Power to the People

I meet Liz Castro in a slightly chaotic coworking space where bicycle frames hang from the wall and a yellow staircase leads up to a small mezzanine where she has set up a workspace. A large selection of brightly-colored cloth is stacked on a shelf behind her desk and a sewing machine sits next to her computer—not an antique for display purposes but rather a thoroughly modern version, threaded up and ready. She tells me she sews her own clothes, although she’s not wearing any of her creations today.

One of the crazy things about the Catalan independence process is that nobody knows about it because it’s all in Catalan. The ironic thing is that the language is so important, but in a way it's a barrier.

Liz is an American best known in Catalonia for her pro-independence activism. She’s the author of two dozen books on digital publishing and one of the most prominent voices on Twitter making the case for a Catalan republic to her 44,000 followers.

Recently, she’s turned her hand to a different kind of people power: her new crowdfunding platform Aixeta, which means “faucet” in Catalan. The subscription donor-powered website enables creators to find and be supported by their audience so that they can concentrate on creating and worry less about their income.

Her professional experience as a digital publisher has taught her that technology can help small projects find their niche market. “My whole life feels like a like a very natural progression,” she explains. “In the 80s I published books about the Macintosh in Spanish, when there were, you know, four-and-a-half Spanish Macintosh users. In the 2000s I write books about Catalonia in English. It’s a very small market but it exists.”

I remember discovering Liz on Twitter during the tumultuous days around the October 2017 referendum, when I relied on her live-tweeted translations of the speeches of Catalan politicians as I attempted to keep up with what was happening. Online she can be controversial, but in person she does not come across as a political firebrand. In her early 50s, she’s relaxed and warm, with smiling eyes behind her glasses and curly brown hair that looks as if it tends towards disobedience. 

There’s something about Barcelona that always pulls me, something that calls to me about this place. I always feel very at home here,” she says. “For me, the most important thing has always been the emphasis on community connection.

It's been more than 30 years since Liz first came to live in Barcelona. Unusually for a foreigner at the time, she could speak Catalan, which amazed and delighted the locals. It was the beginning of a lifelong love of a place, a culture and a language that would become a huge part of her life.

Although Liz moved back to the United States with her Catalan then-husband in the early 90s, she retained close ties with Catalonia. Her three children grew up speaking Catalan and the family visited Barcelona regularly. She watched with interest as the independence movement started to gain momentum from around 2010. Inspired, she began using her expertise in digital publishing to bring the story of Catalonia to an English-speaking audience.

While helping the journalist Matthew Tree put together a volume of his essays Barcelona, Catalonia: A View from the Inside. Liz started to connect with more and more people in the pro-independence movement, joining the Assemblea Nacional Catalana (a pro-independence civil society group) when it was set up in 2012, and later going on to serve as its International Committee Chair.

On September 11, 2012, the day of the Diada (the national day of Catalonia), a huge demonstration in favor of independence took place in Barcelona; it would mark the beginning of a new intensification of the push for independence. While it was a really big deal in Catalonia, Liz was still living in the U.S. at the time and she realized the rest of the world was largely oblivious to what has happening.

“One of the crazy things about the Catalan independence process is that nobody knows about it because it’s all in Catalan. The ironic thing is that the language is so important, but in a way it's a barrier. I thought, ‘I'll just translate all the tweets’ and I spent the entire day in my barn in Massachusetts translating the march into English.”

The following year she used the local platform Verkami to crowdfund a book project—a collection of essays from a range of top-level Catalan politicians and others in the pro-independence movement, translated and published as a book titled What’s up with Catalonia? But, she explains, raising money was not the most important reason for doing so. “Making a book is relatively easy, but distributing and getting people to read it is really hard,” she says. “I had this idea that if we did a crowdfunding campaign, then people would share it themselves. And I just love this idea of everybody contributing a little bit.”

Liz returned to live in Barcelona permanently in 2013. Convinced by the effectiveness of the crowdfunding concept, she went on to use it for other projects, including the 2016 book Many Grains of Sand, which recorded the progress of the Catalan independence movement in stories and photographs. I suggest to her that a belief in people power links her activism and the concept of crowdfunding which led her to set up Aixeta, and she nods in agreement. “The idea is that you don't need to wait for any big, important person or institution to say, ‘Yes, you can do that.’ Now with these tools you can connect with the rest of the community who, with tiny contributions, can fund things that you couldn’t do before. And people are doing it — it actually works.”

Aixeta is modeled on the American company Patreon. Subscribers fund the creator on an ongoing basis, rather than a just for a particular project. Creators receive a regular income and supporters get preferential access to the creator’s work. “You could actually go and meet them. Maybe you go to an exhibition by the artist or a concert by the musician or a book club by the writer. I think that's good for creators too — they like having feedback. It's more than just the financial part, it's a relationship.”

Unlike Patreon, however, Aixeta has been set up as a non-profit. The platform takes 5% of donations to cover costs but any remainder is funneled back to the artists in the form of prizes, grants and promotions. The challenge, Liz says, is to convince people that it can be done here, persuade them that the culture of arts funded by donations is not an exclusively American thing.

“I think that Catalans think ‘we won't give support so easily,’” she says. “But the reality is that they actually do. I've done three campaigns and have raised a lot of money that way for different projects. I think that that if we can encourage people to understand that this is a real way to get support, then the community will come.”

Liz and the small team behind Aixeta have big ambitions. So far, they have 155 artists on the platform but she believes they can generate support for artists in the thousands at least. She tells me about wide variety of things produced by the creators: writers, painters, musicians and even a woman who makes what she calls ‘graffiti recipes.’ “There's a guy who makes cheese and has concerts and book presentations at his barn—it's wonderful. There's all sorts of people who have all of this creativity in them, and we want to give them time and resources so that they can share that with the rest of us,” she says.

As we say our goodbyes, I reflect that whether it’s for creative projects or political change, it’s Liz’s belief in people power that drives her and makes her optimistic about the future: “With the tools of the internet and now self-funding, we can do things that we couldn't do before because you had to get permission from some higher power,” she says. “Now you can go directly to people who are interested in what you want to create and they can support you directly, even if it's done by individual grains of sand.”