In front of the Mandarin Oriental – formerly a bank, now a hotel – luxury vans park.
Yesterday the Mobile World Congress ended and not all the congressmen have left yet.
On my phone I reread an article that Anna Pacheco published in
Playground
six years ago: it was her first exercise in undercover journalism.
She tried to sneak into the mobile fair to observe the companies' managers, but she did not obtain accreditation.
What no one could stop him from was sneaking into her parties.
“Lying to them has been ridiculously easy while they kept repeating to me what they do and what they have.
The few relationships they establish these days with women are like that, for their use and enjoyment, for dancing and partying.
Company culture”.
In 2018, companies did not hire women to drive those luxury cars.
Neither now.
The author of the novel
Ready, Beautiful, Clean
arrives on time for the interview to talk about
I was here and I remembered us
.
To write this chronicle he had to infiltrate again, this time thanks to union complicity.
It was the only way to know the working conditions of luxury hotel workers and observe the relationship that management and intermediate positions establish with them.
What Pacheco saw and noted he thought about with the tools of social anthropology.
“The hotel is not just a workspace, it stands as a moral figure, of authority, of inspiration: it displays the cultural hegemony of those who dominate.”
Thus the chronicle unfolds into an essay to contemplate one of the dark angles of the tourism industry—the corrosion of character due to precariousness—and propose an interpretation of the society of luxury and the metamorphosis of the global city.
It is the classic objective of infiltration journalism: social criticism.
“I am a writer who comes from an aspirational working class background.
As Emmanuel Rodríguez, victim of a middle-class ideology, says: the family believed that through hard work and university studies one would necessarily have to progress.”
The awareness of the end of that promise is the driving force of Pacheco's analysis of the present.
“I reflect on that all the time.”
I come from an aspirational working class, I feel like a victim of a middle class ideology.
I think about that all the time.
The book begins with the description of a space in his parents' house.
On the desk visible on a shelf, next to a copy of the daughter's novel, the miniature reproduction of the cruise that the family once took in the Mediterranean.
For a time, the figurine that the company gave to her mother, an administrator, was there when she retired after 40 years working in the same professional category.
The figurine is now stored in a shoe box.
The pride remains in the professionalization of her daughter as a writer and the testimony of life fulfillment through tourism.
It is the realization of the aspiration.
The one that showed
Paraíso
, which was broadcast in the summer between 2000 and 2003. The aspiration could be to spend a week on vacation in a luxury hotel in the Dominican Republic because Spain was doing well.
But that promise today is a lie and from that position Pacheco analyzes the series in some splendid pages of cultural criticism.
“The paradise of the
Paraíso
series was, therefore, the staging of a tourist setting that revealed an eminently colonial, exploitative and aspirational look in those bubbling years of tourist and real estate boom.”
The origin of the series was a proposal from a hotel businessman to record an advertising spot.
In the end it was a series on public television and obtained very respectable audience figures.
At his house he looked at her.
Anna Pacheco was nine years old, she grew up in a popular neighborhood and was amazed by the stool screwed into the pool in the series and the waiter who served a drink while the protagonist was sitting there.
In 2008 he turned 17 years old.
She finishes high school, starts Journalism, works at the Starbucks in the La Maquinista shopping center.
She also now reviews that work experience.
“It was an attempt to glamorize a shopping center far from the center.
“They wanted to attract precisely a profile of a foreign visitor, who would spend more money,” she explains to me.
She could be a backing vocalist for the new song
Miracle a les Planes
, by Guillem Gisbert.
The Manel singer, who has just released a solo album, also studied Journalism and two decades later thinks about his experience.
He speaks of an evil plan of the youth in the prologue to the crisis: “We wanted to fit in, like good middle-class and literary children.”
At the beginning of 2013, Pacheco spent three months as an intern in the editorial office of EL PAÍS in Barcelona and for a long year
El Periódico
hosted the blog Jóvenes (about) salient that she wrote with her friend and journalist Andrea Gómez until the beginning of 2015.
She exactly what she played.
Anna Pacheco, in 'Operation Triumph'.
The time has come for the boom of digital magazines.
Pacheco was an editor at
Vice
, where she wrote with a feminist perspective, and an editor at
Playground
, a cool magazine whose existence us
boomers
—
mon semblable, mon frère
— don't even know about.
Her videos, with millions of views, were designed, created and aimed at millennials.
The evolution of the company, considered a unicorn by foreign investors, reveals how the digital bubble inflated, as Carlo Padial narrates in the novel
Content
.
Luna Miguel, editor and publisher of the magazine, summarized the acceleration of that spiral.
“We went from working six people in a one-story room to having a two-story newsroom, and from there to a huge building that only needed ping-pong tables to be a parody of Google.”
The headquarters in the Poblenou neighborhood was designed by Estudio Brava.
The project is posted on the Internet and the design and its philosophy are the metaphor of an era.
“The enjoyment of work: The breaking of the conventional limits between the private and public aspects of a company, between representation and production, is one of the starting points of our proposal.
The project tries to reinforce this ambiguity: places where you work, but also for enjoyment, chat or rest.”
Among many others, Christian Flores, Alba Muñoz, Pol Mallafré, Ignacio Pato, Anna Pazos, Antonio J. Rodríguez, Eudald Espluga worked there.
Also Pacheco.
There he published that article about Mobile.
But a change to Facebook's algorithm ended the dream.
The number of visits plummeted.
In 2018 the bubble burst.
Today the neighborhood is increasingly gentrified, more occupied by expats.
During Playground
's ERE
, Espluga was commissioned to write
Don't be yourself.
Notes on a tired generation
.
In an interview about the book he spoke to Noelia Ramírez about the need to “organize collectively to question the conditions of exploitation.”
It was during that period, while he was starting the podcast
Ciberlocutorio
with Andrea Gumes, when he wrote
Listas, guapas, libros
.
The protagonist grows up in a popular neighborhood, where she is her boyfriend, but when she enters the University she experiences a process of declassification that disconcerts her.
She hooks up with a posh cultural guy with an apartment in Gràcia and she is not aware that he is progressive because he is privileged.
One day she dares to question her certainties.
“I can't believe you don't realize that what you've done can't be done by everyone!”
Pacheco, without morality, looks at reality so that we realize it.
“See, where everyone is looking, something that not everyone sees,” to say it with Martín Caparrós.
Pacheco sees, where everyone looks, something that not everyone sees, to say it with Martín Caparrós.
Look to managers to try to construct an ethnography of the elite.
Is not easy.
“Why don't we count wealth” asked Leila Guerriero in
Construction Zone
.
Without her profile, wrote the author of
The Call
, “we will continue to solve only one X, one part of the equation.”
Pacheco did it at The District real estate fair, infiltrated as an entrepreneur, to write a memorable chronicle in the
Quadern
.
Another privileged viewpoint is the luxury hotel.
But infiltration through the unions led her to contemplate another reality.
Because in this case she could hardly be accepted by senior officials or clients.
She chose to focus her attention on those who make luxury possible and investigate how contact with this type of client affects them.
As happened from George Orwell's
The Road to Wigan Pear
to the recent
For Four Dinos
, by Barbara Ehrenreich, or
The Domestic Trench
, by Cristina Barrial, the exercise of observation led her to discover both the mechanics and the paradoxes of exploitation. contemporary work.
She reflects on it or, sometimes, simply transcribes speeches from managers, middle managers or messages that workers leave on the networks.
There is no paternalism.
There is a look and there is a complaint.
“Workers have been deprived of one of the most basic information about their work: the time they spend doing it.”
For months he walked around the hotel, spoke with workers, attended union and corporate meetings or Christmas parties.
“The most critical day was the second meeting with the Human Resources director of one of the hotels.
The first meeting had gone unnoticed as a union advisor.
I stood at the back of the table and took notes.
That day I noticed that my name appeared in the minutes of the day and, therefore, I feared that by the second day of the meeting perhaps one of the managers had looked for me on the Internet.”
Nothing happened, but he did his best to preserve anonymity while taking notes or recording the meetings.
It doesn't take me long to see the place we are going and we don't see where we are.
This is how he categorizes it in the essay: “Tourism that is not done alone, but is done by workers in exchange for misery.”
Anna Pacheco on the breakwater of the dock attached next to the Cruise Terminal of the Port of Barcelona.
massimiliano minocri
Pacheco thinks about this tourism—about his city model and the utopia of the multinational society—as the book progresses.
Inevitably this reflection leads her to wonder what Barcelona is today.
“I imagine it, like so many other globalized cities, as a large store of carcasses, empty and full at the same time, disturbing.”
As disturbing as another of the images explored in I was here and I remembered us: the cruise ship cemetery, an epilogue to an evolution of the tourist city shown in the short film
View
, by Odveig Klyve: four minutes in which you simply contemplate the arrival of a macro cruise in the Norwegian city of Stavanger.
“The streets are blocked and darkened to the point that it seems as if the cruise ship is going to engulf the houses, completely minimized in the presence of the behemoth.”
This trauma, which engulfs Venice and besieges Barcelona, is that of the dehumanization of the city because the tourism lobby rules where tourism becomes the main economic activity.
I ask for the bill: 14 euros for two drinks.
I won't dare pass it on to the newspaper's administration.
When I return to Passeig de Gràcia I look at the façade of the hotel.
There are several columns with friezes by the sculptor Frederic Marès.
They make progress visible.
From primary sector workers to industrial workers.
A ship, a railway, a plane.
When I get home I turn on the computer and read a message from Pacheco.
“A week ago one of the people I dealt with called me to tell me that she had just been fired from the hotel.
He is a worker who had been working there for more than 10 years.
In his dismissal letter, he states, among other things, that it is violence to tell a superior 'I'm fed up.'
Look for it in your bookstore
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