Jordi Puntí’s Els castellans: Reshaping Catalan narratives of immigration and integration

Abstract

Acclaimed Catalan writer Jordi Puntí’s fictional memoir Els castellans (2011) offers an important contribution to contemporary debates on immigration and national identity in Catalonia. Set in the 1970s in the small industrial city of Manlleu, this collection of semi-autobiographical vignettes about two rival groups of boys narrates not only Puntí’s adolescence, but also provincial Catalonia’s struggle to integrate large numbers of working-class Spanish migrants who arrived to the region in the mid-twentieth century. Els castellans is groundbreaking in its literary telling of the experience of the 1950s–1970s migratory wave from a Catalan-identified point of view. Adopting a geographical approach to examine how the memoir interrogates the divisions between Catalans and Spanish migrants, this essay argues for reading Els castellans as a coming-of-age allegory of Catalan and Spanish political transitions that provides a much-needed reckoning with Catalonia’s history of immigration. At the same time, the memoir spatially connects the mid-century Spanish migrants to present-day Moroccan immigrants, revealing a recurring fear of mobility. Els castellans counters this fear by articulating a dynamic, bidirectional integration process that transforms the host as much as the migrant.