into its dance. And now the video, which began as kitchen sink naturalism, metamorphoses into magic realism. These girls are not only transforming their lives, but transforming the life of the street itself, using its structural openness to break down barriers of race and class and age and sex, to bring radically different kinds of people together.
At the climax of the story, the heroine returns, along with her newly constituted popular front, to the tenement and the family that tried in vain to fence her in. She brings the street into the house, the public realm into her private space. Her parents find it horrifying, yet alluring: They are tempted to join their child, go public, and change their own drab lives.
Popular culture is worth paying attention to because of its power to dramatize collective dreams. The dream that gets acted out in “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is a dream of bringing together our private and public lives, of uniting the rights of man and the rights of a citizen. By fulfilling the first commandment of liberal individualism—Express Yourself, Have Fun—we can create a beloved community, a community so radiant that even our parents will want to join. Karl Marx would have recognized this utopian vision: He placed it at the visionary climax of the Communist Manifesto, a society in which “the free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all.”3
Let me try to approach this point from another direction. I have recently come back from Spain, where I spent several lovely afternoons in one of the world’s most magnificent public spaces, Madrid’s Plaza Mayor. This enormous late-Renaissance square can easily hold a couple of hundred thousand people, yet it feels comfortably contained. It is surrounded on all four sides by colonnaded arcades, and the arcades hold multitudes of shops; above the arcades a towered megastructure extends all the way around, containing a large assortment of municipal and national government offices. The visitor today sees the Plaza Mayor as a marvelously rich human mix, full of government workers, petitioners, buyers and sellers of everything legal and illegal, religious pilgrims, foreign tourists, street musicians, political agitators, performing artists, and ordinary people of Madrid seizing time out to see and be seen in the sun. It is impossible for an American not to be smitten with envy here. This plaza looks and feels like the Platonic idea of all that an open-minded public space should be. Why can’t we have spaces like this at home?
The Plaza Mayor is all that it appears to be. But it is also a lot more. In its splendid openness, it has become something radically different from what it was meant to be. This square, built between 1590 and 1619, was designed as an arena for public spectacles that would dramatize the power and glory of an inquisitorial church and an absolutist state. The plaza’s visual focus was a grand balcony from which the king and queen, along with the princes of the church, could look down. What this place was made for, above all, was the auto-da-fé, a ceremony for torturing and killing people, and terrorizing the populace, with all the splendor that the Spanish baroque imagination could mobilize.
One special feature of these autos sheds some light on our theme of private faces in public places. Among the hundreds of victims condemned in the Plaza Mayor from the early seventeenth through the middle eighteenth centuries, the most prominent and notorious seem to have been Marranos: descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had been forcibly converted after 1492 and who professed orthodox Catholic beliefs but secretly kept up fragments of Jewish law and lore, worship, and community. For more than two centuries, the Spanish church and state worked together obsessively to detect and destroy them.
Autos-da-fé were meant to show how effective the Inquisition could be in tearing these peoples’ masks away, stripping them naked, exposing their most secret selves, so as to annihilate private and public selves together. The Marranos who were present at those ceremonies (to stay away would have been to court instant suspicion) were forced to witness people being publicly destroyed for being what they privately knew themselves to be. In this climate of terror, reticence and insincerity had to be absolute, role-playing a desperate imperative. Even one slip, a slight trace of one’s face beneath the facade, could mean a horrible death.
This grisly scenario may be a useful antidote to the nostalgia that often overcomes Americans in the great spaces of the Old World. It can remind us that public space has a dark and checkered past. These dreadful memories should help us to see how the most expansive public space can contract into a dungeon cell and the most vibrant public life into a trial by ordeal, where people are not free to show themselves as they are. We should be able to see, too, how the liberal individualism that Walzer condemns is essential to the open-minded public space he loves. It is only when people are enjoying the rights of man that they are free to walk in the sun.
The people of Madrid are walking freely in the plaza’s sun today. The breakthrough into the sunlight wasn’t so long ago. Millions of Spaniards were forced to live like Marranos for forty years, all through the Franco regime. It was only at the very end of the regime that the city’s planners were allowed to ban vehicles from the Plaza Mayor and let people take over. After eight years of liberal democracy, the plaza today is full of people who would have been arrested yesterday: women in T-shirts and miniskirts, children climbing all over the equestrian statue of Philip II, adolescents playing cassettes and dancing to rock and roll, young couples (including some homosexual couples) necking torridly, graffitists writing irreverent proclamations on arcade walls, agitators handing leaflets out (NO CHURCH NO STATE NO TRIBUNAL NO MISSILES NO THANKS), and God only knows how many more. Some of the people here are consciously engaging in politics (there was a huge anti-Reagan demonstration here in May, in honor of our president’s state visit); others are just out to have fun. The people of Madrid love the Plaza Mayor today because it is a place were they can comfortably do both, and where both can blend and intertwine. They know that, in the realm of public space, the personal is political. The grand balcony is still there; but in a democratic Spain its meaning is purely ornamental. The people no longer focus vertically, on rulers above them, but horizontally, on each other. If they look up today, it is only to enjoy the sun.
A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE: THE URBAN POOR
The most crucial form of openness we will need, if we really mean to have open-minded public space, is openness to the urban underclass. This class of people is as old as urban life itself and a recurrent heartache to people who care about cities. Cities and metropolitan areas have frequently acted as magnets for many people whom they couldn’t—or in any case didn’t—assimilate. The people left out become residents of shantytowns, squatters in abandoned buildings, sleepers in the subways or the streets, dealers in illegal and dangerous commodities, victims and perpetrators of violence, potential recruits for mobs, cults, the underworld and, since the Age of Revolution, for radical movements of Left and Right. Many of them are immigrants and refugees, but others are long-time residents displaced by the city’s changes. Anyone who wants to claim a share of public space in a modern city is forced to share it with some of the people of the underclass, and so to think about where he stands in relation to them.
The range of possible responses to this situation was delineated brilliantly a century ago by Baudelaire in a prose poem he wrote in the 1860s, “The Eyes of the Poor.” The poem tells the story of a loving couple who are spreading their love along a newly completed Parisian boulevard and who come to rest in a glittering new outdoor cafe. Actually, the boulevard is not quite finished: there is still a pile of rubble on the street. Suddenly a family in rags steps out from behind the rubble, and walks directly up to the lovers. (Baudelaire’s audience knew that the rubble in the picture was probably all that was left of the family’s neighborhood, one of the dozens of ancient, impoverished neighborhoods that Baron Haussmann’s gigantic urban renewal projects destroyed.) As the poet presents these people, they are not asking for anything: They are just looking around, enjoying the bright lights. But the lovers are embarrassed by the immense social gulf between them and these ragged people who, thanks to the boulevard, are physically close enough to touch. “I felt a little ashamed of our glasses and decanters,” the narrator says, “too big for our thirst.” Baudelaire’s middle-class protagonists have got to respond, not merely to the ragged people in their midst, but also to
