The Village Against the World (17 page)

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 the 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.

Eventually Mariano pulled up, parked alongside us and got out, shaking hands with everyone, cautiously friendly, but formal. Then we got back in our cars, and followed him through the winding olive groves out of town. After fifteen minutes or so he indicated a turning, a rocky dirt
track cut right into the middle of the groves – so narrow that I could have reached out the window and picked the olives off the trees. The path wound slowly and bumpily up a gentle incline, to a cottage located behind high wire mesh fences topped with barbed wire. ‘Wow. I guess this is the opposition compound?’ muttered Dave, only partially in jest, as three dogs jumped up to the gate. One was massive, two were almost comically tiny, which took the edge off the slight atmosphere of unease.

In the cottage, we sat down at the kitchen table, and Mariano rolled up one blind above the sink. We remained in this dim half-light for the couple of hours we sat there and talked. It was only a simulacrum, but we really felt like we were in hiding.

I had got the sense that Mariano Pradas is rather unfairly maligned in Marinaleda, where he is one of two elected Socialist Party (PSOE) councillors, alongside the nine of Sánchez Gordillo’s Izquierda Unida (IU). He tends to slink around town. On the night of Marinaleda’s February carnival, while I was having dinner with friends in one of the less popular (and thus conveniently emptier) village cafés, Mariano came in on his own, looked around slightly shiftily, had a quick, quiet conversation with the grumpy, boss-eyed owner, and crept off again. He and the other PSOE councillor, José Rodríguez Cobacho, rarely join in with any of the community’s cultural events: they say they don’t feel welcome. Crucially, neither of them actually live in Marinaleda itself; they’re both up the hill in Estepa.

To commence his victory speech after the local elections in 2012, Sánchez Gordillo announced to the waiting crowd, as if delivering the football scores, ‘Marinaleda 9, Estepa 2’ – and was met with enormous cheers. Little could better elucidate the incredible persistence of that key facet of Andalusian life: you are your
pueblo
, and as long as the PSOE representatives live in Estepa, their dedication to and understanding of the life of Marinaleda will be called into question.

Pradas would counter, fairly, that he was born in Marinaleda, he grew up there, and his family are from there. He remembers the bad old days, the daily struggle of life under the dictatorship, and his analysis of the dire state the village was in before the 1980s isn’t that different from Sánchez Gordillo’s – a desperately poor
pueblo
surrounded by
latifundios
, and a people heedlessly left to starve by a political elite with no interest in them.

I was curious to know how anyone from the PSOE, a nominally socialist party, would even begin to make a case against the
jornaleros
’ long, successful fight for the land. Sure enough, Pradas was careful not to dismiss the struggle, or the land occupations. ‘In part, it was a good thing,’ he said, in an I-hold-my-hands-up sort of way. ‘The
jornaleros
have some land now, and that’s a good thing. But it doesn’t provide everyone with as much work as they claim. There is not full employment here, not even close – the real problem is the lack of industry in Andalusia.’ The CUT/SAT fixation on winning the land was a myopic
obsession, the way he told the story of the 1980s: ‘A lot of different things are necessary to make progress,’ he explained, ‘not just fields.’

What about the hunger strike, I asked. ‘The truth?’ He laughed a little, involuntarily: not derisive, or disrespectful, but an irreverent laugh, directed at the legend built up around it. ‘The truth is, it has been massively sentimentalised. The majority of people had nothing to do with it.’ He repeated Félix Talego’s analysis, that it was first and foremost a well-orchestrated media event, coordinated from the top by Sánchez Gordillo with the help of the union and the party.

‘Marinaleda is a divided
pueblo
. Sánchez Gordillo has worked hard to make sure it is divided, using the assemblies, the TV station, and so on. If you are not on his side, that puts you on the right, that makes you a fascist – and you are attacked, you are insulted, you are intimidated.’ Their first task, he said, if the PSOE won control of the village council, would be to restore freedom of thought, and let people make their own decisions, without the polarity of being either ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ the mayor. They would consider questions of how to run El Humoso, and all the other aspects of Sánchez Gordillo’s Marinaleda, after that.

Sure, Pradas said, you have a secret ballot, and a free vote – but it’s the other aspects of life in the village which are undemocratic: people know if you are with Sánchez Gordillo or not. ‘If you’re not clearly a fanatic, people assume you are the other way.’ And the assemblies? ‘They
are only a superficial expression of democracy. Those who are not Gordillistas would never bother going in the first place, and those who are, are mostly attending because they know it will help them get work in El Humoso.’ It is, he said, no different from the era of the
caciques –
the informal biases, the distribution of work and favours to people on ‘the right side’.

It is both known and noted whether you are participating in demonstrations and strikes. If you do, you’re in line for favours, and if you don’t, you’re a fascist.

‘Intimidation doesn’t have to be physical,’ he said, solemnly. ‘Many people have felt uncomfortable, and had to leave the village for Estepa or elsewhere.’

In the past, he said, his sister’s house in the village had had ‘fascist’ and ‘criminal’ daubed on the door. Pradas himself had been called a fascist by Sánchez Gordillo in council meetings; he’d had his car vandalised ‘for political reasons’. The accusations kept coming. During one episode of
Línea Directa
, his Saturday TV programme, the mayor said that anyone who wanted to celebrate
semana santa
with a procession was a fascist. ‘He thinks religious people must be fascists – you can’t be on the left and religious, apparently. He talks about freedom a lot, but where is the religious freedom? Personally, I don’t believe in much either, but I respect the tradition of
semana santa
.’

As with so many of the allegations and counter-allegations, unpicking the gossip from the facts is almost impossible. There are a few verified incidents: in
November 1986, a group of fifty
marinaleños
broke the windows and scratched the bodywork of the regional PSOE leadership’s cars when they came to open a party headquarters in the village.