighbourhood that was then known by the name of Barrio Chino: a maze of narrow shadowy alleys, with buildings too high, too narrow and too shabby, where a diverse array of night-life and a high ratio of brothels were concentrated, defining it as the quintessence of the underworld of the city. The special plan for the Barrio Chino was none other than the demolition of almost all buildings, destroying the whole network of streets, alleys and courtyards, creating wide avenues flanked by new housing, geometrized and stripped of all ornament that were not pure lines of concrete, glass and iron materials that the new architects were so enthused about. The shared dream amongst authorities and planners was the eradication of the physical, human and geographical configuration of the entire area through urban sanitation and materialized in a plan which contemplated the most dramatic destruction and presented explicitly, inspired by a surgical simile: ‘We must remove the infected core as would a surgeon from a sick body’.13
The radical redesign of this area of the Fifth District leaves no doubt about the medical and architectural idea behind the pursued objective – to remove the social and medical problems of the slums of Barcelona – and urban debauchery was seen as the optimal solution. There was no room for relics of the past such as the winding, narrow and dirty streets of the Barrio Chino; even less so for their unhealthy homes and yards. And for its inhabitants and the activities carried out there? Their future remained unclear, but the sanatorium, other confinement or forcible transfer were the pathways with which until then the authorities had followed when attempting to address that particular problem.
Unsurprisingly, the plan was fiercely attacked by property owners and did not receive clear political support until the arrival of the new republican government of the Popular Front in February 1936, on the eve of the Civil War. This appalling conflict finally demolished the dreams of planners and politicians: the vision proclaiming the design of a modern, ambitious and healthy city that involved the destruction of the ailing urban fabric barely materialized, or at least which would not come about until much later, with a whole new set of managers and players and well mixed results.14
The only action carried out in the Fifth District under the Macià Plan before the Civil War was the construction and operation of the anti-tuberculosis Central Dispensary (DCA) (see Figure 8.1, right). The design and building of the DCA, located at the northern limit of the Fifth District, was commissioned precisely to Josep Lluís Sert, together with his even younger colleagues Josep Torres Clavé (1906–1939) and Joan Baptista Subirana (1904–1978).15 The three architects raised the project from reading the work of Lluís Sayé, Les noves orientacions de la lluita antituberculosa i la seva aplicació a Catalunya (1933).16 The tisiologist Sayé noted, apart from highlighting the role of poor nutrition, the importance of the structural housing conditions in the spread of the disease.17 The tuberculosis dispensary allowed a structuring of tisiology as a medical speciality.18
What we would like to propose in this chapter is, in fact, to look back at the two decades prior to the early 1930s. So far we have presented the point of arrival, which is already right on the final frontier of the period covered by this book. In the pages that follow we aim to explain what the Barrio Chino was like at the time, what was happening there and why those in the photograph would wish to destroy it. This wish was nurtured by a desire to sanitize, in line with the most recent trends in urbanism and social medicine. It was promoted by a mesocracy of professional engineers, doctors and architects who were in direct contact with the republican authorities while they themselves did not have any political or institutional responsibilities.19
What was the neighbourhood like? How did residents and visitors face health problems? How had they tried to control – regardless of any radical urban proposals – this area inhabited by generally poor people of such varied nature, which was at the same time frequented by members of almost all social classes who did not actually live there but sought fun, sex, music, entertainment and night-life until dawn?
In the following section, we will proceed to present a vision of the urban geography of the Barrio Chino. In the third section, we descend to the microgeography of a single street (Conde de Asalto) and its immediate neighbourhood to observe not only the diverse world based on show business and sex, but also the consequences thereof, both hygienic and sanitary. In the fourth section, we have chosen one of the premises of that street, the anatomical museum run by the show business entrepreneur Francesc Roca, to reflect on the ambiguities and limitations that the regime of control that social medicine attempted to impose from above was facing, from its role as prescribers and expert advisors to municipal, regional or national authorities, as well as some of the appropriations the end users of these policies made of the content, materials or speeches that were destined for them.
Urban geography, urban planning and architectural design are paramount to understanding medical cultures centred in such a particular area of the city as the ‘underworld’. Therefore, our approach will resort to the kind of sources in which the dimension of public representation is notable: media reports, literary excerpts, images or advertisements promoting medical and health services. Naturally, the assertions of medical experts and planners regarding any proposed control, sanitation or the combatting of disease are also present in the analysis, but these sources have historically been given privilege on these issues, so our wish here is to relativize their weight in understanding the complex world of medical cultures in coexistence or dispute in an area and a specific historical moment.20 An approach to the geography of the urban district under study should avoid giving priority to certain aspects over others when considering the confusing world lived daily in the pre-civil war Barrio Chino. The chronology, the physical space and the social actors go beyond the ideological forms of intervention of public authorities defined in terms of ‘social medicine’ that we are used to seeing.21 On the other hand, taking into account the special characteristics of Barcelona, we wish to point out the usefulness of comparing this case with those of other European industrial and ‘non-capitals’ such as Lyon, Marseille, Hamburg or Turin.22
In the first third of the twentieth century, the Barrio Chino was a scenario characterized by the complex coexistence of diverse urban subcultures, from libertarian anarchism to the trade in and consumption of drugs, the emergence of musical styles and genres such as jazz, or the constant renewal in the settings of prostitution, be they heterosexual or homosexual. The narrow streets of the Barrio Chino spread between buildings crowded with subdivided homes that housed families of disparate composition and condition, but almost always large; dozens of workshops and small factories where largely immigrant workers toiled, cafés, cabarets, taverns and other spaces in which alternative political and social topics were discussed, and where throbbed the city night-life, with the permanent presence of the worlds of prostitution and drugs, music, dance and gambling.23
At the same time, those streets and surrounding areas were still the place of the old institutions devoted to the care of the poor and sick, not to mention the Queen Amalia prison, reserved exclusively for women from 1904 when male prisoners were transferred to the new Modelo Prison, built outside the walls of the old city.24 So, if on the one hand the Fifth District was the geography of the traditional institutions of social control, on the other, it was also the geography of social tumult: there were both male and female prostitution, begging, drug use (especially alcohol and cocaine), subversive activities and so on. From the perspective of the ruling bourgeoisie, this was an infected area, a place that should be cleansed completely. Moreover, serious health consequences marked the sanitary degradation of the whole area: venereal disease, tuberculosis and sundry ailments associated with poverty and overcrowding spread throughout the district during this period. The bourgeoisie in command of institutions resorted to strategies based on their idea of civic regeneration and the recovery of a morally healthy urban landscape. Social medicine and urban planning were the basis for action and the formulation of projects to give an answer to a reality that stubbornly persisted despite all the hype of regulations, institutions and norms.
Beyond the regulatory documents, policy statements and speeches of medical statisticians and sanitary engineers, the use of literary and journalistic sources allows us to capture the cityscape of the time. The novels, stories and news reports devoted to different aspects of life in the Barrio Chino constituted a genuine literary genre in those early decades of the century. Not only in Spanish and Catalan literature, but also in some literary works published abroad.25 Short novels in Spanish such as Sangre en las Drassanes (1926) by Francisco Madrid (1900–1952) or literary monuments in Catalan literature such as Vida privada (1932) by Josep Maria de Sagarra (1894–1961); newspaper reports such as those by the aforementioned Francisco Madrid, or those by Domènec de Bellmunt (1903–1993) compiled in a volume together with his short novel L’àngel bohemi (1935) or those gathered by Josep M. Planes (1907–1936), in Nits de Barcelona (1931).26 These and other reports were published throughout the interwar period in L’Esquella de la Torratxa, El Escándalo, D’Ací i d’Allà, El Diluvio, La Rambla and La Publicitat, publications which reflected various ideological positions and should be analysed as an expression of the Barrio Chino’s visibility to the public and in the troubled political arena of the moment, from the bourgeois and conservative Catholic positions to Catalan anarchists, through various modes of republicanism, all in an unstoppable upsurge since the beginning of the century, before the collapse of the traditional dynastic parties (conservative and liberal).27 For reasons of space, we will present three examples taken from these sources that portray three different scenes, which represented the Barrio Chino for some authors and their readers in different social spheres.
The first of our examples dates from 1929. That year, the Association of Hoteliers in Catalonia sponsored, on the occasion of the International Exhibition, the publishing of what were known as the Guías P.I.C.S., tourist guides with practical and artistic information about the city, with maps and detailed routes. The edition of this year incorporated a section with a variety of itineraries for the city. The eighth of these routes ran around the neighbourhoods of Hospital and Sant Pau, in the Fifth District. By taking as a starting point Carme Street from the corner of Egipcíaques, the guide talks about the ‘severe overcrowding at the Hospital de Santa Cruz’. The tour ran through the streets of Roig, Malnom and Picalquers, ‘very interesting for their picturesque squalor, the incarnation of a portrait by Balzac’. Turning back into Carme, the guide limits itself to highlighting ‘a stately home of the early nineteenth century’ commissioned by the manufacturer Erasme of Gonima (1746–1821). The route continued through the Plaza de Pedró up to San Antonio Abad, where a plaque on the wall of the church reminded the sightseer that it had once been the Hospital de Ardientes. The route continued down the streets of Salvador and Reina Amalia, where, as mentioned previously, the women’s prison was to be found, though the only thing apparently worth mentioning in the guide was a house built by another nineteenth-century manufacturer, and added: ‘adjacent streets are those of labourers losing their economic relevance; rather like the working neighbourhoods as would have been the Barcelona factory districts at the time mechanization began to develop’. Down the Calle de la Cera tourists wandered to the hospital, from which one could access the space which, at the time, had relinquished almost all hospital functions. Returning to the street, towards the Rambles, the guide reminds us of the importance of the Teatro Romea and the artistic allures of the church of St Augustine. Skirting the church, one came to the street of San Pablo, which the guide recommended strolling in its entirety, highlighting a farm shop from 1778 and the Romanesque Sant Pau del Camp.
This seventh route dedicated to Las Rambles included constant entries and exits to and from its tributary streets and peeked out, in its final stretch, onto Conde de Asalto and, on leaving the Plaza del Teatro, the tour left behind the Portal de la Paz to enter, however briefly, the Parallel and skirt the Drassanes (shipyards) building. The character and content of the tour differs little from the previous itinerary. It described routes to follow during the day, amongst the lively hubbub of the inhabitants but, of course, without stopping to discuss with them their miserable living conditions or their squalid dwellings.
Cosmetic operations for the sake of tourism have historical origins and are not merely the product of present times. In this seemingly neutral rhetoric – celebrating background noise – the historical reasons for a port and segregated neighbourhood were deliberately forestalled as a grand receiver of permanent immigration (at that time mainly from Catalonia and adjacent Spanish regions), a schizophrenia of daylight and darkness. A living space for workers, artisans, prostitutes and criminals; night-time entertainment, crime and shootouts between labour activists and the employers’ gunmen, and misery, a great deal of misery.28
The second example we would like to present stands, in a way, in a line similar to that of Barcelona hoteliers, but does so through literary fiction from one of the most gifted pens of the Catalan language of the time, the aristocrat Josep Maria de Sagarra, as described in his novel Vida privada (1932): ‘An excursion to the sleazier neighbourhood known as the Barrio Chino’ located chronologically, as we shall see in the quote, on the eve of the 1929 Exhibition. Unlike the guide, however, Sagarra shows us another reality, a true ‘geography of evil’.29 His is a nocturnal fiction starring eight representatives of the wealthier classes of the city, men and women alike, in which the Barrio Chino is presented as a museum, access to which is gained on foot once the cars have been left at the Lion d’Or, on the Rambles, near the Arc del Teatre. A museum or, as it would now be called, a theme park, with ammoniacal odours arousing the visitors’ fascinated interest and the eagerness ‘to see who knows what’. Sagarra reviewed the aim of the visit with irony:
We are on that stretch of Calle del Cid carefully arranged by the Sociedad de Atracción de Forasteros [Society for the Attraction of Foreigners]. Then, those neighbourhoods were preparing for the great exhibition and operators were scouring the Barrio Chino for Chinese, blacks, the truculently inverted and women taken from the dissection room of the Hospital, half butchered, a green skirt and shawl turning them into gypsies, two pieces of desalted cod feigning breasts; so attired they would then be nailed to the door of the most strategic houses. [...] As for the men, they were of all kinds, from sailors, mechanics to ordinary workers, paedophiles with painted lips, cheeks caked with plaster and eyes heavy with mascara. Among the quirky wag their tails a kind of poor, the ragged and pickpockets, only to be found in those neighbourhoods [...] In this part of the city were the humble also to be seen, not picturesque in the slightest, as one might see in other parts; but the others [...].30
Sagarra also provides a literary visit to certain spaces of sociability:
The taverns were smeared with the extract of orujo; this alcoholic excretion of stones is perhaps the best thing in the world to depict the life sentence of the heart, an irremediable brutishness. Besides the taverns, shops selling condoms, with their blue and red rubber pears, amongst other rubberware, glass and fabric, along with packets of cotton wool, all alluding in such an unlyrical way to the catastrophes of sex [...]
Finally, Sagarra takes a shot at explaining an alleged acceptance of that ‘natural order’:
Despite the accumulation of pathological material, humanity present there seemed to squeeze the juice from life with great naturalness and an oblivion that could be perfectly taken for optimism [...] ladies and gentlemen stopping at the door of ‘La Criolla’ would command very little attention. The neighbourhood was accustomed to this kind of visit and enough literature on the festering appearance of the Fifth District had already seen the light of day, and both the foreign and the native curious were received at ‘La Criolla’ in a perfectly normal and correct manner.
Visitors to this unique museum left it behind on their stroll back to the Rambles, where they would recover their cars to return to the geographical normality of their Eixample.
The Noucentisme movement argued with literary force that, from the beginning of the century, was hatching in the fields of medicalization and transformative proposals to be imposed upon the landscape of the Fifth District.31 Xavier Pla recalls that one of the glosses written in 1906 by Eugeni d’Ors (1881–1954), considered the most representative intellectual of the Noucentisme, sought, with envy, an earthquake for Barcelona as San Francisco had experienced, to finish off the old city at a stroke.32 This idea, linked to other types of intervention in the area, was to re-emerge throughout the first third of the century from different perspectives, including the literary. For example, Carles Soldevila (1892–1967), in a passage from his sexually ambiguous novel Eva (1931), defends the concept of urban space as an area of transit. The project for wide streets in a regular pattern would facilitate movement – commercial, recreational, athletic or sanitary – radically contrasting with the winding streets of the Fifth District ‘full of onlookers, shouts, voices, smells and bands of children; as if they were the corridors of a formidable dwelling’ angering ladies trying to get to the orphanage on Montealegre Street making them express aloud the dominant bourgeois thought, ‘I can’t imagine why they are waiting so long to knock all of this down [...] how disgusting!’.33
The last example we would like to expose in this wandering comes from a publication that appeared two years after the CIRPAC meeting in Barcelona with which this chapter began. The journalist Domènec Bellmunt published one of the stories that, from the pages of Mirador, La Rambla or other Catalan magazines of the period,34 served their readers a seductive yet gruesome image of ‘the catacombs of Barcelona’.35 The article was titled La ‘Creu Roja’ de l’amor (The ‘Red Cross’ of Love) and was dedicated to the dispensary battling against venereal diseases to be found on the Parallel, the western frontier of the Barrio Chino, led by Dr Antoni Peyrí (1889–1973). Bellmunt presented the work of the authorities of the Generalitat whose venereal treatment service Peyrí himself ran – as an ‘efficient and perfect’ organization whilst also recalling the existence of another clinic in the portuary zone – the southern boundary of the Barrio Chino – and a third in Sant Andreu, a working-class district on the north-eastern outskirts of the city.
Syphilis was present in many ways in the popular imagination. Carles Soldevila gives a sample in Fanny (1929), the story of the survival of a young bourgeois girl who has fallen into social disgrace: yet another trip from the bourgeois Eixample to the reproachable Fifth District. The self-sufficient Fanny tries to rebuild her life as a dancer in a club; fearful from the rumours spread on infection by syphilis, she goes to the Library of Catalonia to look up the corresponding entry in the Enciclopedia Espasa. In turn, Sagarra, in Vida privada, speaking of the children of wealthy families in Barcelona, highlights that ‘the conversation amongst most young men revolved around car chassis, bodywork and gonorrhoea’.36
By the time ‘Creu Roja’ de l’amor was published, for the 12 previous years Domènec Bellmunt had already been writing – in La Publicitat, organ of the Acció Catalana party, a splinter group of the Lliga – the news reports that would win him the title of ‘father of modern Catalan journalism’.37 After years of Parisian exile due to the dictatorship, his return to Barcelona in 1928 is notable for his activity as a reporter for the Catalan press, but also for his official entry into the Generalitat Health Service, having passed the corresponding public examinations. The article singing the praises of the personification of Peyrí in the programme of social medicine fighting venereal disease would hence not appear to be a mere coincidence.
So between contemplative museum visits and dreams of radical action, the Fifth District survived the conditions imposed by social and political reformers. The interventions that had been suggested during the first third of the twentieth century had a variety of effects.38 Republican and Catalan journalists exerted a strong influence on the institutions of city government and on the medical profession. Social medicine was not directed to a mere healthfulness of the district, but rather to its medicalization from above, with its clinics and health propaganda – with special attention as to the treatment of syphilis and tuberculosis – as well as its urban planning, in collusion with architects and engineers and supported by those forces installed in political power. But within this equation, in which everything might appear to fit, something fundamental was lacking: the limits set by the effort to medicalize and the moralizing discourse. The diverse population that inhabited or frequented the Barrio Chino certainly met with various manifestations of controlling pressure from social medicine, but also with so much else, abiding side by side in the same urban space.39
In the geography of the Barrio Chino, Conde de Asalto was the main human river that connected the Rambles with the Parallel along which strollers would swim or sail on board the riverboat running through it, Tram N°48, nourishing numerous tributaries and alleys with its passengers, especially on the southern side. The scene that lay before them should be described house by house, premise by premise; you would find a panorama of offices and clinics, rubberware and bathing establishments, brothels, photographic studios, anatomical museums, music and picture houses where films where shown.
Beginning with the clinics we would come across: the Clínica Gallego, at n° 18; the Instituto Médico Femenino at n° 23; the Clínica San Antonio, at n° 47; and the clinic La Corona, at n° 95. Apart from the consultancies – normally advertised as ‘urinary’ – of Doctor Paulino Alcántara (Unió, n° 19), the Clínica Balart (Unió, n° 7) and ‘La Japonesa’, founded by Doctor Holgado in 1924 (Arc del Teatre, n° 1). Octavi Carulla had a urology practice at Unió, n° 10; Francesc Imbert, at Principal at Gravina, n° 8; Joan Morros at San Pablo, n° 63. Doctor Josep Mascaró had a ‘women’s ailments’ practice at n° 47 in Calle Hospital, and Josep M. Segalà at n° 15, Calle Barberà. Brothels also existed with their own consultants, such as that described by Francisco Madrid in ‘The commercial organisation of a brothel’, published in 1925 in El Escándaloand in the following year in the compilation of 23 of his articles titled Sangre en Atarazanas.41 Madrid presents his readers with the description of a brothel in Calle Arco del Teatro accentuating its ‘all modern advances’, among which there was listed ‘a medical clinic’ established by ‘Mr. Ugarte’, the proprietor of the business itself.42
The establishments known as ‘rubberware and bathing’ (that is, offering condoms and a washing of the private parts) were sited preferably in the side-streets, close to the main flow: La Mundial (Espalter, n° 6) ‘Open until 3 a.m’, with ‘Immediate bathing and irrigation service’; La Clínica Oriental and El Cupido (both at San Pablo, n° 110); three ‘rubberware’ establishments in Calle San Ramón: La Manota at n° 1, La Previsión at n° 6 and La Favorita at n° 10; La Normanda was to be found in Calle San Oleguer; La Especial in Barberá; La Cosmopolita in Calle Robadors, practically beside the La Bola de Oro clinic.
Abortion ‘clinics’, sited in various parts of the district (and town), were obviously clandestine, but made an appearance in literary and journalistic sources. Bellmunt, for example, published in 1930 a report-story called ‘human meat for sale’ in which the main character, pregnant at 17, aborted following what the author calls a ‘medicinal treatment’. Bellmunt claims ‘this business of abortion was promoted thanks to the clandestinity of quacks […]’ and concludes with a selection of terms, entirely symptomatic of his mentality, that ‘young people should be aware of all the perils of sexual anarchism and the advantages of prevention of venereal diseases’, proposing the introduction ‘in girls’ schools, to the teaching of real life’.43
Photographic studios located here, such as the ‘Estudio Venus’ at n° 42 Conde de Asalto, could not help but become disreputable and show the ambivalent relationship between artistic, medical and pornographic photography. The theatrical, musical, and from a certain time onwards, cinematic shows were definitely the main attraction of the street. For example, the Eden Concert Hall which, from 1914, became the paradigm of theatrical premises providing quite luxurious variétés to select clients who wished to ‘walk on the wild side’ in the Barrio Chino, with the help of entrepreneurs such as Francesc Buxó.44 Some aspects of life in these places appear in the lyrics of the songs that were sung in variety shows there. Perhaps one of the most significant is the issue of drug use and, especially, cocaine, which had made a swift leap from the operating theatres of modern clinics in the late nineteenth century to the dance halls on Conde de Asalto or the Parallel, into which the aforementioned street flowed. Cocaine use seems to have peaked, coming to a head in 1926 when Joan Viladomat wrote the lyrics to ‘Cocaine Tango’, which became a commercial hit.45 So it is not surprising that the issue of addiction eventually became part of the discourse of social control drawn from medicine. A discourse of control not always stated specifically by the medical press or formulated by the action of dispensaries, as discussed in the following section.
As it has been said, anatomical museums were a paramount component of the geography of spectacle in the Barrio Chino. They played an important role as a means of popularizing a particular medical culture. The publicity inserted in the general press and the records of the Arxiu Municipal Contemporari of Barcelona allow us to set the exact location and physical features of those museos anatómicos, which were distinctive not only by their situation in the area but also because of the role they played as a means of popularizing a particular medical culture. Actually, those spaces were the setting for a cultural event that went beyond the flâneur who visited the neighbourhood, a complex expression which mixed media, genres and styles, a business initiative and, simultaneously, a form of campaigning against disease. But we have direct and unique sources for only one of those collections: the Roca Museum. Significantly, we have a record of the different items of the collection, which is something really unusual in the European context of the time, rich in such establishments, but that has experienced a great loss of that kind of material exhibits. The ephemera produced by the Roca family, which has also survived, allows us to know the variety of resources deployed by the owners in that space: an anatomical collection, some movies, a book store with sex education books and drugs for sexually transmitted diseases, many posters, flyers, ads, and so on (see Figure 8.3).
According to the Diario del Museo, published by the owners of the Roca Museum also located in the Conde de Asalto, the museum had been open to the public in Barcelona since 1925. The documented remains of the wreckage of the museum after the Spanish Civil War showed little more than scattered signs of an institution that had emerged from the world of illusionists and music, fairs and travelling shows from towards the end of the previous century. Francesc Roca, musician, magician, ventriloquist, over the years was to become yet another mainstay of showbiz; a business that would eventually include one of the anatomical museums and freak shows that were all the rage in those decades.46 Billboards surviving from the period suggest that the museum was part of a spectacle in which the owner combined a series of entertainments based on the exhibition of objects and artefacts, musical sketches and circus acts, rarities and monstrosities both human and animal, scientific film screenings and the sale of informative books on themes related to sex.47
The collection of anatomical models had a fundamental weight in the order, division and development of artistic elements of the museum. The exhibits focused on vice and the terrible consequences they could have on the wrongdoer’s body and on their family. Drugs and alcohol, as well as sexually transmitted diseases, were a central theme of the collection, alongside a systematic unveiling of the naked female body. These anatomical models explicitly detailed the process of fertilization, gestation and human reproduction. The projection of films such as ‘How we come into the world’ would reinforce the argument for information expressed and consistently claimed by Roca the entrepreneur. The capacity to attract custom was increased by producing numerous models and exhibits with vivid reproductions of human embryos and foetuses, and especially those with congenital defects.
The nature and content of the Roca show looks set to order the conduct of visitors with learning by means of imagining the terrible consequences of certain types of behaviour. Thus the idea of giving a pedagogical and disciplinarian significance to the exhibits would seem plausible, given the primarily male audience as well as the location chosen by various museums and anatomical collections in the Fifth District from the late nineteenth century onwards and especially during the first third of the twentieth century.
Sagarra’s novel illustrates the existence and the raison d’être for these premises in a literary context characteristic of the deflowering of the young son of a wealthy family in a brothel in Calle Barberá, in the lower part of the Barrio Chino. A commonplace circumstance in many periods: urban youth discovering sex in a seedy world. Sagarra explores the cultural motives that lead from youthful sexual palpitations to a loss of focus. The irresistible impulse must face misunderstanding, taboos, repression and prejudices created by men, the adults, represent an ideological order which prohibits and does not explain, promoting denial and obscurity. Given this confusion, the options available to uninformed youngsters are limited:
They wish the teenager to believe in the existence of sin; the case is presented specifically, with the associated horrifying material consequences. Certain pedagogies use compelling images, catastrophes of secret diseases vividly represented, the most repugnant secretions, deformations and intolerable pain. But it is useless; there comes a time when shame or cowardice pass; the temptation is too cruel and the bare skin of Siegfried will leap over any flame.48
It is difficult to clearly envisage the public attending these shows. The Diario del Museo shows a photograph in which a sizeable crowd fills Conde de Asalto, at the doors of what is presumably the museum (see Figure 8.4). The mass, many with their backs to the observer, is dominated by soldier’s caps and the berets of members of the popular classes. Nevertheless it cannot be assured that the photograph corresponds exactly to the given description. In Verdades, a publication displaying an identical layout, font and publicity as the Diario del Museo, in the same picture, enlarged, you can see that people are about to enter premises where the film ‘Los Averiados’ is being shown. It seems, therefore, that the business project led by Roca would include, besides the wax exhibits at the anatomical museum, film screenings of daring sexual content, presented as part of the social medicine campaign against venereal diseases. This kind of cinema and specifically ‘Los Averiados’,49 as press cuttings from 1933 show, were projected in major cinemas in the city for several weeks and then went on to smaller theatres located in less central positions.50
Significantly, ‘Los Averiados’ and, logically, the Museo Roca, being one of the places where the film was projected, received fierce criticism from Catalan conservatives, as evidenced by the review published by the doctor and priest Pere Tarrés. Tarrés questioned the educational purpose defended by those promoting the film, as well as the creators of other types of products marketed by people like Roca:
The ‘pseudo-scientific’, the unscrupulous, unsuccessful writers in noble literature, have taken advantage of a moment in which much of the world of youth revolves around issues related to sexuality, introducing into the big market – with evocative and catchy titles to explain his way, under a roughly cut scientific flag – all sorts of immoralities which in a cruder form they would not have been allowed to publish. What is the purpose? Just to earn a few miserable pesetas.
Tarrés thus condemns the artifice of entrepreneurs – who were qualified by the doctor priest as ‘true film Pharisees’, ‘hypocrites of cinematic art’, ‘new masters (?) of the spirit of lust’ – who ‘claim that watching graphic exhibitions of such calamities, submitted supposedly as if they were a scientific discipline, our youth “should be good” and never go to visit the houses of prostitution’. The Catalan patriot holds his hands up to the heavens, ‘[...] and we are tired of so much “scientific immorality”! Science must never serve as a pretext for such barely contained passions! [...] Friends, do not be fooled! Let us strive with all our might against this “pseudo-science”, a dishonour to all lands of the world’.51
Throughout this chapter we have proposed a complex vision from multiple historical sources and narrative genres in an attempt to understand the Barrio Chino, the neighbourhood inhabited by working people and immigrants, fraught with misery and poverty, lit by the music and electric lights of shows and frequented by members of most of Barcelona’s social strata. Our view has attempted to highlight three key ideas. First, an eclectic use of historical and literary sources has allowed us to show the complexity of the medical cultures concentrated in the neighbourhood streets before the risks of the lifestyles that prevailed there. Second, we have noted these tensions by closing in on the geography of a major urban artery, the Calle Conde de Asalto, where a variety of experts were available to the public, amongst which the even more diversely profane displayed their wares. Finally, we attempt to sketch the limits of the social medicine intervention from the ambiguity shown by the materials exhibited at the Museo Roca. Nevertheless, this chapter is written from an office lodged in the heart of what was the Fifth District, which today remains a vivid neighbourhood inhabited by tens of thousands. It is therefore unavoidable, as historians committed to the present, that we try to understand, to brief the reader on what has happened and what is still happening in this slice of Barcelona.
As already noted, under the municipal councils of the Franco regime the plan of radical surgery proposed by the Catalan republicans began to be partially carried out: the demolition of the headquarters of the Drassanes and from 1953 on, in the toughest part of the Barrio Chino, entire streets would disappear, such as Arco de Civés, the opening up of García Morato avenue, rupturing the continuity of Conde de Asalto and the associated side-streets.52 The dictatorship ended; in 1979 the surgical operation was to continue at municipal level until the closing of the task, thrown into the fire of the pre-Olympic reforms and executed in the post-Olympic era, by a City Council run by a left-wing local government. The renaming of the district as ‘El Raval’ dates from this period, as well as the demolition of entire blocks to open up the Rambla del Raval, a continuation of the breach opened from the south by the Franco regime, the euphemistic term ‘esponjament’ describing the destroying of homes and opening of ‘hard squares’ which included aggressive architecture for tourism businesses (for example a cylindrical ten-storey four star hotel) or respectable cultural institutions (MACBA, the Film Library) and so on.
All this happened in a new social context and transpired with little obvious foresight over the influx of extra-European immigration during the last 20 years. Again, then, experts (planners, architects, doctors, journalists and officials) have acted ‘on behalf of’ the common inhabitants of the Raval, with little contact with the authentic, changing and dynamic reality of those who live or work there, who carry on in their daily struggle to inhabit the place and to combat health issues and other difficulties.53 Problems have worsened since 2008: not only due to the so-called crisis, which has served to implement severe cuts in cultural, social security and health system, but also due to a change in the municipal government. Since 2011 the Catalan right is in power and it has proven very susceptible to the tourist lobby’s successive assaults on the old Fifth District.54
1We would like to thank Diego Armus and Joan Ramon Resina for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
2Antonio Pizza and Josep Maria Rovira, GATCPAC. Una nova arquitectura per a una nova Ciutat 1929–1939 (Barcelona: COAC Publicacions, 2007). A.C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea was the magazine in which the Grupo de Artistas y Técnicos Españoles para el Progreso de la Arquitectura Contemporánea (GATEPAC) articulated their ideas.
3‘El Barrio Chino de Barcelona (Distrito V)’, A.C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea, 6 (1932): 31–3, quote p. 33.
4‘Congresos Internacionales de Arquitectura Moderna. Internationale Kongrese für Neues Bauen. Preparatory meeting for the Moscow Congress on Urban Planning. Barcelona, 29, 30 and 31 March 1932’, A.C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea, 5 (1932): 38–40.
5In 1893, Macià had founded the company Sociedad Batlle, Macià y Cía., which was to construct, amongst others, the first reinforced concrete buildings in Catalonia employing the Monier patent. Two years after its constitution the company had more than 40 projects under way all over Catalonia: Laura Valls, ‘El mamut de la Ciutadella (1907): biografia d’un objecte urbà’, Afers, 30 (80) (2015): 243-68, p. 254. From 1899 on, Macià dissociated himself from the company.
6To cite two of Aiguader’s conference titles, separated by a period of 20 years, both held at the Ateneo Barcelonés and published the same year they were given: Aspecte social de les infeccions sexuals en el matrimoni (Barcelona: Tipografía ‘La Academia’, 1912) and El problema de l’habitació obrera a Barcelona (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Institut Municipal d’Higiene, 1932).
7 An example of contemporary end-of-century hygienism in Barcelona is to be found in the works of Pedro García Faria (1858–1927), chief exponent of Spanish sanitary engineering: Saneamiento de Barcelona. Condiciones higiénicas de la urbe: su mejoramiento, disminución de la mortalidad de sus habitantes y aumento de la vida media de los mismos (Barcelona: E.T. de N. Ramírez, 1884); Insalubridad de las viviendas de Barcelona (Barcelona: Impr. de J. Balmas Planas, 1890); Medios de aminorar las enfermedades y mortalidad en Barcelona (Barcelona: Adm. de Industria e Invenciones, 1894). See: M.A. Miranda, ‘Pedro García Faria, Civil Engineer (and architect)’, Scripta Nova. Revista electrónica de geografía y ciencias sociales, 10 (2006), http://www.ub.es/geocrit/sn/sn-221.htm (last accessed 17 October 2014).
8 Enrique Perdiguero, José Pardo-Tomás and Àlvar Martínez-Vidal, ‘Physicians as a Public for the Popularization of Medicine in Interwar Catalonia: The Monografies Mèdiques Series’, in F. Papanelopoulou, A. Nieto-Galan and E. Perdiguero (eds), Popularizing Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 195–215.
9 Iris Borowy, ‘International social medicine between the wars. Positioning a volatile concept’, Hygeia Internationalis, 6 (2) (2007): 13–35; Iris Borowy and Anne Hardy (eds), Of Medicine and Men: Biographies and Ideas in European Social Medicine between the World Wars (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 2008).
10Le Corbusier had recently returned from Soviet Russia, disappointed at having failed in his attempt to sell Stalin his projects, convinced that the utopian world he heralded would not come about in the USSR but could nevertheless be pursued in other areas such as southern Europe. Alexander Tzonis, Le Corbusier: The Poetics of Machine and Metaphor (London/New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002).
11Francesc Roca, ‘El Plan Macià i el regional planning (1932–1937)’, Materials ACCAT, 9 (2008); Hermínia Pujol, ‘Dues visions de Barcelona als anys 30. El Plan de distribució en zones del territorio català i el Plan Macià (1932–1934)’, Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Geografia, 43 (12) (1997): 81–116; Salvador Tarragó, ‘El Plan Macià o la nova Barcelona 1931–1938’, Cuadernos de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, 90 (1972): 24–36.
12It was not, however, the first sanitary reform plan that had been set forth for the Fifth District. See: Vicente Casals et al., ‘Manuel Mujica Millán y el urbanismo novecentista en Cataluña, 1917–1927’, Biblio 3W. Revista Bibliográfica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales, 16 (925) (2011), http://www.ub.es/geocrit/b3w-925.htm (last accessed 1 October 2014).
13GATEPAC, display panel ‘Sanejament Districte V’ exhibited during the presentation of the ‘Plan Macià’ for Barcelona at the IV meeting of the CIAM (Congrès international d’architecture moderne), held in Athens, 1933. Reproduced in: Antonio Pizza, ‘Representaciones de la Ciudad Funcional’, in A.C. La revista del G.A.T.E.P.A.C. 1931–1937 (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2009), 191–220, p. 220.
14In the late 1940s and early 1950s, paradoxically – or maybe not so much – under the Franco regime authorities were to carry out drastic urban remodelling in much the same fashion as envisaged by the Catalanist republicans in the 1930s: the widespread destruction of streets and entire blocks, the opening of avenues, radical sanitation measures of the most deteriorated zones and so on. Authorities in the pre-Olympic Barcelona (1992) would continue with the ‘surgery’, now sheltered beneath the less drastic metaphorical umbrella of ‘esponjament’ (opening up/ventilation/porosity/permeability). On the historical continuities of the actions developed by authorities, in the name of the interests of international real estate, beyond the dictatorship or the democratic periods, see: Manuel Delgado, La ciudad mentirosa: fraude y miseria del ‘modelo Barcelona’ (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2007), p. 33.
15Antonio Pizza, Dispensario antituberculoso de Barcelona, 1933–1937: J.Ll. Sert, J.B. Subirana y J. Torres Clavé (Almería: Colegio de Arquitectos de Almería, 2003). Boris Berenguer, Estudi de dos edificis: Dispensari Central Antituberculós de Barcelona i Casa Bloc (Master thesis, UPC, 2011).
16Sayé’s text appeared in numbers 68 and 69 of ‘Monografies Mèdiques’, the collection created in 1926 by Jaume Aiguader. About Sayé: Josep Cornudella, Estudi biogràfic del profesor Lluís Sayé Sempere (Barcelona: Reial Acadèmia de Medicina, 1979).
17Celia Miralles Buil, La tuberculose et l’habitat populaire à Barcelone dans les années 1930 (Master thesis, Université Lyon 2, 2008); La tuberculose dans l’espace social Barcelonais, 1929–1936 (PhD thesis, Université Lyon 2 and UPC, 2014).
18Alfons Zarzoso et al., ‘Especialización y divulgación de la medicina en la ciudad de Barcelona (1868–1938)’, in Actas del XV Congreso de la SEHM. Transmisión del conocimiento médico e internacionalización de las prácticas sanitarias: una reflexión histórica (Ciudad Real: SEHM-UCLM, 2011), 279–305. We understand this action in the framework of the medical police deployed by the Generalitat de Catalunya, as studied by Carles Hervàs, Sanitat a Catalunya durant la República i la Guerra Civil: política i organització sanitàries. L’impacte del conflicte bèlic (PhD thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2004). As regards the material produced by the GATEPAC and the reflection of those proposals in the medical press, see: Celia Miralles Buil, ‘Controlar la ciudad para eliminar la endemia: el caso de la prevención antituberculosa en Barcelona en el primer tercio del siglo XX’, in P. Fraile and Q. Bonastra (eds), El control del espacio y los espacios de control (Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, 2015), 131–143.
19Jaume Valentines, Tecnocràcia i catalanisme tècnic a Catalunya als anys 1930: els enginyers industrials, de l’organització del taller a la racionalització de l’estat (PhD thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2012).
20We have attempted to apply the category of analysis of ‘medical cultures’ from a Gramscian viewpoint, for another period in the history of Barcelona: Alfons Zarzoso, ‘El pluralismo médico a través de la correspondencia privada en la Cataluña del siglo XVIII’, Dynamis, 21 (2001): 409–33.
21Dorothy Porter (ed.), The History of Public Health and the Modern State (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994); Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State (London: Routledge, 1999).
22Patrice de Moncan and Claude Heurteux (eds), Villes haussmanniennes: Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Marseille (Paris: Mécène, 2003); Guido Montanari, ‘Memoria e genius loci. Il caso di Torino da città fabbrica a “città degli eventi”’, Nuvole, 47 (2003): 1–12; Elena Manzo (ed.), La città che si rinnova. Architettura e scienze umane tra storia e attualità: prospettive di analisi a confronto (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2012), Matthew Jefferies, Hamburg. A Cultural and Literary History. Cities of the Imagination (Oxford: Signal Books, 2010); ‘“A City in Distress”? Paul Broecker and the New Architecture of Hamburg’, in M. Gee, T. Kirk and J. Steward (eds), The City in Central Europe: Culture and Society from 1800 to the Present (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 9–26.
23José Luis Oyón, Barcelona 1930: un atlas social (Barcelona: Edicions UPC, 2001); La quiebra de la ciudad popular: espacio urbano, inmigración y anarquismo en la Barcelona de entreguerras, 1914–1936 (Barcelona: El Serbal, 2008).
24Òscar Montero, Normativització a la presó Model de Barcelona abans de 1936 (PhD thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2014); Elsa Plaza, Desmontando el caso de La Vampira del raval. Misoginia y clasismo en la Barcelona modernista (Barcelona: Icaria, 2014), pp. 147–65.
25Joan Ramon Resina, La vocació de modernitat de Barcelona. Auge i declivi d’una imatge urbana (Barcelona: Cercle de Lectors-Galàxia Gutenberg, 2008), pp. 115–45.
26Jordi Castellanos, ‘La descoberta literaria del Districte Cinquè’, in Margarida Casacuberta and Marina Gustà (eds), Narratives urbanes. La construcció literaria de Barcelona (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2008), 83–108.
27An example of historical analysis based on this literary production can be found in Robert A. Davidson, Jazz Age Barcelona (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
28Guia P.I.C.S., Barcelona, Catalònia, 1929; Paco Villar, Historia y leyenda del Barrio Chino (1900–1992): Crónica y documentos de los bajos fondos de Barcelona (Barcelona: La Campana, 1996); Chris Ealham, ‘An Imagined Geography: Ideology, Urban Space, and Protest in the Creation of Barcelona’s ‘Chinatown’, c. 1835–1936’, IRISH, 50 (3) (2005): 373–97. On the Parallel, see the articles dealing with the cultural context of the shows, theatre circus and cinema architecture and the world of prostitution in the Fifth District in El Paral·lel, 1894–1939 (Barcelona: CCCB, 2012).
29Gary McDonogh, ‘The geography of evil: Barcelona’s Barrio Chino’, Anthropological Quarterly, 60 (4) (1987): 174–85.
30Josep Maria de Sagarra, Vida privada (Barcelona: Catalonia, 1932). This and the following paragraphs are our translation into English.
31Noucentisme was a cultural and ideological movement starring the Catalan bourgeoisie in the first third of the century, characterized by a ‘modernizing’ programme with Catalanist roots reflected in literature, art, science and political economy by means of governing structures such as the Mancomunitat de Catalunya. Rosa Cabré, Montserrat Jufresa and Jordi Malé (eds), Polis i nació: política i literatura (1900–1939) (Barcelona: Aula Carles Riba-Societat Catalana d’Estudis Clàssics, 2003).
32Eugeni d’Ors, Glosari 1906–1907 (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1986); Carlos X. Ardavín, Eloy E. Merino and Xavier Pla (eds), Oceanografía de Xènius (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2005).
33Núria Santamaria, ‘Les Barcelones imaginades de Carles Soldevila’, in Casacuberta and Gustà (eds), Narratives urbanes, 127–144. McDonogh reminds us of the theme of the international tourist attraction of the Barrio Chino and recollects the critical words of Avel·lí Artís in the article ‘Legend of Barcelona: “If we clear up the rougher parts of the city, where will tourists go?”’, L’Opinió, 22 October 1933, 1–4.
34For a different perspective see the radical republican press on Barcelona’s underworld: Joan Lluís Marfany, ‘Catalanistes i lerrouxistes’, Recerques, 29 (1994): 41–60; Enric Ucelay Da Cal and Dorsey Boatwright, ‘La dona del “Barrio Chino”. The image of rough areas and the magazine “El Escándalo”’, L’Avenç, 79 (1984): 26–34; McDonogh, ‘The geography of evil’; Davidson, pp. 27–50 and 104–40.
35The title of the book that he would publish in 1930 was a compilation of some of his most successful reports from the previous decade.
36Josep M. de Sagarra, Vida privada (Barcelona, 1932), p. 165.
37Francesc Canosa, ‘Apunt biogràfic. Domènec de Bellmunt: un espia doble i una missió’, in Domènec de Bellmunt, La Barcelona pecadora (Barcelona: A contracorrent, 2009), 163–94, p. 163.
38Silvia Sánchez Estrada, Clases populares y anarcosindicalismo. Barcelona, 1917–1923 (Entremons: UPF, 2013), pp. 20–53.
39Celia Marin Vega, Antropografía del Barrio Chino. Arquitectura o Revolución (1925–1938) (Master thesis, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2011).
40On the cognitive status of the notion of the flâneur, developed by Walter Benjamin in the light of 1920s and 1930s modernism, and how productive flânerie can be, see Karl Schlögel, Moscow 1937 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).
41Barcelona: Ediciones La Flecha, 1926.
42A recent edition exists, translated into Catalan: Sang a les Drassanes (Barcelona: A contracorrent, 2010); quote is from pp. 42–3. Paco Madrid is considered to have penned the denomination Barrio Chino in one of his reports from the same years.
43Domènec de Bellmunt, ‘Carn humana per vendre’, in La Barcelona pecadora (Barcelona: A contracorrent, 2009), pp. 33–4. Sagarra reflects upon abortion in Vida privada, p. 302.
44The short novel by Francesc de Bellmunt L’Àngel bohemi, published in 1935, is a magnificent example. Re-edited in: Barcelona pecadora (Barcelona: A contracorrent, 2009), 125–62.
45Jaume Collell, El músic de l’americana vermella. Joan Viladomat i la Barcelona descordada dels anys vint (Barcelona: RBA, 2013), p. 113.
46On the intended audience and general contents of the Roca Museum, see: Alfons Zarzoso and José Pardo-Tomás, ‘Fall and Rise of the Roca Museum: Owners, Meanings and Audiences of an Anatomical Collection from Barcelona to Antwerp, 1922–2012’, in Rina Knoeff and Robert Zwijnenberg (eds), The Fate of Anatomical Collections (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 161–76.
47Lucenay was the author of many of such books that could be purchased at the Museo Roca. For bestsellers from the library of sexual promogulation in the 1930s see: Raquel Álvarez Peláez, ‘Publicaciones sobre sexualidad en la España del primer tercio del siglo XX: entre la medicina y la pornografía’, Hispania, 64 (218) (2004): 947–60; Richard Cleminson, ‘El libro “Homosexualidad” del Dr. Martin de Lucenay: entre el conocimiento científico y la recepción pública de la ciencia sexológica en España a principios del siglo XX’, Hispania, 64 (218) (2004): 961–86.
48Sagarra, Vida privada, pp. 337–8.
49Palmira González, El cine en Barcelona. Una generación histórica: 1906–1923 (PhD thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 1984); Luisa Suárez Carmona, El cinema i la constitució d’un públic popular a Barcelona. El cas del Paral·lel (PhD thesis, Universitat de Girona, 2011).
50For further information on the social context of this and similar films, see: Francisco J. Navarro, A la revolución por la cultura: prácticas culturales y sociabilidad libertarias en el País Valenciano (1931–1939) (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2004); M. Antonia Paz Rebollo and José Cabeza San Deogracias, ‘La realidad que vieron los españoles. El cine de no-ficción durante la Segunda República Española (1931–1936)’, Hispania, 70 (236) (2010): 737–64; M. Antonia Paz Rebollo and Julio Montero Díaz, ‘Las películas censuradas durante la Segunda República. Valores y temores de la sociedad republicana española (1931–1936)’, Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodístico, 16 (2010): 369–93.
51Pere Tarrés Claret, ‘Glossa. Los Averiados’, Flama, 87, 20 August 1933, 6.
52Olga Sendra Ferrer, Barcelona (1950–1976): Ciudad de márgenes. La construcción de la ciudad condal a través de la narrativa y la fotografía de posguerra (PhD thesis, Princeton University, 2012); McDonogh, ‘The geography of evil’.
53Gary McDonogh, ‘Discourses of the City: Urban Planning and Urban Problems in Post-Transitional Barcelona’, in Setha Low (ed.), Theorizing the City (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1999), 340–76. Fran-cesc X. Hernández, Mercè Tatjer and Mercè Vidal, Passat i present de Barcelona III. Materials per l’estudi del medi urbà (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona-ICE, 1991).
54Miquel Fernández González, Matar al ‘Chino’. Entre la revolución urbanística y el asedio urbano en el barrio del Raval de Barcelona (PhD thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 2012); ‘La invención del espacio público como territorio para la excepción. El caso del Barrio Chino de Barcelona’, Revista Crítica Penal y Poder, 3 (2012): 21–35.
