Peripheral Visions, Global Positions: Remapping Galician Culture

Jos F. Colmeiro
The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Volume 86, Number 2, 2009,
pp. 213-230 (Article)
Published by Liverpool University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bhs/summary/v086/86.2.colmeiro.html

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Peripheral Visions, Global Positions:

Remapping Galician Culture
jos f. colmeiro
Michigan State University

Abstract
This essay synthesizes some of the most dramatic changes taking place in the Galician cultural landscape and argues for a shift towards a postnational and interdisciplinary cultural studies approach based on a deterritorialization of the Galician
cultural map, where the hitherto privileged institutional channels of cultural identity language, literature, territory are set alongside new cultural formulations
whose provenance and import are not only Galician but global. Examining literary,
cultural, musical and visual works emanating from Galicians around the world and
from citizens of the world based in Galicia, the essay proposes an interpretation of
Galician cultural production in which the peripheral is reimagined as central and
the Galician as incontrovertibly global.
Resumen
Este artigo sintetiza algns dos cambios mis dramticos que se estn a producir
no panorama cultural galego e apunta a necesidade de mudar cara un enfoque
postcolonial e interdisciplinar dentro do marco dos estudos culturais galegos. Dito
marco estara baseado no que o autor denomina unha deterritorializacin do mapa
cultural galego, onde as, polo de agora, privilexiadas canles institucionais da indentidade cultural lingua, literatura, territorio existen xunto con novas frmulas,
cuxa orixe e relevancia non son s galegas, senn tamn globais. Examinando os
traballos literarios, culturais, musicais e visuais producidos tanto por galegas e
galegos espallados polo mundo, como por artistas extranxeiros asentados en Galicia,
Colmeiro propn unha interpretacin da promocin cultural galega na que o perifrico reimaxinado como central e o galego como indiscutiblemente global.

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Ser perifrico te sita en el centro del mundo
Manuel Rivas
Today all cultures are border cultures
Nstor Garca Canclini

In this essay I would like to present an overview of the remapping of contemporary Galician culture and the challenges and opportunities it faces in a global
twenty-first-century world. The transformation of the cultural landscape that
has occurred in Galicia in the last few decades following the demise of Francos
dictatorship has been nothing less than dramatic. It has been characterized
primarily by a remarkable if uneven cultural and political reawakening after a
four-decade longa noite de pedra (long night of stone), the establishment of political self-government, rapid demographic urbanization and industrial reconversion, reversed migration patterns, and some significant advances towards gender
parity and cultural and linguistic normalization. All these changes have taken
place against the backdrop of a very rapidly evolving process of cultural hybridization and readjustment to the new patterns of globalization.
The profound shifts that have occurred in Galicia and the world in the last
decades dictate that we approach cultural production from new perspectives
and conceptual models to produce an alternative cartography that is more
inclusive and better reflects the new social realities. Beyond the nationalist and
disciplinary criterio filolxico to use the expression coined by Xoan GonzlezMilln which is still largely the norm in Galician Studies, I propose to follow
a postnational and interdisciplinary cultural studies approach, in line with the
recent groundbreaking work of other Galician Studies scholars in the US and
the UK (Bermdez, Gabilondo, Hooper, Romero) on issues of migration and
transatlantic studies, more in sync with the hybrid complexities of contemporary cultural production. My theoretical perspective is particularly sensitive to
the multiple interactions between the local and the global, and the creation
of glocal realities in complex relations of interdependence and interpenetration (Garca Canclini 1995). This approach implies decentring language and
Galician literary production as the privileged institutional channels of cultural
identity, while still recognizing their crucial importance for Galician cultural
identity, as a way around the overdetermined fatal junction of nation and
culture in minority cultures and stateless nations such as Galicia (Gilroy 1993:
4). In my analysis I propose the deterritorialization of the Galician cultural
map to overcome long-established exclusions based on gender, national origin,
language or territorial demarcation, and the disjointing of the centre/periphery
dichotomy that has relegated Galician culture to the margins. In essence, it is
an attempt to address the perceived necessity of opening Galicia and Galician
Studies to the world.

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Peripheral Visions, Global Positions: Remapping Galician Culture

Remapping Galician culture

The Galicia of the twenty-first century is rapidly coming out to the world. It
could be argued that in these last years Galicia has been coming out of a lot of
adverse enclosures: coming out of the dictatorship, coming out of the legacy of
cultural minifundio (fragmentation and atomization) and patriarchal caciquismo
(provincial political corruption), and coming out of the periphery. In one way or
another, Galicians have also been coming out of the nation for a long time, as
migrants and exiles to the Americas or to Western Europe, or sailing around the
world and the seven seas, reimagining the nation from afar, and in the process
opening themselves up to new forms of cultural hybridity.
In response to the great modern diasporas associated with globalization, Garca
Canclini has asked: Cmo pensar una nacin que en gran medida est en otra
parte? (2005: 52). This question is particularly relevant in the case of Galicia,
which necessitates an alternative conceptual model of the nation. It is symptomatic that from Cuba came the modern symbols of Galicia, the flag, the coat
of arms, and the national anthem, as well as books, periodicals, cultural insti1
tutions and political ideas. And from the British Isles and Brittany have come
modern models of peripheral nationalism and cultural resistance, such as the
current Celtic music revival, that have been instrumental in Galicias reclaiming
of its cultural identity.2 Likewise, myriad migrant and exilic Galician communities have spread across Europe, north and south, and across the Americas from
Montevideo to Montreal.
In fact, Galicia has greatly expanded her horizons and created new communities beyond the confines of the geopolitical borders of the nation, on a par with
other major migrant European groups, such as the Jewish and Irish communities. In the last century, the greatest urban concentrations of Galicians were
found not in Galicia or Spain but in the New World, in the metropolitan areas
of Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Havana. And this is not simply confined to the
past, since it has its own very perceptible legacy in the present. In the census of
registered voters for Spains general elections in March 2008, there were 325,000
3
registered Galicians living abroad, a 5.5 per cent increase since 2004. And in
1 The role of the transatlantic Galician migrant communities in the development of modern
Galician cultural identity, and particularly the Galician community in Cuba, is well known.
One of the crucial books of the Galician Rexurdimento, Rosala de Castros Follas novas (1978
[1880]), was originally published in Cuba by the Galician colony. The Real Academia Galega
was also founded in Havana during the exile of Curros Enrquez, and the emancipation
ideals of Cuban nationalists also influenced Galician nationalism. See Axeitos (2006) and
Bermdez (2002).
2 The idealized association of Galician cultural identity with Celtic origins goes back to
Pondal and the Romantic movement. For an overview of the modern cultural reinvention
of Galician Celtic music as an assertive act of reclaiming a distinctive identity, see Toro
(2002) and Romero (2006).
3 Between 2003 and 2007 there was only a 0.3 per cent growth in local Galician voters,
but a 12.3 per cent growth in absentee voters (Sampedro 2007). This increase, due to the
new generations of post-migrant Galician descendants, is asymmetrical. The spectacular
growth of registered Galicians in Latin America has gone from two-thirds to about three-

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2008, the percentage of absentee Galician voters from the total number of voters
residing in Galicia (2,132,737) is 14 per cent, more than the whole province of
Lugo or Ourense. That is why Buenos Aires has been commonly called Galicias
fifth province. This situation is not merely a case of Galician magical realism,
with the spectral reawakening of the dead to participate in the elections, but a
present-day consequence of the great Galician diaspora. Most of the new influx
is composed of post-migrants, second- and third-generation descendants of
migrants and exiles who have reclaimed their ancestors nationality for personal,
economic and political reasons, now that their Spanish nationality is recognized
4
and the Galician authorities facilitate their integration. For this reason, Galicia
is one of the few countries in the world where the main political parties regularly campaign outside the nation, and candidates and representatives occupy
billboards, tour the cities, have rallies and meet voters.5
That diasporic dimension is integral to modern Galician cultural identity, and
its dynamic condition could potentially be a major advantage for its survival
in our global age.6 Openness and cultural hybridity, creative fusion, economic
growth, social dynamism, global solidarity and interconnectedness are some of
the positive values that could be recognized in this new horizon.7 I propose that

quarters of all absentee voters in only four years, most likely a result of the economic
and political crisis experienced in their native countries. The situation is not the same in
Europe, where there has not been a similar increase. In fact, Switzerland, a traditional
centre of Galician migration, moved in 2008 from second to third position in number of
Galicians, a place now occupied by Venezuela (see Los emigrantes 2008).
4 The fraudulent conditions of the Galician migrant vote have been repeatedly exposed in
the media, with the appearance of dead voters in the registry and a lack of security around
voting procedures, in particular provision for ascertaining the true identity of the voters.
Until very recently, not enough has been done to remedy this. See Baamonde (2008).
5 Some recent examples of the echo in the Galician press of the political campaigning in
Latin America and Europe reveal the real scope of this important post-migrant connection: As, el presidente del PPdeG, Alberto Nez Feijo, viaj a Brasil a mediados del mes
de enero, as como a Venezuela, Mxico, Argentina y Uruguay en febrero. Tambin el diputado en el Congreso y cabeza de cartel del PP a la Cmara baja por Ourense, Celso Delgado,
se desplaz a Suiza y Alemania y la nmero uno por la provincia de Pontevedra Ana
Pastor estuvo en Nueva York [] Pese a ello, fuentes populares enmarcaron dentro de la
normalidad estos viajes y destacaron que el propio Feijo viaj al exterior con frecuencia
desde que es presidente del PPdeG, hace dos aos, para conocer las necesidades de los
emigrantes [] De igual modo, las diputadas del PSdeG Marisol Soneira y Laura Seara
viajaron a los pases latinoamericanos con mayor nmero de emigrantes gallegos y visitaron Venezuela, Brasil, Argentina y Uruguay entre el da 7 del pasado mes de enero y el
22 de este mismo mes. [] Pese a ello, fuentes socialistas opinan que la incidencia del voto
emigrante en las generales depender de la participacin que, segn recordaron, nunca
super el 33 por ciento (see Un total 2008). For another critical perspective on the Galician overseas vote see also Hooper (2006), who also mentions the particular case of Haiti,
where political campaigns are taken beyond the nation.
6 As Axeitos has noted (2006: 18), en gran parte, nos conformamos como pobo desde a
extranxera e non desde a familiaridade dos horizontes coecidos (in a large measure,
we were constituted as a nation from afar and not from familiarity with well-known horizons). All translations from Galician are my own.
7 Obviously, there are also very problematic issues related to the process of economic and
cultural globalization, such as the real dangers of homogenization, deracination and the

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Peripheral Visions, Global Positions: Remapping Galician Culture

these visions from the periphery, coming out of the margins, can actually turn
into advantageous positions on the new global map. As we know, peripheral
visions have a wider range of vision, and therefore are more open to what is
beyond the limiting confines of the centre. The locations of culture in the global
age surpass the geopolitical limits of the nation. These peripheral visions are
then turning into global positions, as we witness the establishment of a potential
new paradigm that is both postnational and post-peripheral, one that we could
label perhaps as The Galician Atlantic, appropriating Paul Gilroys concept of
the transnational Black Atlantic diaspora (Gilroy, 1993), as Joseba Gabilondo has
done for the Hispanic Atlantic (2001).
This remapping of Galician culture is, directly and indirectly, related to the
political and cultural remapping of the nation-state since the transition to
democracy in the 1970s, with the official recognition in the 1978 Constitution
of Spains multicultural and multilingual diversity, which has enabled the recuperation and preservation of distinct sub-national cultural identities. This realization is particularly significant in the contemporary context of the post-cold
war remapping of Europe and the concerns about the erosion of local cultures
challenged by political and economic globalization. My working hypothesis is
that this double cultural and political delineation has created both a need and an
opportunity for redefining Galicias cultural identity in a wider cultural context
exceeding traditional national and state parameters. The erosion of the traditional nation-state paradigm, by both centrifugal (nationalist movements) and
external forces (supranational globalization), has provided a fertile ground and
a creative impetus to redefine Galician culture and identity beyond the limiting
confines of the nation or the nation-state. This double bind has been redefined
by some critics in Hispanic Studies as the postnational paradigm (Bermdez et
al. 2001, Gabilondo 2002, Hooper 2005). And this is precisely, according to my
thesis, the impetus that has allowed the modern cultural reawakening of Galicia.
These apparently opposing cultural forces create new hybrid realities and new
forms of identity that bind the old with the new, the local with the global. A
new Galician culture has emerged that is neither urban nor rural, but rurban;
neither national nor colonial, but postnational; neither simply authentic nor
foreign, but profoundly hybrid, as the interaction of the local and the global
has produced new post-peripheral glocal cultural forms that are transforming
the inherited status quo.8 The following pages will provide various examples of
9
this hybrid redefinition in contemporary Galician culture.
reinstatement of world inequalities and asymmetries, but for the purposes of this essay
I am more interested in the new forms of cultural hybridity and the strategic remapping
that become possible in the new global order. For more on the negative aspects of globalization, see Garca Canclini (1995, 2005).
8 Garca Canclini (2005) adopts the neologism glocal, borrowed from the field of economics
and social theory, to refer to those hybrid cultural realities resulting from the dynamic
interplay of the local with the forces of global modernity.
9 I analyse the particular dynamics of the glocal and the rurban in relation to Galician
rock brav in my forthcoming essay Smells Like Wild Spirit (see Colmeiro forthcoming,
2009).

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Historically speaking: a postcolonial coming out

The study of contemporary Galicia can offer fascinating insights and potentially
valuable lessons about the process of collective identity formation within a
multicultural and multilingual context. Likewise, it can enlighten us about the
creative interactions of local cultures with global forces in a postcolonial twentyfirst century. Galicia presents an interesting case study of the demarginalization
of subaltern identities and the fragmentation of absolutist power and monolithic
thinking associated with the trends of postmodernity, and the parallel demise of
the old colonial empires and emergence of postcolonial discourses. The critique
of modernity by postcolonial thinkers and subaltern studies scholars such as
Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy and Gayatri Spivak has a peculiar inflection in the
case of Galicia, where the nation has always been at the same time more than and
less than a nation. Galicia has been simultaneously a nation negated by the state,
and a nation overflowing the nation, marked by migration and deracination.
This marginal and diasporic condition responds to the concept of DissemiNation,
Homi Bhabhas metaphor for the modern postcolonial nation, which transfers
(and transforms) the meaning of home. This process follows in the footsteps of
Eric Hobsbawms history written from the margins, the history of the modern
Western nation from the perspective of the nations margin and the migrants
exile (Bhabha 2006: 200).
Galicia today is a stateless nation with its own particular cultural identity:
it is one of only three officially recognized historical nationalities (with the
Basque Country and Catalonia) in the 1978 Spanish Constitution; and one with
its own language, Galician, which is one of the four co-official languages recognized in the Spanish Constitution. Galicia is also one of a handful of relative
success stories in the contemporary Western world, a minority culture, long
repressed and marginalized, which has resisted and grown despite all doomladen predictions. It constitutes an exemplary case of the revitalization of a
minority culture and language that has come dangerously close to disappearing,
an achievement brought about not simply by returning to a mythical past but by
hybridizing and embracing the new (new technologies, new media, new urban
idioms) and engaging in a productive and creative dialogue between the local
and the global.
The multicultural and multilingual diversity of Spain has only been discovered and generally recognized in recent years, after the long period of political and cultural repression exercized by Francos dictatorship, and the even
longer five centuries of Castilian domination. As some cultural theorists have
remarked, empires begin at home: The building of empire is first an internal
process with internalized others (MacKenzie 1995: 35). From this perspective, it
could be argued that the formation of the Spanish empire actually began with
the domination of conflicting internal others such as Galicia what Alfonso
Castelao named, following Zurita, the chronicler of the Catholic Monarchs, the
doma y castracin de Galicia (1996: 47). It is also true that the collapse of the
imperial edifice often follows the inverse order of its construction, something

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Peripheral Visions, Global Positions: Remapping Galician Culture

that Ortega y Gasset already observed in Espaa invertebrada (1922). This is clearly
the case of the Spanish empire, with the progressive fragmentation of the old
empire through the nineteenth century and then the vanishing of its latter-day
vestiges in the twentieth, coinciding with the disappearance of the neo-imperial
Fascist ideology of Francoism. Thus, 1975 marks the official end of Spanish neoimperialism in Africa, with the transference of Western Sahara, as well as the
end of Fascist rule at home.10 As a result, the internalized colonies within the
nation-state (Galicia, Catalonia and the Basque Country) were the last ones to
obtain their autonomy from the central power during the democratic transition
after the 1978 Constitution. From a postcolonial theoretical framework we could
argue, then, that Galicia was one of the first colonies of the Spanish empire,
paving the way for the conquest of the new world overseas, and also its last,
with the approval of the Statute of Autonomy in 1981 and the return of self11
governance.
The history of this Spanish colonization has had a huge impact on the development of Galician culture through the centuries and has been marked by domination and subjugation. The old medieval kingdom of Galicia was incorporated
into the Crowns of Leon and Castile in the early modern period, which led to
a long period of political, economic and cultural neglect. Galicia experienced
a continuing decline after its cultural height in the Middle Ages, when Galician-Portuguese was the main poetic language of the Iberian Peninsula, and the
pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela traversed the European continent, thus
forming the cultural nervous system of medieval Christendom Goethe has
been quoted as saying: The idea of Europe was born along the road to Santiago
(Roseman 2004: 78). Galicias long period of neglect and decline, with the tacit
complicity of the Galician nobility, lasted four centuries until the intellectual
regeneration that started with the nineteenth-century Rexurdimento (Galician
revival) in line with the Spanish (Basque, Catalan) and other European nationalist movements (the Irish among others), and continued through the 1930s.
Of course, this cultural and political revival was cut short by the Spanish Civil
War (193639) and the four decades of repression and obscurity that followed.
Because of these circumstances, massive migration of the poor and subaltern
classes to the Americas, and after the war to Western Europe, has characterized
10 Spanish rule over northern Morocco and Equatorial Guinea also collapsed under Franco in
the 1950s and 1960s respectively. The enclave cities of Ceuta and Melilla and surrounding
islands, regularly contested by Morocco, are the only exceptions to the end of Spanish rule
in Africa.
11 I am aware of the inexactitude and anachronism inherent in using the term colony
to refer to the particularities of the historical nationalities within the Spanish nationstate. However, the historical situation of Galicia shares many of the attributes of colonial
oppression and political and cultural dependence, something that has been argued by
many leftist Galician nationalists (X. L. Beiras, X. L. Mndez Ferrn) since the 1960s and the
emergence of anti-colonialist emancipation movements in the Third World. I have used
this formulation in my article on postcolonial detection in Spain (2001). The postcolonial
perspective has been argued also for the case of the British nation-state and its peripheral
nations (Scotish and Irish in Reizbaum 1992, Welsh in Aaron and Williams 2005).

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the modern history of Galicia. With the transition to democracy in Spain in the
1970s, the return to self-government and the entry into the European Union in
the 1980s, Galicia underwent a process of rapid transformation, reclaiming political autonomy, cultural and linguistic normalization, and economic development without historical parallel. This regained confidence in its cultural identity
and autonomy has offered opportunities for coming out of the colonial mould of
the centralist nation-state.
But also, Galicia is more than a nation, if a nation is traditionally defined
in essentialist terms according to a monocultural mould and a clearly defined
geopolitical space. As we noted before, Galicia has been a nation of migrants,
dispersed around the globe, which has persistently expanded its horizons
beyond the confines of the nationalistic definition of a Nosa Terra (literally Our
Land, essentially a geographic description of the motherland). In recent years,
Galicia has experienced a reverse phenomenon, becoming the destination of
many migrants from overseas, much as in other parts of Spain after the country
joined the European Union in the mid-1980s. In Galicias case, this phenomenon
has also had particular inflections, since a large number of the new migrants
have come from areas with direct historic, cultural and linguistic links, even
with close family connections through the Galician Atlantic diaspora, such as
12
Latin America and the lusophone world. This new situation, which inverts the
Galician migration paradigm but reinforces the Atlantic orientation of Galicia,
necessarily involves a more inclusive redefinition of the nation, presenting new
challenges, but also new opportunities for growth and cultural hybridity.
Coming out of the periphery
Like other cultural identity filters (race, gender, class), Galician identity involves
a particular way of perceiving reality and of interacting with the world, inflected
by its history and geopolitical situation on the margins of the nation-state. What
I would like to argue, however, is that Galicias historically peripheral condition has paradoxically facilitated its transition to the global condition. Galicians
are geopolitically positioned away from the centre of the nation-state, at the
margins of the centre but also beyond its confining boundaries and, therefore,
are freer to experiment with alternatives, and more open to movement and engagement with the outside world in Europe and the Americas, and beyond. This
peripheral double position, inside and outside, also suggests a wider angle of
vision, a supplementary vision that augments and enriches the narrow angle
from the centre, as the following examples will illustrate.
As the traditional lands end (finis terrae) of the European continent, Galicia
is positioned at a double geographical periphery, at the farthest point in the
peninsula from the centre of the nation-state and from the centre of political and
12 Portugal is still the origin of the largest number of migrants coming to Galicia, followed
by Latin America, particularly Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela, traditional receptors of
Galician migration (Izquierdo 2004, Bouzada Fernndez and Lage Picos 2004).

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Peripheral Visions, Global Positions: Remapping Galician Culture

economic power in Europe. Yet, on the other hand, Galicias Atlantic position has
also meant that it is closer to other peripheral Finisterres and to the Americas, a
transatlantic dimension of Galician culture that transcends geographical limitations and geopolitical national borders. This gravitational pull away from the
centre and reorientation towards other nations has made possible the formation
of other connections and alternative centres beyond the confines of its territory.13
Peripheral positions can thus lead to global visions. Galicias physical position on the
periphery has also frequently found a parallel in the political, socio-economic and
cultural realms, since in modern history Galicia has traditionally been dominated
by hegemonic groups subservient to the nation-state (Beiras 1973; Gemie 2006).
Galicias peripheral condition (geopolitical and economic) was the key factor that
opened the floodgates to massive migration, first to the new world in the nineteenth century, and later to northern Europe in the mid-twentieth century.
As a result, Galicians probably have a more direct connection to the outside
world than any other group in Spain, since even today there are very large numbers
14
of Galicians living outside Galicia (estimated at between 1.5 and 2 million). This
global connectedness has meant, for example, that Havana or Buenos Aires have
a direct and familiar immediacy for most Galicians that is not shared by other
Spaniards, or Europeans in general, and this is reflected politically, economically,
demographically and culturally. In that sense, their peripheral positions have
meant much wider global visions.15 Migration, uprootedness, transculturation,
and nostalgic saudade are Atlantic themes that permeate Galician culture, having
an enormous influence on its literature, music and visual arts, and are a large
part of Galician cultural hybridity. Attesting to this reality we encounter novels
and stories such as A man dos paos (The Migrants Hand, 2000) by Manuel Rivas,
or Tres trebns (Three Thunders, 2005) by Xurxo Souto, films such as Mamasuncin
(1984), Gallego (1987), Sempre Xonxa (1989), or Hotel Tvoli (2008), the tangos, corridos
and Caribbean rhythms of the Galician diaspora and its eternal return (the habaneiras and tangos from Marful, the conga santiaguesa from Carlos Nezs Para
Vigo me voy, or the transatlantic album Saudade, by Luar na lubre with Pablo
Milans, Lila Downs, and Adriana Varela, and so many others).
Even today, when traditional migration patterns have reversed and Galicia
13 Galicia has a rich history of cultural and economic exchanges that are not subsidiary to
the structures of the nation-state, from direct transatlantic relations with Latin America
to the establishment of world fishing enterprises, to the new global phenomenon of Zara.
It would not be redundant here to reiterate the important migrant dimension of Galicia,
as well as its direct cultural links with other European peripheries, through, for example,
the Celtic music network of festivals and performers, or the utilization of its peripheral
status as Europes mythical lands end with the modern cultural redefinition of the road
to Santiago (see Roseman 2004).
14 For more information see the website of the Instituto Galego de Anlise e Documentacin
Internacional (http://www.igadi.org/index.html) and the article by Debora Campos (2005).
15 Sharif Gemie has commented that as a result of the massive migration of Galicians to
the new world, Galicia was experiencing an early form of globalization: its people were
learning to think in a bigger world. Stretching out beyond their region, which was shaped
by international forces (2006: 52).

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is now the recipient of migrant workers from eastern Europe, Africa and Latin
America (sometimes the grandsons and granddaughters of former Galician
migrants), this Galician mobility has not stopped, and still today Galician workers
travel around the globe alongside the new migrants in the new world economy,
from the Seychelles to South Africa. Manuel Rivas and Xurxo Souto have written
extensively about the enormous challenges, life-changing experiences and intercultural exchanges of this working community, which signal a move from the
Atlantic to the global.16 A clear example of this new paradigm is the fact that
Galician traditional cofradas of fishermen and sailors, who form the second
largest fleet and second largest fishing industry in the world after Japan, now
regularly employ large numbers of African and Latin American migrant workers
who have relocated to Galicia. As an example of this transnational hybridity,
Batuko Tabanca, the female choir of batucadeiras consisting of the wives and
mothers of Cabo Verdean sailors stationed in the Galician fishing port of Burela
(with a Cabo Verdean colony of some 500 people in the last decades) are now
a definitive part of the Galician music scene, regularly appearing in the mass
17
media and performing their songs across Galicia.
It is clear that Galicias peripheral condition has profoundly marked its
cultural identity, to the extent that in many significant ways Galicias imaginary has more in common with Ireland, the other traditional lands end of
Europe at the periphery of Europe and the British Isles, than with most of the
rest of Spain (Celtic music, folklore and mythology, landscape and climate,
isolated location, minority autochthonous language, colonial history of subjugation to the nation-state, population dispersion and massive diaspora). Not
16 This redirection towards the global is manifest in the Revista Brav (main press outlet of
the 1990s rurban movemento brav), which dedicated its third issue to this topic in 1998
(7 portas, 7 mares). In Xurxo Soutos essay Galicia-Capetn, with its reference to the
popular renaming by Galician sailors of Cape Town as Capetn and Antwerp as Antuerpe, he remaps Galicia according to outra xeografa (another geography), which is postperipheral and indeed global: Galicia unha rocha cativa chantada no Atlntico e tamn
un inmenso pas marino que abrangue todos os Ocanos... Reclamamos para o brav o pas
invisible do mar Non hai lmites nin fronteiras. Existimos entre a realidade e o misterio.
O fucio no Ocano, a porta de todos os camios Desde a hiper-periferia cara Capetn
(Souto 1998: 73), (Galicia is a small rock stuck in the Atlantic and also an immense sea
country encompassing all the OceansWe claim for the brav people the invisible country
of the sea There are no limits or frontiers. We exist between reality and mistery. Our
snouts in the Ocean, the gate of all roads From the hyper-periphery towards Capetn).
One of the albums Xurxo Souto recorded with Os Diplomticos de Monte-alto was precisely
titled Capetn. For more on the brav movement see Colmeiro (forthcoming, 2009).
17 The integration of Batuko Tabanca into the Galician musical scene is particularly revealing
of this cultural hybridization. They have appeared in the brav rock band album by Os
Diplomticos de Monte-alto, Kmunikand (2003), and the Televisin de Galicia programme
Alal, which specializes in Galician traditional music, devoted one full programme to them
(see Alal 2007). Batuko Tabanca are produced by Galician musician and singer Uxa, a
raiana product of the Galician-Portuguese border culture and an active advocate of the
reunion of lusophone musics (from Galicia, Portugal, Azores, Cabo Verde, Mozambique,
Angola and Brazil) through her own work as singer, but also as producer of albums,
concerts, and radio and television shows.

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Peripheral Visions, Global Positions: Remapping Galician Culture

surprisingly, Galician musicians have in the last decades started exploring their
common Celtic roots and experimenting with fusion with other forms of world
music (such as Latin and African music), thus profoundly renovating traditional
Galician music through hybridization. As a result, a booming Celtic neo-folk
music revival movement has grown up in Galicia, with international festivals,
concerts and music conservatoires. Today, some of the best Celtic music produced
in the world comes from Galicia, and some of its musicians such as Milladoiro,
Carlos Nez, Susana Seivane, Mercedes Pen, and Luar na Lubre are internationally known as composers, ethnomusicologists, experimental artists and
virtuoso performers. On the other side, alternative writer-musician, and now
film director and producer, Antn Reixa, has opted for the revolutionary hybrid
mixing of dance grooves and hip hop beats with traditional Celtic bagpipes, or
Galician folk rhythms with electronic instrumentation, over agitprop-like lyrics
of urban disaffection and political activism, becoming a national cult figure and
18
mass media persona.
It is my belief that these peripheral visions, opened to the world, and fully
aware of their gravitation in a global orbit, have enabled contemporary Galician
artists and authors to resist marginalization or assimilation and come out with
strong original voices, relying on the large arsenal of a rich ancestral culture,
but renovated and immersed in the new global currents, thus claiming a postperipheral, global position.
Galicia in the global world: beyond/coming out of the local
Galicia est en el centro.
En los siglos XIX y XX ramos periferia,
pero en el mundo global ya no existen periferias
Jos Ramn Garca

Galician contemporary culture is fundamentally redefined as a post culture:

first, post-Franco; then, paradoxically, both post-industrial and post-rural (or
rurban); also, postcolonial (profoundly marked by the experiences of colonialism
and migration, but also struggling for its own identity and survival vis--vis the
imperialistic legacy of the centralist Spanish nation-state); and ultimately postnational and post-peripheral (beyond the nation and immersed in the global
economic and geopolitical order). The remapping of cultural boundaries in Galicia
beyond the strict confines of the nation-state corresponds to the postnational
paradigm characterized by the erosion of the nation-state and the emergence
of new realities that signal the hybridization of traditional peripheral cultures
with global forces.
18 Antn Reixa was the leader of the well-known rock band Os Resentidos, the first modern
group to use exclusively Galician in their lyrics. Their postmodern protest song Galicia
canbal (Fai un sol de carallo), which mixed the rhythm of muieiras and the sound of
gaitas with electronic dance beats, became one of the most celebrated songs from the
movida galega in Spain in the 1980s (with different mixes in English and Basque).

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The intimate relation between the local and the global is quite palpable in
Galicia today and is redefining its traditional peripheral status.19 The worldwide phenomenon of ZARA would be one of the more obvious examples of this
trend.20 Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the postmodern transformation of Santiago de Compostela, the historic spiritual and cultural capital
of Galicia, and perhaps the ultimate signifier of Galicianness, into a veritable
medieval theme park for the benefit of pilgrims, returning migrants, business
visitors and tourists. It is visited each year by several million people from all
around the world.21 The cultural, and now also political and tourist capital of
this new Galicia, Santiago has redefined its role as a hybrid of old and new,
mixing the enxebre (traditionally Galician) and the global, folkloric gaiteiros
(bagpipers) and pandeireteiras (tambourine players) and light-and-sound megaconcerts. This is a city of medieval tunas, xacobeos (pilgrimages) and world
conferences, rural zoquios de madeira (wooden clogs) next to ZARA, ancestral
queixos de tetilla and tartas de Santiago (Galician cheese and almond cakes)
next to souvenirs made in China, ancient architecture and postmodern global
starquitects Mestre Mateo next to lvaro Siza, Peter Eisenmann and Norman
Foster. All consumable culture is found within the small perimeter of the city,
whose mystical ancient town is today surrounded by a colossal, overpowering
ring of new highways. Altogether, it constitutes a perfect metaphor for the new
glocal Galicia.
The Galician cultural industry has also profited from this glocal transformation in the form of a blossoming tourist economy and the export of cultural
products, such as the booming Galician neo-traditional popular music and its
successful insertion into Celtic world music, the production of cultural guides
and books, the export of multimedia, audiovisual and television productions
with satellite transmission covering Europe and the Americas, and Internet
broadcasting around the globe. The recent starring role of Galician culture at
Havanas International Book Fair (2008), the first time a stateless nation has
been invited as honorary guest, and the institutional and artistic representation
of Galician music for the first time at the 2007 International Midem Festival (the
most important international music trade show in the world), are other indica 19 Significant in this regard is the statement by successful Galician entrepreneur Jos Ramn
Garca: Galicia est en el centro. En los siglos XIX y XX ramos periferia, pero en el mundo
global ya no existen periferias. Internet es una gran autopista, adems el mercado es global,
no importa el punto del que partamos (Blanco 2008). Garca is co-founder of Blusens, a
booming Santiago-based manufacturer of international leading-edge technologies (MP3,
GPS, TVLCD), with manufacturing plants outsourced in China.
20 ZARA is a textbook case of supply chain management. It is also one of the featured companies in Thomas L. Friedmans bestseller The World is Flat (Friedman 2007: 154). This global
phenomenon has transformed the local reality of Arteixo, ZARAs main production centre,
now a booming multicultural enclave. As Alejandro Bolaos has stated (2008), la multiculturalidad es una rutina: en su sede central de Arteixo (A Corua) hay empleados de ms
de 30 pases.
21 For more on this cultural transformation see Gmez-Montero (2001) and Roseman
(2004).

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Peripheral Visions, Global Positions: Remapping Galician Culture

tions of the potential projection of Galician cultural productions beyond the

confines of the nation.22
Within this same glocal frame, one of the latest cultural developments in
Santiago de Compostela, and the subject of continued public controversy, has
been the project of the Cidade da Cultura. Without a doubt one of the hot topics in
Galician culture today, it underlines the key relationship between creative cultural
producers and cultural and political institutions in contemporary Galicia. The
project of the Cidade da Cultura, originally planned by the former Partido Popular
government, could be interpreted as an attempt to create a Galician version,
certainly of gargantuan proportions, of the project commissioned from Frank
Gehry by the Basque government, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The transnational dimension of this project, branded by an American Cultural Institution
and signed by an American starquitect, with funding from the Official Basque
Government, highlights the trend of creating spectacular cultural projects for
global consumption, whose origins may be found in the national but whose realization is indeed glocal. Two American cultural brands, Guggenheim and Gehry,
carried out a postmodern intervention in the post-industrial urban wasteland of
Bilbao, a controversial project that ultimately transformed the city and placed it
23
on the postnational map for global consumption. In both cases, in Bilbao and
Santiago, we encounter spectacular postmodern buildings by one of the leading
starquitects in the world (Frank Gerhy and Norman Foster), publicly funded by
one of the historical autonomous communities with the aim of promoting its
global image. In both cases, the impact of the building as packaging is much
more important than the actual contents of the package. The Guggenheim in
Bilbao does not have an important permanent collection, and what the Cidade
da Cultura will hold is still unknown, so that the two institutions perhaps create
their own metaphors of the void generated by the postmodern culture of simulacra. Nobody knows what the Basque or Galician component of these projects
really is, other than their location.
Nevertheless, the comparison between both projects ends there. Santiago is
not a decaying post-industrial area, virtually unknown in the world. It already
has a long, well-established presence in history and is a cultural and tourist
world destination in itself. The new project, however, is on the periphery of the
city and is five times the size of the Guggenheim, this in a considerably smaller
city with a much smaller budget.
Needless to say, there has been a great degree of opposition to the project
22 These are not without public controversy. The representation in Cuba, understood as an
endorsement of the regime by some and as a costly self-publicity stunt by others, has been
the subject of constant attack in the media, particularly by the PP opposition when these
events coincided with the general election campaign. The costs associated with the Book
Fair totalled 1.3 million euros and brought 150 Galician cultural figures to the event. For
a report on the Fair and the response of Galician Conselleira de Cultura nxela Bugallo,
see Daniel Salgado (2008).
23 There has been a great deal of controversy on the subject of the Bilbao Guggenheim
Museum. For an overview of the topic, see Guasch and Zulaika (2005).

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of the Cidade da Cultura, in part for ideological reasons since it was a legacy of
the former Partido Popular government and a direct product of the megalomaniac vision of its autocratic leader, and former minister under Franco, Manuel
Fraga. The change of heart of the new bipartite government PSdG-BNG, which
has finally endorsed the project and continued with construction after being
vehemently against it while in opposition, has only further heated the debate.
Above and beyond political reasons, the widespread resistance to the project
today is largely articulated on conceptual and economic grounds. Critics have
pointed out its gigantic scale, which is out of place for a small-sized city like
Santiago de Compostela, the fact that it is removed from the city centre a
periphery of the periphery and the budgetary implications of building, maintaining and operating such an enormous public project, which undoubtedly
would diminish official subsidies for other cultural projects. While the long-term
effects are unknown, the huge costs are certain and any cultural and economic
benefit remains to be seen. Whether it will be another successful Guggenheim or
another massive catastrophe like the Prestige oil spill in 2002, its success will ultimately be determined by its ability both to connect in vital ways with the local
population and to attract foreign visitors, that is, its success in becoming a wellintegrated glocal reality. For that to happen, a new vision is needed to overcome
the peripheral blindness that launched the project, which was autocratic and
neo-liberal in nature, seduced by its immediate political benefits and blind to its
long-term effects. A new creative peripheral vision must be transformed into a
sustainable and singular position on the global map.
An important interplay of the local and the global has manifested itself sometimes in the most dramatic and tragic ways. Such was the case in November
2002, when the Prestige oil tanker, a substandard ship from Liberia chartered
by a European company, released 70,000 tonnes of fuel oil into the ocean and
polluted hundreds of kilometres of Galician coast and sea bed. This was one of
the biggest environmental disasters in modern history (bigger than the Exxon
Valdez). The spill affected all the main resources of the region, with devastating
consequences for the ecology and the economy, particularly agriculture, tourism
and the crucial fishing industry (the worlds second largest fleet). The spontaneous popular mobilization was also a glocal cultural phenomenon. The new
grassroots organization Nunca Mis (Never Again), an umbrella organization
for myriad collectives and groups, was formed in response to the catastrophe
and grew very rapidly. Thousands of individuals and members of non-governmental organizations from Galicia, Spain and many other European countries
volunteered in the massive clean-up effort, participated in rallies to mobilize
the complacent authorities, to gather international support, and to make the
international shipping regulations more ecology-friendly (i.e., by banning singlehulled tankers). Galician cultural figures responded just as vigorously and took
charge of the popular movement, in light of the blindness of politicians and their
incapacity to deal effectively with the emergency.
The voice of the popular movement was not a politician, a party leader, or a

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Peripheral Visions, Global Positions: Remapping Galician Culture

professional civic organizer but a well-known female singer by the name of Uxa,
the former lead singer of the folk band Na La, who travelled around Galicia,
Spain and Europe to mobilize support for the cause. Writers wrote in newspapers
and spoke in the media; singers and musicians organized concerts and published
CDs as fund-raising activities; film-makers and audiovisual producers made
documentaries that travelled throughout the world. They organized a popular
response denouncing the negligence of the authorities, demanding reparations
and responsibilities. The collective effort revealed a new form of solidarity and
popular resistance that crossed national borders, and the possibility of changing
the status quo. In this sense, the massive mobilization in Galicia offered a good
example not only of how the global directly impacts the local but also vice versa,
how the local can influence the global. We could say, then, in a double paradox,
that a peripheral position demands a global vision, just as much as a peripheral vision
implies its own positioning globally.
Several key cultural areas represent this new creative hybridity in Galicia,
one that goes beyond the confines of the national; it is particularly visible in the
literary, musical and audiovisual areas. This is certainly the case of the rurban
and glocal literature of Manuel Rivas and Suso de Toro, the most widely translated and successful of contemporary authors writing in Galician, and of the
transnational queer approach of Teresa Moure (Herba Moura, 2005; Benquerida
catstrofe, 2007) and Antn Lopo (Ganga, 2001) in their exploration of alternative sexualities and gender identities across national borders. Perhaps even more
ground-breaking is the emergence of new non-national authors such as Vctor
Omgb, the Cameroonian immigrant writer in Galicia who wrote his testimonial
autobiography Calella sen sada (originally in French), or Ern Moure, the experimental Canadian poet laureate of third-generation Galician background, who
has written in a hybrid English/Galician-Portuguese transnational lyric language,
her works having titles such as Little Theatres (teatrios), or O Cadoiro, poems.
In the area of popular roots music and neo-folk music, Galician musicians
and singers have already established themselves firmly in the world arena. In
fact, the only two forms of roots music originating in Spain that have successfully been exported abroad in significant numbers are the ones that have been
able creatively to hybridize their strong cultural heritage with new world music
trends. One is flamenco with African and Latin American rhythms, and the other
is Galician folk, hybridizing with Celtic music and other forms of world music.24
The growing presence of foreign migrants in Galicia has also translated to the
musical scene, where it is not strange to see foreign performers adapting to
Galician culture (Batuko Tabanca) and hybrid bands of rock, reggae, rap and folk
with members from Galicia, Senegal, Angola, or Tunisia (Pato 2006).
24 The list here is long, Milladoiro, Berrogetto, Na La, Uxa, Carlos Nez, Luar na Lubre,
Mercedes Pen, Cristina Pato and Susana Seivane among others, but we could also include
the Irish band The Chieftains,with their Grammy-winning and Galician-inspired album
Santiago, or the Belgian-Galician folk groups such as the female ensemble of pandeireteiras
called Ialma (Marmuladas, Nova era), or the folk band Camaxe (Imaxes), who have introduced
the Galician pandeireta into the repertoire of Belgian folk bands.

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Another area of great interest in this regard are the visual arts and the so-called
boom of the Galician audiovisual sector, with animation, multimedia, television and state-national and transnational film co-productions made in Galicia or
out of Galicia.25 Multimedia artists such as Antn Reixa, graphic artist, painter
and film director Miguelanxo Prado, and Menchu Lamas are good examples of
this new cultural hybridity.
These cultural agents and creators have been instrumental in the process of
redefinition of Galician cultural identity, opening up to the world in the postmodern global age. They have been able to transcend both cultural essentialism
and homogeneous uniformity by successfully incorporating the global in the
local and by simultaneously inscribing their Galicianness in the global arena.
The emergence of these creative artists, writers and cultural performers with
powerful and diverse voices is redefining what Galicia is, or could be, in this
postmodern, postnational and post-peripheral environment. The new Galician
cultural production (particularly the more traditionally consumable forms of
culture such as literature, music and the visual arts) should then be understood
in relation to its repositioning on the global map, and to the process of construction of a new Galician cultural identity, post-Franco and postmodern, a/part of/
from Spain, and fully immersed in the new global currents.
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