In Search of Connections
Youngsters in Spain (including Catalonia) are seeking connections with peers from Latin America- a trend that stands in stark contrast with the Catalan independence movement
"Ibai Llanos en La Velada del Año." by Cristinaperiodista1999 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
A business scholar called Clayton Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation” after studying how new entrants are able to compete with incumbents. Christensen, who often worked alongside with other academics, says that disruption is possible because established companies usually try to keep their biggest and most profitable customers happy; and as a result largely ignore other segments.
New entrants are able to gain a foothold by targeting these forgotten or under-served segments with new offerings at lower prices, Christensen says. As the new player gain traction, they can gradually move upmarket and begin to challenge incumbents on their home turf while keeping prices low.
There is a textbook example of disruptive innovation in the media right now. Over the last decade and a half, live commentary on video games played by skilled players has taken off on the internet. Established media organisations have largely ignored the trend, which they initially saw as a marginal niche for geeks (if they even thought about it at all). The trend has been enabled by platforms like Twitch, which was founded in 2011 as a spinoff from an earlier startup from San Francisco. The platform’s parent was bought by Amazon in 2014.
Away from the limelight, streamers have gradually become stars with the younger generation, along with YouTubers (the video platform was founded in 2005 and bought by Google the following year) and TikTokers (TikTok was launched in 2016). If you want to feel old, grab a passing teenager and ask which streamers, YouTubers and TikTokers he or she follows. You might be surprised by how detailed the answer is.
As Christensen predicted, these new content creators are beginning to move upmarket. One of the best examples is MrBeast, a 26-year-old American YouTuber with more than 300m followers. He is making an astonishing $700m a year from his videos, but is reinvesting nearly all of it as he builds a media empire.
Spain recently saw an amazing example of a new entrant into a neglected area moving upmarket. Ibai Llanos is 29-year-old Spanish streamer, who was born in Bilbao (the Basque Country) but lives in Barcelona (Catalonia). He started commenting on League of Legends games online at the age of 19 and, just like MrBeast, is building his own media empire. He organises an annual streaming festival, which has been growing every year. The fourth edition, held in July, packed out the Santiago Bernabeu stadium in Madrid with a multi-ethnic crowd. He is on the right at the photo at the top, which was taken at the previous event in 2023.
This year’s event largely flew under the radar with the mainstream media (with the exception of Spain’s sporting press) and most older adults. I only found out about it because one of my kids is a fan; and I watched some of it with her via her Twitch account on the Playstation on our smart TV. The event broke Twitch’s records with more than 3.5m viewers tuning into the show.
Llanos’ event featured three main elements. The streamer and some of this mates sat on stage providing live commentary on the games with impressive endurance while linking up the segments. There were a number of performances from musical artists from Latin America and Spain. And there were amateur boxing matches between streamers, who trained intensively for the event over a few months. Many of the bouts pitched streamers from Spain against others from Latin America.
Watching much of the event with my teenage daughter, I was struck by three main themes. First of all, it was incredible to see how Llanos had been able to build an under-the-radar media empire in around a decade. It is very impressive; and business scholar Christensen would have recognised the playbook in an instance.
Secondly, old-world media organisations sneered at the very idea of commentating on video games back in the day, at best; or completely ignored it, at worst. Isn’t it just a bunch of geeks on the sofa? Who’d want to watch that? By embracing the physicality of amateur boxing, the streamers are fighting back against their critics in an interesting way. Many of the fights seemed to be more a test of bottle than technical skill, but we have to give credit where it’s due. Stepping into a boxing ring in front of a crowd is always worthy of respect!
Thirdly, when I first moved to Madrid as a young man in 1991, I was always struck by how isolated Spain seemed from its former empire. Mexican and Peruvian restaurants were notable by their absence. Spanish multinationals began to invest heavily in Latin America in the 1990s, but the traffic mostly went one way at first.
Matters began to change around the turn of the century, as what would turn into a massive wave of immigration from the Americas began to get underway. Spanish youngsters born since the early 1990s have grown up with many friends with their roots in Latin America in a way that would be unfamiliar to previous generations. Llanos and the other streamers have taken this point of contact and run with it in ways that might surprise older Spaniards who have never taken much of an interest in Twitch or streaming.
It is quite hard to get exact numbers on Latin American immigration to Spain, largely because many people from countries like Argentina and Uruguay have the right to European passports, often through Italian-born grandparents. However, there are certainly more than 3m Latin Americans residing legally in Spain (at least 6% of the population), the majority with double nationality. The real numbers might be significantly higher, maybe by a million or two. There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who have over-stayed their visas (many of whom are applying for European passports in the meantime). The numbers are expected to rise dramatically given low fertility rates among native-born Spaniards. Already, nearly a third of the babies born in Spain have mothers who immigrated to the country.
As a result of the changing demographics, Madrid is earning a reputation as “the European Miami”; and Spain is said to be the second most popular destination for migrants from Latin America after the US (some studies say it is the third after Canada). Spain is also the second most popular destination for immigrants within the European Union (EU), after Germany, largely as a result of the influx. Mexican and Peruvian restaurants are no longer unusual in Madrid or Barcelona.
Also, music based on African diaspora rhythms that has been nurtured in South America and the Caribbean - from Latin pop to reggaeton and Latin trap - have become also very popular throughout Spain, in a way that would have surprised music fans in the 1990s. At the time, most Spanish pop and rock musicians mostly took inspiration from stars from the UK and the US rather than Latin America.
A thriving salsa scene in the 1990s was a clear exception. It helped pave the way for Afro-Latin rhythms on mainstream Spanish dancefloors in later decades. Although Cuban music had been discouraged during the country’s long dictatorship, it was allowed on the Canary Islands, creating a space for salsa singers like Caco Serrante to begin to develop a local scene. There are clear parallels with the Catalan rumba scene, which sprang to life in the 1950s as musicians from Barcelona (the capital of Catalonia) looked for a point of connection between flamenco and Afro-Cuban rhythms, with songs in both Spanish and Catalan.
I moved to Barcelona from London in 2005. Speaking personally, it has been a pleasure to spend time with people from countries like Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Peru and Uruguay since then, in a way that would have been unusual in my two stints in Madrid in the 1990s. My kids have made friends with roots from even further afield, including places like China and Colombia, as well as various European countries.
Returning to Llanos’ streaming event at the Santiago Bernabeu, one of the highlights came from Bizarrap, a 25-year-old music producer from Argentina. He uses his YouTube channel to promote collaborations with top stars from Spain and Latin America, including the likes of a 22-year-old rapper from Madrid called Quevedo.
Bizarrap hit headlines last year when he produced Out of Your League / Pa’ Tipos Como Tú for Shakira, the Colombian singer of Lebanese and Spanish descent, who was 45 at the time. The song is one of the most epic diss tracks of all time, slamming her ex-partner, retired Spanish/Catalan footballer Gerard Piqué (35 at the time), for starting a relationship with a much younger Spanish/Catalan lady (24 at the time), who Shakira saw as being a decidedly mediocre replacement.
At the end of his short set at Llanos’ event at the Santiago Bernabeu studium, where he dropped remixes of his most famous songs, Bizarrap got one of the largest cheers of the night when he urged Spain to beat England in the final of the European Championship, which was due to be played the following night. He then waved Argentina’s national flag. Spain, of course, won. Argentina also won the Copa América a few hours later.
The games in the European Championship have been shown on giant screens throughout Barcelona and other towns in its metropolitan area - something that would have been unthinkable during the Catalan push for independence, but has been made possible by a new generation of Socialist mayors (plus a handful of conservative mayors as well) as the independence movement has run out of steam. It has been very interesting to watch ethnically mixed groups of young Spaniards draped in flags and wearing la Roja’s shirts cheering on the national team in Barcelona and its outskirts.
Of course, some of the team’s best players are non-white as immigrants from Latin America and Africa (and their descendants) have started to take centre-stage in Spanish football. This has come a little later than in other large European national teams from countries that used to have empires.
There is something happening here. Young streamers, who have developed their own subculture away from the mainstream, have encouraged friendly competition between rivals from Spain and Latin America, while enjoying each other’s music. Young Spaniards often have Latin American friends, in a way that would have been unusual as recently as the 1990s. The relationship of a Colombian pop star and a Catalan footballer has attracted intense interest. Young people cheered goals in the final of the European Championship from Nico Williams, a 22-year-old player from Pamplona whose Ghanaian parents had crossed the Sahara to get to Spain, and Mikel Oyarzabal, a 27-year-old Basque player.
These interlocking trends are all based on young people making connections with like-minded people from different backgrounds over the internet and in real life, with the new relationships often enabled by the Spanish language, which is spoken as a native tongue by more than 500m people around the world. There is a clear contrast with the Catalan independence movement, which is largely based on exaggerating minor differences between neighbours. The movement is also characterised by its hostility to Spanish, which is seen as a threat to the Catalan language (just over 4m native speakers).
For example, Catalan nationalists have long promoted linguistic fines for restaurants that hire Latin American waiters who have yet to get to grips the region’s minority language. The underlying attitude is clearly going against the grain of the trend we are discussing in this week’s essay.
Support for independence has been falling sharply for years and remains well below 50%. The independence movement is also much more popular with retired people, who found a previous wave of migration to Barcelona from poor Spanish-speaking provinces in the south of the country a little distressing, than it is with their grandchildren and other youngsters.
We can see some hints at what is happening in a recent opinion poll. Around 20% of the generation of Catalans between 18 and 24 were born outside the region. Having grown up with family roots outside the region or with many friends from somewhere else, only around 7% are concerned with Catalonia’s relationship with the rest of Spain (compared to one in five for those above 50). Although the youngest voters tend to be more conservative than previous generations at this stage of life, they are largely unconcerned with immigration. Less than 10% see it as a problem, which is significantly lower than older generations.
Young people’s quest for connection within a wider Spanish-speaking world has attracted little notice in Spain. However, I expect it will be one of the biggest themes of the 2020s and 2030s as immigrants and their kids increasingly join Spain’s middle class. The country has seen a couple of politicians at the national level with Argentine roots in recent years. I expect to see many more in the future.
One of the few politicians in Spain to even hint at the existence of growing links with Latin America is Madrid’s regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who regularly talks about how folk from Latin America can find their own way to become madrileños. She has been a pivotal figure in making the Spanish capital into a European equivalent of Miami since gaining power in 2019.
Ayuso, who is a member of the Popular Party (PP), is something of a hate figure for Spain’s left, who often fail to notice that their own allies among the Catalan nationalists have a problem when it comes to welcoming new talent from overseas. The hard left’s short-sighted embrace of authoritarian populism in countries like Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela is also a poor bet for the long term given the way that millions of Latin Americans have fled dysfunctional economies at home in search of a better life in Spain’s market-based economy, which is tempered by the existence of the welfare state.
There is a clear contrast between Ayuso and Carles Puigdemont, the former leader of Catalonia, who is much more concerned about the identity of native Catalans than with the views of more recent arrivals. After seven years as a fugitive from justice, he briefly appeared in Barcelona earlier this week to make a short speech and then escaped without getting arrested for misuse of public funds (Spain’s judges claim that the recent amnesty cannot be applied to this type of crime).
Puigdemont’s speech was attended by a couple of thousand Catalan nationalists, who tended to be middle-aged or elderly and white, as well as (presumably) middle class and native born. Young people and immigrants were notable by their absence. Having said that, the whole event had a cult-of-personality flavour, which wouldn’t have been out of place among Latin America’s populist strongmen.
There is a question mark over to what extent the national, regional and metropolitan governments were complicit in the politician’s second disappearing act. Puigdemont’s party, Together (Junts), supports the Socialists in Madrid; and the Socialists have also run the local administration in Barcelona for more than a year. Two police officers have already been arrested for supposedly helping Puigdemont. My bet is on lots of noise about alleged complicit by politicians but not much hard evidence. I would also bet against the new regional government of Catalonia looking too hard at how Puigdemont was able to make a speech in the centre of Barcelona and then get away scot-free afterwards.
Of course, Puigdemont’s populist stunt failed to prevent Salvador Illa, the Socialist winner of the recent regional elections, becoming president of the autonomous community a few hours. He will govern with the support of a rival separatist party that he dislodged at the top, as well as with the hard left. Under Illa, the Catalan branch of the Socialists beat Puigdemont’s Junts, with 28.0% against 21.6%, after running on a centre-left platform emphasising investment in infrastructure, education and the energy transition rather than nationalist identity politics. Illa also has a couple of populist policies, including a new financing system for Catalonia and a crackdown on tourist flats.
Illa has become Catalonia’s first Socialist president in 14 years, effectively marking the end of the region’s long flirtation with populist nationalism, which began to pick up steam around 2012, a couple of years after the establishment nationalists dislodged the Socialists from power in the region.
It is worth mentioning that the Socialists absolutely thrashed Junts in those areas of Catalonia where more than 25% of the population were born abroad (31.1% vs 18.1%). Illa had talked about “regulating, welcoming and integrating” immigrants while protecting Catalan identities before the campaign. A poll before the European elections in June showed that the Socialist Party throughout Spain does particularly well with voters with roots in Argentina, Bolivia and Colombia, as well as those from Morocco, while the PP also draws votes from Argentinians, as well as from Cubans and Venezuelans.
Meanwhile, Junts does particularly well with those middle-aged and elderly voters who were born in Catalonia and are worried that there has been too much immigration in recent years. This is hardly a good bet for growth. Fertility rates are particularly poor among native Catalan women.
In 2023, more than half the babies born in Catalonia had foreign mothers, while around 5% of children under the age of five in the region were born overseas. Although Latin American mothers are a big part of this demographic trend, immigrants to Catalonia from Muslim countries like Morocco and Pakistan punch above their weight when it comes to raising large families. It is interesting that Lamine Yamal, the teenage star of the Spanish team, is half Moroccan. It will be interesting to see what other points of contact these new Spaniards develop with natives and immigrants from Latin Americans in the decades ahead.
The comments are closed, as always when I discuss the failures of the Catalan independence movement. If you subscribe to this newsletter, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a chance. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
The need for physicality in the modern world
Linguistics in Catalonia (part one and part two)
Further Reading
What Is Disruptive Innovation? by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor and Rory McDonald
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