Once again this year, Metzineres and L’Arravalera joined the Festa Major del Raval to celebrate the community we build every day in and from the neighborhood. Over two days, Friday 10 and Saturday 11 July, Carrer de la Lluna filled with music, dance, community radio, memory and encounters.
For us, taking part in the Festa Major is a way of asserting our right to be present, to create, share, enjoy ourselves and occupy public space. We also understand celebration as a form of feminist resistance: a space where we can come together, make our ways of life visible, and defend pleasure, joy and collective building as essential parts of a dignified life.
The festivities began on Friday outside Metzineres, where we turned the street into a stage for popular music, conversation and Raval culture.
Eli, our master of ceremonies, accompanied us throughout the day. Broadcasting live, MetziRadio brought together voices from Àgora Juan Andrés, El Lokal, Antiga Massana, the Sindicat d’Habitatge and Metzineres. We talked about the right to housing, the defense of community spaces, grassroots organizing and the need to sustain networks capable of responding to increasing precarity and displacement. For us, celebrating the neighborhood also means acknowledging its conflicts, sharing its struggles and strengthening the alliances that keep it alive.
Music accompanied us throughout the day. Luana opened the performances with a flamenco show, and Jessica Soteldo got the whole neighborhood dancing. Noah, Tania and Antonia followed, sharing their music, songs and voices. DJ Txarnega closed the night with two powerful hours of perreo, keeping us dancing until the very end.
The stage expanded beyond the platform itself with the participation of Tumberas en Barcelona. Their dances, songs, skirts and movements took over the street, drawing the attention of neighbors, participants and passersby.
Their performance was an invitation to learn more about the history of Afro-Ariqueño tumbe carnaval. During the Raval festivities, we once again celebrated and defended a culture built from the margins, shaped by migrant experiences, colonial memories and multiple forms of resistance. Interculturality—so central to the identity of our neighborhood—was understood as both a right and an everyday practice of recognition, exchange and collective creation.
Tumberas en Barcelona: Dancing Memory
Tumberas en Barcelona was founded in late 2025 in the Carmel neighborhood as a street comparsa made up of women and gender-diverse people brought together by tumbe carnaval. Today, it brings together around fifty women, most of them migrants from different parts of Abya Yala.
Tumbe carnaval is a cultural expression of the Afro-descendant people of Arica and the Azapa and Lluta valleys in northern Chile. After decades of persecution, silencing and erasure, new generations began reclaiming it through the stories, memories and knowledge passed down by Afro-descendant families. Since then, tumbe has become a tool for memory, self-recognition and visibility.
In Barcelona, this practice intersects with migrant experiences, feminisms, and anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles. The comparsa explores the relationship between body, memory, displacement and belonging, understanding dance as a practice of organizing, community building and collective joy.
By intervening in public space, dancing together becomes an expression of memory and resistance. The comparsa is rooted in shared experiences shaped by racism, discrimination and precarity, while refusing to separate the dance from the history of slavery and colonialism that runs through tumbe. Bringing the body into the street thus becomes a way of reclaiming embodied, festive and collective forms of political action.
Their participation in the Festa Major del Raval invited us to discover this history, question ourselves and continue learning. It also reminded us that popular culture remains alive when it creates connections and enables different memories and struggles to meet in public space without erasing their origins.
On Saturday, We Continued at L’Arravalera
The celebration continued on Saturday at L’Arravalera, our activist, cultural, educational and community space at Carrer de la Lluna, 20.
Odysseas and Christoforos shared their music, while Killiah Kiss presented a drag performance that once again placed bodies, desire and dissidence at the heart of the celebration.
L’Arravalera filled with neighbors and community members who came by to share another afternoon of culture and connection. This second day extended the celebration and connected Metzineres’ two spaces on Carrer de la Lluna.
During the Raval festivities, we made our street a place to meet, dance, talk and build community. Thank you to all the artists, collectives, neighbors, friends and community members who made these two days possible, and to everyone who came to share them with us.
In the face of the violence that displaces us, isolates us and makes our lives increasingly precarious, we continue to defend culture as a space for connection, creativity and transformation.
We are neighbors of the Raval. We keep celebrating and building community from the margins.
Metzineres, always on Lluna!
Photographs: Andre Gaetano