ABSTRACT
In four novels to date-El día que me vaya no se lo diré a nadie (2003); Cosas que hacen BUM (2007); Rompepistas (2009); Eres el mejor, Cienfuegos (2012), two chronicles: L’home intranquil (2010); Mil violines (2011) and an anthology of published essays-Chap, Chap (2015), Catalan writer Kiko Amat’s male dominated rst-person narratives collide with more centrist versions of the Catalan democratic experience supported by campaigns in pursuit of a collaborative role in Spain and the European Union during the democratic transitional process. In the ensuing years of urban reconstruction of Barcelona as the post-industrial city par excellence, Catalan nationalism often provoked the political epicenter of Spanishness in Madrid and still foments a polarized reaction regarding its “peripheral” identity which relies on imported and immigrant cultures to uphold its difference from Spain. Similarly, foreign soundtracks accompanying this democratic difference, during the early transitional years play a key role in reshaping expressions of youthful working class masculinity on the outskirts of the Catalan capital, as captured intimately in Amat’s third novel, Rompepistas, whose teen narrator reveals his subaltern masculine identity in connection to his tribe of skinhead friends, the geographic and political reality of his birthplace on the fringes of bourgeois Catalan society, a fraught relationship to school and to family, and no hope for a place in the dwindling labor market. This emotional connection to the past evokes a marginal existence as part of an urban development plan that emphasized aesthetics in the postindustrial city and in politics as a means to creating a discourse of consensus that governs “the organization of the visible, and what will be relegated to invisibility” (Balibrea 204).
