Our guest contributor is Mark Edwards, chair of the Sociology Department at Oregon State University. But more than being just a stodgy professor, he’s also a good friend of mine. He’s thoughtful, and considering sociologists are about as rare as Vancouver Island Marmots, he offers us his unique perspective on one of Madrid’s oldest neighborhoods, Lavapiés.

I just finished reading Camilo José Cela’s novel La Colmena (“The Beehive”) which describes the misery and futility of dozens of people’s lives in post-civil war Madrid. The unique thing about his book is the dizzying collection of vignettes that illustrate the interconnectedness of people’s lives. La Comena has no real plot, just as the life of a beehive has no plot – it just lives. And this human hive lives because everyone goes about his or her daily activities in spite of suffering and in hopes of something changing. OK, it’s a really depressing book, but as a sociologist I was fascinated by the emphasis on how a small part of a city is woven together by people’s day-to-day affairs. And it was with this image of a beehive in my head that I took my family for a walk through one of Madrid’s more notorious neighborhoods.

We wandered through Lavapiés, a commercial district of Madrid that has been the receiving ground for tens of thousands of immigrants during the past decade. Immigrants from all over the world have descended upon this city, concentrating in many different barrios and suburbs, but Lavapiés is the oldest neighborhood to be impacted by the newer processes of globalization. A saunter through this neighborhood, even by a pasty white wide-eyed family of four Americans, gives a taste of Madrid that is worthwhile and free.

Descending south from the shopping madness of Plaza Mayor, you begin to see a preponderance of clothing, cloth, bead, and cheap jewelry stores, penetrated by an occasional mom-n-pop grocery (alimentación) or tavern (cervezería). Surprisingly, most of the stores are not selling things to tourists or even to local residents. Most display a sign saying, “ Venta al Mayor,” a phrase that for the longest time I thought meant “we sell to everyone” or “we sell to old people” or “we sell big sizes.” But it turns out that this means “we sell in bulk to people who sell this stuff elsewhere.” Indeed, when my kids tried to pick one t-shirt or one bracelet out of the bulk piles, they were scolded by the (usually) Chinese owners. And the more I looked at the things for sale, the more I realized that what I was seeing looked just like the stuff for sale in other gift shops around town. Aha! The turf of the Chinese middle-man that I studied about in my sociology classes – importing things inexpensively from abroad, selling them to local venders, and creating a solid middle class among otherwise poor immigrants.

Once we realized we could not buy anything, we focused more on just seeing what was in the neighborhood. (There’s a lesson in that I suppose.) Above these store fronts on narrow streets you can look up and see five floors of pisos with tiny balconies tilting toward each other over the street, an occasional diapered black bottom leaning against the wrought iron rail, an olive-faced young woman with kerchiefed head peeking from behind old curtains, and laundry drying everywhere. While descending from the Tirso de Molina metro stop in the direction of the Lavapiés metro stop, the streets are busy but not congested, although I discovered later that on Monday mornings the streets are completely plugged up with delivery trucks. But in the afternoon, storeowners linger at the door for a smoke, with apparently little else to do but cast suspicious gazes on people passing by. A white American family with two elementary-aged girls is a bit of an oddity in this place, and we got some stares too, but no one seemed too interested in us, perhaps because they had nothing to sell us and because we refrained from snapping photos of anyone. I suspect the men huddled on the corner, exchanging handshakes and small packages within handshakes, may well have shown some fear if we had taken pictures.

Unlike my neighborhood near the palace, there were very few people walking dogs, and as a result, the streets were refreshingly free of excremento canino (let the reader understand). We could walk without one lizard eye constantly scanning the ground for things to avoid and the other looking ahead for knee-cracking posts in the sidewalk. In the absence of canine smells lingered other smells – a whiff of sewer in the June heat, a current of cigarettes and sweat, an eddy of curry or fish frying. At the bottom of the hill, we turned left toward the Plaza Lavapiés, an amazing crossroads of humanity with people still sporting native dress from Africa, Moroccan men sitting on the backs of benches, smoking together and glowering at others, women scarved and in a hurry pulling the kids along home, and signs over restaurants indicating food from Arabia, India, Pakistan, Korea, and the Maghreb (NW Africa). The little old Spanish ladies hobbling around the sidewalk just outside their door, looking tired and mad, must have a story to tell about how their neighborhood has radically changed during their jubilado (retired, but who knows how “jubilant” they really are) years, and perhaps about how their kids don’t visit them enough, or about how their kids are trying to move them out to live with them in the suburbs but they don’t want to leave the piso where their husband died or the neighborhood they still regard as home.

Our trip through Lavapiés was not purely a walkabout, but rather we had a goal to find a North African restaurant listed in an expatriates’ newspaper as a “cheap eats.” Of course we timed it badly, as we usually do in Madrid, a couple hours after lunch had closed and a couple hours before the evening opening (which is in fact the time Americans like myself usually eat.) But our walk helped remove some of the mystery and fear of this neighborhood, one clearly discounted and warned against when tourists are instructed about safe travel in Madrid. (This is the neighborhood where some members of the accused Al-Queda cell lived while planning the March 11 train bombings and where gypsies supposedly plan how to steal your wallet.) Our kids are old enough to have felt a little bit uncomfortable, knowing they did not fit in to this place where in fact everyone fits in. I have heard about one practice of fitting in lots of people here, described by fellow urban sociologists as camas calientes (hot beds) — not some sexual practice, but rather crowding like submarine sailors endure – rotating inhabitants of a bed, where one guy gets it for 8 hours, the second guy another 8, and the third guy gets one more shift.

A great irony of Lavapiés is its name. One might think that lava pies (wash feet) is a piece of sanitary advice for those who have dared to wander these streets. But in Catholic Spain, this name must have been inspired by Jesus’ bold act of washing his disciples’ feet. In doing this, he challenged people who anticipated becoming influential leaders to have humble attitudes of service toward all. The people who live here, if they are fortunate to find work, spend their time washing other people’s feet, dishes, laundry, sidewalks, cars, houses, etc. But they return each night to a neighborhood named for the prophetic demand for the church to wash their feet. I do not know the degree to which the church serves there, but I know that to public administrators and social workers, this neighborhood looks like a confusing hive of human need with problems more complex than dirty feet.

There are lots of great places to walk in Madrid to learn about Spain’s history, but this neighborhood tells one of the big stories of contemporary Spain—a prosperous post-Christian European country dealing with a massive influx of people from all over the world, crammed into a tiny place in the city center, cutting the lawns of suburban professionals, selling pirated DVD’s in Puerta del Sol, looking for work caring for old ladies stuck in the city, and putting up with curious tourists who can get on the plane and go home once they have collected their story to tell back home.