L’Hospitalet: The rapper Morad and the blocks of La Florida | Catalonia

It is the densest neighborhood in Europe: 44,000 inhabitants in less than a square kilometer. 40-meter apartments in which several families live, an average income of 8,600 euros per year and one of the highest rates of youth unemployment and school dropout in Spain. This is the neighborhood of La Florida de L’Hospitalet, which in recent weeks has risen like a meteor on television screens due to a truly unique conflict – the pulse between the police and rapper Morad for control of public space – and with many edges, which combine the lack of horizon of the young people of the neighborhood, the frustrated expectations of its former inhabitants and a new disruptive factor: the ability of social networks to create referents and leadership.

The neighborhood is divided around the figure of one of its neighbors, rapper Morad El Khattouti, a 23-year-old boy of Moroccan origins who defiantly says he is Street boy, a boy on the street At the age of 14 he begins to compose songs inspired by his neighborhood and his friends, with the police as the big villain of a system that rejects and expels them. It happens that Morad has become the very image of success: he fills the concerts, he has millions of followers, his song “Pellele” accumulates more than 50 million reproductions and with his rebellious lyrics he earns more than one million euros a year. . But unlike others, he didn’t run away. The opposite: he made his neighborhood and his fellow travelers the protagonists of his successful video clips.

He distributes money, takes care of his friends and when he wants to take control of the street, much to the annoyance of those first immigrants from all over Spain who at the end of the 1950s occupied the famous Blocks of Onesimo Redondo built by the Franco regime for the Somorrostro slums. . . The dream of those first immigrants was to tidy up the neighborhood, get equipment and, over time, have a peaceful retirement with the future of their children on track. But things went wrong. Three consecutive crises have shattered all dreams, the neighborhood has become even more degraded and a new foreign immigration has arrived which already represents 60% of the population, of which Morad and his companions are the most visible and noisy part.

At the end of October, in the umpteenth protest of the neighbors over the nocturnal noise, the police intervened and Morad, who already had a history of accidents, confronted the officers. According to the statement, he threatened to burn down the neighborhood if they didn’t leave. That night containers and cars burned, the rapper was arrested, a judge ruled that he shouldn’t go near the neighborhood and now the other street kids are demonstrating to ask for them to return. It may all be a one-time accident, and it may not be. The question is whether in what happened lies the same conflict between rootless angry young people that set fire to the outskirts of Paris or the streets of Tottenham a few years ago. To what extent the confrontation between old and new immigrants is the wrong expression of helplessness and discomfort that can escalate into an explosion of social conflict. The blocks of Onesimo Redondo were poor in the 1960s and today the blocks of La Florida are even poorer, without the Barrios plan and municipal programs being able to prevent it. Behind this story is a neighborhood trapped in chronic poverty, entrenched and hopeless.

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