Enriqueta Martí Part III: Her Time and Place

1/24/2013 Editor's Note: A comment left on this post last week brought to my attention further sources that I would like acknowledge. 

But before I do, I would like to share a brief reflection in relation to sources generally and the overall character of this blog. This personal blog is an eclectic space for personal reflection and sharing of current interests (academic or otherwise); it isn't formatted with a formal bibliography, nor does it attempt to be or simulate a peer-reviewed journal. It is my hope that readers who are especially interested in any given post subject do investigative research of their own. The links I do provide to my sources are only an initial lily pad jump in the direction of that exciting work -- they are often secondary sources that lead back to primary sources, opening doors to new and diverse scholarship, references, sources, citations. All-inclusivity is an impossibility, especially in an informal blog space such as this one, and I do not pretend otherwise. 

That said, there is quite a difference between not referencing and inadvertently misattributing a source, as is the case here. An interview with historian and novelist Elsa Plaza was the primary source of the historical background and social critique for Catalina Gayá's journalistic piece on el Raval, and Plaza is the true source of some statements and statistics I inadvertently attributed to Gayá in this post originally. I've made edits in the body of this post in order to correct these misattributions. 

I'm a historicist at heart -- all stories (and this is a "story," after all) have a time and place. No story has ever been created/told/perpetuated in a socio-historical vacuum. Stories live and breath, they grow and redirect themselves. They fill in gaps, grow up and over themselves and others. They feed off of their environments. Their environments feed off of them. I had a professor in undergrad who would correct me when I would argue that stories -- that literature -- acted as a mirror for any given culture: literature does not mirror, he would state, it creates culture and culture begets it in return.

Somewhere between yellow journalism and prensa rosa. "Crónica gráfica", publisher unknown. 1912.

Enriqueta Martí's story is no different. It was no coincidence that Enriqueta Martí devastated Barcelona's cultural imaginary at the time of her arrest in 1912. It means something that her case made big news in international newspapers, that she skyrocketed to a level of infamy that put her face on the front pages of both la prensa rosa* and seedy tabloids alike. The two girls rescued from her apartment became instant media darlings, their families enjoying certain celebrity (albeit briefly) as well.  It is important to note that this macabre spectacle occurred in Barcelona in the early teens. It's important to understand that Martí's time and place matter(ed).

Victim Teresita Guitart posing for the press with her family and the policemen who rescued her. 1912. 

Census figures show that, in 1912, Barcelona's population pushed over 587,000; in 1860, there were 140,000. The population practically tripled in 40 years, the majority of these new Barcelonans finding themselves in el Chino, the Fifth District. Waves of immigration brought peasants and proles to "The Pearl of the Mediterranean", but what many of them found, as Catalina Gayá writes in her 2012 article on el Chino, now el Raval**, was "The City of Death": the average life expectancy in Barcelona was 41 years; the infant mortality rate topped 17%. Mothers would frequently hide their sons' births from city authorities; if typhus or tuberculosis didn't finish them off as children, they would only be sent to fight for a foreign occupation in Morocco.

This city saw the worst of the War (Disaster) of 1898***, being the Spanish port that sent -- and later received -- the most Spanish soldiers called to war. As already mentioned, after the turn of the century, Barcelona sent even more young men to fight and die in Morocco. In the summer of 1909, the city suffered through an explosive, week-long, episode of civil unrest --La setmana trágica started out as a general strike of the city proletariat, and later spiraled out of control, resulting in free-for-all street fights with city police and the eventual occupation of the port city by national troops.

General Strike, Setmana Tragica July 1909

According to Gayá's article, of the 6,000+ homes found in Barcelona at the time, a little over 2,000 were in the Fifth District. Journalist Josep Maria Huertas wrote that "it was common for forty to fifty people to live in one house." Due to the district's close proximity to the port, hostels and boarding houses abounded, seedy taverns were converted into flophouses and bordellos to better serve those coming through. Morphine use was rampant in the district, as was alcohol abuse. There were frequent knife fights, a large population of teenaged prostitutes, and an estimated 8,000-10,000 street urchins and child thieves in the streets.

Urban warfare, Setmana Tragica July 1909

This is the neighborhood in which Enriqueta Martí operated. This is the neighborhood from which she stole away the two girls found in her apartment in the winter of 1912.

Barcelona burning, Setmana Tragica July 1909

Barcelona was a city filled with illiterate and poor immigrants, and -- much like 1920's Berlin -- disfigured and unemployed war veterans and military deserters: invisible people circulating in a city filled with what Gayá calls "la misma miseria de siempre".****

Barcelona was/is an international port city. Anything could/can (and did/does) happen. Barcelona is said to have been, at the time, the pornography capitol of Europe, exporting pornographic films and postcards to foreign capitols throughout Europe and the New World. It was also the European port most frequently used to traffic underaged prostitutes to major American capitols such as New York, Sao Paulo, and Buenos Aires. Children of the Fifth District who evaded forced prostitution and sex trafficking were often kidnapped and enslaved in sweatshops and ramshackle factories located within the district itself. Let us not forget that this was the city lauded as "The Pearl of the Mediterranean"; the city enjoys a very similar reputation today. One has to wonder how much has changed. 

This was (is?) Enriqueta Martí's world. For an angry, disempowered, politicized (and, in some cases, militarized) proletariat, she represented a very real boogie monster: a vampiress/witch preying on her own people -- operating in the margins, a direct threat to them and their families.

Catalina Gayá's article on Enriqueta Martí dares to posit a very different thesis from what we see so often in the annals of cyber space. Gayá interviews historian Elsa Plaza for her piece, who argues that Martí was set up, that she was a "straw (wo)man" -- representative of decades of misery and abuse in the eyes of the proletariat suffering in the Fifth District, just the last straw to break the long-suffering camel's back, and demonized by the city government and print media as well. Martí took the fall for so many others.***** Plaza reminds Gayá's readers that Martí never confessed to murdering those many children she kidnapped, nor did she ever confess to selling their bodily parts as potions and elixirs. According to Plaza, Martí was never formally accused of murder, nor was any child's cadaver actually found in her home. The second child found in her home with Teresita -- a girl named Angela -- was proven to really, actually, truly be her neice, as Martí always claimed the girl to be.

Elsa Plaza argues that Martí wasn't a vampire at all. She was just another pimp, another Sack Lady/Man in a city filled with many. If she were a monster, she would have been in good company -- living in a monstrous place, as Giorgio Agamben would say, operating in a state of exception, the abnormal made normal. 

She also argues that Martí, rather than being brutally killed by her fellow inmates, died of uterine cancer after eight months of waiting for her trial date, that the other women in the jail insisted on washing her body, holding a vigil, and giving her a proper funeral. 

She argues that Martí's story has always been told by men. This blogger argues that it has always been told for men as well. 

One of the final photographs taken of Martí after her arrest. 1912.
Hauntingly familiar, we all recognize the iconic image of the
celebrity shielding their face from the cameras. 

What does this mean for us, devotees of the urban legend of the Vampiress of the Carrer Ponent? Does any of this really matter? That she may not have been a vampire, a serial killer, after all? Does that really matter? Does it change the story? Are we disappointed (in ourselves)? Do we feel sheepish? I could spell it out for you, but I won't. We're all thinking the same thing. Though, this is only a story after all. 

Remember, monsters operate as meaningful signs. Ghosts do, too.

In his 1993 text The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, Jacques Derrida reminds us that:

"The specter, as its name indicates, is the frequency of a certain visibility. But the visibility of the invisible. And visibility, but its essence, is not seen, which is why it remains epekeina tes ousias, beyond the phenomenon or beyond being. The specter is also, among other things, what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects—on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see. Not even the screen sometimes, and a screen always has, at bottom, in the bottom or background that it is, a structure of disappearing apparition."******

***

Further reading:

       Read the first installment, "Enriqueta Martí: Vampire, Serial Killer, Sack Lady", here.

       Read the second installment, "Enriqueta Martí Part II: The Nature of the Monster", here.

       Read the Sack Man post that started it all here.  

* "Periodismo del corazón", journalism dedicated to high society, lifestyles of the rich and famous, media and entertainment. 

** Read Catalina Gayá's excellent 2011 article for elPeriódico.com -- that so informed this post -- here. 

*** Known in the United States as the Spanish American War. 

****Anyone who has seen Alejandro González Iñárritu's devastating 2010 film Biutiful -- or has had direct access to the most marginalized communities throughout Barcelona -- would recognize that very little has changed in the port city in the past 100 years. 

***** Remember: if Enriqueta Martí is the urban witch from "Hansel and Gretel", who play the roles of the mother and father who abandoned their children in woods at the beginning of the fairy tale? How many parents in Barcelona sold their children into slavery, sexual and otherwise? Many, unfortunately, tragically, horrifically.

****** Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. 1993. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. 101.