The Village Against the World

by Dan Hancox

  Sánchez Gordillo’s philosophy, outlined in his 1980 book Andaluces, levantaos, and in countless speeches and interviews since, is one which is unique to him, though grounded firmly in the historic struggles and uprisings of the peasant pueblos of Andalusia, and their remarkably deep-seated tendency towards anarchism. These communities are striking for being not just anti-authoritarian, but against all authority. ‘I have never belonged to the Communist Party of the hammer and sickle, but I am a communist or communitarian,’ Sánchez Gordillo clarified in an interview in 2011, adding that his political beliefs were drawn from a mixture of Christ, Gandhi, Marx, Lenin and Che.

  In August 2012 he achieved a new level of notoriety for a string of actions that began, in forty-degree heat, with the occupation of military land, the seizure of an aristocrat’s palace, and a three-week march across the south in which he called on his fellow mayors not to repay their debts. Its peak saw Sánchez Gordillo lead a series of supermarket expropriations along with fellow members of the left-communist trade union SOC-SAT.* They marched into supermarkets and took bread, rice, olive oil and other basic supplies, and donated them to food banks for Andalusians who could not feed themselves. For this he became a superstar, appearing not only on the cover of the Spanish newspapers, but across the world’s media, as ‘the Robin Hood Mayor’, ‘The Don Quixote of the Spanish Crisis’, or ‘Spain’s William Wallace’, depending on which newspaper you read.

  The first time I visited Marinaleda, it was January 2012, and a friend from Estepa had offered to help me get an interview with Sánchez Gordillo. This was arranged not through the usual network of aides and official channels, but through an informal, friendly sequence of favours I would soon learn was entirely typical. My friend Javi called his friend Ezequiel, who lived in the village; Ezequiel wasn’t home, so Javi asked Ezequiel’s mum, who said of course, she would speak to the mayor when she saw him, and tell him we were dropping by.

  So we drove the fifteen minutes from Estepa to Marinaleda, down the hill through undulating olive groves, on a road almost completely free from traffic, around a junction pointing to Marinaleda; someone with delusions of grandeur had scrawled ‘ciudad’ (city) underneath the village name. We crossed the city limits, which are marked with a painted sign featuring a dove carrying an olive branch and the words ‘En lucha por la paz’, in struggle for peace. As we slowed down into the main road, we came to a halt at a red light: no one was crossing, and there was no other traffic – it certainly looked peaceful. At first glance, it was difficult to distinguish it from any other Spanish pueblo of this size. The idiosyncrasies don’t jump right out at you, but slowly appear and multiply before your eyes, like ants on a hot pavement. It was very quiet. It was very plain. There were no signs indicating multinational brands: no advertising hoardings or intrusions from modern capitalism.

  The town hall car park had only a few cars parked in it, the muted sound of children playing drifted over from the nearby nursery, and there, gleaming in the afternoon sunshine, was the Ayuntamiento, the town hall. Next to it was the equally impressive Casa de Cultura, the cultural centre, with its ostentatious pillars painted a brilliant white, framing oblongs of soft blue light on the facade.

  Two women were cleaning the steps of the Ayuntamiento, and informed Javi that no, sorry, ‘he’ is not here right now. A man of about twenty-five in smart jeans, black shirt, black jacket, black stubble and shades emerged, surveying the scene with the confidence unique to those with the good fortune to have both youth and power on their side. This was Sergio Gómez Reyes, one of the village’s eleven councillors – later, his face jumped out at us from a wall, on the Izquierda Unida (United Left, IU) election posters. ‘If he takes forever to turn up, I’ll call his mobile,’ Sergio said idly, fiddling with his sunglasses.

  So we waited, and kicked our heels in the late afternoon warmth, dark clothes soaking up the dying light, as the shade-line crept diagonally up and over the Ayuntamiento. ‘That’s his house over there,’ Sergio explained, and we toyed with the idea of just knocking on his door. A huddle of women in tracksuit bottoms power-walked down the main road in front of us, gossiping away. In fact, the village is so small that twenty minutes later they were back, going in the same direction on their second lap.

  It was so bright that, squinting up at the town hall, I didn’t even notice when a man sporting a polyester football jacket and a beard that could topple empires ambled quietly up to the entrance. It was Sánchez Gordillo.

  We followed the scourge of Spanish capitalism inside. The lights were off in the foyer – Spanish interiors are often dark, the negative of the brightness outside – but a few posters were still visible on the slightly cracking paintwork: notices of a food bank for the unemployed of neighbouring villages, as well as more commonplace small-town activities like basketball tournaments, photography workshops, and a course on how to use new pesticides. It wasn’t exactly palatial – the ‘benign dictator’ notion perpetuated by more sceptical Spaniards I had met led me to wonder whether the town hall would be adorned with stuffed tigers and comically vulgar paintings.

  In the mayor’s office the walls were lime green, and the floors cold grey marble: it was very clean, but not at all tidy. His desk was piled with papers and books, a jacket lay discarded on the chair, and scattered on the floor around the edges of the room were cardboard boxes and ring binders, while gifts honouring the town, mostly ceramics, sat proudly on modest bookcases. Where a picture of King Juan Carlos I might normally hang, there was a framed portrait of Che Guevara, declaiming from a podium. Behind Sánchez Gordillo’s desk, either side of a framed aerial photo of the town, were a trio of flags slumping dormant on their poles: one bearing the green and white of Andalusia, one the totemic purple, red and yellow of the Spanish Second Republic (the one Franco launched a coup against, and destroyed, in 1936), and one the green, white and red tricolour of Marinaleda itself.

  In the back corner was a flip-chart covered with semi-legible multi-coloured marker pen scribbles, bullet points and wonky arrows; this, it emerged, was the town’s budget – that same flip-chart is used when the village is debating its spending and resources at the regular, relatively popular general assemblies. The atmosphere was both dignified and beguilingly amateurish – it felt like what might happen if I suddenly had to run an entire community of 2,700 people. There was a ceiling tile missing, which, living in a world where politicians happily spend £650,000 of public money on their wallpaper, was also rather endearing. We sat on fake leather chairs around a cheap wooden table, rather than facing the desk, which was way too messy for the task at hand. It felt like that was where most of the work got done anyway.

  The mayor’s zip-up sports jacket had what looked like a small toothpaste stain on the shoulder – the colours were Venezuelan, bold chevrons of red, blue and yellow. It was a homage to Hugo Chávez, who just the day before was on Spanish TV, denying the seriousness of the cancer that would eventually kill him. Sánchez Gordillo had bracelets in blue, green, white, and brown leather on his right wrist, and a solitary red bracelet on the left; it was odd to see a look commonly sported by fifteen-year-old girls in Camden Market carried off by a swarthy Spaniard in his early sixties. His salt-and-pepper hair was well trimmed, while his beard was a more unruly socialist mess, the kind of beard a Latin American people’s hero would be proud of, and that didn’t feel like an accident. It was only when he smiled – which he did more and more often, once we had warmed into the interview – that his gappy teeth were revealed in all their glory.

  He spoke that day with range and passion, for hours, about the struggle he had led the village through, its general assemblies and hunger strikes, its cultural opportunities and collective personality, and the inhumanity of the capitalist world outside, as well as the misery of its crisis. I left feeling inspired, and slightly dazed, by his stamina, his determination, and indeed his ready willingness to talk about politics for most of the afternoon with some stranger from the other side of Europe,
when he probably had better things to do. As the Spanish press realised from their very first encounter with him, during the 1980 hunger strike, Sánchez Gordillo is both an authentic force of nature, captivating, charismatic and persuasive, and a canny user of the media to further the aims of the village, and his own projects.

  Afterwards we went in search of a drink. In one of the village’s more traditional tapas bars it still felt oddly like the 1970s, decorated sparsely with Blackpool-style comic caricature postcards, and populated by old men quietly nursing their sherries and plates of anchovies. The few children in the bar were drinking Fanta through straws, wearing garish Nike tracksuits like they do everywhere in Spain. But the bar had no signage outside, no branding and no adverts, just a stripy awning.

  We popped into the SOC trade union bar, situated in the former town hall, now converted into a social centre, with a large, mural-adorned hall at the back, where the village’s general assemblies take place. Twenty-odd men were quietly gabbing away, half-silhouetted, watching the football with one eye, leaning against the cool green tiled columns with small glasses of beer, tossing their olive stones on the floor. Then as night fell we moved on to Palo Palo, the substantial, peculiarly Wild West—themed bar where most of Marinaleda’s rock concerts take place, drawing in revellers from across Andalusia. Its wide frontage displays a giant guitar, the body of which is shaped like the map of Andalusia. Inside, there are saloon doors and a fake log effect – it’s slightly tacky, but all part of the fun.

  Marinaleda is a slender village, comprised of two discrete barrios that bulge outwards from one long main arterial road, Avenida de la Libertad: Marinaleda proper, and Matarredonda – though for political and administrative purposes, it is all one pueblo. There was once about a kilometre of vacant land between the two settlements, but it is slowly being filled in by the casitas, the 350 self-built family homes which constitute one of the village’s greatest achievements: the Andalusian regional government provides the materials, the villagers build the houses themselves, and then pay fifteen euros a month as a ‘mortgage’.

  The first time I explored Marinaleda in daylight, it was in blazing January sunshine, and the village was almost eerily quiet – but then of course it was, as everyone was working. We took a turning off the main street, into a residential street named for José Domínguez ‘El Cabrero’ – a legendary Andalusian flamenco singer and friend of Sánchez Gordillo’s. Many of his songs are about the struggles of the Andalusian jornaleros, about the land, about freedom. ‘Ah, so he’s a socialist?’ I asked. ‘No! He’s a communist!’ Javi corrected me, laughing.

  El Cabrero wasn’t the only one. When Marinaleda’s first democratic elections in 1979 returned a majority for Sánchez Gordillo’s party, the CUT, or Collective for Workers’ Unity, the town council renamed most of the streets. They named one for Fermín Salvochea, the nineteenth-century anarchist mayor of Cadiz, and one for Blas Infante, the ‘father of Andalucía’, murdered by Francoists for the double crime of being both a regionalist and an anarchist. Plaza de Franco was transformed into Plaza de Salvador Allende, replacing the name of Spain’s fascist dictator with Latin America’s first democratically elected Marxist leader. There are streets named for fraternity and solidarity, for Federico García Lorca, Che Guevara, and Pablo Neruda, as well as for numerous Spanish communist, republican and artistic martyrs, including the poet Antonio Machado. The man who coined the famous phrase ‘the two Spains’, describing the secular, progressive left and the more authoritarian, religious right that would fight Spain’s Civil War, Machado died in 1939, at the end of the conflict, while fleeing the one Spain he wasn’t considered a part of.

  If you walk down the wide new boulevard alongside Avenida de la Libertad, you can enjoy an extensive display of well-rendered political murals winding along the white walls. They vary enormously in size, age and quality, but many of them are truly magnificent, and together, they take up a lot of wall space. Andaluces, levantaos (Andalusians, arise!), declaims one, alongside the flags of Andalusia and the Spanish Second Republic. Another says ‘Turn off the TV / turn on your mind’, accompanied by a baby with a TV instead of a head, clutching a euro coin. Slightly less cloying is a painting of the globe, with the seas painted red instead of blue, and a red fist emerging from the north pole, with the robust slogan, ‘Against capital – social war!’.

  The most striking mural represents a rather different aesthetic to cuddly pacificism (and the village’s fondness for doves): alongside a ten-foot-high painting of a hooded man with shadowy eyes is a star, and the slogan La libertad no se mendiga – freedom is not begged for. This is a quote from the Cuban revolutionary José Martí, and the second, somewhat more assertive half of the quote is absent from the wall: Se conquista con el filo de un machete – it (freedom) is conquered with the blade of a machete.

  Other murals call for agrarian reform, demilitarisation, ‘peace, bread and work’, an end to homophobia, and solidarity either with or from the people of Palestine, Catalunya, the Basque Country, Peru, Vallecas (a working-class district of Madrid) and Colombia – many of them, in fact, were painted by visitors from struggles beyond the village, who came to see what utopia looks like, in the hope they might take a bit of it home with them. The most detailed of the murals depicts the village’s notorious land seizures in the 1980s, where they addressed Andalusian land inequality directly by occupying what they deemed to be theirs. A chain of marinaleños, Marinaledans, march single file towards the fields in the distance, towards their destiny. They look like L. S. Lowry’s figures if they’d been fattened up and bronzed by a Spanish diet and sun.

  On the other side of the road is the Estadio Jornalero, the workers’ stadium, all painted in the village’s ubiquitous tricolour: green for their rural Utopian ideal, red for the workers’ struggle, white for peace. Directly above the stadium on the hill stands the huge multi-purpose indoor sports pavilion, and immaculately rendered on its wall, looking down on the football stadium and the village, is a painting of Che Guevara’s face, approximately the size of a house. Next to this is the parque natural, a substantial, well-kept combination of gardens, benches, two tennis courts, an outdoor gym, and a stone amphitheatre where films are screened on hot summer nights. Across the road is the village’s outdoor swimming pool – admission costs three euros for the year.

  Beyond this hub of sport and leisure possibilities are the village’s two schools – one primary, one secondary, and beyond that the casitas, the self-built houses. I’ve never seen a whole street being built on vacant farmland before. It’s a strange sensation, and reminds me of the film Back to the Future, when Marty McFly is sent back in time to 1955 and comes across the empty stretch of land earmarked to become the street he will one day grow up on, sign-posted only by a dreamy architect’s painting.

  The new developments in Marinaleda are built directly onto rocky, unpromising black dirt; the darkness on the edge of town is transformed into new life and light. It’s a futurist victory, a conquest of sorts – on one half-built street, the shells of the houses are finished and glistening white, but the road is still waiting to be paved, a reminder of the dead dirt before utopia, and the process of transformation: 3-D sketches of utopian lives, blueprints of possibility. Just around the corner is a recently completed street, in sumptuous white.

  The process of building is surprisingly straightforward. The Andalusian government provides the basic materials for the new houses, the bricks and mortar, as well as architectural assistance – and then it is up to the residents-to-be, with help from friends, neighbours and comrades, to build them. In theory, the co-operative owns all the houses; in practice, if individual residents want to repaint their homes, or renovate, no one’s going to stand in their way. The main point, Sergio explained to me, is to ensure that no one has the opportunity to accumulate capital on their property, and thus to speculate on and profit from the housing market.

  It’s difficult to argue with this logic, given that you’d be arguing
from a position that was instrumental in destroying the Spanish economy. As well as its horrendous eviction stories, crisis-era Spain has four million empty homes, 900,000 of which are new-builds, including entire 10,000-capacity ghost suburbs on the outskirts of Madrid, finished just before the crash and now devoid of life.

  While Marinaleda brims with excitement and festivity during its famous annual ferias and carnivals, its numerous high-days and holidays, and the rock gigs that see the village momentarily double in size, most of the time it is incredibly peaceful.

  Except, an hour or so before dusk, when all hell breaks loose. Dominating the cacophony is a chorus of shrill, chirruping birds. I once asked Antonio, my landlord in the village, what kind of birds they were – he didn’t know, but he did a perfect imitation: they sound like a falling bomb in a cartoon, just prior to impact. ‘I think they migrated from the park – I think they’re tropical?’ They’re quite difficult to spot because they are clustered tightly in the evergreen orange trees, engaged in fierce but invisible debate. Competing to be heard are dozens of dogs of diverse size and shape, who have perfected a web-like network of conversation across the white stone garden walls.

  In among this come baying cockerels, and from the main road, the slowly grinding gears of a tractor, a few heavy-goods lorries and, with varying regularity, cars pounding out cheaply made dance music, the vehicles’ frames rattling along in concert. Because Avenida de la Libertad is also the A-388, connecting other small pueblos, such as Herrera and El Rubio, with each other and with the big cities, there’s a fair amount of through traffic, kicking up the dust into the hazy sunshine – or, for a few days each winter, the wide, still rain puddles. At the weekend, the through traffic is usually playing reggaeton, the Latin dance music innovation that is surely the most appropriately communist of all dance music subgenres, in the sense that there is seemingly only one rhythm track, without variation, deviation or adornment, available to all its exponents.