Carles Feixa: "The riots in Barcelona have been the initiation ritual for a marginalized youth"

BarcelonaCarles Feixa is a professor of social anthropology at the Department of Communication of the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), specializing in the study of youth cultures.

Has it surprised you that half of those arrested for the riots in Barcelona are minors?

— No. First, because it responds to the mirror effect of what is happening in France, where it is also students who are leading the protests. And second, because a week or 15 days ago there were already signs on social media, especially on TikTok, where the presence of teenagers is greater, that there was some more or less spontaneous call to mobilize them. Furthermore, teenagers are always the group most susceptible to getting involved in these types of movements. They are also the easiest to instrumentalize.

Why have they been easy to mobilize?

— There is a breeding ground for them to feel attracted to it. One thing is that there are arsonists who, for more or less declared interests, want to light the fire, and another is why this fire takes root and there are 500 young people—not a massive amount, but not few either—who enter into this game. I think this may have to do with the effects of the pandemic and a generation that has lived their childhood and adolescence with restrictions on face-to-face contact and with a surge in mental health problems.

Is there also more recent unrest?

— Yes, there is all the unrest in Catalonia regarding education from the last two years. Until now, the protagonists had been the teachers and the education system, but young people have also experienced it. And there is another element. As already happened in France, Great Britain, and Germany in the past, we find ourselves with urban peripheries where there is a youth, whether born here or second generation, that does not manage to find paths to a future and life projects that are attractive. And when these life projects are not viable, sometimes the temptation to let oneself be carried away by easy promises of a night supposedly of fun is greater.

But what we saw on Saturday was not a typical demonstration with a specific message.

— It is true that the novelty was perhaps that there was no prior demonstration, but rather that as soon as there is a clash with law enforcement, it immediately moves to this vandalism, probably due to an imitative factor from France. But, obviously, there is an amalgam of motivations and one would have to ask each of these 500 young people why they went and how they found out about it. Many social movements begin with general unrest; now, this expresses a generational malaise that affects above all sectors of urban peripheries and surely more boys than girls. There is a sector of male youth that is sometimes attracted to the far right, feeling disoriented and not seeing their path of identity clearly. The other key element is that many young people feel that if they do not act violently, although in this case it was not against people but against things, they are not listened to.

We are not used to seeing teenagers causing disturbances of this type. Have they normalized these behaviors?

— The Youth Report in Spain explains that the majority have witnessed fights on the internet. These are fights that go viral and have become a kind of narrative genre. On the other hand, there is the whole language of video games, where in some way this type of aggressiveness towards things is indeed trivialized. Furthermore, there is a clear and direct imitative effect of the French model. When they see the images on television or on TikTok, they believe that this can happen here without anything serious happening to them.

Many, directly, have boasted about it on social media.

— It is a performative violence, in the sense that it is a violence that is exhibited, which is not secret or clandestine. There is an alleged anonymity in covering one's face and dressing in black, but on the other hand, towards others there is an exhibitionism, which may respond to this viralization of the fights that I was mentioning.

It is also surprising that the vast majority of those arrested have no criminal record.

— Indeed, it has been like an initiation ritual for the public presence of a youth that feels marginalized, that lives in school segregation, in urban peripheries with precarious housing conditions and that does not see much of a future. In many societies these initiation rituals involve violence to show that you can be an adult. It is a generation that is claiming that it wants to have a place, even if they do it in a way that is not legitimate. There is also the fact of being able to be a protagonist for a night. It remains a way of empowering oneself tragically, but I insist that we should speak with each one to see their motivations.

Much has been said about the origin of these young people.

— In France, residential segregation clearly created this social fracture, and in Catalonia, it is more a matter of school segregation that generates ghettos. This does not mean by any means that those who have protested are foreigners, but I believe that this school segregation is an element that can aggravate the feeling of exclusion and marginalization that these young people experience.

Could the fact that the riots have gone so viral trigger a call effect for upcoming demonstrations?

— I think quite the opposite. Since this first call has generated so much alarm, I do not believe that there will be a massive protest at the next one, unless there is a more ideological and structured organization later on. But there is indeed an underlying malaise and the mistake of providing an exclusively police response to these phenomena should not be repeated.