The Village Against the World

by Dan Hancox

  One local organisation that does keep records of its activities – and publishes them in a magazine-like bulletin – is the institution that has had a guiding hand throughout so much of Spanish history: the Church. You wouldn’t think they had much of a history in Marinaleda since 1979, if you read any of the short online pieces about the village. Indeed, when I asked him about Christian festivities and the village’s attitude to Catholic tradition and faith, Sánchez Gordillo told me confidently: ‘We are not religious.’ Even at the time, this seemed a bit of a presumptuous generalisation. Almost every village in Spain, however small, has a church – Marinaleda has two, in fact, one in each barrio. ‘Yes, there is a church,’ he admitted, in a manner that suggested I had missed the point, ‘but there’s no priest. Priests are dangerous. We like to say, “Thank God we have no priest.’ ”

  In reality, unsurprisingly, erasure of Catholicism from the workers’ credo espoused by Sánchez Gordillo since 1979 did not have the effect of erasing all of that faith which existed before. And so, in spite of his statement that ‘we’ are not religious, and the fact that the semana cultural has ostensibly replaced semana santa, both worship in general and that vital part of the Spanish Catholic year, Holy Week, continue in Marinaleda.

  The Catholic Easter traditions persist in the streets of the pueblo, starting with the Palm Sunday procession in which children walk dressed as apostles, accompanied by one niño dressed as Jesus Christ on his donkey. It proceeds on Good Friday with the parading of the Christ statue from the seventeenth-century Iglesia Parroquial de Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza, tucked away from the main road in the north-western corner of the village, and then the Virgen de la Esperanza, the Virgin of Hope, the village’s patron saint. There is also weekly worship with a non-resident priest, Manuel Martínez Valdivieso, who presides in El Rubio. He and Sánchez Gordillo avoid each other, and Valdivieso has been known to say, bitterly, that he is the priest for all of the village, whereas Sánchez Gordillo is only mayor of the half who elected him.

  There are half-truths to Sánchez Gordillo’s claim that utopia is secular. Marinaleda is certainly much less observant than many neighbouring pueblos, and it is, crucially, situated in a long history of often violent enmity between the Church and the workers. The Church has traditionally been a proxy for the State, both before and, in a sense, even after Franco’s dictatorship. Until recently, a portion of all Spaniards’ income tax went towards paying for the upkeep of the Catholic Church and the salaries of the clergy; only in 1988 did the PSOE bring in the possibility to opt out by ticking a box on your income tax form.

  But the peripatetic priest, Valdivieso, is right too. The regular churchgoers complain, studiously off the record, that they are marginalised by the village’s official culture. No one will despise them for going to Mass, much less prevent them from doing so, but it’s telling that the Ayuntamiento and the Marinaleda TV station ignore all religious events in the village.

  ‘Holy Week does exist’ in Marinaleda, protests the peculiar, ancient-looking website of the parish church, in a declaration surrounded by kitsch religious clip-art, ‘and there is a small Brotherhood whose office-holders are highly revered in the village.’ The legacy of a time when reverence was more commonplace – indeed, under Franco, at the very heart of state-sanctioned culture – is still visible behind closed doors. Throughout my host Antonio’s house, the walls and shelves are crowded with Catholic icons and trinkets, more on the refined than the kitsch side; paintings, figurines, framed passages from the Bible.

  When I first arrived, I assumed – wrongly – that their presence must mean Antonio was an anti-Gordillista, as if you had to make a choice: you were either conventionally religious or a worshipper of the new messiah. Chatting one evening after dinner, I discovered he was neither. ‘The heavy metal concerts they have for semana cultural are very popular here,’ he told me from his rocking chair, before getting up to stoke the coals in the fire. I used the opportunity to ask about the icons on the walls. ‘No, no, all of these religious things were my mother’s, and I just left them up.’ Most marinaleños have become communists instead of Catholics, he added – it’s a direct replacement, a new faith.

  Are you a believer in the new religion then? I asked. ‘No!’ he said, happily. ‘I don’t like politics either. I believe in nothing – I’m a nihilist, an existentialist. I just want to live, I don’t need a philosophy. I have my friends here, and everywhere I go people say hello to me. There’s no crime. The police and the priests are superfluous – and so are the politicians.’ In this wonderfully charming, slightly camp septuagenarian, it struck me, was the innate Andalusian anarchism I’d read about. Individual freedom and autonomy above all else – and a pox on authority figures of all kinds.

  ‘Carnaval is my favourite holiday of the whole year,’ Cristina had told me with genuine excitement a few months beforehand, ‘better than Christmas, better than semana cultural, better than the feria.’ It’s the traditional Catholic pre-Lenten festival, a last gasp of indulgence before forty days of self-sacrifice; in Marinaleda, they persist with the festivity, but without the religious penitence that follows. In the run-up to carnival, the only discussion is your disfraz, your costume. Like a ludic version of anarchist ‘affinity groups’ convened for direct action, in groups of up to fifteen close friends, they choose a collective theme and work on their costumes together.

  This was carnival season across the pueblos of the Sierra Sur, and there was an ineffable excitement in the air. There seemed to be a greater than usual number of boy racers roaring down Avenida de la Libertad, playing reggaeton so loud it shakes my bedroom window. On the Saturday before Lent, Estepa, Rubio, Herrera and all the rest of the surrounding villages celebrate, with two exceptions. In midweek, Pedrera has its unique Ash Wednesday carnaval. The following Saturday, after the start of Lent, and thus somewhat missing the point of a pre-Lenten bacchanal, is Marinaleda’s turn. The date was chosen for the simple reason that they want everyone in the region to come, rather than competing with all the other festivities.

  When I attended in 2013, the revels began with a parade around the village: everyone was told to congregate at 7 pm on Saturday night, in the Ayuntamiento car park. I arrived early – which is to say, on time – but even with only a quarter of the participants there, it was already quite a scene.

  The people who dress up are mostly between the ages of five and thirty-five – liable therefore to get excitably drunk on either rum-and-coke or plain coke, depending. Every group wheels around a trolley stocked to the brim with bottles of booze, mixers and plastic cups. There were swarms of bugs, squirrels and harlequins, about twelve aliens in green body paint and purple wigs, a good showing of clowns, doctors and nurses, a few hens, some slightly dubious geishas and Native Americans, straw men from the Wizard of Oz, a bullfighter or two, and a gaggle of hippies. As the crowd swelled with ever more ridiculous-looking incomers, the older people of the village gathered around the edges of the car park, looking on in their serious brown and grey civvies; parents proudly arranged their little ones for photos. Even before we set off on the hour-long, slow-step circuit around almost every street in the village, there was already a high fever of singing, extravagant toasts to each other and to the village, and giddy high jinks. The human right to joy was exercised with righteous determination: it was a tremendous piss-up.

  There were prizes for the best group costume, and some displayed their theme with impressive thoroughness. One group had built a large, mobile, mostly cardboard elephant to embellish their big-game hunting theme. Topically, it featured the Spanish king Juan Carlos I in camouflage greens, who gave an interview in character to Marinaleda TV, surrounded by his fellow hunters, and, awkwardly, a couple of ‘natives’ in grass skirts and blackface. The man dressed as the king looked so uncannily like the real Juan Carlos that I hardly recognised him at first – it was Bigotes from the olive oil factory, but crucially, shockingly, without his talismanic moustache: he had shaved it off f
or the occasion.

  There were also two young men dressed as Mexican bandits, who made up for their slightly hackneyed outfits by riding actual animals, one a white horse, the other a donkey. But best of all, only a week after Benedict XVI announced his resignation, was the papal entourage. The pope himself, smoking cheap cigarettes and drinking vodka and coke from a fake golden goblet, was driven around in an actual functioning Popemobile, converted from a golf cart, piloted by one of his equally lairy cardinals.

  The image that will stay in my head longest is that of a little girl dressed all in black, with a V for Vendetta–style Guy Fawkes mask, of the kind popularised by Occupy, drinking a carton of orange juice through a straw, her black cape gently floating behind her. She was in an all-female troupe of more than ten Guy Fawkeses of various ages and heights, who’d even dressed their trolley in black. The legacy of old-school anti-establishment militancy, filtered through pop culture, into the ancient rite of costuming.

  After the parade, people settled around the nucleus of Palo Palo, Gervasio, the Sindicato bar and Disco Pub Jesa for a long night of eating, drinking and dancing. Temporary stalls and food vans sold band t-shirts, sweets, kebabs and waffles. The under-twenty-ones established their own area around the back of the Sindicato, to drink away from their parents, smoke dope, and mill about like teenagers do to three different car-boot sound-systems, blaring cheesy techno, the inevitable reggaeton, and Gangnam Style, this last seemingly on a loop. Disco Pub Jesa was home to a lot more cheesy global pop music and a lot more dancing – even intergenerational dancing – while directly outside it, tied to a lamppost, stood a donkey. While the parents drank, many of their young children were still up and about, playing football in their costumes into the small hours. Indeed, at 2 am there were still as many actual prams outside the bars as there were drunk men in their late twenties dressed up as babies.

  Even at that time, more revellers were turning up from other villages, some of them in costume. The latest point at which I managed to have a serious conversation about the village was around midnight in the Sindicato bar, according to my increasingly illegible notes. Paco, a smart, serious man in early middle age, was even-handed in his appraisal of the village: ‘The crisis is not just here, but everywhere … this can be a beacon for the world if we remake it and start again. A new utopia, a different one.’

  ‘When I first came back to Marinaleda from Barcelona [in the 1980s], I came to an assembly and his words got me, here,’ Paco said, patting his chest.

  Organised fun is integral to the spirit of the pueblo, but so is the less organised kind. On a Thursday night in December, the night before Constitution Day, a national holiday, I went out for a quiet drink with a friend at 10 pm. There were only about seven people in Bar Gervasio: two young women, and a separate group of five men in their early twenties. The football was on, the fire was substantial and warm, and not much was happening. As the hours passed, the lads were knocking back not light, sensible cañas but copas, large glasses containing something like three, four or five shots of hard spirits (who knows, since they never, ever, measure in this part of the world), topped up with coke or lemonade.

  By midnight they had persuaded Gervasio, the owner, to switch the cables so as to broadcast music videos from his laptop behind the bar onto the big TV. By 2 am the drink and carefree, what-the-hell atmosphere of the village at large had persuaded not just the five lads, but the rest of us too, to get up and dance ‘La Macarena’, complete with every one of the silly choreographed moves, hip thrusts and twists. La lucha, the way Sánchez Gordillo tells it, is a solemn fight to achieve those moments where the inherent, irrepressible dignity of the people finally triumphs. This was not, perhaps, one of those moments.

  Cheesy pop music is enduringly popular in this part of the world, and after an equally rumbunctious sing-along and dance-along to Whigfield’s ‘Saturday Night’, we were treated to La Macarena’s less local contemporary equivalent, ‘Gangnam Style’ by Psy. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it did feel striking that a pop phenomenon from South Korea was that familiar to the denizens of a village so isolated thirty years ago that its mayor compared it to a Native American reservation, an island in a sea of latifundios. Most of these young men’s grandparents had never seen the sea, one hour’s drive to the south, much less rejoiced – dance moves and all – in the music of a country 10,000 km away.

  It was followed by a popular Spanish Gangnam parody about the cuts, entitled En el paro estoy, I’m on the dole. Mouthing the kind of lyrics common to everyday conversation – ‘I don’t know what to do anymore ’, ‘I moved back in with my parents’, ‘my grandmother can’t go to bingo’, ‘my girlfriend left me’, a sarcastically grinning young man in a yellow reflective jacket and protective helmet goes around doing Psy’s cowboy dance and picking up euros off the floor in desperation. ‘Rajooooy, give me work!’ runs the chorus. Parodying something which is already a parody is fairly low-level art, and it hasn’t got the deep-set pain of blues or indeed, more relevantly, flamenco, but it obviously touched a nerve with the 9 million people who viewed it on YouTube.

  Later, slightly tired from all the excitement, the young men in the bar switched away from music, re-stocked their rum and cokes, and cued up YouTube clips from a Catalan sketch show called Polònia, the one about el Régimen de Franco, or the Franco Regime. Since régimen means both regime and slimming diet, the conceit is a spoof advert from the old days, in flickering black-and-white, in which an effete, over-eager General Franco advertises his regime like a diet. With the Franco regime, you can’t eat meat in Easter week, you can’t have sex, you can’t smoke pot, you can’t speak Catalan; and all of this will bring you guaranteed weight loss. Follow this diet, it concludes, ‘para tener mejor facha’, for a better look – a pun on the other sense of facha, short for fascist.

  At some point closer to 4 am than midnight, Gervasio disappeared into a back room and re-emerged a little later dressed in the unmistakable outfit of the Guardia Civil, complete with bizarre green tricorne hat. The young men fell about laughing, and when they’d picked themselves up off the floor, jostled to have their photos taken with him.

  The costume was a caricature, Cristina explained the following night, laughing at my photo of her wasted young peers, thumbs up, posing with the pretend Guardia. It was mockery, not an affectionate tribute to the enemies of the people. It was also related to it being the eve of Constitution Day: a day that celebrates Madrid, and the central state, epitomised by the Guardia. Caricature is a popular form, as the Cadiz carnaval testifies.

  There was another custom Gervasio practised that I was fond of. Cristina and I had just paid our tab after a slightly quieter evening in his bar – you always pay at the end of the night – when a fresh round of drinks arrived at the table. I was confused: I had thought we were leaving. It turned out that Gervasio had ‘invited’ us. Crisis or no crisis, the bar owners often do this in Marinaleda: you pay, and one more round arrives, on the house.

  The landlord at Palo Palo, León, was king of these extravagantly generous invitations; I lost count of the number of drinks I had on the house with him. His bar is one of the key landmarks in the town, open for over a decade now, and famous far beyond the village, thanks to its mix of high-profile gigs and eccentric Wild West theme, complete with fake logs around the walls and saloon doors. Its exterior is if anything even more striking: above the broad entrance is a fifty-foot-long guitar, whose base is shaped exactly like the map of Andalusia.

  Palo Palo specializes in rock music, booking bands with such illustrious names as DP Ebola and Anvil of Doom. As one critic sarcastically complained, ‘They have broad taste at Palo: punk, hard metal, dark metal, Satanic metal.’ It’s not entirely fair.

  León took a liking to me the first time he met me, when an English filmmaker, Uzma, was visiting too. He came around the bar to join us for shot after shot of sweet rum liquor (on the house, at his insistence). As the clock ticked gently past 3 am, he swayed to t
he live blues guitarist’s mixture of French, Spanish and English rock and pop – playing to a crowd of less than ten.

  León dragged the ashtray over and leaned in closer, drunker, to tell us that Andalusia is a nation without borders, with many different people and cultures – it’s the place of the Moors, too. He said it proudly, and it wasn’t the first time I had heard marinaleños speak that way of their ancestry as Al-Andalus, as well as Andalusia. He was probably showing off to Uzma a bit, since she had ancestors from the Indian subcontinent and was a relatively rare non-white face in the village, but he meant it, too. ‘No borders!’ he exclaimed. ‘For me, it’s just people.’ He brought up Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, Spain and Morocco. They’re all brothers and sisters, he said.

  As talk turned to politics, he oscillated between finger-jabbing seriousness and rocking back on his bar stool, laughing a big toothy grin. ‘I’m not a socialist, or a communist,’ he announced eventually, wagging his index finger. ‘Then what is your philosophy – what are we drinking to?’ I asked.

  He reeled back, swung around to grab the next round of sweet caramel rum and raised it with outstretched arm, as if to make a big announcement to the room, to the world at large.

  ‘La libertad.’

  6

  Opposition in Utopia

  Mariano Pradas asked to meet us on the very edge of Matarredonda, where the smaller end of the village drops suddenly away into open fields, and Avenida de la Libertad splits into two, south towards Estepa, or east towards Herrera. We parked on a dirt layby next to the junction, and since it was a gloriously sunny day, we got out and stood by the car until he turned up. It felt like waiting to do a drug deal, or a hostage exchange. Passengers in passing cars turned their heads to glance curiously at the four young men idling on the edge of the village in the middle of the afternoon – I had brought along Javi, from Estepa, Ezequiel, from Marinaleda, and Dave, my photographer friend from London.