Vindicating the Charnego? Classim and segregation in Javier Pérez Andújar’s and Jorge Javier Vázquez’s autobiographical discourse

Abstract

In this article I analyse two autobiographical narrations that have recently been published by the sons of southern Spanish migrants to Catalonia. In Paseos con mi madre by Javier Pérez Andújar (2011), and La vida iba en serio by Jorge Javier Vázquez (2013), the authors deal with their social condition as youngsters in the urban periphery, producing a discourse, written in the first person, that is unprecedented in the Catalan context. The relevance of these books derives from a number of factors. First, they offer a new voice that rises out of a self-representation vacuum in this social sector. Secondly, they conflictively rethink a social place which hegemonic discourse had assumed «normalized» and overcome. Thirdly, although both reflect on their migratory origin and the difficulty of fitting into Catalonia’s urban mesocracy, their migratory background is largely subsumed in the experience of urban segregation, and hardly expressed at all in either ethnic or national terms.