The Village Against the World

by Dan Hancox

  The primacy of work and land within the Marinaleda mythology comes less easily to the younger generation, who did not spend their formative years denied it, nor struggled throughout their lives to get it. Moreover, modern technology and transportation has dissolved the hard boundaries of the pueblo – and its tight occupational possibilities – in a way that would have been inconceivable 100 or even thirty years ago. The Andalusian jornalero identity – with its unique iteration in each pueblo – has been remarkably tenacious over the centuries, but the fact is that both culture and people now seep in and out of the borders of each town with incredible ease. Cheap cars, cheap flights and the internet have flattened the landscape.

  ‘A thousand euros a month is fine – 1,200 a month is pretty good,’ Cristina, a young law graduate, told me one evening as we nursed our cañitas of cheap lager. We were talking about the mileuristas, her generation, so christened because they had learned to get by on one thousand euros (mil euros) per month. The Spanish minimum wage works out at €600–700 a month, and unemployment benefit is generally €500–600 per month. Cristina was living with her mother in Marinaleda while also renting a room in a flat in Estepa, where she works as a teacher some of the week. She lives a dual life, she explained: she loves her life in the larger pueblo, shared with other people her age; it offered an escape of sorts from an unfortunately prolonged adolescence. Her peers in Estepa tell the same story – many of them are thirty or above and still live with their parents.

  Cristina’s parents are marinaleños, and moved to Barcelona in the great exodus of the 1960s, when there was no work in the fields. Like so many, they returned in the 1980s because the situation had changed. Despite the long absence, they were always, of course, sons and daughters of the pueblo. Cristina was schooled in the new post-Franco Catalan education system, and almost everyone in her class was a Spanish emigrant – there were people from Extremadura, Galicia, Andalusia, and only about four or five Catalans. ‘It gave me a big belief in cosmopolitanism,’ she told me. ‘People were sharing their cultures from across Spain. One child would say, “at home we eat this kind of food”, another would say, “ah, well, my mother cooks the stew like this …” ’

  In the perfect storm of Ryanair, la crisis, and the internet, a new kind of wanderlust-by-necessity is detectable among Spain’s younger generations – and it has infiltrated Marinaleda, too. There is a growing sense that the current Spanish juventud sin futuro, youth without a future, will only find one by emigrating. Cristina had this same zeitgeist mixture of despair – she’s been unemployed before – and sense of adventure and excitement when she considers that leaving the country might be her only option. I’d love to see London, she said, agonising, as she often did, about the quality of her English skills – she badly needed to pass her imminent English exams, she felt, in order to get out.

  In 2013, everyone knows that full employment in Marinaleda is a myth. In fact, it’s not even fair to call it a myth: ‘They don’t really have full employment!’ is a straw man set up by right-wing critics of the village. Sánchez Gordillo’s line in interviews in recent years has been: ‘We have almost full employment.’ This is correct, according to the official statistics from the Junta de Andalucía: the unemployment rate in the village is 5 to 6 per cent.

  The situation is certainly tougher now than it has been for a long time. One evening in the Centro de Adultos, where evening classes take place, I picked up a Youth of Marinaleda Bulletin, a monthly four-page leaflet produced by the town hall. Alongside notices of go-karting and basketball tournaments, and courses in ‘personal marketing’ for budding entrepreneurs, laid on by the Andalusian Youth Institute, was a page of jobseeker websites including summerjobs.com, pickingjobs.com, holidayresortjobs.com, workingholidayguru.com, gapwork.com. Almost all of them offered short-term, seasonal work orientated around harvests and holiday high seasons on the coast. On the back was another page devoted to job vacancies, advertising work in McDonald’s, Toys R Us and Disneyland – or, for anyone willing to travel not just beyond the pueblo, but beyond the Spanish border, there was the possibility of cleaning jobs in France.

  In a sense, it was ever thus. The modish idea of ‘the precariat’ describes the group experiencing ever-worsening labour conditions under late capitalism following the slow disintegration of the job-for-life, with its relatively stable, union-backed working conditions and pensions. In Spain this is a process which Prime Minister Rajoy’s landmark, detested labour reforms of 2011 have deliberately accelerated (for the good of the economy, naturally). But for Andalusian jornaleros, short-term contracts, long periods without work, permanent financial insecurity and poverty pay have been the norm for centuries. In a region which never really experienced Fordism – the standardised system of industrial mass production embodied by the Ford Motor Company in the United States – post-Fordism is a slightly meaningless concept. For young marinaleños who can’t, or don’t want to, work as a cooperativista in El Humoso, these less than tantalising job offers are just a continuation of the labour conditions of their ancestors before 1979 – neo-feudalism with a Disney smile.

  In Somonte, the latest, most high-profile piece of Andalusian anarchist land expropriation, I had seen a sophisticated mural which expressed a sentiment I had expected to hear more of in the crisis. Painted in green on the side of a white farmhouse building, in large capitals, it read Andalusians – don’t emigrate, fight! Further down, underneath stencilled portraits of Zapata, Malcolm X, Geronimo and Blas Infante, was a quote from the latter: The land is yours: reclaim it!

  I’ve encountered almost no resentment of the people emigrating in search of work – but then the generation of ninis (neither work nor study) are not the first to face this dilemma: their parents had to do the same, and their parents before that. The only difference is now you emigrate on a cheap flight to Berlin or London, rather than hitching a slow ride to the fields or factories of the north.

  Despite the lack of reproach, those leaving certainly felt guilt and sadness. I recall one Spanish friend speaking to me very quickly in English about his plans to leave, for the third time in five years, to go and work in Berlin (following Stockholm and London). He had to speak fast because his mother, who didn’t understand much English, was in the living room with us watching television, and he hadn’t yet mustered the courage to tell her he was leaving again.

  Outside Marinaleda, the situation for other young Andalusians is devastating. Once, at a bar in Estepa, a young man called Jesús joined us. I asked him the same broad questions I asked everyone, about the economy, about the government, about the future. He clasped his face with one cradling hand – he was weary but stoical, like a cargo ship buffeted by strong winds. ‘Things are getting worse everywhere. Wages are now even lower, and contracts are shorter. If you have graduated from university, you must go to Germany or America or England to get a job.’ Spain has the highest proportion of graduates of any country in Europe – for all the good it is doing them now. There were two options, Jesús said. Either live with your parents, spend all your time looking for work, go out and protest occasionally, or join the hordes scuttling down the brain-drain to points beyond Spain.

  What about Marinaleda, as an alternative? He shrugged. It’s good that you can have a free house and a job there, but it’s not all great, he said. ‘You know you have to work on Sundays?’

  In Seville, a woman in her mid-twenties called Emma told me that about 90 per cent of her friends were out of work, and most of them had had to move back into their family homes after a few fleeting years of adult freedom. ‘I’m talking about all different kinds of people, people with no qualifications, people who have a masters, people who have two degrees.’ She went on:

  ‘It’s really, really bad here. Seville had so many building companies before the “brick crisis”, as we call it. You have so many unemployed young and not so young people with no other qualification than to work in construction. We have thousands of flats where construction just stopp
ed, and the buildings are left half-finished.’ These relics of late capitalism scar the whole Spanish landscape now.

  A lot of her friends left school when they were fifteen, Emma explained. The authorities didn’t really mind, because they knew there was work available, and they needed people to do it. ‘The government just said, “Okay, leave school, go!” So now in the south you have a lot of young unemployed people with no qualifications, but they have a house and they have a family and they have a loan, and they need to pay for everything – and they can’t go back to school, because they have responsibilities. What are you going to do in that situation?’

  There is little else to do but come out into the plazas, in fact – either to idle, or to organise. Access to the monthly unemployment benefit is being limited, she said, with new applicants blocked by bureaucracy – because the government’s austerity programme simply can’t afford to give it to everyone who is unemployed; there are just too many of them.

  Back in Marinaleda we were invited to visit one of the casitas, the self-built houses, belonging to a family with two grown-up children facing up to the realities of the crisis-era job market. The invite had come via Javi’s twenty-seven-year-old friend Ezequiel, who I’d met once in London, when he was a diffident young man lost in the big city, mute from lack of English, slightly perplexed at my enthusiasm for his obscure little pueblo. His family story is a common one – like Cristina’s parents, his grandparents migrated north in search of work in the 1950s. His father was born in Barcelona but went back to his roots, to Marinaleda, to find work when the struggle for land began, and soon met Ezequiel’s mother, from Estepa. ‘A lot of people never came back to the south,’ Javi explained.

  Ezequiel had returned to his parents’ house because he had a couple of days off from his job working in a Seville hotel reception, and greeted us warmly – cheeky smiles swim near the surface of the Andalusian gene pool. The house was lovely; modest but big enough, clean but lived-in. Each of the 350 casitas built under Sánchez Gordillo’s leadership consists of ninety square meters for construction and 100 square meters for a patio or garden, and normally incorporates three bedrooms, a bathroom, living room, kitchen and courtyard. The living room was dominated by a towering bookcase and a large cage of chirruping birds. ‘Say “Gordillo”!’ Javi instructed a parrot, pointing a finger at it mock sternly. The parrot looked at him impassively and puffed its chest out. ‘Say “communism”!’ The bird refused.

  Ezequiel is one of many young marinaleños torn between utopia and the wider world. He wanted to do something more exciting than farming, he explained, whatever the benefits of the co-operative might be. He spent most of the week working in the hotel in Seville, improving his English, renting a small room in a flat there, but even so hadn’t quite cut the apron-strings to utopia: he was still coming back to stay at his parents’ house most weeks and was on the waiting list to build a casita of his own in Marinaleda, in spite of his wanderlust. A fifteen-euro-a-month ‘mortgage’ for a brand-new house in his pueblo, especially in the context of the Spanish housing crisis, would be pretty hard to argue with.

  Did you like it, growing up here? I asked him. ‘Sure. But if you don’t want to work in the fields, what do you do?’ What indeed. You probably have to leave for the big city or the coast. Do people here grow up as communists? I wondered. He seemed unsure of what to say. ‘Many people become communists, because they want to work, or they want to have a house, but not because they are communist. They don’t sit at home reading Karl Marx.’

  In a way, Ezequiel was no different than any Spaniard of his age – more enticed by the possibilities of gallivanting and adventure than by Sánchez Gordillo’s earnest poems about struggle. His parents came back from Catalunya to join the revolution, he acknowledged. ‘Ah, but this generation, they don’t care about communism,’ interrupted Javi, mocking Ezequiel for his ideological heresy. There was some truth to Javi’s jibe, and I heard it said more than once in the village, and in the surrounding pueblos, that those who inherited utopia may not treat it with the same reverence as those who struggled to create it.

  And yet, even with Ezequiel, it felt like a certain level of solidarity had been unconsciously embedded: despite his middling English, he wanted to practice, and told a lucid English-language version of the history of the land seizures that had happened before he was born. The Duke of Infantado, he said, was ‘just walking around with a horse, while people starved in Marinaleda’. And then he reeled off the word ‘expropriated’ without a second thought.

  Most English people don’t know the word ‘expropriated’, I told him.

  5

  Bread and Roses

  With the exception of the ferocious heat of high summer, Marinaleda feels at its most utopian in the afternoon. La tarde starts not at noon, but when work starts winding down and lunch and siesta time commence, between 2 and 4 pm. The village’s few shops and workshops close, workers drift back from the fields and the factory, the pensioners finish their games of cards, and parents stand outside the primary school gates, chatting idly as the kids run in circles around their legs.

  Some stop off for a drink on their way home and sip small glasses of beer called cañitas (normally about a third of a pint) under the sun-gazebo in front of Bar Gervasio and at the tables outside Bar Sur. Lunch, which never starts before 3 pm, is normally a long-drawn-out affair involving several courses, with loaves of bread broken up into big hunks sitting on the table next to platters of grilled chicken or pork, rich stews of lentils and beans, fanned triangles of manchego and bowls of pale, watery lettuce, tossed with tuna and sweetcorn.

  Home is where the stomach is, but the social centre of the Spanish pueblo, as Julian Pitt-Rivers observed in his book The People of the Sierra, is outdoors, in the streets themselves. During la tarde, the broad, tree-lined promenade that runs next to the Avenida de la Libertad, connecting Marinaleda to nearby Matarredonda, is teeming with activity. Gaggles of middle-aged women walk four abreast, men just turning grey jog in pairs, and teenage boys on bikes do that half-standing, half-cycling soft-pedal thing that only teenage boys can pull off, while the girls walk behind them, laughing. The older youths are kitted out as cool young sportsmen, and pose with their lightweight motorbikes, or lean on car doors showing off their tracksuits, like aspiring alpha males everywhere.

  After lunch and a short siesta, the heat of the day cools, and the performance is repeated. The pensioners rest their walking sticks against the metal green benches, stocky men stroll two by two in their berets, serious trousers and olive-coloured cardigans, always nattering away, the birds in the surrounding orange trees by now engaged in deep debate too. Outside the casitas kids walk their dogs and chase their footballs, and a group of roller-skating tweens flies down the Avenida and into the village park, past the outdoor gym, which is populated by grown-ups doing their work-outs and children using it as a climbing frame. The younger children sit on their mothers’ laps on the benches, eating crisps. If you do a circuit of the village, by the time you return half an hour later the congregations around each bench have rearranged slightly, but the principle remains.

  Between the Ayuntamiento and Matarredonda a lush green field spreads motionless in the afternoon sunshine, only occasionally disturbed by the two white horses grazing in it. When the sun finally sets, it does so in a blaze of pink over El Rubio to the west, casting an irresistible peach glow over the whitewashed walls of the town, with Estepa sitting prettily on the balcony of the mountains to the south. When there is more than, say, 50 per cent cloud coverage, which there very rarely is, dusk is a moodier affair of purplish, deep-sea blues, but no less picturesque.

  ‘We have every reason to keep fighting’, proclaims a slightly torn Sánchez Gordillo election poster still clinging to the wall of the parque natural. It’s not just their work, but their lifestyle that they’re fighting to keep – and in almost every instance, it’s one that they created from the space they won for themselves: not just via the economi
cally empowering struggle for land, but by deliberately building the infrastructure for a cultural and social life far out of proportion with their size.

  The Gordillistas never miss an opportunity to remind people of the connection between the marinaleño quality of life and la lucha. ‘You truly believe that without struggle we could achieve all this?’ demanded the central spread of the 2011 election manifesto brochure, illustrating such achievements with countless pictures of high days and holidays, community activities, sports teams and facilities, and organised fun for children, pensioners and everyone in between.

  When the streets are your social centre, it’s important to keep them clean. All the house facades are immaculate, the majority of them gleaming white, with only a few rogues in yellow or orange, or covered in beautiful Moorish mosaic tiles. On a morning stroll around the village you’ll most likely encounter a few women outside their front doors, sweeping dust and twigs from the pavements. One matriarch beats the front of El Sur with a kind of cat-o’-nine-tails to get the dust out. It still hangs in the air a little, augmenting the hazy sunshine with an extra layer of fuzz. It’s a constant struggle, when the motorbikes haring down Avenida de la Libertad are kicking up their own oily smoke too, and the lorries are churning up the dust.

  On Sundays, on Calle de Federico García Lorca, one household literally airs its laundry in public, hanging wet linen on a line between the orange trees on the pavement. Nobody minds. Public space is negotiated space, and if someone has a problem with a fellow neighbour’s use of it, they will mention it directly. It’s too hot in this part of the world to waste time on working yourself up with passive-aggressive grumbling.