Trevor @ Monday March 14th 2005 22:39

Bar Daguiri on Barcelona beach: a Guardia Civil hangout?

It would be an exaggeration to describe Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920) as the Spanish Thomas Hardy, but they were both concerned to reproduce the large and the small things of nineteenth century provincial life using the vernacular of the broadsheet ballad and other representations of popular speech. Guiri is a racist epithet used in politically incorrect Spain to indicate a (well-off/drunken/transient) Anglo or northern European. Here’s one of the best-known early occurrences of its use, taken (original lead) from Galdós’ 1898 Zumalacárregui, which deals with the first Carlist war (1833-39/40):

Salvador Alcolea Martínez picks up on this hypothesis in a letter ($$$) to La Vanguardia:

The problem is that, while there are references to the GRP, I have found little trace of the GRI in the literature or iconography of, or referring to, the 1830s (here are more from the 1820s), although it seems that the entity survived until 1841. The Real Academia Española suggests a another option (ie no 2):

Bar Daguiri on Barcelona beach: a Guardia Civil hangout?

I am about as proficient in Basque as in Arabic, but, like the GRI>guiri hypothesis, seems like it might just about suffice:

1. The followers of Queen Cristina were called cristinos. This is unproblematic (Carlist War explanation here). Here’s a chunk from Mariano José de Larra’s Dos liberales o lo que es entenderse, a (fictionalised?) 1834 account of the conflict then underway: “Seeing an chink through which to save the fatherland, I become a cristino amongst those first ones who in secret almost started a war in Madrid. Shortly after, the famous minister who did not like dangerous innovations must have taken displeasure in the fact that we had adopted the innovation of being cristinos, and I and a few others were exiled.” Cristino was widely used in this sense in educated circles in Spain for the rest of the century. Take, for example, Antonio Pirala’s Historia de la guerra civil y de los partidos liberal y carlista (1868), which uses cristino to refer to government soldiers and liberals (“the individuals of the urban militia or cristinos.”)
2. The Basques called the cristinos guiristinos. Although I’ve seen no Basque evidence for this particular example, this does seem feasible. One of the many interesting features of proto-Basque (ie before the Romans ) is a relative predominance of |g| over |k| as initial consonant, something that seems to carry over to modernish oral Basque variants in the selective modification of loan words from |k|- form to |k|-. For example, castellano tends to become gaztelau while cristiano may become either kristau or giristino. (This kind of thing is quite common: a similar initial |k| => |g| replacement tends to take place from classical to Bedouin Arabic, and you’ll all be aware of the (declining?) tendency of native Spanish speakers to add an |e| to the beginning of Anglicisms commencing with |s|, eg My name is Estefanía and I am |e|-stoned.)
3. Guiristino was abbreviated to guiri. This seems feasible, although I can’t think of any comparable examples.

The difficulty with this Galdós’ hypothesis is to explain how guiri was transferred to northern Europeans, presumably during the first major wave of tourism in the late 60s (its revival in works like Rafael Sánchez Mazas’ 1951 La vida nueva de Pedrito de Andía is a mere echo of, for example, Galdós), and what it was doing in the meantime (Emilia Pardo Bazán suggests (La madre naturaleza, 1881) that it was still in use during the third Carlist War (1868) but after that mentions dry up).

In terms of regional origins, Galdós himself proffers a helping hand by, towards the end of the same novel, hinting that guiris may not (only) have been sweet young boy soldiers from near Zaragoza (and that patatas bravas are a comparatively modern invention):

Depending on what you think she means by the word “race”, this might have been what Emilia Pardo Bazán was suggesting in Un viaje de novios in 1881:

So was the term guiri coined for application to northerners (Brits and French were involved in the war, principally on the liberal side), was it then applied, willy-nilly, to all outsiders in the Carlist regions of the north, and did it then reappear in its original usage a century or so later? If there were slightly more evidence, then I’d be strongly in favour of this hypothesis, simply because it would explain more of the evidence more simply. Given that the French (and not the numerous Irish generals serving in the Spanish military) seem to have introduced the Spanish to potatoes, I think it most likely that the original guiris were French. With reference to this, it is interesting to note that some believe that the characteristic Carlist red (gorri = red in Basque) caps were originally introduced by liberal volunteers from France:

Another, even more improbable explanation is that the word has Welsh origins. The Welsh gwr, “man”, is the source of Welsh words like Goronwy, and one might fantasise that it arrived in Spain’s mining country (ie the north) along with British mining expertise, uniformed company militias, and liberal ideology at the turn of the C19th. The Welsh miners used to call each other gwr all the time and became known by the locals as gwris, and when war broke out, guiri became generally known as a term used to stigmatise all that was foreign, new, and imposed. Madrilenian novelists, many of whom did not speak Welsh and who were not particularly interested in industrial history (no Zolas here, and Galdós was the only realist to make any money), thereafter made the mistaken association with cristino.

In the next few days I will publish a radically different hypothesis, which traces the word back from contemporary cognates as far away as Tibet to an old, old Semitic root, and which I believe is also favoured by Mr Goytisolo.

Tags: Galdós, Unamuno
Categories: Liberals & locals

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1. itn
   March 15th 2005 13:49

   Very interesting “guiri vision”.

2. Carlos B.
   March 15th 2005 19:33

   This site http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/servlet/SirveObras/31260794874299983074424/p0000005.htm#I_8_ says that gura is thieves’ slang for justice, so guripa might not come from G.R.P. after all.

3. Trevor
   March 15th 2005 19:48

   Getting crazier still, Girion is one of the spellings used in mediaeval Spain for Geryon, a giant king with lots of oxen. Maybe he was the original guiri–and hell, what about those Visigoths!

4. kalebeul
   March 24th 2005 23:32 Guiris and Phoenicians
   “And as we find in a book of laws called Digesto that city used to be called Guiris because it was created by Garfeus, son of Canaan and grandson of Noah.”

5. kalebeul » Wanted: 150-year-old palmist
   October 2nd 2009 18:17

   [...] to add a little bit of very vaguely circumstantial evidence to an alternative hypothesis discussed here. At the time I turned over in bed and muttered: So was the term guiri coined for application to [...]