El Raval
Barri Xines (Chinatown)
In summer 1937, Langston Hughes wrote about walking around "Chinatown" with Nicolás Guillén. Its working-class, marginal, and racialized life drew Hughes' attention more than official institutions did. Raval was known at the time for nightlife, sex work, sailors, and political radicals.
Little Harlem
At the same time that Raval was known as Barri Xines, it was also called Little Harlem "due to the concentration of Black musicians and boxers. The newspapers of the time went so far as to describe a 'Black invasion' coinciding with the jazz phenomenon, even saying Blackness was in fashion."
As journalist and researcher Xavier Montanyà wrote regarding the life of Cuban boxer Kid Tunero: "In Carrer Nou de la Rambla, Barcelona's Harlem, Cubans were king. It could be said that they had spontaneously formed a tumultuous community that brought together Blacks of various origins: Puerto Rico, Martinique, Senegal, Alabama, Georgia and, the poorest of all, the natives of Equatorial Guinea, the Spanish colony in Black Africa."
Hughes and Guillén also visited the Club Cubano Julio Antonio Mella, a leftist political gathering space named for the Cuban revolutionary — a Cuban Marxist student leader assassinated in Mexico City in 1929 and an icon of anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and international revolutionary solidarity. The Mella Club was a meeting place for writers including Pablo de la Torriente Brau (1901–1936) and Juan Marinello (1898–1977).
Although Hughes and Guillén spent time in Raval, they likely missed the jazz scene either because the clubs were marginal during a time of war or because of the racial segregation surrounding them. The Barcelona Hot Club, which opened in 1935 on Carrer de l'Hospital, operated under principles of racial exclusion and cultural hierarchy: its obsession with differentiating 'artistic' jazz from popular jazz in no way signified protecting or respecting Black people.
The Olympia (Carrer de Casanova, Eixample) and the Eden (Nou de la Rambla, 12) were the real meeting places for Barcelona's Black residents — musicians, pugilists, artists and dancers of North American, Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Guinean, and Senegalese origin. These bars and clubs were likely spaces of solidarity and exchange, where all variants of jazz, but above all hot jazz, were played.