The Mexican mayor of Barcelona

The two most emblematic mayors Barcelona has ever had are, without a doubt, Bartomeu Robert, popularly known as Dr. Robert, and Pasqual Maragall. These days, at the spectacular and massively crowded Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), where Barcelona is the guest city—and where it's playing a brilliant role and where the speeches are part of a pompous protocol—paradoxically, no one has bothered to mention the remarkable fact that Dr. Robert was born... Yes, I guessed it! The famous mayor of Barcelona has Mexican roots. How can it be that no one has pointed this out? Mayor Collboni was right to express his gratitude for the generous and fruitful welcome Mexico gave to the exiles of the Spanish Civil War; so was the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa. But what about Dr. Robert? Why this absurd oversight?

Specifically, Bartomeu Robert y Yarzábal was born on October 20, 1842, in Tampico, where he lived for the first four years of his life. Four years is a short time, yes, but he had and maintained close family ties (Javier Cercas also spent only four years in his native village in Extremadura, but it marked him as a "rootless" person, according to [author's name]. He explained this precisely these days at the FILDr. Robert's grandfather was from Sitges—also named Bartomeu Robert y Girona and a doctor—and had settled in Campeche at the beginning of the 19th century, where he had a son (the father of the future mayor of Barcelona), Francesc Robert y Batlle, born in 1813. Francisco Robert studied medicine in Paris and returned to Mexico. He settled in Tampico, where he married Teodora Yarzábal, born in Pasaya, in the Basque Country. Their two children, Bartomeu and Josepa, were sent to Sitges, the family's hometown, in 1846 due to the American invasion of Mexico, which would lead to two years of armed conflict and end with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, under which the United States acquired Arizona, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Bartomeu Robert remained in Catalonia. In 1863 he graduated in medicine from the University of Barcelona, ​​married a woman from Sitges, and began a brilliant professional career. Due to his civic prestige, despite his lack of political experience, he was appointed mayor of Barcelona in 1899 by royal decree (that's how things worked back then) at a delicate moment: the Spanish colonial defeat. A Catalan conservative, and president since its creation of the Regionalist League of the young Prat de la Riba and Cambó, he inherited a Barcelona that had begun to take a modernizing and cosmopolitan leap with the Universal Exposition of 1888. The City of Wonders From Eduardo Mendoza's novel, a Barcelona in turmoil, which the writer himself described this Sunday at the FIL (Guadalajara International Book Fair) before a dazzled audience.

He was only at the helm of Barcelona for seven months, but he left his mark. The monument to him in Plaça Tetuan (it was initially in Plaça Universitat), a work by Josep Llimona, depicts a woman of faith. He agreed to take over as mayor with the government's promise of a decentralization project that was very soon halted and reversed. Then, this calm, thoughtful, and pragmatic professor rebelled and spearheaded the refusal of merchants, shopkeepers, and small business owners in the city to pay taxes to the State—the famous "Cierre de Cajas" (Closing of the Cash Registers). Faced with this untenable conflict, out of principle, he submitted his resignation on October 22nd, but very soon he was elected to Congress with an overwhelming victory. The following year, in 1902, he died at the age of 59 from a cerebral hemorrhage.

I found the clue to the Mexican identity of Dr. Robert and his family in the book The presence of Catalan women in Mexico. Five centuriesThe book by José M. Murià, published in 2021 by the Mexican Academy of History and the College of Jalisco, can be found in the Josep Maria Murià i Romero Library (with more than 10,000 titles in Catalan), a section of the Jalisco State Public Library. President Isla is scheduled to visit it this Tuesday.