It’s seven in the afternoon on any given day in June and in Florida it’s hot, very hot. Plaça de los Blocs, one of the neuralgic points of this neighborhood of l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, demonstrates this. Dozens of people get together to escape the embarrassment and discuss their day. A scene that seems from another era, long before social networks burst into our lives. “Most of them don’t have air conditioning at home. Some may even live with five or six other people in the apartment, so the summer can be very long”, explains Pedro Luna, a member of the Association of Veïnes i Veïns from the neighborhood of La Florida.
Anyone who contributes conversation is welcome to join, but if you are not a neighbor you are easily identified. “It’s to talk about Morad, right? Everyone who comes from abroad asks for him. He is a machine. But only positive things and no tape recorder. We are tired of everything that is said about him and the neighborhood being bad. I am sure that most of them have not even bothered to come here”, points out Lorena. He prefers to give another name, “I don’t want anything he can say to be misinterpreted and then thrown back at me. Besides, I’m not going to get involved in police matters”. Talking about culture, on the other hand, sees it with better eyes. Behind her, the young woman points to one of the many murals that give color to the different blocks and in which Johan Cruyff appears embracing a player. If she refines her vision, she reads: ‘If you can do something for someone, you must do it’. “It is a motto that fits perfectly with Florida. Here we all help each other. If not, look at Morad, which helps the people here. It seems unfair to me that he cannot enter his house ”.
The rapper has been prohibited from entering his neighborhood since last October, after he incited and allegedly paid a group of young people to cause public disorder in which two cars and two containers were burned in the Blocs de La Florida area. A precautionary measure issued by the investigating court number 5 of the same town. At the same time, the Prosecutor’s Office requests 6 years in prison for him for attacking the Mossos with a ‘Taser’ during the night confinement in July 2021, in the midst of a pandemic. “I am not going as a mafioso for life. When you go with children you have to be good, ”the singer pointed out forcefully during the concert last weekend at the Share Festival, alluding to the group of minors who accompanied him on stage, all of them residents of Florida. “Even if they don’t want to, they will be with me until the last day.”
These facts make a large part of those around him suspicious of the press. “You cannot speak ill of a brother. Nobody betrays themselves here,” recalls Lorena. On the other hand, they do highlight all his good deeds, “he has many and that is not said on TV”, such as the fact that he has managed to get all the children of Florida C.F. have kits from Adidas, their main sponsor. The shirts have the initials M.D.L.R. on the front, or, what is the same, Mec de la rue, a French term that means street boy and which is also the title of one of his songs.
The club’s coordinator, José Rodríguez, assures La Vanguardia that “our gratitude is enormous. When they told us we didn’t believe it. We cannot say more than good things. The kids have him as an idol. Many of them even appear in his video clips.” Like Ismael, who admits that since then “I have even more friends.”
The singer has also paid several of them the tab. “To those in his closest circle. At the beginning of last season a lot of people came to sign up thinking he was paying for everything, but that’s not the case. You don’t have to take advantage of it either. I think he has already done a lot for us and it honors him. Of course, his influence has meant that we have more than double the number of players than years ago ”, Rodríguez applauds.
This “revolution” has also been reflected in “an increase in tourism, to put it another way, or curious people who come to the neighborhood to see the places where they have recorded their videos,” says Alba Tedoro Blaya, educator of the Espai Jove Sidecar.
Lluís Esteve, director of the comprehensive urban regeneration plan for Les Planes-Blocs Florida, assures that “on more than one occasion an attempt has been made to enhance all the positive aspects that it contributes. In the end, the youngest see themselves reflected in it. He likes it or not, he is a reference. But he is not the only one. So are, for example, the writer David Aliaga, the singer Antonio Orozco and the most recent Gisela Quirós and Omar Bentaleb. The latter are protagonists of La Flori, the short film that recognizes the talent of the youth of the neighborhood. She was a semifinalist on the Got Talent program and has been developing her musical career for some time. He was one of the protagonists of the Movistar series La Unidad, directed by Dani de la Torre. A casting promoted by the Nakeramos intercultural association in 2019, at the La Florida and Les Planes youth center, gave him a great opportunity that, beyond providing him with a job, allowed him to regularize the roles.
“I wanted to be a soccer player, but life took me another way,” acknowledges Bentaleb, who combines his interpreting work with his position at the neighborhood’s ICT point, where he helps residents do their business online. He dreams of “sometime being able to get my mother out of here” but, at the same time, he admits that “even if you leave the neighborhood, the neighborhood will not leave you. I don’t think people from other places have this pride of belonging that we here feel, despite everything”.
There are several castings in which he participates, but each time he feels more “tired of being pigeonholed. He looks like he can only play the roles of an illegal immigrant or a terrorist. That’s why I’m writing my own series with my friend, the writer Issa Malick. We are finishing the script and we would like to start recording soon. It will start with an eviction, something very common here. Some were born with open doors, but we had to open them one by one”.
Bentaleb believes in Florida as a “creative nucleus”. In fact, more and more initiatives are being carried out. One of them is Filmserè, an international short film festival organized by the students of the Eduard Fontserè institute. Also since 2015, the LaFundició association has been carrying out the Des dels blocs project, a tool to “make visible subalternized cultures and for the very diverse neighborhood to explain itself,” says Francisco Rubio, a member of the entity.
“There is a lot of talent here and a lot of things move. It would be unfair for everything to be colored by the less successful things that Morad can do, someone for whom, after all, the kids feel questioned because he shows a reality that many strive to hide. Blaming everything on a boy in his early twenties for what is truly a structural problem would be unfair”, concludes Walaâ Hechach from the Communalitat Urbana de L’Hospitalet.
