by Dan Hancox
If you’re not taking the most important meal of the day at home, there’s a small range of modest but tremendously cheap tapas dishes in the bars of the village, usually costing one euro each, same as the beers, the glasses of wine and the coffees. And just on the very edge of the village, near the road sign which indicates you are entering Marinaleda, is La Bodega – a proper, spacious family restaurant for passing traffic and locals alike. By 3.30 on weekday lunch-times it’s pretty much full, with fifteen or so cars, lorries and tractors parked outside.
Extended families, work associates and groups of retirees eat there often in large groups of more than ten, drinking decent reds and helping themselves from great communal clay pots of chicken and potatoes. Competing with the flamenco-pop on the stereo is a whirring ceiling fan and The Simpsons, dubbed, on a TV in a high corner. There’s an open fire, an old-fashioned wood-burning heater, a giant, human-being-sized amphora turned into a plant pot, open shelves messily stacked with wine bottles, and hams hanging behind the bar. The atmosphere reflects the gloriously unhurried Andalusian ethic: no hay bulla, there’s no fuss. Even the sopa de mariscos, seafood broth, off the daily menú del día takes over thirty minutes to arrive; but if you’ve got half-broken, briney olives from the local fields, a good book and a sparkling cañita, there really is no fuss.
You can eat a long, langorous lunch, but people also head there in the evenings for less formal tapas plates of rich rabo de toro, ox tail, secreto, a gloriously moist, fat-marbled cut of pork, and flamenquín, the peculiar Andalusian hybrid of a scotch egg and a sausage roll. Eating there with Javi and his mates on a Friday night, they taught me the kind of key contemporary Spanish phrases you don’t learn in a language class. Phrases such as dinero negro, black money, and that Rajoy’s government had recently offered the nation’s corrupt businesspeople an amnistía fiscal. This meant that they would clean their dirty money, no questions asked, no charges pressed, only provided they brought it back to Spain and paid 10 per cent tax on it. And then there was gossip about the various senior politicians embroiled in various corruption scandals. I struggled to keep up with which one was which: there were simply that many cases in the news at any one time.
After some light dinner like this, at around 9 or 10 pm, for the younger adults (and many of the older ones) weekend nights mean more drinks, gently sliding along from bar to bar, either in the village or a neighbouring pueblo, and eventually some dancing.
In terms of decibel levels Marinaleda is generally a quiet village, but when they celebrate, they do so in a manner which is once again far out of proportion to their size. The major annual festivals – most of them Catholic in origin, now stripped of all religious rituals and icons – draw in thousands of outside visitors, from neighbouring villages and beyond: chiefly the pre-Lenten carnaval blow-out, the week-long July feria, and Holy Week recast as semana cultural. In addition there are the famous spring and summer rock concerts, either in Palo Palo or outdoors in the feria grounds, which frequently see the village double in size.
Sport and physical activity are treated with similar enthusiasm. Marinaleda has a number of football teams for different ages and levels – including Unión Deportiva Marinaleda, founded in 1986, which until recently punched above its weight, in the Spanish fourth division. There is also a large outdoor swimming pool, four tennis courts, an indoor gym, an outdoor gym, and in the 500-capacity multi-purpose sports pavilion (the huge white building adorned with Che Guevara’s face), basketball, volleyball, gymnastics, judo and handball, among other things. On summer evenings, films are screened – for free, of course – at the purpose-built amphitheatre that sits tucked away in the parque natural. Several hundred marinaleños bring cushions, food and drink from home, and settle in for the night, while the kids scamper around in the vicinity. All of these, it must be said, are achievements of the Sánchez Gordillo era.
The citizens of Marinaleda have the leisure opportunities and facilities of a village at least five times its size, and that is no accident; but is their provision a distraction, or a reward?
You’d need an unhealthy level of cynicism to argue for the former. There’s an evident and sincere ideological commitment to the socialist maxim ‘bread and roses’, drawn from the James Oppenheim poem of the same name, and its key line: ‘Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!’ The struggle of the 1980s was for cultural and spiritual sustenance, as well as land – full hearts, as well as stomachs. Joy, Sánchez Gordillo has often said, is a people’s right.
In 1985, as the land occupation campaign intensified, he counter-intuitively tested his philosophy by cancelling the feria – the major annual community street festival in all Spanish pueblos, often lasting up to a week. The economic situation in the village was so dire, Sánchez Gordillo reasoned, that they could not pretend to celebrate. It sounds like a slightly demagogic and eccentric move, but as ever it was ratified by a general assembly, and the villagers understood its propaganda power. Cancelling the feria was deemed a newsworthy event, not just by Sánchez Gordillo, but by the national media.
‘Without joy, la fiesta is impossible,’ Sánchez Gordillo said in a solemn declaration to the press. ‘Without work, all we know is hopelessness and despair.’
Of course, not just Marinaleda, but the majority of Spanish society had been denied their fundamental right to joy for decades, throughout the Franco years. One of the first principles of organisation in Marinaleda in the 1970s was to rediscover liberty and autonomy in their cultural and social lives – the same spontaneous cultural catharsis that created the hedonistic creative boom known as la movida madrileña. La movida saw Madrid make partying and transgression into a political statement. The spirit of liberalisation carried across the arts, but also in the Dionysian spirit of drug decriminalisation and the flourishing of previously repressed subcultures of all types.
There was a grassroots cultural and social rebellion across the country, in reaction to an autocratic regime which had brutalised not just bodies, but souls. In the Marinaleda: Huelga de Hambre pamphlet, written in 1980, the authors lament that the Francoists ‘wanted to impose on the rest of the Spanish state a distorted Andalusian folklore, in an attempt to build a “Spanish culture”, uniform and equal for all. In that way, making a caricature of the Andalusians, it tried to use folkloric elements to crush the different cultural manifestations of the pueblos.’
This desperate desire to recover local and personal cultural autonomy from repressive central control – control from outside the pueblo – was integral to the revolutionary mindset of the late 1970s. As the green-and-white-flag-waving Andalusian nationalists are the first to admit, there is no uniform Andalusian culture, any more than there is a singular Spanish culture. Every pueblo has its own unique character, rituals and festivities – and with Franco dead and his architecture of centralised repression crumbling, these began to thrive anew.
For Sánchez Gordillo it was necessary in the late 1970s to pro-actively ‘recuperarfiestas’, to reclaim their festivities from the hands of their traditional enemies; Franco, the state, the pro-regime bourgeoisie, and perhaps more controversially, the Catholic Church. In Andalusia, Easter week, or semana santa, generally involves an almost total shut-down of normal life for the sake of prayers, processions and other rituals. So while in Seville, dramatically hooded penitents dubbed nazarenos honour the story of Christ’s Passion by following their ornate religious icons on ten-hour-long processions, often barefoot, through the medieval city streets, things in Marinaleda are determinedly secular. Sánchez Gordillo’s semana cultural is an alternative, non-religious celebration, consisting of concerts and theatrical performances.
The current design of Marinaleda’s July feria is at once an ancient form of community revelry and a conscious subversion of the typical feria under Franco: demure fairs in fenced-off grounds, with entry fees which were prohibitive for all but the petty bourgeoisie (small landowners, doctors, priests) and members of the Guardia Civil.
These days, of course, the fences have come down, in every sense. Each feria is given a new political theme to tie the aesthetics together, which is decided at a general assembly: previous themes have included agrarian reform, the current housing crisis, and Che Guevara.
The feria is a political festival in these relatively superficial leftist flourishes, but its politics run deeper: it couldn’t happen without the largely voluntary work and enthusiasm of the collective. Several hundred volunteers serve food and drink, construct the stages, and prepare villagers of all ages – and incomes – for a boozy week of free entertainment and dancing until way beyond dawn.
Marinaleda’s notoriety as a cultural jewel of the Sierra Sur is also a good source of income for the village, or the SAT union, depending on who is officially behind each event. One high-profile fundraising concert on the outdoor feria grounds in February 2013 sold 5,000 tickets at fifteen euros each (the population is 2,700, remember). Billed as a ‘Concert Against Repression’, its posters were plastered across the entire region. All the proceeds went to the SAT legal fighting fund, following numerous arrests during the previous year’s many strikes and pieces of direct action.
As well as bringing money into the village, these kinds of festivities make pretty good publicity for the project. Elsewhere in Andalusia I have met people who’ve come to Marinaleda just for the gigs or the feria – even one or two who know the town primarily for its parties, rather than its politics. The emphasis on bread and roses is both a useful supplement to propaganda and something grounded in Sánchez Gordillo’s sincere belief in the betterment of the collective:
‘We believe that public well-being should never have a limit,’ he told me in 2012. ‘Private well-being should. But public well-being, the good of everyone – not some more than others – the well-being of a collectivity; that should be limitless.’ He then reeled off a list of facilities, indexed by price: ‘Wireless internet is free. Swimming in the public pool costs three euros for the entire year. The child daycare centre costs twelve euros a month – and the children also eat there.’ Many of these amenities have come directly through protest. When I met Sánchez Gordillo the first time, he was talking about the next addition to the leisure life of Marinaleda, an indoor swimming pool complex for which artists’ designs had already been agreed. If the Junta was unwilling to foot the bill, they would just have to protest until it gave way, he said.
Marinaleda’s relationship with the state is a curious web of paradoxes. They despise its intrusions, its determination to throttle their liberty, rights and local culture, and its historic enmity to the autonomous spirit of the pueblo; but they still make appeals to the central state, as well as to the regional government – more than that, they make strident, substantial financial demands of it – and simultaneously call it names, disrupt its functions and repeatedly, determinedly, break its laws. All of which makes it the more astonishing that neither the Andalusian nor the Spanish government objected to Sánchez Gordillo’s dramatic-sounding decision to abolish the police force.
‘They didn’t say anything!’ he insisted. ‘By law, due to the number of inhabitants we have here, we should have around four to seven cops. But we don’t want police here. The one policeman we had wasn’t allowed to have a gun. Then when he retired, he wasn’t thrown out of the village or anything – but we didn’t hire a new policeman, because we don’t need one. Because we have our voluntary work, because we throw a lot of parties and party collectively, because we fight together, because we make our lives together, there is a high degree of good neighbourliness. When we plant trees, we do that together, too.’
Sánchez Gordillo’s articulation of what the word ‘community’ means is especially striking when you consider how blithely and emptily the word is used by mainstream politicians across the West.
Suspicion of the state, of any extension of centralised power, is something that flourishes in the Andalusian soil – and has been especially intensified in Marinaleda, thanks to its unique three decades of struggle. Of course, there is always the Guardia Civil. You see them slowly driving down Avenida de la Libertad sometimes, suspicious sentinels of a remote but destructive power, patrolling in their green and white cars, still adorned with the emblem of the royal crown over a sword crossed with a fasces.
The young lads standing outside the bars purse their lips or mutter obscenities, careful not to do so too loudly. The Guardia still have jurisdiction, as Spain’s national gendarmerie; the local station is in Herrera, six miles away. Hypothetically, if there was a sudden and vicious murder, it would be members of this Guardia who would be summoned to deal with it.
In 2007, the Herrera force was called in after repeated robberies and vandalism at the two schools in Marinaleda. A small group, largely suspected to be a few students with discipline problems who rarely attended class, had stolen pieces of sports equipment from the school and left a trail of broken glass, forced doors and windows, and walls daubed with insults aimed at their teachers.
Normally, if there’s this kind of trouble, they don’t let it get as far as the Guardia. I heard one story of a group of local youngsters committing acts of boredom-inspired petty vandalism, throwing stones and blowing up letterboxes with fireworks, so the residents on the street affected spoke to Sánchez Gordillo, who gave them his mobile number and told them to call if it happened again. It did, and they called him at 11 pm one night. He turned up five minutes later in a car, and the kids scarpered; but he worked out who they were, went and talked to their parents, and it never happened again.
The young people do get bored sometimes, as they do in small villages everywhere. Weed is smoked slyly, and not so slyly, in the fields away from the grown-ups, or in a huddle on the Casa de Cultura staircase. Other recreational activities not permitted in parents’ homes have caused problems. On one recent visit, while taking a stroll, I noticed a sign affixed to the allotment and garden situated next to the school. ‘This park is for enjoying, not fucking’, it said, dispensing with any attempt at euphemism. The young people can get bored, but – and it’s a ‘but’ acknowledged by them and their parents alike – it could be so much worse. They have innumerable sporting options, free Wi-Fi at home, a park and swimming pool to hang out in, free computers in the Casa de Cultura internet café, and in general, a hell of a lot more going on than in most villages of fewer than 3,000 people. And when they grow up they have the possibility of work and home ownership denied to the majority of their peers elsewhere in Spain.
Their grandparents are certainly well occupied, not least in the Centro de Adultos, where, among other things, literacy classes provide education for an older generation that never had the chance to complete formal schooling. It’s also a social hub, especially popular with the village’s older women. There’s even a thrice-weekly evening class in Spanish for the village’s émigrés, mostly Brits plus the odd Frenchman, Romanian and Senegalese. The evening classes are all brought together for termly day-trips to regional sites of interest, like the Alhambra in Granada. During one of my visits, I was invited to a pre-Christmas meal where the women made us migas, a popular peasant dish consisting entirely of mounds and mounds of fried breadcrumbs – served with wedges of fresh orange to cut through all the oil. It felt as heavy and dense as the dirt in the fields; but again, I hadn’t spent all day working in them, so probably hadn’t built up the right kind, or volume, of appetite. For dessert we were served another delicacy, gachas dulces – which again looked rather like gloop, tasted rather like gloop, weighed a tonne and, all told, was quite pleasant.
After we’d finished eating, the old ladies tried to get the last few breadcrumbs off the plates by smacking the back of them with plastic spoons – a deafening impromptu percussion section, accompanied by plenty of giggling. Following an earlier discussion about leche frita, a kind of deep-fried custard, one of the teachers, Rafa, a kindly man in his late thirties with a childlike sensibility, beamed and led the old ladies in a chant of ‘¡Queremos leche frita! ¡Que
remos leche frita!’ (we want leche frita!). They banged their plates in time as the chants grew louder, before finally dissolving into laughter. ‘This is what it’s like all the time,’ said la inglesa Ali, fondly, with a smile and an eye-roll. ‘If the lunatics ever do take over the asylum, this is what it’ll look like.’
After things settled down again, I pulled out my Huelga de Hambre book, and they crowded round to look at the pictures. Like the veterans of la lucha in the olive oil factory, they’d never seen them before. There was again a great deal of reminiscing about the assemblies, the hunger and the heat, the friends who had since passed on. Hands clapped brows: what a strange, distant place August 1980 was. They have created a remarkable world since then, but they grew up in one, too. One older woman in the class recalled giving birth to her third child, out in the fields; the defining characteristic about this particular birth, the thing that jogged her memory, was not that it happened in the middle of a field – an unsurprising detail – but that it was raining that day. ‘Oh yes!’ responded her friend, ‘it was raining that day.’
Afterwards, Rafa took me to see the village library in the building opposite. I asked about village archives, and he said regretfully there wasn’t really anything at all. We leafed through the official Ayuntamiento de Andalucía statistics almanacs, the kind of dry tome that every local library has, but there is no proper archive available to the villagers. There weren’t many political books at all, in fact, let alone any specific to the Andalusian struggle: only a lonely copy of Lenin’s ¿Qué hacer? (What Is to Be Done?).
For a village and a region with such an extraordinary history, it’s remarkably under-historicised. In the Ayuntamiento, there are no meaningful archives either. ‘It’s surprising, I know,’ one amiable employee, Manolo, told me, ‘not least because local government is so bureaucratic!’ Directly downstairs from the library is the pensioners’ social club, where the old men drink one-euro coffees and cañitas, read the newspapers, and play cards most of the day. The history is with them, passed down the generations through storytelling and the reproduction of the practice of struggle, rather than upstairs in the library.