Immediate Struggles: People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain

Immediate Struggles Immediate Struggles People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain Susana Narotzky and Gavin Smith UNI...

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Immediate Struggles

Immediate Struggles People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain

Susana Narotzky and Gavin Smith

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley

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Los Angeles

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London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2006 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Surname, Firstname, birthdate–. Narotzky, Susana. Immediate struggles : people, power, and place in rural Spain / Susana Narotzky and Gavin Smith. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13, 978-0-520-24568-6 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10, 0-520-24568-7 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13, 978-0-520-24569-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10, 0-520-24569-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Bajo Segura (Spain)—Rural conditions. 2. Bajo Segura (Spain)—Economic conditions. 3. Ethnology—Spain—Bajo Segura. I. Smith, Gavin A. II. Title. HN590.B24N37 2006 2006003043 306.360946765—dc22 Manufactured in the United States of America 15 11

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This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 60, containing 60% post-consumer waste, processed chlorine free; 30% de-inked recycled fiber, elemental chlorine free; and 10% FSC-certified virgin fiber, totally chlorine free. EcoBook 60 is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/astm d5634–01 (Permanence of Paper). I

A mi madre y a mi padre S. N. To Winnie, Corin, Laura, David, and Tim G. S.

Immediate struggles [are those in which] people criticize instances of power that are the closest to them, those which exercise their action on individuals. They look not for the “chief enemy” but for the immediate enemy. Nor do they expect to find a solution to their problem at a future date (that is, liberations, revolutions, end of class struggle). Michel Foucault, in H. L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 1982

Contents

List of Illustrations

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Glossary

xvii

Dramatis Personae

xxi

1. Toward an Anthropological Framework for Studying Contemporary Europe

1

part one . Conflicting Histories 2. 3. 4. 5.

The Histories of the Regional Political Economy Regulating Social Life through Uncertainty and Fear From Insecurity to Dependency From Insecurity to Movement

33 56 75 97

part two . Regional Capitalism 6. Families and Entrepreneurs 7. Flexible Structures and Torn Lives 8. The Culture of Politics, the Politics of Culture

121 145 169

9. The Power of Ethnography

203

Notes

221

References Cited

235

Index

247

Illustrations

figures 1. 2.

Victoriano Fuentes family chart The Romero family firms

81 134

map 1.

The Vega Baja del Segura and Surrounding Area

xxiv

Acknowledgments

The project for which this book is a finished product was a long time in gestation, a long time in researching, and a long time in writing, so the two of us have many people to thank—and all of them especially for their patience. For alerting us to each other’s existence we thank the late William Roseberry, and for sponsoring and organizing the workshop on societies in transition at which we met, in Figueras around 1989, we thank Maurice Godelier, Louis Assier-Andrieu, and Dolors Comas. We also thank Maurice for his continued interest in this project and for making it possible for Susana to spend a month at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in January 2003. Yet of course the origins of this project go back farther than that, to Gavin’s early fieldwork in the País Valenciano . Gavin thanks those people who guided him toward this field site: Joan Martínez-Alier and Joan Frigolé in Barcelona, and Josepa Cucó, Joan Romero, and José María García Bonafé in Valencia. To Antonio Gil Olcina, who introduced him to Primitivo Plá, to whom he owes a very special thanks for unstinting help, unbelievable hard work, and constant support over the many years that started in the crepúsculo of the 1970s. For support and help of a different kind during those initial years he thanks Corin Sworn and Joanna. We both have many people to thank in and around the Vega Baja, so many in fact that we hope mentioning the few following names will act xiii

xiv

Acknowledgments

as the tip of the iceberg for all the others to whom we feel such strong sentiments of gratitude: Ricardo and María, Francisco and Eloina as well as Eloy, Manolo, and Pilar, and Manolín. Paco Illán and Angelita, Manuel and Carmen, and all the friends of the cuadrilla. Also Victoria Navarro and Hipólito Guerrero, Natalia Cecilia, and María Rocamora, who spoke to us openly about their life and feelings, about getting by in a difficult historical period. For this we especially thank the late Juan Gelardo and his son and daughter-in-law, Juan and Conchita, and her sisters. There are so many others: we mean this book to be a token of our respect and thanks to those who may endorse it and those who may not. We owe a special and long-term thanks to Josep-Antoni Ybarra at the University of Alicante, who has always shown huge interest in our project and has always urged us to go on with it. Likewise we thank Enric Sanchis, director of the Institució Alfons El Magnànim when we worked in the Vega Baja in the mid-1990s, for his help. We thank the Rockefeller Foundation and especially the staff of the Villa Serbelloni for providing us with the opportunity to produce a first draft of this book during a collaborative research stay at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in October–November of 2000. Gavin is grateful to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for their support during various phases of this project. Susana thanks the Programa Nacional de Promoción General del Conocimiento, of the Spanish Ministry of Education, for making funding available through projects PB98–1238 and BS02003–06832 during the period 1999–2006. Both of us have a debt to friends and colleagues who helped us think through some of the issues we tackle in this book. Among them are the late Eric Wolf and the late William Roseberry. On the west side of the Atlantic we especially thank Malcolm Blincow, Philip Gulliver, Don Kalb, Winnie Lem, Nicole Polier, Katharine Rankin, Veronica Schild, Jane Schneider, Peter Schneider, Gerald Sider, Marilyn Silverman, and Sydel Silverman—all of whom, whether they know it or not, have had a hand in the making of this project. On the east side of the Atlantic we can begin by thanking people who helped us during our brief comparative study in Italy, notable among them Enzo Mingione, who has for many years been a supportive and good colleague and friend. We also thank Vittorio Capecchi and Giovanni Mottura for their early input to our Italian project, Nicoletta Carmi for making it all possible, and especially Claire Belanger and Si-

Acknowledgments

xv

mone Ghezzi for their insightful input. But it goes without saying that out deepest intellectual thanks go to our friends in Spain: Jesús Contreras, Joan Frigolé, Ubaldo Martínez-Veiga, Lourdes Méndez, Isidoro Moreno, Paz Moreno, Gonzalo Sanz, and Ignasi Terradas. Last, but not least, Susana thanks José Antonio for his knowledge and love, Bruno and Lucas for being there and enjoying life.

Glossary

acequia: irrigation channel, ditch. a destajo: piecework. agramar: the work of producing hemp fiber with the gramera; see chapter 3. albañil: construction worker. alcalde: mayor. almacén: warehouse almacenista: warehouser; commercial middleman for agricultural produce; see chapter 6. alpargata: rope sandal amo: dueño, landowner aniaga, aniaguero: type of contract, typically extending for a year (año); agricultural laborer who is hired with such a contract and usually gets a minimal plot of land; see chapter 4. aparado, aparadora: stitching shoe uppers in the shoe industry; specialized worker who does such tasks; see chapters 6, 7. apoderado: manager of an owner’s interests; someone who has been given power; see chapter 4. apodo: nickname. autarquía: autarchy, a system of economic self sufficiency together with autocratic and isolationist self-rule aval: endorsement; guarantee given by a trustworthy person in reference to another person; see chapter 3. ayuntamiento: town hall; metaphorically, town council. cacique: local political boss; see chapters 3, 4, 8. cáñamo: hemp. cañizo: cane, used locally to produce brooms, reeds, etc.; see chapter 6.

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Glossary

cartilla: booklet with numbered pages used to certify payments into the social security system; see chapter 3. cnt: Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores, the anarchist union. colonos: tenants comisiones obreras: the communist union. comunidad de regantes: the irrigation association. confianza: trust, a term used locally in the expression hombre de confianza, a trustworthy man, generally referring to a worker with strong dependency ties to a particular dueño. Also used more generally in the expression persona de confianza, a trustworthy person. corredor: commercial middleman or agent, in this area referring to produce or livestock (corredor de trigo, de ganado) or land (corredor de fincas). cortado, cortador: process of cutting leather following predesigned patterns; person who does such work. cuadrilla: group of friends or a team of co-workers. cuñado: brother-in-law. depurado: politically purged after the civil war for engaging in leftist or Republican politics. dueño: landowner; also large renter of land; see chapters 2, 4. encargado: foreman. envasa: process of packaging finished shoes, generally including quality control and minor finishing touches. espadador: hemp worker; see chapter 3. esparto: esparto grass, a fiber plant. estraperlo: black market; see chapter 3. falangista: member of Falange Española, the fascist party founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera. After the civil war, the Falange was amalgamated with the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista and became the only legal party in Francoist Spain, further institutionalized as the Movimiento Nacional. finca: large landholding. forrar: process of covering the plastic, wooden, or cork heels of shoes with a “nobler” material, generally leather. garmera: upright stacks of hemp. gramaera, gramadera: cutting tool for working hemp into fiber, a guillotine; see chapters 2, 3. gramisas: residues left after separating hemp fiber. guardia civil: Civil Guard, a military force originating in the eighteenth century to police the rural countryside and repress bandits. In the twentieth century and especially during the Franco regime, it became a powerful and all-encompassing repressive force. hipoteca: mortgage, a term often used locally in the expression hipoteca humana, human mortgage; see chapters 3, 7. honesto: honrado, an honest, decent person with self-respect; see chapters 5, 8. huerta: irrigated land used for cultivating fruit crops and vegetables, especially referred to in the areas of Valencia and Murcia.

Glossary

xix

inem: Instituto Nacional de Empleo, the Spanish national institute of employment. iniciativa: initiative jornada: official length of a work day. jornal: day’s work; also the wages obtained for a day’s work. jornalero/a: day laborer, a term used locally to denote both the jornalero eventual, casual worker, and the jornalero fijo or peón, permanent worker. In the latter case the term partially covers that of aniaga; see chapters 3–5. labrador: person who holds land and farms it directly, with or without day labor work; see chapter 4. mayoral: jornalero in charge of hiring other jornaleros to do the day’s work; see chapter 5. montado: process of assembling different shoe parts on an assembly line (via de montado); see chapters 6, 7. movimiento nacional: see Falangista. municipalidad: municipality. oficial: skilled worker, also referred to as oficial de primera or obrero oficial. patrón: roughly translates as employer. pce: Partido Comunista de España, the Communist Party of Spain. peseta: Spanish currency up to 2001 (when replaced by the Euro). político: public arena of power, political ideas and action on the Left, or persons engaged in either of these. psoe: Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the Socialist Party of Spain; after the transition, a social democratic party. rastrillador: hemp worker; see chapter 3. respeto: respect. saladar: extension of dry land with high salt content. sindicato vertical: vertical unions during the Franco regime. soga: rope, used in the expression hacer soga (to make rope). Rope was used in sandal soles. tahulla: local land measure that varies slightly in size from one municipality to the next. In Catral, 1 hectare equals 8.479 tahullas. taller: workshop. término (municipal): geographic extension of a municipality. trabajo de mano: manual work; the process of organizing the work flow in a workshop and doing minor jobs such as cutting threads; see chapter 7. trenza: braid of fiber, generally esparto grass fiber; also used in the expression hacer trenza (to braid). ucd: Unión de Centro Democrático, a political party formed during the early transition years by the appointed head of government Adolfo Suárez; see chapter 8. ugt: Unión General de Trabajadores, the socialist union. The union’s agricultural branch was the Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra (FNTT), but local day laborers referred to it as the UGT. yerbacero: youth employed to gather cut grass for small livestock.

Dramatis Personae

Except for public figures, all names in the text are pseudonyms. aguilar gómez, juan manuel: Successful almacenista of agricultural produce; involved in politics during the transition years with the local Unión de Centro Democrático party (chapters 3, 6, 8). aguilar gómez, mario: Juan Manuel’s brother, also an almacenista, but with a different commercial structure (chapter 6). alicia: El Podenco’s daughter, coming from an aniaga background of dependent agricultural workers. She worked for her uncle to organize shoe parts for subsequent distribution to homeworkers (chapter 4). alvar, jorge: Owner of the main local shoe factory, Ivanshoes, outsourcing large parts of the aparado work to workshops and homeworkers (chapter 7). amanda: Manager of Jorge Alvar’s aparado process (chapter 7). arias, poldo: Head of a cañizo manufacturing firm. His brother Julián, who is associated with him in this firm, is married to a sister of Paulino Romero Jr. (chapter 6). arroyo iglesias, josé: Day laborer with communist leanings. Repressed during the 1945 round-up in the area; after the transition, he ran on the Communist Party ticket for the first municipal elections (chapter 3). cardona, clara: Head of a small aparado workshop with her two sisters, Teresa and Esmeralda, and two neighbors (chapter 7). celia: Mariano’s wife. Works in the packaging process at the Ivanshoes factory but is not a legal worker (chapter 7). el cubano: First an almacenista, later owner of a small aparado workshop in the shoe industry (chapters 6, 7). el podenco: Alicia’s father, a sharecropper (chapter 8). el rociero See Rico, Pedro. xxi

xxii

Dramatis Personae

esteban: Pharmaceutical worker, friend of Tomás, and part of the cuadrilla that includes Diego and Pilar.(chapter 7). fuentes, victoriano, jr.: Son of Victoriano Fuentes Sr. and an hombre de confianza to José Mariano Lara, from whom he rented land. Politically, a Falangista (see chapter 4). Also known as Tio Ciriaco. fuentes, victoriano, sr.: Coachman for José Mariano Lara (chapter 4). gamero, conchita: Homeworker, covering heels, previously a jornalera and also braided esparto grass. From a jornalero family (chapters 5, 7). gamero vila, marisol: Aparadora, previously a homeworker, now works in El Cubano’s workshop. A cousin of Tomás (chapter 7). garcés: Owner of the local Robins shoe factory (chapter 7). garcía, ismael: Member of the Unión General de Trabajadores and industrial worker in a local rug factory. Virginia Nogales’s husband (chapter 8). garcía, jaime: Agricultural worker, sometimes in aniaga relationships, sometimes in jornalero relationships. The son of Tio Ponarro, an aniaga worker, he worked for a long time for Tio Perico, a medium-sized land owner (chapter 4). gema: Esteban’s sister. Works as an aparadora in a local workshop (chapter 7). gil, alba: Aparadora in the Ivanshoes factory and daughter of José Gil Jr. and Consuelo Pereda (chapter 5). gil, josé, jr.: Jornalero and son of José Gil Sr. Socialist, elected mayor after the transition (chapters 5, 6). gil, josé, sr.: Socialist day laborer strongly engaged in politics before and after the civil war. He was key in the reconstitution of the local socialist union during the Franco regime and occasionally worked as a mayoral for José Mariano Lara (chapters 3, 5, 6). gutiérrez, roberto: Distributor of homework in the shoe industry. His wife, Mónica, and his daughter, Montse, work for him, as do many of his neighbors (chapter 6). iglesias, josé (pepe): Son of a large tenant, he started working as a corredor before the war and became a powerful black marketeer and local powerbroker. Father of Pablo (chapter 3). iglesias, pablo: Son of Pepe Iglesias. Vice-mayor for cultural issues, with socialist leanings (chapter 8). lara fernández, josé mariano: Large landowner and part of the powerful Lara family. Before the war he and his brother Juan were the main caciques. He owned the finca Lo de Vera (chapters 3, 4). lorenzo, fernando: Day laborer with socialist leanings. Son of Miguel Lorenzo Sr., a guard in the finca Lo de Vera for José Mariano Lara, brother of cañizo factory owner Miguel Lorenzo Jr., and uncle of cañizo firm owner Fernando Lorenzo (chapters 3, 6). Also known as Tio Cornelio. lorenzo, miguel, jr.: Son of Miguel Lorenzo Sr., he married Florencia Romero and became the head of an important cañizo firm, now headed by his son Emilio. Eventually his son Fernando Lorenzo branched out into another cañizo firm (chapter 6). lorenzo, miguel, sr.: Guard for the finca Lo de Vera (chapter 4). mariano: Member of a workers’ cooperative manufacturing wooden boxes for packaging agricultural produce. Husband of Celia (chapter 7).

Dramatis Personae

xxiii

marín, joaquín: Large landowner and moneylender. President of the local irrigation association during most of the Franco regime (chapter 3). muñoz lara, emilio: Doctor and landowner. Member of the Lara family, thinks of himself as as socialist. President of the local Cámara Agraria (Chamber of Agriculture) during the transition (chapter 8). nogales, virginia: Daughter of Pedro Nogales Pereda, committed to socialist ideas (chapter 8). nogales cardona, fernando: Day laborer with socialist leanings, involved with his brother in petty estraperlo after the civil war (chapter 3). nogales pereda, pedro: Teacher, socialist mayor during the Republic, later imprisoned and purged (chapter 8). olaf: Commercial agent for the shoe industry (chapter 7). pereda, camila: Multi-occupational worker from a jornalero family. Sister of Consuelo and Amelia (chapters 6, 7). pereda, consuelo: Homeworker covering heels, previously a day laborer. Wife of José Gil Jr. and sister of Camila and Amelia (chapter 5). ramírez gamero, tomás: Teacher from a jornalero family. Worked on assembly lines in several workshops and in the Robins factory. Nephew of Conchita Gamero (chapter 7). rico, pedro: Labrador in the finca Lo de Vera (chapter 4). Also known as El Riociero. roldán, marcos: Head (with his brother-in-law) of a small artisanal broom manufacturing firm that eventually disappeared. Married to María José Romero, a sister of Paulino Romero Jr. (chapter 6). romero, florencio: Founder of the first local broom factory in Catral. Father of Florencia Romero and Paulino Romero Sr. (chapter 6). romero, paulino, jr.: Head of one of the main cañizo manufacturing firms and son of Paulino Romero Sr. (chapter 6). tio ciriaco: See Fuentes, Victoriano, Jr. tio cornelio: See Lorenzo, Fernando.

To Barcelona

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Valencia

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SPAIN

Map Area

VALENCIA

C ASTILLA– LA MANCHA

To Madrid Almansa

Alcoy Villena

ALIC ANTE Vin alo pó

Ri

Crevillente Albatera

v er

Alicante

Elche Dolores Catral

MEDITERRANEAN SEA

Cox a gur Se

Guardamar del Segura

Orihuela

R iv er

Callosa del Segura

Murcia La Marina

MURCIA

Cartagena

0

10

Map 1. The Vega Baja del Segura and Surrounding Area.

20

30

40 km

chapter 1

Toward an Anthropological Framework for Studying Contemporary Europe

First and foremost this book is a historical account of people who seek a livelihood by threading their way through agricultural, manufacturing, and service pursuits in a rural area of southeastern Spain. But it is also an exploration of the possibilities of ethnography as a means of understanding the history of the highly complex, fractured, crisis-ridden world of today. As such, this book is directed to readers concerned about finding a comprehensible perspective on that world while simultaneously being deeply engaged within that world—an audience interested in people and places, an audience far wider than our colleagues in anthropology. Ethnography has conventionally been associated with “place” in the sense that physically or metaphorically the anthropologist “travels there” (Clifford, 1997: 17–46) and, once “there,” does fieldwork “in which the whole self physically and in every other way enters the space of the world the researcher seeks to understand” (Ortner, 1995: 173). In the more literal reading, insofar as ethnography is about place— how places are peopled and how people are placed—it has something in common with other kinds of study of the production and retention of place. Over the past fifteen years, as capitalist forms have undergone moebius strip–like changes (Sabel, 1991), there has been a fluorescence of such studies in a wide variety of social science disciplines. With the striking exception of David Harvey’s work, much of this literature on the social constitution of place has gone unremarked in our own discipline, while conceptualizations long developed and debated among ethnogra1

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Framework for Studying Europe

phers are taken up unproblematically in those studies. This is especially so with respect to the use of history and culture for understanding the present. A more metaphorical reading of place and travel would probably rest more comfortably with most of today’s anthropologists, as Ortner’s caveat of “in every other way” suggests: “in every other way enters the space of the world the researcher seeks to understand.” We have no problem with such a journey, though we feel that the need to experience the space of other people’s worlds is only part of ethnography. By confining themselves to the exploration of “experience,” “identity,” “everyday practices,” and the like, anthropologists run the risk of reproducing the shallow image of their discipline and of culture so often found in studies of place uninformed by a thoroughly multidimensional ethnography. Here we present a particular account of some people in Spain with whom we have lived but on whom we have a perspective also as intellectuals, social scientists, or anthropologists. We seek to make a case for a particular way of doing this which we see to be different from recent studies of place in other disciplines and different too from ethnography understood in uniquely cultural terms. We call this “historical realism,” a notion to which we devote much of this first chapter.

historical realism The world is changing. The capitalist economy and society on which the founding figures of social science honed their conceptual tools no longer looks as it did to them. Though industrial capitalism or the modern state that so obsessed Marx, Simmel, Durkheim, and Weber may not have been superseded, still Marx’s industrial England or Durkheim’s modern France would seem idiosyncratic places to begin an exploration of economy and society in the twenty-first century. How then might we study today’s economy and society in a way that is sensitive to contemporary realities while not shying away from the deeply felt responsibilities of scholarship these earlier writers felt? We seek to do this through ethnography. But in making our ethnographic inquiry sensitive to the complexities of today’s reality as well as responsive to scholarship committed to political change, we seek to produce an especially rigorous, historically grounded kind of ethnography (Smith, 1994). As a form of inquiry, ethnography currently spans academic disciplines ranging from anthropology and sociology to geography, political science, and history as well as a wide range of methodological and theoretical positions (Wacquant, 2003: 2). Yet this renewed


3

centrality of ethnography as an expression of a different understanding of our responsibilities as social scientists has to be both noted and queried. Defining ethnography as “social research based on the closeup, on-the-ground observation of people and institutions in real time and space, in which the investigator embeds herself near (or within) the phenomenon so as to detect how and why agents on the scene act, think and feel the way they do,” Wacquant also highlights its role as a “form of public consciousness” (2003: 1). In this book we use ethnography—both as a mode of inquiry and as a form of political engagement—from the perspective of historical realism. The object of our study is the social relationships that produce— historically—an economic “factor” that has recently been described as “social capital” and has been attached to particular spaces or territories in what has been termed by social scientists and economic historians “regional economy,” “industrial district,” or even “economic nationalism.” Methodologically, we stress a multilevel approach by highlighting the dialectical tension between the social practices we observe and the concepts and models we construct, which then feed back into the discourses and practices observed, mainly through the implementation of development programs and policies. We seek thus to problematize the issue of place in the context of contemporary capitalism, an issue that addresses the anthropologist or sociologist interested in revived expressions of locality in a globalizing world as much as the geographer or economist interested in the benefits to be gained for a regional economy from its “local culture.” For some social scientists the critique of the grand narratives of the Enlightenment led to an increased stress on various forms of ethnography, in an attempt to understand the ways this vast world is experienced on an everyday basis by ordinary people. Few who spend long stretches of time doing fieldwork would reject this agenda. Yet we become uncomfortable when our fine-grained attention to people’s lives, as experienced daily, leaves us no room to address the currents of force and tendency that underlie those daily experiences—currents sometimes historically produced, sometimes arising from diffuse sources beyond the local sites of daily experience. So it is our goal in this book to work at the interface between people’s articulated experiences and feelings and the obscured connections, currents, and relationships of social reproduction and—always immanent—transformation. The challenge to ethnography is great: what part of the Hydra to tackle first? One recent anthropological study of Europe goes immediately for the head(s?)—Cris Shore’s Building Europe (2000; see also

4


Abélès, 1992, 1996; Bellier, 1999)—while another—Douglas Holmes’s Integral Europe (2000)—applies George Marcus’s (1998) injunction to do “multi-sited ethnography.” Both make distinctive and important contributions to the study of the current conjuncture through political anthropology and cultural history. Meanwhile, Producing Culture and Capital, Yanagisako’s (2002) ethnography of entrepreneurs in northern Italy’s Como district, addresses the culture of small capitalists (see also Blim, 1990; Rothstein and Blim, 1992). Yet for us something is absent. The dimension of capitalist reproduction and the necessary forms of regulation it requires keep tugging at our sleeves, as we try to get on with studying the politics and culture of people’s daily lives. The specificities we encounter from one time and place to another lead us to a particular way of deciding what first steps to take in trying to understand the Europe of the twenty-first century. This has to do with the way space is being reconstituted across the continent. A key figure in the discourse of today’s Europe is the ubiquitous yet amorphous term “region,” with the integration of Europe being envisaged along the lines of “regional economies.” There is no reason such a history of spatial forms might not be understood in terms of its implications for changes in social experience; this is what Raymond Williams did in seeking out “structures of feeling” in nineteenth-century England in his study The Country and the City (1973; see also1988). They might on the other hand be understood in terms of the structural logics of capitalist production and regulation, what David Harvey undertook in his Limits to Capital (1982). But the fault line of our own explorations runs somewhere between these two geographies, seeking to discover the dialectical constitution of the one by the other: a history in which people [re-]produce concrete and abstract artifacts for life, these concrete abstractions then providing the landscape that conditions subsequent generations’ reproduction and transformation. We term this kind of approach “historical realism” (Smith, 1999, 2004b), and in the next section we explain how such an approach gave rise to an agenda and set of priorities—that is, a problematic—that led us to a particular place and a particular entwining of our histories.

in search of a social world Our analysis entwines three different kinds of attention to reality. The first requires the inquirer to seek elements of reality that help him or her characterize the reproductive features of the current political economy


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narrowly conceived. Were we to disaggregate the term, we would see the “political” within this frame in terms of Wolf’s “structural” power and the “economy” in terms of what David Harvey (2001), following Marx in the Grundrisse, calls the “concrete abstractions” that condition the possibilities of social reproduction. This would mean attending to the historically specific “deployment of social labour [and] how people are drawn into the social ensemble” (Wolf, 1999: 289–90) as well as to the conditions of material production (machines, technologies, etc.) and the historical impress of such things on the landscape in the form of roads, irrigation channels, and prisons. So we devote all of chapter 2 to the historical geography of the area, and throughout our chapters we try to place social practices and cultural expressions within the settings of these concrete, but nonetheless silent and obscured, abstractions of capitalist reproduction. Our second lens is more familiar to people doing fieldwork in the tradition of social anthropology. We call this the lens of “instituted social practices.” We add “instituted” to the normal phrase “social practices” to allude to the way practices become part of the albeit malleable frame that organizes agency. This concept approximates Bourdieu’s (1977) habitus, though whereas Bourdieu is especially exercised over the dialectical constitution of practices and the emergent elective affinities that then structure them, we note the additional structuring effect of concrete abstractions as we have just described them.1 It would be hard to select any one part of our book to illustrate this particular focus, but our persistent attention to real people, addressing actual circumstances in their lives, probably best reflects our commitment to this element of social reality. Finally, our third kind of attention to the social world alerts us to the ways people interpret their social world in the immediate practical moment of living it. Here the “facted-ness” of the world as it presents itself is suspended in favor of a particular kind of interpretive sensibility. We invoke Raymond Williams’s expression “structures of feeling,” a term he used in a thoroughly historicist sense to describe the essentially collective sensibility of an epoch. In writing on the development of the country-house novels of nineteenth-century England, for example, Williams explored how these works both silently invoked and actively constituted a structure of feeling that gave rise to a specific meaning of “the country” and “the city” as “knowable” communities.2 Likewise, we employ histories (in the plural) to show how concrete abstractions, instituted practices, and structures of feeling are reciprocally

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conditioning and enabling (Roseberry, 1989). Ultimately the goal, the project, of such a sociological exercise is to discover the praxis of people hidden in the undergrowth and potentially unearthed by our intellectual contribution. It is hard to select bits of the overall cake that would demonstrate the moments when our attention is so drawn in this ethnography— though perhaps chapter 8, on political cultures, offers the most sustained example. But the more important point is that, seen over a historical period, changing concrete abstractions combine with the agency of people’s practice to change the conditions that confront them. Language, gestures, and sighs, patterned by the structures of feeling of a given place and time, then make those things knowable. And these taken together—concrete abstractions, practiced agency, and structured feeling—cast each of us into a particular kind of person: a historicized social subject/agent. This study focuses on an area in the Valencia Autonomous Community, to the south of Alicante. There has been a long history of prosperous irrigated agriculture here, combined with small manufacturing. Pockets of product-specific manufacturing centers go back a long way, one town and its surroundings making rugs, another ropes, and yet another shoes. The growing of commercial crops sold on international markets has a long history here too. There is a significant history of interlocking agricultural and manufacturing production rather than a separation of industrial town and agricultural country. Moreover, for both the male and female populations, geographic mobility, small-scale manufacturing, large-scale factory employment, and service work were variously experienced. In the 1970s, to these preexisting modes of production came the demands of the new international division of labor—first, and with greatest influence, affecting local shoe production but also taking in other manufacturing and service activities in the nonagricultural sector. With changes over the subsequent thirty years, the overall pattern was one in which a small local firm, and in a few cases branches of larger firms, organized production through a workforce located in its legally registered factory, plus a much larger workforce spread out in a “putting-out” system. Putting-out involves both stages of work undertaken in semilegal workshops and stages undertaken through homework. In the home, from the initial wife’s contribution, we move—through her already established network—to an extensive set of subcontract and then subsubcontract homework. Through the 1970s and 1980s, homeworking women were likely to be part of an agricultural household and, as a result, under extreme


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pressure. Of that period, Smith wrote (1990; see also Sanchis, 1984; for Catalonia, see Narotzky, 1989, 1990, 2000, 2001): The demands for work on the family’s own farm are erratic—the husband/ father for example, may get a day’s work and, finding a task on the farm incomplete, will put pressure on his wife or daughter to put aside the home work in favour of the farm. . . . [Meanwhile] work distributors, anxious to minimize the amount of travelling and contacting they have to do . . . encourage women to take large batches by paying geometrically higher rates up to the last item completed. To acquire these rates, home working women, already under pressure from their farming husbands, may speak for excessive batch sizes with a view to off-loading some to a neighbour.

Such a complex set of social relationships is built on a long history of extensive interpersonal networks. Over time, personal claims extending outward from immediate family to extended family, neighbors, community members, and so on became an institutionalized component of everyday life. Moreover, these complex sets of ties also served to offset regional instability produced partly by unpredictable climate, partly by trade cycles, but most significantly by the elusive character of firms themselves. When changing economic and policy conditions arose by the end of the 1980s, providing government endorsement for “flexible” and deregulated firms and labor practices while severely undermining local agriculture, this already thoroughly “informalized” economy was made still more informal. A primary means of social regulation became the invention of crises and the inducement of pervasive insecurity. Often, for example, firms transmogrified from production to intermediary status, but entirely for evasive reasons. Registered firms declare bankruptcy and close one day, only to open the next with the original shell firm now operating entirely in a merchant capacity, leasing the old machinery either to a “cooperative” or to a now wholly illicit subcontract shop made up of workers who agree to reduced wages, safety, and benefits to get the contract from their old boss. The pattern is a familiar one: while officially registered firms and employment figures in the industry declined, overall shoe production increased. Superficially this looks like a response to recession, but in fact the atmosphere of crisis and disorganization was ideologically constructed to justify forms of labor regulation that generated personal insecurity and fragmented collective responses. And this has a long history. Ruling groups’ attempts to control ordinary people through induced insecurity and attacks on collective responses are well established in the

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area. Thus, alongside this organization of economy and society we found a kind of alienation from public politics among the people we worked with, and this too became a major element of the problematic we began to form as we gave shape to our study. Though, needless to say, there is much about all this that is specific to this region and to these people—indeed much of our argument stresses the importance of recognizing specificity—the insecurities, the strains on families and individuals, the sense of alienation from the direction the economy is taking, and political projects being formulated in “higher places” are all widely felt among people trying to put together a livelihood in many parts of contemporary Europe. One might address this with an “ethnography of the present,” focusing on the way people in this area experience their daily lives today and trying to evoke the particular character of that experience. This is certainly one way we, as anthropologists, have approached the situation—but, again, it is only one dimension of our inquiry. Indeed we feel strongly that current anthropology has narrowed its focus far too much to an agenda that appears to refer only to issues of “culture” or “experience” of “the local” and “the everyday.” Our discomfort with this current strain of anthropology can partly be explained by our respective backgrounds. We are both shiftless Europeans. Susana, having her early education in Spain and France, had migrated to the United States to do her doctorate and subsequently returned to Spain. Gavin, born in England and having his early education there, moved to North America at seventeen but returned to England for his doctorate. After earlier fieldwork in Peru, Gavin began a long period of ethnography in southern Valencia. As the stuff of that fieldwork—the data, the personal interactions, the gaps and highlights—began to take some kind of narrative and theoretical form, he felt a growing urgency to join his perceptions and ongoing work with Spanish scholars working in and on Spain. And so we met at one of a series of workshops held by French and Spanish anthropologists with the support of Maurice Godelier, on the issue of social transitions. Committed to the importance of historical ethnography, both of us also felt strongly that comparison too enriches ethnography. Although this book is not formally a comparative ethnography, it is fundamentally informed by Susana’s earlier fieldwork in Catalonia as well as the work we did together (with the help of Clare Belanger and Simone Ghezzi) in La Brianza, a regional economy of northern Italy. So, as we talked about our political and intellectual interests, we became convinced that the


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sum of our separate endeavors would be far greater if we worked together: Gavin, as a European something of an insider but as a Canadian anthropologist also an outsider; Susana both European and Spanish though with great familiarity with Anglophone anthropology; and the two of us sharing theoretical and political concerns—a sharing that has increased over the years we have worked together. For us social inquiry should always be clearly situated within a stated political project, and both of us had been embroiled in a debate in which the concept of class was essential to the political project of understanding social and cultural difference as well as a crucial lever for transforming unequal social relations to attain undifferentiated opportunities of livelihood. So, working against what we believed was the current in both anthropology and the other social sciences, we felt we needed a form of doing ethnography that would retain a way of sorting out the complexity of the social world by using class as the guiding conceptual base. Yet we were not so much interested in the various structural properties of class, be they Weberian social strata or Marxian relations to the means of production (Ossowski, 1969), as in the principles that led theorists to stress class in the first place. We were thinking, for example, of Marx’s image of society in which the process of social reproduction generates structural contradictions which, in turn, are resolved—technologically through greater overall productivity, geographically through displacements of capital across space or, most important, through the outcome of social conflicts—conflicts that cluster people around the control of property and the necessity to offer out labor. However far we may have moved into a postmodern condition, or a postindustrial society, we have by no means moved away from a kind of society in which “the reproduction of daily life depends upon the production of commodities produced through a system of circulation of capital that has profit-seeking as its direct and socially accepted goal” (Harvey, 1985: 128), and it therefore seems to us that anthropologists have a responsibility to address this fundamental characteristic of social reproduction under capitalism. So this is the first reason why, for us, class remains central to ethnographic inquiry. A second characteristic of the spirit that led authors on the Left to focus on the crucial features of class, strongly associated with the work of Edward Thompson, might be summed up as the proposition that it is only through collective action that subordinated people have any leverage on power and that, while there are many lines and shapes through which collectivities can be expressed, there remains a crucial organic

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link between collectivities of class and the retention or transformation of capitalism. This second element was especially important to us precisely because of its apparent absence from everyday life in our field site. Why absent? Because such collectivities, as structures of feeling, as models of social relations, and as leverage to political empowerment and agency, had been the objects of severe attack through history and continuing into the present, an attack that took on particular force in the years following the Spanish civil war. Indeed, it is in the wake of this attack that the kind of world we have described above has become configured in recent hegemonic discourse as one of regional economies—a “Europe of the regions.” These are new configurations that downplay the structural and political features of class as a means of understanding historical process. They favor instead an understanding of social practices, experiences, and relationships in terms of corporatist collective values, local knowledge, and emotional propinquity. In place of a complex history loaded with the tensions of contradiction, conflict, resolution, and transformation, we get an audit of their entrepreneurial “social” and “cultural” possibilities (and failures thereof), a balance sheet of pluses and minuses: “flexible production,” “downsizing and dispersed firms,” and “social capital.” A responsibility of our social inquiry was, therefore, to find the traces from which collective strengths could be reconstituted. Even so, as we familiarized ourselves with the literature, we found historians, economists, and sociologists working on Europe (Berg et al., 1983; Bagnasco, 1977; Piore and Sabel, 1984) who increasingly paid attention to something like organized petty capitalism. A new model of the development of the market economy, taking account of social “externalities,” was becoming increasingly popular as a “third way”—a more viable and even humane mode of organizing capitalism. While this seemed to confirm to us that these other ways of organizing labor/capital relations were indeed significant, it also made us conscious that we must understand two rather different phenomena simultaneously: the practices and relations we could find in a loosely predefined economic area, and the economic models for developing regions along the lines of networks, social markets, flexible firms, and so on that experts and policymakers in Europe are generating today. Moreover, we soon recognized a dialectical relation between the two levels, for developmental policies (regulatory or deregulating practices, subsidies, etc.) were providing crucial conditions giving direction to the practices and relations we were seeing in the field. They provided specific material resources


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that people had to claim in particular ways, of course, but they also affected people’s lives more generally. The way people thought about their own lives and the social space they inhabited was threaded through hegemonic discourses that highlighted the region as cohering under the general rubric of an “entrepreneurial culture,” or what was termed “economic nationalism.”3 Our sense was that such conditions, strikingly at variance with the classical Manchester model of industrial development, were widespread, and so we sought a setting where such a pattern was both historically deep and currently thriving. In Spain, Gavin had done previous fieldwork in the area of the Valencia Autonomous Community described by economic historians (Nadal, 1990; Lluch, 1976; Aracil and Bonafé, 1978) as one of those regions where a different sort of capitalism had developed during the nineteenth century. The area south of Alicante presented a landscape of small family firms and a mix of commercial agriculture and manufacturing industries. Less well known was the presence there of a mix of political radicalism and extreme conservatism, going far back into the nineteenth century. Gavin had been interested in pluriactivity in his 1978–79 fieldwork, and this seemed to sum up many of the main issues we wanted to observe in detail. Pluriactivity directly raised this question: What happens with class when the process of social reproduction generates a structure of constant uncertainty and fluidity in peoples’ life destinies so that the classical oppositional experience between labor and capital does not prevail? Aware of the radical changes taking place in the labor process of capitalist production in Europe then, we intentionally sought an area that would not fall neatly within the frame of the classical capitalist definition of a “developed economy” with an efficient market system regulating labor/capital relations. Instead we were looking for a region that, while long inserted into commodity production, indeed into the entire circuit of national and international capitalist trade, nonetheless exhibited forms of relations of production that differed from the classical model. But then the question shifted into pragmatic gear: insofar as there was no longer a homogeneous working experience among the people of the region, like that of classical Fordist industry, for example, was class still a useful concept? So fragmented had people’s livelihood experiences become that the way their insertion into the processes of social reproduction related to their social identity and their historical praxis became ever harder to trace. Working through the complexities of these issues

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over the years has given form to the way we wanted to make the inquiry: first in reference to the locality or the scope of our observation, second in reference to the need to embed history deeply into our observations. We needed historical depth if we wanted to understand the main forces of social reproduction, and we knew we could get this through the work done by Valencian economic and social historians of the region. But we also needed the nuanced narratives of particular histories if we were to get at the lived experience of people. So the fact that we had life histories for the region that went back to the beginning of the twentieth century was key for us. Key too was the fact that the Valencian fieldwork had been carried out at an especially important political moment, during the first years of the transition from Franco’s regime to parliamentary democracy, when Gavin had observed and recorded firsthand the debates emerging around the first democratic municipal elections after forty years of dictatorship. Susana, in particular, thought that firsthand data on that period of Spanish history would be extremely useful to get an idea of the public expression of class issues. Even so, we did not want to think of this as the “return” of the anthropologist, twenty years later, to record the changes that had occurred from an older to a more modern type of society (see Collier, 1999). Rather, we were interested in tracing a process of social reproduction— the historical continuities and ruptures—that produce and constrain people’s practices. But it was not only practices that interested us; we also wanted to attend to how these are experienced by people as historical subjects, and then how they become institutionalized to constitute the cultural environment. This, then, was not really just an ethnography of the daily life of ordinary people, nor was it an audit sheet used to frame the successes and handicaps of a regional economy in Europe. For us history is not so much the background to the present as two synchronic moments—one in the past, the other in the present. History is the necessary way to understand society—as the varied means by which the social reproduction of a particular kind of social system—capitalism— becomes a lived part of the present.

naming the present The way social scientists name phenomena in this real world has implications for ordinary people’s lived present. In this section we show how this process has unfolded—from the notion of articulated modes of production to that of an informalized economy, and thence to the current


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designation: “regional economy”. Aware as we are of these changing designations and their implications, we make a case for a particular kind of historical anthropology that attends to the specific ways power is used to make exploitation possible and, over time, gives form to various kinds of social person. In the 1960s several regions west and southwest of the port city of Alicante became sites of small and medium-sized firms producing shoes for the national and international market. These included the areas around Elda and Novelda, the Vinalopó to the west of Elche, and the area we are interested in, the Vega Baja, south of Elche. As demand for shoes grew through the decade, a particular form of vertical integration took place. At the marketing end, some of the more successful companies became quite strongly tied into U.S. retail firms—conforming not just to design requirements but often to particular features of a labor process, and in most cases relying on credit advances from Americans. At the production end, the factory-based labor force was supplemented by short-contract workshops usually making basic primary inputs and located in Elche itself, together with women working at home along a continuum ranging from specialized skills employed steadily to very minor jobs on an entirely short-term and ad hoc basis. As the distribution system became more sophisticated and union organization in Elche drove up urban wages, the dispersal of production began to spread outward toward towns farther from the center, and this was soon followed by the construction of factories in towns of the Vega Baja. Simultaneously capital dependence on the United States was reduced as entrepreneurs sought to develop a broader array of markets for their goods. As a result, a far more complex set of relationships between factories, workshops, work distributors, and homeworkers came into existence. To a great extent, what was happening in Elche was but one variation of changing patterns of manufacturing production throughout Europe. Though clothing production is the best known, exemplified by Laura Ashley in Britain and Bennetton in Italy, closer to our own site the Ford Motor Company, after careful and much publicized research, had located its Fiesta assembly plant immediately south of the city of Valencia. This was regarded as a major coup for Spain versus the more prominent industrial nations in Europe, and for the País Valenciano in particular, so how was such a coup carried off? Apart from the anodyne point that the site was well located at the nexus of key communications axes, the decision seems to have been based on the realpolitik of national and

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regional power and class structures. Francoist technocrats went out of their way to assure Ford of the future continuity of the authoritarian regime (Lluch, 1976; Picó López, 1976). In doing so they undoubtedly stressed not only local workers’ long-standing familiarity with manufacturing techniques but also the absence of collective militancy associated with mass production factories. The Fiesta plant represented a significant shift toward renewed capital interest in the broad area of the Levante or Valencia, otherwise popularly known for its oranges and market gardens. Increasingly relatively well-off yeoman farmers began to shift to less labor-intensive crops, either themselves becoming pluriactive families4 or clustering together as seven or eight family farms and contracting out all the care and harvesting of their citrus crops to “machine-contractors.” As Arnalte Alegre (1980) noted, a subtle and complex new social system was coming into being that would both industrialize agriculture and ruralize industry. What then was the imagery techocrats used to represent these processes? Beneath the bucolic rurality of an area superficially known for its rich, irrigated agriculture and directed toward international markets were revealed important segments of the population skilled with manufacturing machinery or proficient in commercial activity. The result was a culture especially suitable to Ford’s needs: directing their attention to the daily pragmatics of making their small enterprises respond to changing opportunities, these people were economically adaptable while having no inclination toward redemptive politics. Faced with some shift or other in their socioeconomic environment, their response would be to seek out some change in the economic targets to which they could direct their labors, not to simply down tools and complain or, like the French farmers across the border, demonstrate in Paris, conduct lightening attacks on supermarkets selling foreign agricultural produce, or highjack the Barcelona–Paris express. (Lem, 1999). We should remember that we are speaking of the early seventies here. In the press and in policy documents, industry was certainly seen as a major issue for Europe’s future, but there was also the question of the family farm, its viability and survival. Valencia appeared to be offering a way forward through the introduction of industry into rural areas. Among academics two other images were being employed, both originating in recent studies of the Third World. Largely inspired by Marxist work, writers noted the superimposition on a preexisting mode of production (albeit itself a variant of rural capitalism) of a new mode of production that took advantage of elements of the older form, though


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thereby distorting many of its elements (Servolin, 1972; Faure, 1978; Vergopoulos, 1978). Anyone who knew the Valencian case well was quite aware that industry was far from new, much of it aided and abetted by the processing work that formed the crucial value-added on many of the agricultural products traditional to the zone: hemp, esparto, cotton, silk-worm breeding, and vines.5 A second body of literature, best captured in The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries (Portes, Castells, and Benton, 1989; see also Redclift and Mingione, 1985; Pahl, 1984, 1988), began to draw attention to the particular features of work that were crucial to the survival of many, perhaps even most, European working people and certainly of growing significance to the well-being of national economies as a whole. Castells and Portes, in the introduction to their collection, showed what brought the issue of the informal economy to prominence in the West. The issue of how to define something called “the informal economy,” they said, was far less important than recording the process in which Western economies were becoming increasingly informalized—sectors of the economy hitherto functioning through relatively stable, hierarchical, and bureaucratic institutions being replaced by less visible, less permanent, and less stable alternatives. That such a characterization was well suited to the Valencian reality was reflected in the publication by the Institució Valenciana d’Estudis i Investigació of La Otra Economía: Trabajo Negro y Sector Informal (Sanchis y Miñana, 1988) as well as the translation by the institute of texts dealing with rural industry and submerged economies (e.g., Houssel, 1985). Especially notable figures in this work were Enric Sanchis (1984) and Josep Ybarra (1986). What began to occur in this second kind of characterization of economic processes in Valencia was a shift of inquiry from the nature of capital to the nature of labor and of work and livelihood. Despite their different focuses, when taken together the effect of these images was a paradigm shift in theories of capitalist development. Studies showing the historical embeddedness of a form of capitalist production in southern Europe that had its own characteristics quite distinct from the hegemonic models of northern industrialization combined with studies showing systematically, not just that informal forms of work were taking on increasing importance throughout Europe (as indeed they were), but that in different degrees and forms they had been part of people’s livelihoods and hence of national economies throughout the so-called industrial period.

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Whether by chance or design, shoe firms in Elche, furniture manufacturers in Castellón, or the Ford plant near Valencia were able to take advantage of a whole series of sociological and cultural features that came with a society many of us had been told no longer existed—one in which a relatively effective commercial agriculture operated alongside rural artisan production.6 For the economic historians of the region, the crucial question was why this path had not developed into a highway; for those working on the informalization of the regional economy, the pressing issue was to record the social costs of the transformation of older social arrangements for the purposes of what appeared to be an especially rapacious kind of capitalism. Yet the convergence of these two intellectual currents—beyond Spain and Valencia—was to produce an entirely opposite reading. The nightmare scenes of Grimm’s fairy tales were to be given a Disneyesque new life by reinventing the articulation of modes of production and the undeniable informalization of the European economy in the form of dispersed production chains, social markets, plus flexible firms and workers, all packaged together spatially in successful regional economies. In the hands of Piore and Sabel (1984), it turned out that the path of regionally intertwined small-scale dispersed systems of production had not failed in the Darwinian sense. Their early demise had been urged on by the godfatherly attentions of a deeply antiregional state (see also Sabel and Zeitlin, 1984). Where these attentions had been especially thorough, budding utopias had been disappeared, lost to historians and silenced in the discourse of industrial development programs. Luckily, where the state had been more inept, or perhaps too preoccupied elsewhere, notably in Italy, there were signs of the resilience of this kind of upsidedown economy—where trust was as important as competition, where market strategies were rendered “impure” by actors’ persistent retention of social calculi in their decisions, where closely guarded and well-walled formal firms gave way to clusterings of operations that dovetailed into networks that formed around longer- or shorter-term projects. Clearly the implications for policy were devastating. Where an older school of thought had sought to discover why an economy like nineteenth-century Valencia’s had failed to take off because of local elements that distinguished it from the more successful northern Manchester model, now it turned out there were jewels hidden within the Valencian crown, only to be discovered. Where some people might see child labor in Italy, for example, Sabel was able to identify the careful nurturing of a family-based apprenticeship system.


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It would be naïve to imagine that these changing images of more or less the same reality had no effect on ordinary people trying to make a living from day to day, as well as trying, where possible, to imagine what a realistic future might be for them and their children. Early writing on the informalization of the European economy took a generally critical stance toward the phenomenon and encouraged policies directed against its spread. By contrast, the newer regional economy literature is itself invariably developed to produce policy that will enhance the features of social life that render the regional economy more competitive.

histories of the present Absent from both of the aforementioned sociological images—the informalization of economic life or its conceptualization in terms of a socialized regional economy—is a historical exploration of the role of class relations and the changing vectors of power that ensured the ongoing extraction of surplus value from people’s labor. While assessments of local resources of social capital or the suppleness of flexible labor may have some practical policy payoffs, more critical is the need to explore, through a history of the present, the various leverages, restraints, movements, and roadblocks that were the expression and constitution of power and the linchpins of differentiations: not one neat and ordered history of a regional economy with an appended local culture but multiple histories and a heterogeneity of actors with quite different notions of what might be celebrated in the local culture. As it turns out, the history the technocrats had drawn for Ford with respect to politics was convenient, abbreviated, and superficial. There was nothing natural—or even cultural—about Valencianos’ disinclination toward revindicative politics. It is just possible that Franco’s technocrats were entirely unaware that the first anarchist international was held nearby, in Alcoy in the 1870s, but they can hardly have forgotten that Valencia was the final seat of the Republican government in 1939, or that the province of Alicante to the south had shown strong support for the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores. Even so, the denial of working people’s political past has a long history in the region (if not in Spain more broadly), which extends to the present. Still, firms like Ford were onto something when they sought out and found a body of people who were prepared to work that extra sweated hour, were forever scanning the horizon for the vector of economic change that would call for a quick shift in their tactics, and whose rela-

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tion to family and friends reflected the picaresque necessities of such livelihood projects. But the histories of this present are complex indeed. When the shoe industry became such a strong presence in the Vega Baja, it was by no means the introduction of a new product or process onto a social and economic tabula rasa. The region had long been Spain’s major producer of rope sandals (alpargatas) used by the vast majority of working people in the early part of the twentieth century (Bernabé Maestre, 1976).7 Relying on the agricultural production and processing of hemp fiber, alpargatas too did not arise ex nihilo. Prior to being Spain’s major supplier of footwear, the region had been the major producer of sails—in huge demand by Spain’s vast seagoing fleets—and subsequently rope and fishnets, all relying on hemp cultivation and processing into fiber. Even in the present, shoes are by no means the only manufactured item produced in the region. Crevillente performs an analogous role in the production of carpets and rugs to Elche’s role in the production of shoes; dolls, dolls clothing, and other toys are also produced throughout the area. All this might suggest that manufacturing was complementary to agricultural development. And though this may have been so with respect to agricultural produce, it was certainly not so for labor, nor to a lesser extent for land. When placed within the broader rubric of Spanish agriculture in the nineteenth century, the Vega Baja was in many ways neither fish nor foul—neither the site of viable small farms found in some parts of the north nor monopolized by the latifundia system of Andalusia. The beneficiary of an ancient irrigation system based on the Segura River, the area had not been very successful in using this system for the intensive agriculture that could have produced medium-sized farms, as for example in Catalonia. This is explained in part by the holding of much of the Vega Baja by large, aristocratic landlords, similar to Spain farther south. These owners used the resources of power deriving from a hierarchical society to keep the cost of labor low and thereby reduce the need for investments in fixed capital (including soil and irrigation maintenance and seed and fertilizer experimentation as well as machinery). The result was that every advance in industrial production within or on the periphery of the region, while apparently almost incidentally producing a useful demand for some agricultural crop, much more obviously and threateningly also produced a demand for labor. Indeed, while a steady demand from local manufacturing for commercial agricultural produce was useful, much more notable has been the huge swings from


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one export-driven crop to another. Long a producer of olive oil and, to a lesser extent, wheat, the area was affected by the phylloxera crisis in France at the end of the nineteenth century, which produced a goldrushlike shift to vine production. Olive trees were ripped out and replaced by vines, though in many cases by the time the five-year maturity of the stock had been reached the boom was over and the demand for wine declined. Then, after 1939 and the civil war, Franco’s policy of autarchy for Spain gave rise to a hemp boom more thorough than the earlier wine boom. Again, with the opening of Spain in 1959, hemp quickly became a relic and the skills and occupations associated with it became obsolete. We can learn two things from these historical threads. Perhaps the most important is the extreme volatility of the economy, responding as it did to national and international currents. Translated into the world of working people, such shifts in direction over periods much shorter than a generation translated into persistent and chronic uncertainty. When combined with attempts by the landed classes to resist the commodification of labor through the use of hierarchical and personalistic work contracts and tenancy relations, this uncertainty itself becomes inherent in the system of value-production and appropriation—a crucial gear driving the mechanics of the social reproduction of local agricultural capitalism. The second thing we learn has to do with the long but uneven history of the role of manufacturing in the region. The simple fact of a presence of nonagricultural livelihoods in the rural setting has frequently been noted by writers on other regional economies (for a critique, see Ghezzi, 2001), but we need more dimensions in the picture. Manufacturing was not just everywhere in the regional setting and was by no means consistent in its growth or decline or in the way it affected ordinary people in the towns of the Vega Baja. For many it was in a sense an absent presence. And this leads us to our third strand in the history of the area—the question of movement. For many years day labor costs could be minimized by a simple manipulation of insecurity: day laborers needed work, and by playing with the hazards of the daily labor market in each town’s plaza, farm owners, their managers, and large tenants were able to satisfy the varying demands of the agricultural cycle. Yet even in the best of circumstances such a world could not be entirely contained. The need for wheat harvesters in La Mancha each year, or for vine pruners in Catalonia, was always a draw. This remained largely seasonal and, like the army service experienced by young men, travel was individually

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experienced. Still, the satanic mills of Elche, Crevillente, or Callosa de Segura, not to mention more distant lures, put continued pressure on the extraction of absolute surplus value from agricultural workers, and the major way of dealing with this was to control movement. The facilitator in such a strategy was insecurity. We have seen how volatile the economy was, and to this must be added the natural hazards of an extremely uncertain climate, by no means offset by irrigation. Simply being able to ensure food enough for one’s family was a goal in itself. The tensions and contradictions contained in movement, then, were felt quite differently by different members of the region. Over time this fetish of fixity and suspicion of movement took on a far wider and metaphorical sense. For both traveling worker and well-established local patron there was inevitably something fearful and unknown about the world that awaited as close as Elche or Crevillente, still more fearful in Barcelona or perhaps even farther away. The sense that one returned “touched” in some way became widespread. For many workers this was to be touched by experience. Sometimes these experiences were, in the short term, unpleasant, even a setback, but taken on the whole and through the years they could amount to an education, a move to a more worldly-wise kind of maturity. By contrast, for those left behind— not just the patrons and their agents but their more subordinated dependants—this was to be touched by something unknown and almost inevitably threatening and impure—impure in the sense that it disturbed the known ordering of the local world, bringing in new variables for decision making and wider possibilities for a future. If we were to ask how a culture of locality came into existence in this area, or what the specific texture of its structure of feeling might be, then it could well be worth reflecting on these features.

histories of regulation As for politics, like the Ford Motor Company we could easily have been misled. Working as we have been in the post-Franco era, we found that most people had little interest in national politics and very little more in their local institutional offshoots at provincial or municipal level, and we were inclined to assume that this demonstrated a long-standing perception of a rural people. Yet, though there was a strong Catholic and conservative movement in Valencia during the Republic, the Vega Baja in general was sympathetic to the government, and the towns we knew best became entirely controlled by the Socialist Party union and subse-


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quently combined their efforts with the anarchist union. Once the war began, many large landholdings (fincas) were expropriated through local initiatives, local money was printed, and these fincas were run collectively. As Republican forces retreated at the end of the war, toward the port of Alicante, and the Nationalists together with their various political appendages and vigilantes advanced into the region, a new regime of daily life was to begin. The war (1936–39) was followed by a vast array of state-controlled systems of rationing. This was certainly in part to manage an extremely debilitated economy but, more important, it was a means for selectively punishing and rewarding members of the new Francoist society. Both repression and the black market were crucially, almost by definition, selective. The repression of the Franco years was so effective in closing down a collective sense of alterity (let alone resistance) and more generally any sense of a public political field by being highly personal and highly selective. It was individual personalities holding positions of power who selected targets of repression, and they did so from day to day on an almost random basis.8 Moreover, these were explicitly supposed to be positions of power used for the personal profit of the holder. Franco gave his stamp of approval to this personal fattening up of the victors at the expense of those without power by likening it to the rights of pillage and rape traditionally awarded to victorious armies in olden times. One effect, intentional or not, was for the daily desperate search for food to drive out concern for, or interest in, anything else. Another was that many who had been sympathetic to the Republic, being unable to acquire the documents necessary for a normal life, were now forced into the black market. This in turn rendered them the more vulnerable to momentary discovery and punishment, but it also made people particularly aware of the palms that need greasing, the rural byways that were less guarded, the “crimes” that were in reality not so much crimes at all, thus producing a further wrinkle in the twisted rope of selectivity. The differentiations resulting directly from political power were also amplified by the advantages that lay in the Right’s participation in the estraperlo (black market). Here arose huge opportunities for quick profits. Indeed, property changed hands to such an extent that one might refer cynically to the estraperlo as Franco’s land reform. An older class of landlords, many of them absentee, faced with a stripped-down agricultural sector and perceiving opportunities in the big urban centers, sold off their land to their larger tenants, who often then sold parcels to

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those newly enriched by the estraperlo. Subsequently, with the coming of the fifties, new opportunities arose as the area became increasingly committed to the lucrative hemp fiber market. Thus, the forces of economic, social, and cultural differentiation shifted directions numerous times over the hundred years between 1890 and 1990, as no doubt they had before that. But the forces that took hold in those deadening years that followed the civil war in which Franco placed his iron stamp on Spanish society can hardly be overestimated. It is hard to see how one might talk of the informal economy of the 1960s without some reference to this earlier period, and is it impossible to talk of the “natural” disinclination of local people for public politics without some reference to what made such attitudes so natural. When through the 1980s ordinary people in Spain were being asked to give voice to a renewed public politics, and when through the 1990s the Vega Baja was being reframed as a regional economy, these moments were surely conditioned in some way by the absent presence of this crepuscular history. More immediately striking, however, was the way they were framed—more obviously—by current political discourse. We have noted already how the sociological language used to invoke regional economies employs descriptions of phenomena that situate them within notions of functionality and competitive advantage while minimizing references to class relations and the role of power in social reproduction. This kind of framing—which obviously plays its role in marginalizing the history we have just been talking about—is itself situated within context: the political-economic, institutional, and discursive field of neoliberal corporatism. We hope that the evidence of the ethnography contained in this book allows us to return to a more exhaustive critique of the historically particular conjoining of capitalist forms with regulatory practices. Here we want to demonstrate the value of historical ethnography by exploring the way the past we have just described facilitated this specific kind of conjoining. We have called it “neoliberal corporatism.” Hitherto corporatism and neoliberalism have been understood as mirror images of each other, the one placing priority on the health of the overall social body, the other stressing the health of the individual actor, there being no such thing as society (as Margaret Thatcher famously remarked). Yet more recently writers have begun to cross these differences with such terms as “the new paternalism” (Mead, 1997) and “liberal authoritarianism” (Dean, 1999, 2002), at least in part to address the issue of practices of governmentality in the European Union generally, and more particularly


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in states where some kind of “third way” is being invoked. Corporatism places high priority on the proper functioning of society as an integrated and coherent whole. Conflict internal to the system is a pathology, like suicide or delinquency, which must be addressed by reengineering the overall package being targeted. These packages were usually thought of as national societies, as in Durkheim’s France or Marshall’s Britain, but they need not be. While both corporatism and neoliberalism are concerned with the overall productivity of the polity in an internationally competitive world, they differ most specifically in that for neoliberalism this goal is achieved by outsourcing a major part of governance to the market and other institutions of the so-called civil society. In so doing it recasts in terms of “contracts” the functional interrelations of these institutions and what is normatively expected of their practices—from municipalities, to hospitals, to law courts, to universities. Far from pathologized, conflict here nonetheless is validated only in its specific Darwinian variant: competition between units—individuals, firms, and the like. For this reason among others, regulation, as Polanyi insisted (1957), always remains an issue to be dealt with; neoliberals are as afraid of anarchy as anyone else. So the question that arises concerns the relationship between order and management—in short, government—and that element of society now being relied on for its competitive productivity—marketized civil society. The particular history of stewardship in continental Europe (Holmes, 2000), while taking a variety of forms, has nevertheless answered this question with various versions of neoliberal corporatism. Productivity and government, then, are the two perpetual partners of modernity. And though the two are as paired as hands locked in cordiality or combat, Marx had a lot to say about the one, Foucault about the other. While acknowledging their profound differences, we can get a handle on neoliberal corporatism when we explore their complementary views of productivity and government. To make this point we draw an analogy between Marx’s distinction between absolute and relative surplus value (and, by extension, his distinction between the formal and real subsumption of labor to capital) and Foucault’s distinction between monarchical rule and modern government. This can be seen by noting an essential feature of expropriation within capitalism and another feature of regulation in modern societies. As to the first, investments in better machinery and improved ways of organizing labor result in greater overall productivity. This particular dynamic was termed by Marx the production of “relative” surplus value.

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For Marx the emergence of this dynamic understanding of advances in productivity was in real history a rocky and uneven road, as capitalism at times took on only the formal elements of these relationships, often slipping back to a less dynamic form he called the production of “absolute” surplus value (Capital, 1: app). When we shift to Foucault’s work on rule, we see something quite similar in his understanding of the shift from older forms of monarchical power toward modern power—from absolute to relative power, if we were to retain Marx’s terms. The notion of power being preeminently about restriction, the “power of the sword” was replaced by what we might call the (horse-)power of the machine. From absolute to relative surplus value, from monarchical to modern power—each had the effect of forming quite different ideas of first the material and social world (the factory and society) and then the social subjects to be found therein. Seen in this way we might propose that Marx’s equivalent of monarchical power was absolute surplus value, and in the appendix to volume I of Capital he tried to work through the uneven ways relative and absolute surplus value are, in real life, complexly combined. Especially where capitalists try to expand the amounts they can derive as profits but do not invest in the technical means for doing so, one is likely to find a vast array of “extra-economic” means for turning value (labor) into profit. And these were precisely the features being employed in the social relations and practices in the Vega Baja after the civil war. This in turn meant forms of regulation that pervaded families, friends, neighborhoods, and communities—resulting, it might be tempting to argue, in a quite specific kind of local culture. Yet, given what we have said, the stress on “culture” seems evasive; more important are the practical relations of exploitation facilitated by specific and identifiable kinds of power through which the whole was regulated. Perhaps this comes as no surprise, but if we are talking about processes of production and the forms for its regulation and find ourselves called on to resort to class relations and fields of power, why should these latter fall away when we talk about the same things—production and social regulation—but now in the new regional economies invoked by scholars caught in the web of neoliberal corporatist discourse? Let us take neoliberalism first. The ideal of neoliberalism is for the state to farm out governance to economic and civil institutions (Dean, 2002). Why should these institutions be immune to the same ideal— sourcing out as well, until the buck finally stops at the self-controlled so-


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cial subjects who conduct themselves in a way appropriate to a social project understood in the productivist terms we have described above. If the Taylorist expert kept his vision largely within the enterprise, while his Fordist successor colonized suburban lands beyond it, for the neoliberal expert social subjects are enterprises. Workers possess a kind of capital—human capital—and they or their predecessors have invested in that capital, producing physical strength and skills, of course, but also love, affection, morality, and so on (Burchell, 1993). Foucault prompts us to note that the result might be a quite fundamental shift in the way power is thought about and exercised. For example, our new expert working on behalf of this kind of profit-seeking system may come up with the idea that the more workers feel free and untrammeled as they work—more flexible hours, a wide range of work sites, and so on—the more they might contribute to the overall power of this modern society. Power then, far from being about restriction and restraint, might be made to appear to rest in their opposites. As Adam Smith had noted 250 years earlier, “those [places] that have the most security are not necessarily those where the greatest number of police regulations exists. Rather they are the ones in which the ‘common people’ are independent and employed in manufactures. . . . Manufacturing labour can thus be recommended to foster good police” (Dean, 2002: 51; see also Hindess, 2001). Within such an imagined social world all practices and relationships can be understood in terms of two potential beneficiaries—the social subject himself or herself and, by extension (through its increased productivity), the overall social project in which the person is inscribed (family, firm, nation, etc.). Here hegemony works through the payoffs of active collusion. Collusion arises from a trade-off in which participation in the social project promises to empower those recognized as legitimate members through the intensified productivity of the overall corporate body politic.9 It is not difficult to see where the corporatist element creeps into this otherwise classic neoliberal agenda. But what is an “overall corporate body politic” with which I can sufficiently well identify so as to see my inputs and my rewards? Certainly not membership in a neoliberal kind of state, from all we have said above; still less the vast and impersonal European Union. Here regions become key. The reworking of the relationship between labor and property ownership in terms of human capital relies on quite particular understandings of personal responsibility that are tied to recontouring the paths of participation in the broader so-

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cial project. With appropriate interventions by intellectuals, regions offer the kind of local scale that allows members to assess return on investment (of human capital) while at the same time measuring that participation in economic rather than political terms. On the other hand, as regional economies can increasingly be given recognizable form, for example through allusions to the distinctive and positive features of the local culture, so a closer identification of the neoliberal entrepreneurial worker with the enrichment of an identifiable social unit—the region and its social capital—can be achieved, though at the price of redrawing the conditions of social membership.

the structure of this book In this chapter we have taken a schematized and selective path—from the post–civil war interface of coercion with a shadow economy to the embedding of regional development programs within neoliberal doctrine—not so much to assert a truth as to illustrate how historical ethnography can raise questions. Much of the remainder of this book looks very different from this schematized path. There are so many crosscutting histories to be dealt with. There are bends and dead ends along the various paths we take, belying the possibility of a single history so central to both Spanish governance today and the project of building a coherent European Union into the future. When these projects are pursued through neoliberal corporatist understandings of the social world, a politically vacuous history results. Yet it is surely difficult to deny the salience of class differences in what we have been discussing, and if we accept class we must also accept the facts of expropriation inherent in capitalist relations of production. And this in turn makes it hard to accept an image of social dynamics that denies the salience of conflict. There is, then, a connection between the way expropriation takes place and the way society is regulated, on the one hand, and the way people think about themselves as social subjects and hence the possibilities for praxis, on the other. In chapter 2 we explore the regional space as a historical site. It emerges less as a bounded territory, more as a series of force fields such that any one place—we centered ourselves on the town of Catral— appears to be at the intersection of several historical currents, be they the relatively unpolarized rural households of neighboring Dolores, the highly polarized communities closer to the old city of Orihuela, or the manufactories of Callosa, Elche, or Crevillente. What emerges is not so


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much a clearly demarcated map as a congeries of crisscrossing pathways and temporally unstable landscapes. Turning from space to social relations, we find another history of variation—sets of social bindings that had force in one setting but in their real outcomes generated ill-fitting combinations, so that the stability of one structure was undercut precisely by its positioning proximate to another. Irrigated agriculture does not spread homogeneously through the area but is interlarded with barren scrublands (saladares). The richness of intensive agriculture at first apparently offers an ecology for autoconsumption, but we then see it to be set within the wavering calls of international commercial demands: vines pushing out a potato harvest, hemp thirstily drinking up the water for wheat, and so on. Far from offering the kind of clearly distinctive site that might lead to a well-ordered ethnography, we are faced with a kind of incoherence, a sort of placeless space crisscrossed with the multiple paths of historical discontinuities. Chapter 3 is set in the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps a result of the long English fascination with the Spanish civil war (see especially Thomas, 1977; Fraser, 1979), Gavin expected to find the occasional vivid discovery about the period; Susana, because she comes from a generation who have queried the appearances of the Spanish past, likewise expected the occasional revelation. Neither of us was prepared for the “totalness” of that awful period. For some, this post–civil war period was the end of an era; for others, a period of frenzied opportunity; for still others, a period of hunger and fear—and all of these were layered one on another. The period was captured in the odd trinity of personalized repression, underground economy, and the ambiguous bounty of hemp cultivation and processing. Some of the figures, like the landlords of old, or the trope of the sleazy trader, were quickly and easily visible for the outside investigator. Others were not. The world of the tied laborer and the almost inverse world of the ostracized ex-Republican were more difficult to unearth. As we see later, in chapter 8, these kinds of occlusions and distortions in the rear-view mirror, aided by the encouragement of the “official version,” were reproduced in the form contemporary political culture took. In chapters 4 and 5 we shift scale from the region and municipality to the everyday world of interpersonal relations and practices of ordinary people. As we do so, we find that a crucial component of social regulation had to do with movement and its denial. It was the very nature of social dependencies and the absence of such dependencies that gave reality to place. And what gave the currency of this kind of regu-

28


lation its gold standard was insecurity; without the perpetual presence of uncertainty amid scarcity, regulation would have lost its essential leverage. This meant that onto the natural uncertainty of climate and the volatility of the commercial economy there was grafted a purposeful politics of insecurity that was (again usefully) unevenly felt both quantitatively and qualitatively. We try to show that the embeddedness of dependency on the one hand and the exhausting pursuit of niches of opportunity on the other were both simultaneously made up of the structural conditions that positioned a person or household at a given time and the agency that inheres in each person’s character. Part II brings us to the present (or recent past). In chapters 6 and 7 we see how these multiple trajectories and the unfolding patterns that give rise to various kinds of social subject—various socially reciprocated notions of self-awareness—produce the flexibility, self-exploitation, intrafamilial exploitation, and wider social exploitation that make possible the present-day regional economy and its reproduction. In chapter 6 we look at smaller entrepreneurial figures and, in doing so, cover the transition of the area from a predominantly agricultural economy in which manufacturing and services played important complementary roles to one in which industry begins to occupy the center of gravity. Then, in chapter 7, we introduce the wide variety of actors who are entangled in the contemporary “flexible” industries of the region. We believe that this history—economic, political, social, and cultural— engenders relationships between people that are classlike and thereby produces people who relate to each other as members of classes. In the conclusion of this chapter, therefore, we begin to address the ways class is simultaneously obscured—in part by the multiple nature of household and individual work-career occupations—and yet elusively grasped at by some of those younger actors whose experiences have given them some degree of mobility. Despite immediate appearances, it is impossible to imagine the social character or cultural figure of the homeworker, or of the tied laborer or jobber and his wife (or daughter), beyond the history of the relations of exploitation from which each generation emerges and on which each individual negotiates his or her present. We do not say this dogmatically or happily. We believe it is the essence of what makes for the dispersed and erratic kinds of regulation inherent in regionalized flexible production regimes, of which the Vega Baja is just one example. In the final ethnographic chapter (chapter 8) we turn to politics. We show how, far from regional economies relying on local culture in the


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sense that most anthropologists would understand culture, in some sense there appears to be a kind of cultural deficit—a failure in the dialogical possibilities of collective culture. The vacuum such a deficit leaves makes possible the invention, the super-imposition, of something else—something quite different from anything that in our view should be called “culture” but is nevertheless called just that. Such an ersatz kind of public culture is by no means successful in inscribing everybody within it, however. Culture as the old socialists saw it, for example, invokes a critical awareness of their lived reality—consciousness almost in a classical Marxist sense. But this more ersatz culture is imagined rather ephemerally—as an “atmosphere,” a dehistoricized abstraction, a “worldview” floating superorganically above the material forces and ambivalences of real life. This pageant of dehistoricized performative classification (winners and losers, insiders and outsiders, etc.), vividly exemplified in the fiesta of Moros y Cristianos or in the marketing of the region’s native entrepreneurialism, may well warrant a study of its own. Our focus, however, is the various factors that appear to have leached the ground of any possibility for a public culture of collective intercourse— something that has sometimes been glossed as “community,” a sense of place and belonging-ness. We believe that a particular history of livelihood practices and political repression combines with current neocorporate liberalism to produce this result. A particular dialectic has arisen between intimate and public spaces and practices in the context of forms of regulation always articulated with and through an underground (or perhaps better put, close-to-the-ground) economy. Because regulatory practices have varied through history and, despite these variations, operated selectively and haphazardly, they have affected people in widely different ways and thus constituted a multiplicity of social subjectivities. In the concluding chapter 9 we draw on the evidence of the earlier chapters to revisit the images of society and the economy that are hegemonic in the European Union today. In so doing we not only interrogate the now vast literature of regional economies and regional development but also explore the way institutional structures arising under neoliberal regimes have affected the intellectual production of these particular images of today’s social world.

pa rt o n e

Conflicting Histories

chapter 2

The Histories of the Regional Political Economy

There is much to suggest that our study area had many of the features ascribed to successful regional economies like the “Third Italy” and Baden-Württemberg. Combining an arid area of farming and a coastal littoral of (albeit poorly supplied) irrigation, and combining agriculture and rural industry as well, the province of Alicante has long been a place of rural pluriactivity. For years agricultural activities have been complemented by an almost infinite number of nonagricultural jobs, from trading to transport and manufacturing. There was pluriactivity both at the family level, with each member engaging in quite different occupations, and at an individual level, with one person performing a variety of quite separate occupations in a single timeframe or going through a series of quite different work experiences over the course of their economically active life. Such pluriactivity is common to most regional economies, but this rather static description obscures what for us turned out to be a crucial element of historical reality. As we worked through the history of the area, we found that qualitative differences—from one microregion to another, in the occupational mix of a household and so on, what we call heterogeneity—over time drove people along different paths that effectively produced local-level differentiations, social and cultural.

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the geographic setting Aside from the major Mediterranean port city of Alicante, this half of the province can best be understood in terms of three geographic zones: (1) the coastal littoral that runs from the extreme south to the city of Alicante; (2) the Vinalopó River valley, which runs south-southeast from Almansa through Villena to Elche—an area of volatile agriculture that benefited historically as a major axis for goods passing between Alicante, Spain’s busiest Mediterranean port, and Madrid; this combination, in turn, provided a long experience of pluriactivity bridging agricultural and nonagricultural occupations; (3) the rest—an arid, marginalized upland confined to poor agriculture (see map 1, p. xxiv). A closer look at the littoral actually suggests two subzones. One forms a curve running from Callosa del Segura through Orihuela to Crevillente, Elche, and then Alicante. This area has historical patterns of pluriactivity similar to those of the Vinalopó, but with differences that derive from the nature of the flat, unevenly irrigated agriculture of the coastal plain. A second subzone runs from the extreme south of the province, La Marina, and along the coast to Guardamar del Segura. Deprived of the openings provided by a well-maintained communications system and with a stronger presence of large landlords, there were far fewer nonagricultural occupations in this zone (Censo de Floridablanca, 1787). We focused our study on the threshold between these two subzones. Catral, our epicenter, is just 7 kilometers from Callosa and Crevillente and 14 kilometers from Elche. Thus it has often fallen within the orbit of developments in these centers. On the other hand, Catral has the third tanda (turn) in the irrigation system that extends out from the lower (vega baja) Segura River at Orihuela. Often associated with the wellknown and highly effective irrigation works of the Moors, this arm of the Vega Baja system owes little to this heritage and was almost useless until the late nineteenth century when, after a catastrophic flood destroyed much of the town and surroundings of the city of Murcia in 1879, a series of improvements were gradually brought in.1 The present Catral irrigation association (Communidad de Regantes) was founded ten years later, but not until 1907 was the rotation system among Orihuela, Callosa del Segura, and Catral officially put into writing. Between 1913 and 1977 the irrigation system of the Vega Baja expanded from 19,000 to 44,638 hectares (López Bermudez, 1980: 285) (only to decline again in the 1980s). The area is highly complex as a result. On the one hand, Catral has long been tied to an old irrigation system with great

Histories of Regional Political Economy

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rigidity and inequality in land tenure. On the other hand, it lies at the farthest end of this irrigation arm and has suffered so much from this that there is a local expression “as dry as Catral.” One old informant recalled that, in her youth, “There were pastures in the Hondo [a drained marshland] where stallions, mares and mules were raised: I can also remember sometimes the bulls that came here to pasture” (Fieldnotes GS 1978). Although in theory Catral benefited from an ancient irrigation system, in fact that system had the detrimental effect of sustaining a far more polarized landholding pattern than the town of Dolores just beyond the irrigation branch or the drier area near Crevillente.

landlords, farmers, and laborers Much of the writing on the historical background of western Alicante as an industrial district refers to a past of smallholders. This is not the case for Catral, which is pinched between two quite different kinds of landed property structure and hence is a mix of them both. We note in the next section that immediately west of Catral is Callosa, to the north Crevillente, and to the east, Elche—all of them acting as magnets for dispersed manufacturing. But the area’s agricultural character derives more from two other neighbors. Close on the east, before Elche, is the town of Dolores, and on the west, beyond Callosa, is the large and ancient city of Orihuela, with its various smaller dependent municipalities stretching down either side of the Segura River. A Resumen hecho por la Junta Consultiva Agronómica de las Memorias sobre Riegos of 1904 commented: Territorial property is very much divided in the entire province [of Alicante] if one excepts the huerta [irrigated land] of Orihuela, where there exist various fincas that take up whole términos [administrative units] like for example Formentera that belongs to the Marques de Bosch, that of Jacarilla to the Barón de Petres, that of Rocamora to the Conde de Villamanuel, and that of Algorfa to the Marqués of the same title (de igual titulo); but these properties only in part are cultivated by their dueños [owners], the rest is divided among a greater or smaller number of renters.

Let us look for a moment at the two areas on either side of Catral, noting how their agriculture and culture were connected. Orihuela (Agri-)Culture Though by no means as extreme as Formentera—or Cox, for example, where the Ruíz-Dávalos family traced their property back to 1458—

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Catral was not unaffected by the kind of land tenure arrangements described in the previous section. When Paquita, the elderly widow of a day laborer, was asked if property was very concentrated in Catral in the past, she responded: Yes, in the hands of six. Of the richest there were the Laras, that were three offspring (hijos); they lived here. Others like the Duque de Tamames never lived here, nor his family. He had apoderados [those with delegated power] in Orihuela, who were the ones that later on were responsible for the sale of the lands. Many renters bought the land. There were other big fincas [besides those of the Duque and the Lara family] like los Frailes that was taken in rent by the Ubedas. Later they left it and, in 1913, I remember it well, the Oriolanos arrived who took charge of the finca.2 (Fieldnotes GS 1979)

As Paquita’s account makes clear, sediments in the present are not confined to people’s memories, for she gives a clear sense of the way old social relationships are also shifted and transcribed onto the present. We need for a moment to go back to those relationships. Early in the nineteenth century (1829), 28.6 percent of Catral’s land was in the hands of eight noble families (especially the Marqués de Dos Aguas and the Condes of Santa Clara and Villapunt) and 8 percent was held by religious orders (especially the Monjas de San Juan and the Convento de la Merced). But 42.8 percent was in the hands of untitled proprietors living in the town itself. Almost half of these had holdings of more than 100 tahullas, making them viable commercial farmers in their own right.3 Only 19.6 percent of the land was held by local peasant owners, and of these 38.8 percent had less than 5 tahullas (Catral Municipal Archives).4 Since a minimum 8 tahullas would be necessary for a household to live on (Millán, 1984), these people were, one way or the other, obliged to sell their labor or work in nonagricultural trades. A hundred years later not much had changed. In 1829 there were fourteen landowners with holdings larger than 300 tahullas, and they controlled 54.6 percent of arable land. By 1935 most of the aristocrats had gone, yet 60 percent of the agricultural area of Catral was still in the hands of only seventeen landowners who owned more than 300 tahullas each (five of them with more than 600 tahullas), and 30.2 percent of peasant owners held in all 185 tahullas in holdings smaller than 5 tahullas. If anything, by the time of the Republic, polarization had increased. The number of day laborers in the area, around 68.5 percent in the Floridablanca census of 1787, increased during the nineteenth cen-


37

tury (70 percent in the 1857 census), and then peaked in the 1930s (Municipal Archives, Tax Registers). Clearly the disentailments that followed the dismantling of the ancien régime had not done much to transform the dependency relations inherent in this kind of land distribution. As a result, antiliberalism pervaded the area through the nineteenth century with the upsurge of Carlism,5 the political response of rural people to instability and the multiple dependencies tenants were caught up in—from landowners pressuring for rent, to creditors pressuring for interest and payment on capital advanced, to corredores (commercial land and agricultural produce agents and speculators) who charged large percentages for their services (Millán, 1984). We should note that these political expressions took place in the context of crises often brought on by external economic factors. When traditional commercial products like silk were in crisis, tenants were caught between the need to capitalize their agriculture (through the increase and upkeep of irrigation and the increasing use of guano) or invest in new commercial crops and the impossibility of doing so because of the multiple ways their profits were extracted by rent, credit, and commercial margins. International commodity prices triggered crises with knock-on effects, but significantly the response in these kinds of agricultural relations of production was to increase the ties of dependency for the vast majority of people. Though occasionally evicting nonpaying tenants as the situation grew disastrous, more often landlords were caught by the need to maintain their land in production. This was especially so as liberal agrarian policies took as a crucial criterion of their land reform whether landholdings were in productive cultivation or abandoned. Many seigniorial or ecclesiastic lords, although strongly interested in getting the best economic profit from their lands, were forced to accept the increasing debt of rents from tenants unable to pay, even in kind. Meanwhile, among the poor the generalized practice of micro-subtenancies cum day laborers (see below) extended the dependency situation into increasingly dispossessed and fragile livelihoods. Not all were thus effected, however. Moneylenders (often rich tenants who had accumulated cash) and commercial land agents were able to avoid these sorts of dependency ties. The sole interest of land agents was the increase of transaction volume. This in effect could benefit better-off tenants. Once having extended credit to landlords against securities in their land, by then pressing their claims these agents often drove the

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older rentier class to unload some of their property to tenants. So disentailment and liberal legislation in general were profitable for both groups. Generally these were the people who benefited from the liberal revolution of the nineteenth century, and their families became the new large landowners by the turn of the twentieth century. This polarization of property and the complex labor and rental arrangements that went along with it—both the cause and the result of an uncertain and hazardous world—produced a kind of personal and social splitting. On the one hand, people sought to activate to their best advantage the dependencies arising from patronage; on the other, they tried to make shifts to take advantage of various resources and opportunities for pluriactivity in the area. Dolores (Agri-)Culture Close though it is to Catral, Dolores is not part of the irrigation system of the Vega Baja. All the same, people in Catral frequently refer to Dolores as a place where the farmers have been more committed to their work, less cobbled by the yoke of tradition. Much of Dolores’s water comes from the sobrante (runoff) of Catral, but that is not what accounts for the particular character of these people’s land tenure, social structure, and livelihood practices. On April 9, 1715, Don Luis Belluga y Moncada, Cardinal of Cartagena, petitioned the city of Orihuela for some 44 square kilometers north of the Segura River—roughly the present términos (geographic municipal extension) of San Fulgencio, San Felipe de Neri, and Dolores. This was such dense marshland that it could not be entered for accurate measurement, and the cardinal planned to drain it. After 1720, when Guardamar gave him an additional 13,000 tahullas of marshland and the draining began, his area totaled more than 38,000 tahullas (roughly 4,500 hectares), and he intended its rents to be used for an orphanage and hospital. The marshes were drained into a saline inland lake, the Laguna Del Hondo,6 and in 1734 an agreement was signed with the jueces cequieros (irrigation arbitrators) of Callosa and Catral in which they conceded some of their runoff waters to Dolores (Archive of the Sindicato de Riegos de San Felipe de Neri). The first colonists arrived in 1730, most of them (1,227) from Murcia but a few from Catral (176) and Almoradi (171). Four years later the town of Dolores was officially founded, but people quickly discovered how unhealthy the area was; documents speak of “graves enfermedades,” “epidemias pestilenciales,”


39

and “infección de los aires,” so that by 1740 the enfiteusis rents were changed from a quarter to a sixth of the harvest, to discourage people from leaving (Léon Closa, 1962). Unlike Catral, then, Dolores was an area without large landlords and with a very low level of social polarization. With at least some irrigation water, Catral’s nonagricultural activities were the result of inequities in the distribution of land, while in Dolores it was the arid and uncertain conditions that encouraged the pluriactivity of smallholders (for similar circumstances in the Vinalopó valley, see Bernabé Maestre, 1976). In subsequent chapters, we see that these distinctions—between Orihuela to the south and Dolores to the north—made each a symbol and sanctuary for the two extremes of social class.

a varied and uncertain world Transportation and trade provided an early experience of geographic movement in the area during the nineteenth century, and all these factors combined to give rise to the commercialization of agriculture earlier than in other areas of Spain and fairly generalized throughout the area by mid-century, despite scarcity of water for irrigation and generally poor soils. The combination of commercial agriculture and handicrafts in turn made possible a greater population density than in other parts of rural Spain, which, in a knock-on effect, gave rise to the need for more commodities to be bought and sold in the local markets. On one side of Catral the manufacture of rope and sails in Callosa dates back to at least the early 1700s. For the other side, in Elche, the 1797 Floridablanca census records 900 workers under the supervision of fifty-four employers working in textiles—producing various fabrics as well as ribbon and cotton skirts. Though it appears that at this early stage the production of alpargatas was still a small activity undertaken by a few craftsmen for the local market, by mid-century the rationalization of hemp cultivation for the production of the soles of alpargatas pushed the sector to another scale and into the broader national market. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 provided cheap jute from India (just as it brought cheap silk from the Orient and, together with the epidemic of pebrina, put paid to Valencian silk production). In 1875 the first sewing machine arrived in the town; in the following twenty years Singer had sold 5,713 machines in the area. “It was this that was the speciality of the women who at that time [worked on] the soles. This kind of work increased among the farmers of the huerta and of the

40


nearby towns, as a result of the fact that it produced more benefits than their crops” (Monbeig, 1930: 465). Writing just before World War I, a traveler noted: At the moment one can say that the entire population of Elche is dedicated to the production of alpargatas. In the doorways of houses the men, seated on a bench next to an inclined table, make soles. From the houses there comes the noise of the sewing machines. Through the streets go children carrying baskets on their heads full of shoes and sandals, all the work of the family, that they are taking to the factory for completion. Evidently this is essentially an industry of homework (una industria esencialmente a domicilio): the man makes the sole, and sews on the piece of cloth that the woman has trimmed and formed (punteado y bordado). But this work is combined with a modern industrial organization: even though a few small workshops exist that work for themselves and sell in the region, the majority of workers depend on large firms that distribute the tasks to them; at midday and through the afternoon the women and the children carry the jobs that the family have been given, back to the factories. (quoted in Monbeig, 1930: 471)

This same observer commented that, though it was impossible to provide an accurate figure given the nature of the industry, he knew one factory that distributed work to five hundred women. When we explore the regional economy nearly a hundred years later, we see that this observer could have uttered the same words—describing the same impossibility of getting useful figures, the same large numbers of homeworking women, the same pluriactivity within households. Alpargata production arose first to meet local demands, then later the national market, and by the end of the century Latin America, North Africa, and Spain’s few remaining colonies. But it was the war in northern Europe that provided a major impetus for the region’s transition from alpargata production to shoe production. In the early part of the century, the region was in fierce competition with Barcelona shoe producers, but by the 1930s it had became established, largely because the combination of work on shoes and agricultural work made possible low labor costs.7 Making alpargatas provided much of the experience needed for what was to become today’s shoe industry, but we should note too the changes implied in the switch, as shoe production gave rise to demands for different raw materials, different machinery, and ultimately different capital needs as well as a changing labor process. What we see here is the historical depth of nonagricultural livelihoods. Meanwhile, in the agricultural sector at least some commercialization had occurred as early as the mid- eighteenth century (well ahead of the


41

Spanish interior and Andalusia), and by the mid-nineteenth it was quite generalized in this area. There were several social effects. The higher proportion of land devoted to cash crops decreased the possibility of autoconsumption through subsistence plots and hence gave rise to commodification and the trades that this implies—demand for textiles, soap, aguardiente, agricultural equipment, and repair shops. This in turn gave rise to people who provided services such as those whose job it was to keep information about the state of markets and possible new equipment or seed varieties. The result was that alongside the more specialized centers like Callosa, Crevillente, and Elche many smaller municipalities became centers of mixed manufacturing and small commerce. For a brief period when the phylloxera crisis hit the French vineyards at the end of the 1870s, this commercial agriculture went into a kind of frenzy as the (apparently) unaffected Alicantino grape resisted the disease and, with the aid of a trade agreement with France in 1882, promised untold amounts of wealth. We can get a strong sense of this gold fever from Julio de Vargas, who commented on “the past ten years” in his 1895 Viaje por España: Alicante y Murcia: It occurred, for example, that an agriculturalist who owned a thousand vine stocks that produced an equal number of cántaras8 who, with the sudden rise in prices, sold them for an average of 15,000 reales aspired to enlarge his property so as to dedicate it entirely to the cultivation of a product of such secure and fat profit (tan segura y pingüe salida); and he had almond trees, he tears them up, and he owned olive trees, he converts them to firewood, with the desire (afán) to plant vines, that provide more benefit in less time and perhaps even cost less to look after. (1895: 25)

Now, it is true that wine fever generated much more wild speculation in land than actual vine planting, and it is true that because of the particular pattern of land tenure in the Vega Baja vine fever did not affect local people in quite the uniform way Vargas describes for areas where old landed estates had been replaced. But the fact remains that when the bubble burst—as it did when France, having discovered safe American stocks for their vines, tore up their trade agreement—it was like a cardiac shock to the area, one that led to longer-term failure when the phylloxera fungus found its way to Alicante. From 1900 to 1901, Alicante wine exports halved (Martínez et al., 1978: 39). Ironically, precisely because pluriactivity made it possible for an unusually dense population to survive in the countryside, the economic crisis at the turn of the century was especially hard hitting and stimulated migration. In and around Catral people skilled in the care of vines began a practice of mi-

42


gration, first to North Africa and then to France, which was to end only in the 1950s.9 An elderly woman whose father spent many years in Orán, recalled: They went once in winter and once in summer. In winter it was for the pruning of the vines (la poda). A few went, ten maybe twelve. It was work for those who understood how to do it. More went in summer, in June and July, if they had previously got work there. Just 2 or 3 months, although some who went for the pruning, stayed on (en la siega [sic]) and were there for 8 or 9 months. (Fieldnotes GS 1978)

So we see the area of our study lying at a series of different thresholds—between an area of large landlords and one of yeoman small farmers, between arid and irrigated land, and between areas strongly devoted to manufacturing and others almost entirely agricultural. The result is heterogeneity—in social relations and practices, in social institutions, and in the character of the social person. The tied and dependent relationships of landlord-dominated agriculture in some ways form a web of dependencies set firmly in their place, which contrasts with the unstable and fluid world of the various nonagricultural sources of livelihood.

a town on the threshold of the second republic (1931) So far we have swept back and forth widely across history. Before taking our bearings, we produce a more detailed picture of what society in the area was like as it entered the Republican period. We can do this best by limiting ourselves to evidence from one término in the Vega Baja. Our purpose is to provide a reasonably comprehensive sense of what a town was like at the beginning of the 1930s, as a background to understanding the contemporary period. It is not entirely easy to do this. We have found it necessary to resist two errors: one is to use agriculture as a synonym for rural, so that landholding and farm labor relations dictate entirely the image we gain of rural society; the other is to be misled by the bias of census data that makes individuals and households appear to have but one occupation. Catral was a town of about 3,000 people in the 1920s. Was it a “peasant village,” or a bipolar community of landlords and laborers? Was it a buzzing commercial town, or a lazy bucolic backwater? To answer such questions we try to give some idea of what the active population was doing during this period. We reserve for later a more extended


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discussion of social relations of production in different occupations and a deeper discussion of the class system. We have already noted that Catral was different from the drier areas that bordered it as one moved away from the coastal littoral in that it did have an established landed class. Yet it was different from the area closer to Orihuela and the basin of the Segura in that the landed elite were by no means as dominant here; it was different from those areas too in that a sizable part of the término and its borders were made up of saladares—unirrigated, usually poor land that could barely be used even as pasturage. By the 1920s most of the titled landowners had moved away, leaving a small cluster of dominant landlords. The degree of concentration is obscured first by the fact that property lists recorded wives, sons, daughters, and so on all as separate owners, and second by the fact that the elite were an exceptionally intramarrying group. For example, the largest landlord in 1923 was the twenty-seven-year-old Rafael Lara Moreno, who had 948 tahullas of land in Catral itself (111.8 hectares), all of it irrigated, and another 860 tahullas of secano (dry land) in San Miguel de Salinas, bordering the municipality.10 Yet we have every reason to believe that Rafael had in his control more land than that registered directly in his own name, using that of his wife and other family members. We get some idea of the concentration of the landed class from the fact that, aside from Rafael, another nine major property owners bore the name Lara, of which five bore the name Lara Lara (indicating that both lines bore the name Lara) and another eight bore Rafael’s other surname, Moreno. Even putting aside commercial operations like canning factories, the social relations associated with landed property and farm labor were multiple and complex. Large landowners with more than 35 hectares had many ways of administering their land. Some, like José Mariano Lara Fernández, who owned 624 tahullas, had a few large tenants, in his case just three, while others had several smaller tenants. Juana Aguilar Lara, for example, had 469 tahullas and fourteen tenants, one of them directly working 260 tahullas, while she herself directly worked 100 and the remainder was distributed among small tenants (with 5–10 tahullas). Others like Rafael Lara Moreno directly managed most of their land. Landowners with less land, but still quite large farmers (with 50–300 tahullas), followed the same three basic patterns—they distributed their land among either a few large tenants or among numerous smaller tenants, or they worked most of it directly.

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the second republic Spain of the early twentieth century was a country dominated by a rigid hierarchy of the landed class, the military, and the church. Until 1923, when a military coup brought Gen. Miguel Primo de Rivera to power, conservatives and liberals alternated in power under the rule of the Spanish monarch. Once in power, Primo de Rivera set about to run a rigidly centralized corporatist state, repressing the regions, especially Catalonia and the Basque country, and leftist working-class and peasant movements. By 1930, Primo de Rivera was forced to resign, victim of economic collapse and the political rigidities of his dictatorship. In April 1931 parties in favor of a republic won the elections and the king went into exile. For two years a coalition of leftist and centrist parties ran the Republic with some success, setting themselves the progressive goals of limiting church involvement in the state, reducing Spain’s huge and archaic military, and passing liberal civil laws such as the right to divorce as well as various initiatives that would increase women’s role in public life. Nonetheless, tensions among the various parties of the Left always got in the way of a longterm alliance among them. An incipient Partido Comunista de España was strongly influenced by the Soviet Union through its membership in the COMINTERN, while the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, the largest of whose organizations was the Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores, were handicapped by their frequent refusal to join an established government and, at times, their open hostility to the Republic. The Partido Socialista Obero Expañol, with its trade union affiliate the Unión General de Trabajadores, formed a powerful force with support from both urban and rural sectors, but it was itself internally divided between pro-parliamentary moderates and more revolutionary radicals. These divisions, together with a groundswell of fear among the middle classes that revolution was at hand, resulted in the success of the Right in the elections of 1933. Fears among many on the Left that the Right would now harden its hold on power and drive Spain back to the pre-Republican order were soon confirmed. Laws were passed that reversed the reforms, especially as they pertained to labor relations, resulting in increasing extraparliamentary actions. By October 1934 a widespread strike spearheaded from Asturias was viciously put down with the help of the army, and more than 30,000 people were imprisoned. Through the following year it became evident that progressive forces would have to overcome their divisiveness if they were to tackle the power of reaction in Spain, and by January 1936 the Popular Front had been formed, at least partly as a result of a change


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of strategy on the part of the Partido Comunista de España, which, following Stalin’s directive, agreed to work with other parties within the framework of a parliamentary system. The February elections were narrowly won by the Left, and Manuel Azaña led the government, but rumors of an impending military coup circulated widely, giving rise to a series of politically motivated murders that culminated in the killing of an officer in the Republican militia, the guardia de asalto, on July 12 and then a retaliatory killing of the monarchist José Calvo Sotelo.

Two combinations were quite common. In one, a large portion of land was directly worked while a small portion was distributed among several smallholders who, as a result, were tied into quite dependent relationships; in the other, one or two sizable holdings were distributed to large tenants and then these people redistributed some of the land in smallholdings to other dependents. Nevertheless, it is clear that the strategies of landowners and large tenants varied. Some worked land directly and made use of day labor as the main form for harnessing work; others used a more complex system of articulating dependencies and chains of exploitation. Thus, each finca exhibited its own rather particular combination of relationships and, as land changed hands and labor relations were subjected to different economic, legal, and social conditions, these relationships underwent shifts and realignments. As a result, an extremely complicated and overlapping set of terms was used, terms that acquired a social and cultural importance well beyond the narrow confines of the agricultural labor process. Although large landowners are referred to as dueños (owners), this term was often used too for large tenants who were usually called labradores, a term also used more broadly for any farmer who could live from the land alone. Many of the big leaseholders acted as owners, however, and were therefore called dueños by the laborers who worked for them. Though unremarked in the documents, it is clear from our older informants that these big leaseholders reproduced with workers the relations of production that were found on the landowners’ large fincas, and they were perceived as the effective proprietors of the land. Indeed, most of them subsequently accumulated capital and bought sizable amounts of land after the civil war.

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Those with much smaller holdings, 20–50 tahullas, were also referred to as labradores. We see from old tenancy contracts the extent to which these people were caught in webs of dependency. Some who were tenants and others owning small parcels tried to break the monopoly of any one tie by taking land from different landowners. Hence 26 percent of people referred to in the 1936 registry as colonos (tenants) held land from more than one landlord. But by the end of the war this figure had decreased considerably, expressing their greater dependency. A typical contract during the period—usually for just a year, occasionally for up to four—made the tenant responsible for all costs except the land tax. The tenant, moreover, agreed to leave the entire crop with the landowner as a deposit until the full annual rent had been paid on the stipulated saint’s day. A 1901 contract reads: “[The tenant] to guarantee payment of rent with harvests which will be deposited into the hands of the owner, who can sell them two months after the date of payment if such has not been effected. ([El colono] responde del pago del rento con las cosechas que depositará en manos del dueño el cual podrá venderlas si dos meses después de la fecha del pago éste no se hubiera efectuado) (Archive of Sebastián Sierras). Very similar conditions are found thirty years later. Such contracts are not much different, in turn, from those historians of the area describe for previous centuries. They are short-term; they try to prevent nonpayment or even short-term indebtedness by means that would cripple the tenant, and they force onto the tenant all capital inputs. They usually also seek to maintain control over which crop is planted and how it is to be commercialized. Rents, moreover, seem to be quite high. The contract cited above for a total of 23 tahullas was 750 pesetas annually for only five years at a time when the average day wage of a day laborer in the province was 1.84 pesetas (male), 1.01 pesetas (female) (Rodríguez Labandeira, 1991). Thus, it would be misleading to see these small labradores as in some way independent yeomen farmers, even though this was a context of reasonably good market potential for local crops. Whether smallholders supplementing with partial tenancies or full-time tenants, the emerging picture is one in which they have only nominal control of the land they rent and of their organization of production and marketing. In reality they are dependent on the landowner or some other local source for capital, and they are likewise dependent on the landowner or some corredor (middleman) for the processing and commercialization of the crops. This situation creates permanent indebtedness and is formally ex-


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pressed by the mortgaging of total crop production to the landlord. In effect, these rent contracts are closer to a sharecropping arrangement, yet worse: all costs are assumed by the leaseholder, the entire crop mortgaged to him or sold in advance to a corredor in exchange for cash— either to pay the rent, to get production capital, or to meet a subsistence crisis. As we might expect, these draconian conditions were passed on from small labradores to the people who worked for them. Seventy percent of the active population in the 1930 census described themselves as jornaleros (day laborers), and to these must be added the 41 percent of tenants who held less than a hectare. It is difficult to get accurate figures from census material (because the assumption is that each adult had just one profession), but 621 people were registered as jornaleros in agriculture and another 42 in construction. Besides the many jobs we might expect such people to be involved in (much of which we discuss below), we need to make the same caveat here as we did regarding the labradores. Jornalero, in this context, would have meant a person who relied on eventual work. Normally he would be paid the jornal (established day rate) for doing it. Informants trying to convey the extent of hardship would often resort to saying, “In those days the jornal was X pesetas.” Some jornaleros, however, would have found much more regular work than others. One way they did this was by entering into an aniaga (annual) relationship with someone who owned or managed a farm. (These various kinds of land and labor relations are taken up in greater detail in chapters 4 and 5.) We have stayed within the orbit of agriculture because of its great weight in the overall social world; still we find a complex set of overlapping terms—dueño sometimes overlapping with labrador, for example. The complexity grows denser as we widen our focus to the broader rural setting. With the exception of the rich, various trades took up much of this rural population, with households often appearing more as clusters of various activities. Moreover, any one man, say, fifty years old had probably experienced work such as carpentry, leather working, and rope making, each of which required a broad array of skills, and for women there was the sewing of borders for sandals, carpet work, and for a few even silk cultivation. Even so—despite the bias of the census in allowing only one occupation to a household—we still find a large number of people selfidentifying across a remarkably extensive set of professions for a town of scarcely more than 3,000 people. Forty-two people called themselves es-

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padadores (guillotiners) and rastrilladores (combers) working in hemp. Harness makers, smiths, and carpenters were in constant demand, not just for the upkeep of work animals but also for the maintenance of farm machinery and carts. Besides jornaleros who probably engaged casually in such work, there were eleven full-time herradores, which translates literally as “blacksmiths” but would have included all forms of anvil work and metalwork for the bits and pieces needed for carts, ploughs, and harvesters as well as the making and repairing of spades, scythes, and axes. There were well over thirty-five people engaged full-time as carreros (carters) and many more unrecorded who worked as such at some time during the year, so that at any one time there were at least a hundred people involved in some form of transportation. Likewise, though only twenty-six people called themselves albañiles (builders), many more would frequently find work building. The census taker in the 1920s would find one or two canning factories, a knife manufacturing workshop with some fifteen or so workers, and at least three operations making bamboo and raffia products. If one cared to count, there would be five or so calderos and hojalateros making buckets, funnels, and water pipes; five full-time carpenters with their own premises; ten barbers; and nine grocery stores, three of which also sold bread made on the premises. There were also four horneros who were not just bakers as the name implies but also provided their ovens for families to bake their own bread or cook other items. Catral still has a tiny street near the church called “Street of the Butchers,” but in fact meat eating for most people was confined to special occasions. Because of the hot climate, meat had to be made quickly into sausage, and for health reasons the municipality insisted that those who did the killing and curing as a sideline—the tabladeros, as they were called—came to this area for the purpose. There were five greengrocers, a chemist, and shops that sold cloth (there was no full-scale clothing store). This was a small town yet with quite a variety of commercial activities, but no bars or restaurants are registered, though undoubtedly there were places where people met to drink and pensiones (hostels) where people could eat. If one walked through the streets of Catral on a day in the 1920s, the men who were not in the fields and not engaged in the just-mentioned trades would be involved in the arduous job of processing cáñamo (hemp), while women would gather together, old and young, to do various kinds of homework—seated on benches to be glimpsed inside patios, or out in the street and clustered together for company. Much of


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their work involved finishing alpargatas for Elche or packaging items for shipment to Callosa del Segura, Santa Pola, or Crevillente. All these items were in some way related to hemp production and processing for, after the crisis of the vines and a long period of stagnation (when many migrated away), the area devoted to cáñamo gradually grew. It is important to note that silk, vines, and cotton—all at some time grown in the area—involve some greater or lesser amount of nonagricultural processing before being commercialized, and this is especially so for hemp. Once harvested, cáñamo is left to soak in a balsa de agua (water basin) until it has decayed or rotted. It is then dried and passed through a kind of guillotine (gramaera) to separate the fiber from the rest (gramisas). This job was usually done by the farmers and jornaleros themselves. The next processing phases were done by an espadador (of which there were eighteen) and two rastrilladores. The job of the espadador was to beat the bundles of cáñamo, which were hung over a support, with a long wooden stick with sharpened edges in order to get rid of the remaining nonfibrous material. This was then passed to the rastrilladores, whose job was to comb the fibers with an iron comb, an unhealthy job because the fibers were inhaled. So hemp growing, hemp processing, and manufacturing hemp goods for market outside the region all contributed to the formation of a mixed agrarian/industrial regional economy. The same could be said of the wine produced earlier, and the silk before that. For whatever reason, we find commercialized crops whose value-added relied heavily on both postharvest nonagricultural labor and consumption demands from beyond the region. This was the setting as Spain entered the period of the Republic and subsequently the civil war, which we take up in the next chapter.

some preliminary conclusions about histories The sense one gets of this historical narrative is that no one plot helps provide direction for our journey. Hedges are poorly cut, brambles keep getting caught on our clothing just as we thought we had left one area of the woodland for another. Paths seem almost entirely absent, and when they do emerge they seem to go only small distances and then are taken over by the wild bush again. The heterogeneity of historical experiences seems to work against one common history. So we conclude this chapter with an attempt to explore some of the relationships among

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elements of this heterogeneity, making a very tentative move toward exploring how their interaction reciprocally reconstitutes each element. First there is the question of the special nature of the region’s industrial development. Historians of the Valencian economy tend to view the latter part of the nineteenth century as the period when the industrial base was formed in the País Valenciano (Aracil and Bonafé, 1978; Bernabé Maestre, 1975; Lluch, 1976). Small-scale capitalist enterprises were slowly and unevenly being replaced in the key sectors by manufactories. Nonetheless, while this implied a less haphazard pattern of industrial organization, certain features remained to distinguish this industrialization from the Manchester model. Apprenticeships (learning on the job and not through any kind of formal technical college; see Capecchi, 1988, for Bologna) involved the practical learning of virtually the whole range of skills needed for the production of an item rather than the specialization of skills. Despite this, most products—sandals, brooms, bamboo furniture, shoes, nets, carpets, and toys—were amenable to fragmentation of the production process, making outwork a relatively simple operation that did not interrupt the overall process. In many sectors, too, work was seasonal. As alpargata making shifted over to shoe manufacture, for example, there was a four-month layoff period (December to March), demand increasing thereafter, just as the slow period (March to June) came on in agriculture in the Vega Baja. Such industrial rhythm went hand in hand with pluriactive households that had one foot in agriculture, the other in one or often quite a number of nonagricultural pursuits. Yet these were not the generalized rural skills often associated with peasant farming, where nonagricultural activity might reflect the absence of nearby markets. Peasants do things for themselves—bake their own bread, fix their own buckets, and build their own houses—because there are no bakers, tinkers, or builders who sell those services. Put another way, peasants perform nonagricultural tasks to produce use values, not exchange values. This is emphatically not the case for the people we are talking about. Pluriactivity is income seeking (exchange value seeking), often to such an extent that autoprovisioning of the family household is sacrificed—unpaid domestic kinds of jobs being passed out to “economically inactive” (clearly a misnomer) older or younger family members. Family pluriactivity presupposes the extensive use of all available resources, such as labor power, including the incorporation of family members normally inactive. We should note that income seeking, though gendered, was not gendered in the sense of being confined to men, but rather in terms of the


51

kinds of jobs undertaken. Moreover, it is important to recognize the extent of pluriactivity, its multiple manifestations. We have seen it as a household phenomenon (Bernabé Maestre et al., 1984, talk specifically of family pluriactivity), but it was also an individual phenomenon, and here too in several ways. One person might engage in two or three occupations in a given year. This might be seasonal and obviously often was. But it might also be circumstantial. A cousin finds work in Elche, whence he commutes each day (one informant told of rising at five in the morning and walking to Elche from Catral to work, a 14-kilometer distance) and, while there, hears of a three-week job. Economic happenstance may coincide with the family cycle: that three-week job might arise when the young man is just the right age, or when his parents have just made a particular strategic decision, to allow him the opportunity to make a longer-term choice (Hareven, 1982). We must also recognize that over a lifespan a person is likely to move through several occupations. Each time, these may indeed be single occupations and at any one statistical moment register in the records as such. This latter point draws attention to an issue we saw clearly in the Catral of the 1920s. Even where a wide variety of occupations in regions of dispersed industrialization like this one are recorded in one or another register for the countryside, the pluriactivity of households and individuals means that this variety is underrepresented. We found that travelers as far back as the nineteenth century were quick to note the propensity of women to record their occupations as “sus labores” (housework), evidence to the contrary. And one informant interviewed in 1978 explained the loss of his right arm as the result of an industrial accident, but he was so used to the classifications of outsiders that he insisted he had spent his entire life as an agriculturalist.11 A third conclusion relates to blockages and unevenness. Terms such as “household pluriactivity” (implying family members exchanging experiences across occupations), “family networks,” “dispersed industrialization,” and even “apprenticeship” can have the effect of overemphasizing the degree to which knowledge was spread generally through regional economies such as this one. So it is important to note the extent of unevenness in the regional development we have seen and the disarticulation between sectors—again, this becomes important as we seek to interpret the present, too. Thus, notwithstanding this fleeting glimpse of the kinds of shifts toward capitalist labor relations that must have been occurring in Elche as shoe production increased fifteen times between 1896 and 1920 (Moreno Saez, 1987), commercial agriculture

52


was undertaken while maintaining old principles of land tenure and labor relations and expanded only when reinforced further in a kind of local version of the second feudalism in eastern Europe. We also want to point out the vital role of international currents, and it would be wrong to call these narrowly economic—unless we call World War I or a Parisian taste for colorful straw matting simply economic. As the region became more commercialized, international factors did not so much reduce the volatility of life in southwest Alicante as change the coefficients of volatility. One reason for this vulnerability was the failure in the formation of a regional power elite. Much happened in Valencia during the nineteenth century that put paid to the landed aristocracy in a way that did not happen in the interior of Spain, but this occurred much more slowly in the Bajo Segura and, even as a new class of landlords like the Lara family emerged from the remnants of old titled landlords, they were far from being adventurous and visionary bourgeois capitalists. Even so, as a class, in the early part of the twentieth century it was in their interests to seek an unfettered international market for their produce. Yet, for the textile owners of Alcoy, or the neophyte shoe industrialists of Elche, or the transforming carpet enterprises of Crevillente, what they needed was tariff protection (initially, they sought it even against Catalonia). What we are seeing here is a class expression of the disarticulation referred to above. A further limitation to the formation of such a bloc was the ephemeral nature of entrepreneurs in Crevillente and Elche. Referring to the early nineteenth century, García Bonafé argued that a particular feature of Valencian capitalists was their propensity to retain a relatively small size of operation rather than seek expansion (Aracil and Bonafé, 1978). This sounds very like Bernabé Maestre et al. (1984:25) with reference to the next century: “There doesn’t exist a commercial history of accumulation alongside the formation of this [small amount of ] capital. Large firms end by closing up. Firm history is, rather, cyclical: increasing until they have reached a limit (tope), followed by a period maintained at this level for a while and then to end declining and closing in a period of general crisis.” If this is so, then it follows that many entrepreneurs were, continually, first-time entrepreneurs. Refugees from a volatile commercial agriculture, newly independent artisans, ambitious millers, carters, and corredores all joined more seasoned manufacturers at one point or another, to provide small amounts of capital in the industrial sector. They came, of course, with their own particular culture (or lack of it).12 These are cru-


53

cial figures in the social landscape of the Vega Baja, for Catral in the 1920s, and as we see later for the end of the twentieth century. All these factors combined, then, to curtail the possibilities of collective action to protect the regional economy. This in turn fractured the continuity of any sustained public political discourse by a regional power bloc, a factor whose cultural implications we take up in chapter 8. And finally, since we eventually develop the role of movement and restriction in this kind of economy, we end with a comment on what this chapter’s historical evidence tells us about mobility. We note not so much the fact of a floating and agile labor force, and a heterogeneous trading and petty capitalist sector, but rather the particular nature of this movement. As we have emphasized for other features of the regional setting, here to we stress that “floating” was by no means something shared by all the working population. There may have been those for whom movement—migration to North Africa or France, seasonal wheat harvesting in La Mancha, or commuting to Crevillente—was a speculative possibility that simply never happened, but there were others—we discuss them at length later in the book—for whom this kind of cultural panorama was unthinkable. And its unthinkability was entirely the function of the politics of Spain, of Valencia, and of the Vega Baja. And then for those who did move, or who at least spent much time discussing it and strategizing around it, it is worth noting the extent to which these were family household decisions. Again and again we return to this peculiar feature of the household as a kind of incomeseeking enterprise (which is not the same thing as the household as a wage-earning unit, or the laborer as an “entrepreneurial worker”). Here suffice it to note the difference between, for example, the wave migration of Andalusian day laborers (Gregory, 1971) and short-term, household-specific migration here: a couple go to Elche from Catral for six years, leaving their small amount of (rented, owned, or sharecropped) land in the hands of an older parent, so that the man can work in a shoe factory while the woman gets peremptory homework—a condition that then changes to one in which the man returns to Catral and commutes while the woman operates a small workshop of neighbors subcontracted to a factory in Crevillente. There are many factors that go into the scenario just described; it would be hasty to draw conclusions at this stage. But we end by noting a series of absences, absences that we cannot at this stage quite articulate. They might begin with the nineteenth-century traveler who noted his inability to see the extent of homeworkers—something he knew was

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spanish civil war The coup d’etat of July 17, 1936, was intended to be just that: the conspirators expected little opposition. In the event, the Nationalists (as they came to refer to themselves) failed to secure the three major cities of Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia. What was to be a decisive blow became a protracted civil war in which more than a half million people died and possibly an equal number were driven into exile. The war was experienced differently from one region to another. In towns like Seville and Zaragoza, which the Nationalists controlled from the outset, organized terror from the top down persisted throughout the war and was part of the Nationalist campaign to win the war by terrorizing the civilian population in the areas they occupied: “It’s our programme . . . to exterminate a third of the male population,” a press officer told an American journalist. “That will clean up the country and rid us of the proletariat” (Richards, 1998: 47). By contrast, the ability of Republican-controlled regions to organize a state for the pursuance of a war was constrained by the persistent incapacity on the part successive governments to govern. Thus, whereas the Nationalists declared war in July 1936, the Republicans did not officially declare a state of war until January 1939, weeks before their final defeat. As Pierre Vilar noted, “The violence of class hatred, when exercised from above, is much more coherent and durable than in the other direction” (quoted in Richards, 1998: 33). Also giving rise to different war experiences was the fact that during the first months, while the government was getting established under Largo Caballero, large areas of the Republican sector were taken over by the different political groups. Aragon, for example, was a stronghold of rural anarchism, while the País Valenciano (whence the government had retreated in November 1936) showed strong support for the Partido Socialista Obero Expañol, though various factions held sway in different areas. Juan Negrin, a moderate socialist who replaced Largo Caballero in May 1937 and supported the communist-dominated Popular Front, had moved the seat of government to Barcelona by October and with Russian support set about disciplining the regional autonomists and various parties of the Left. Republican hopes faded with the defeat at the Ebro River in November 1938, just after Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Munich Pact underwrote Britain’s and France’s antipathy to those resisting fascism and also made the Soviet Union shore up its troops at home, thereby reducing all sources of aid for the Republic. As the Nationalists pursued their advance into Catalonia and Negrin was ousted by a Council of Defense, he and a


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few of his deputies fled first across the Pyrennees to France, then to Elda, close to the Vega Baja, and finally to Toulouse. The council itself soon retreated from Madrid to Valencia, site of the final resistance to Franco’s troops in late March and early April 1939.

there, but whose public face seemed elusive if not entirely unavailable. To this we might add the difference between the occupations recorded in the registers and the pluriactivity these records both hinted at and obscured. There is an absence too in the failure of the regional power bloc to coalesce; we begin to see some kind of failed translation of private concerns into public issues, something we see taking on different forms as it threads its way toward the present.

chapter 3

Regulating Social Life through Uncertainty and Fear Cautivo y desarmado el ejército rojo, hemos alcanzado nuestras últimas posiciones militares. La guerra ha terminado. (With the red army captured and disarmed, we have reached our final military positions. The war has ended.) General Francisco Franco, April 1, 1939

It is now time to get a sense of the social world that prevailed in the Vega Baja through the 1940s and 1950s. By exploring people’s remembered experiences of the broader regional history, we can see how the common frame of political repression and the postwar black market actually created divisions among ordinary people, privatizing their experiences and thus limiting the possibility of their being voiced. “The terror,” notes Julián Casanova, “succeeded in breaking the ties of friendship and social solidarity, preventing any germ of resistance” (Casanova et al., 2002: 29).

“ LA

GUERRA HA TERMINADO ”

Before the war one could do well with cáñamo but it was up and down. After the war it was always good; about 80 percent of people in Catral were involved in cáñamo one way or the other. Most of it went to Callosa. It wasn’t just cáñamo, either. With the rise in prices for food—with the estraperlo—people ploughed up their olive trees to plant more intensive crops. It was the renters who did it. They bought the land under olives and then they ploughed them up and planted other things, but once the olives had gone the demand for water grew. . . . There was a cupo [quota] on olive oil, so to “arrancar” [pull out] olive trees you needed official permission. But for some people it didn’t matter much. I got permission to tear up 4 tahullas of my olives but I tore up all 25 tahullas. The soil here isn’t good for olives anyway. But Tio Cornelio [Fernando Lorenzo] who had been a

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Regulating Social Life

57

socialist concejal before the war, he only got his permiso [permit] in 1975.1 (Juan Manuel Aguilar Gómez, Fieldnotes GS 1979)

When Franco announced the end of the war on April 1, 1939, the port of Alicante (just 30 kilometers from Catral), the last city to fall to Franco’s forces, became the refuge of people fleeing the victorious forces and their political henchmen. Ronald Fraser recorded the conditions late in March: 15,000 men women and children were crammed in the port area. . . . [The testimony of Saturnino Carod:] “As he stood staring out to sea, the man standing next to him with a cigarette in his mouth slit his own throat and crumpled on to the quay. Almost immediately word came from the other end of the port that someone he knew had shot himself. Suicides spread like an epidemic; he no sooner turned to look at some people running than he heard that it was because someone had thrown himself into the water. A man climbed up a lamppost and began shouting incoherently of the dangers that awaited them. At the end of his speech, he threw himself from the post and crashed on to the quay.” (1979: 503; see also Damiano and Bayo, 1978)

Undoubtedly there were important civil and military people who had supported the Republic among the refugees, but there were also many ordinary people, peasants, day laborers from small towns of the Vega Baja who had played some public role in local politics. Catral itself changed hands only two days before the official surrender. Those who had been active participants in local government, or whose hopes had been tied to a participatory civil society and a less polarized rural economy, or those who retained their doubts about any kind of change but were pleased to follow along, were now in real physical danger. Two such people were Fernando Nogales and Fernando Lorenzo (Tio Cornelio, mentioned in the quotation above), who had fled to Alicante hoping to be evacuated from the port. Caught and placed first in the stadiums and open, fenced areas in and around the city, they were then shipped to the concentration camp of Albatera in the heart of the Vega Baja, one of the largest of Franco’s prison camps.2 Fraser records: Testimony of Narciso Julian: “Designed to hold a few hundred, the camp [at Albatera] was packed with nearly 10,000 prisoners. Hygiene and shelter were primitive to the point of non-existence, food and water scarce. Falangists, police, civilians, even priests came from different parts of Spain to look for men they wanted; many whom they took away at the beginning never reached their home towns or villages. Some prisoners succeeded in escaping; others were executed in front of the camp inmates for trying. On

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Conflicting Histories one occasion a temporary second lieutenant inspecting the sentry posts turned a machine gun on the inmates and opened fire.” (1979: 507–8)

During those first weeks the roundups were a daily nightmare. A newly appointed fascist mayor would arrive at the camp with a war widow. The bereaved woman would then identify someone she claimed had supported the killing of a Nationalist. An officer stepped forward with a pistol and shot the man in the head—without trial and in front of the rest of the camp. In May 1939, five people from Catral were denounced and shot. With army units on the roads and in the towns, together with the roving bands of Falangist thugs and the Guardia Civil reestablishing its authority in the local guard posts, the old figures of authority began to emerge from their hiding or simply from discrete quietude. Very few had actually been imprisoned during the war.3 Some landlords and larger tenants had moved their residences into towns like Valencia, others had simply moved close by to the church-dominated town of Orihuela. Some of the small farmers and workers whose close ties of dependency to their dueños made them unsympathetic to the Republican cause had nonetheless been drafted into the Republican army. While people like the two Fernandos were desperately searching for survival, these people were moving back and establishing their old claims to property, status, and power and then organizing a net of relationships that would allow them to set their operations back in motion. Meanwhile, the mothers, wives, and friends of people like the two Fernandos were desperately calling on the resources of their networks— to catch the least rumor of their loved ones’ whereabouts, to secure food for them, and then to get it to them. It was not easy. Some people had been picked up while still in custody in Alicante and taken away by Falangists to be beaten up or summarily executed. Others never made it to Alicante and were picked up on the road. Through this, relatives and friends were moving backward and forward in desperate searches; information picked up about one person in the course of a search was transmitted to the relevant kin, rumor and information thus shaping the frantic urgency. Nor was this inconsistent with the intentions of the new regime, not at all concerned to keep this random treatment of impure and shameful Reds under wraps. Food and information aside, the most pressing concern was to alleviate relatives’ dire legal position. This meant that, however meager their resources to do so, people had to pull the strings of more vertically ori-


59

ented networks. The problem was not one facing only those people like Tio Cornelio who held political office. There had been widespread support in the Vega Baja for the UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores, the socialist union). There had also been extensive participation in expropriation and land redistribution. These people too were now in dire straits. Our evidence from municipal archives suggests that pretty much all the jornaleros of Catral had supported the general strike of 1934, well before the more radical days in the area during the war itself.4 From the perspective of the new regime, these people had already broken the law. Those who had supported the Republic were not simply denied the rights of a citizen, they were to be chastised actively and purged through punishment (Bernal, 1981). This was the setting for the pursuit of the notorious avales. Translated innocuously in a standard dictionary as “endorsement” or “guarantee,” out of context, these glosses do nothing to help understand the institution of the aval, either in the postwar setting or more generally in Spanish rural society. Finding that a relative was being held for some unknown reason in a Guardia Civil post in a nearby town, or in the infamous almond fields near Alicante, or still worse in the Albatera camp, the wife, mother, daughter, or grandparent had to seek desperately for a person of authority who was able to vouch that fulano de tal (so-andso) had long been a person of good character, a man who knew his place in society, who perhaps had gone astray momentarily in the heat of the moment and under the influence of other more fearful and dangerous Reds. Such a figure, most often a priest, could have a decisive effect on the well-being of an ordinary person. But such people of influence were hard to find, often being thoroughly committed to the crusade of cleansing Spain of impious Reds, and even when compliant they were likely to extract the full weight of reciprocity in return. While downplaying some of the distasteful facts of Franco’s repression is perhaps to be expected, a much more troubling issue is Spain’s relationship to the political culture that went with it. The Nationalist cause was understood to be literally a crusade (Vincent, 1999) for the cleansing of Spain through violent retribution. It was to recuperate Spain’s golden years, and to do this one version of history was made to prevail—a version that made the present reflect the glorious days of the reconquista when uncivilized, Moorish non-Christians had been driven from Spain’s pure body. Cleansing, purification, as well as national and individual atonement through punishment were key elements of the Nationalist discourse. Political cleansing, when it did not mean literal elim-

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ination of Reds and their relatives, meant at least personal cleansing and retribution. As we see shortly, the war’s (and Franco’s prisons’ subsequently) ravaging of the labor supply formed one of the elements helping to balance the otherwise hopeless equation. The immediate aftermath of securing an aval for a working person was to set the terms of subsequent social relationships, and this must be understood within the overall ideological atmosphere. “Can there be anything more humanitarian, just and social for those who have tried to annihilate an entire civilization,” wrote a supporter of the regime in 1939, “than to oblige them to reconstruct what they have destroyed” (quoted in Juan i Fenollar, 1979), who then proposed that the jornada—the length of the working day—be calculated in terms not of the capacity of the worker but rather of the needs of a wounded and recovering Spain. The idea that working people had to undergo a quite physical penance was pervasive. For many who returned to work, even if they had been loyal to their old employers during the Republic, a certain personal sense of shame and humility was expected merely for being a worker. Acting against the use of networks of friends, relatives, and neighbors was the countercurrent of suspicion, again quite intentionally produced. Official notices urged people to denounce those close to them and rewarded them with part of the property of the guilty party. “Any person who knows about the commission of a crime done during the time of the red dominion, is obliged to denounce the fact to the Jefe de Sector that corresponds to his residence” (Avance, April 31, 1939). Notices like this one from the military governor of Valencia were published in all local newspapers and yielded immediate results. Alongside the daily personal fears was the constant news of more executions, and not just in the camps. Executions in nearby towns occurred in large numbers well into 1943.5 The sense of random terror was increased by the fact that not only current infractions were punishable. The Law of Political Responsibilities passed before the end of the war, in February 1939, laid out punishments retroactively for crimes that took place during the Republic. This was designed especially to net those who had participated in the infamous general strike of 1934 that had been so effective in the countryside. The repression in the immediate aftermath of the war may have lost its virulence in the following years, but its apparent randomness and personal selectivity continued. Several people were detained in 1945 in Catral, beaten, and taken to Elche where they were released after a few


61

days. These included José Arroyo Iglesias, Fernando Nogales, José Gil Sr., some of whom we have met, some of whom we are yet to meet. This was part of a redada (sweep) against the communist resistance that was trying to organize locally; 800 people were detained in the Vega Baja and Alicante, many between Elche and Crevillente, under the accusation (that local authorities forced people to sign) of being members of the PCE (Partido Comunista de España, communist party) (Furió, 1995: 615). Indeed, the worst years of repression lasted until the mid-1950s. Not until 1969 did Franco decree the proscription of war crimes. Yet the culture of repression had been well sown and carefully nurtured over the years. And to the politics of repression could now be added the economy of scarcity. Taken together, these combined to concentrate people’s minds on the immediacy of personal survival. ESTRAPERLO

and selective repression

When Fernando Nogales had served his time in prison and eventually found himself back in the Vega Baja trying to survive, it was a draconian world he found himself in. To the repression he had faced was now added the deprivation of a devastated economy and the semi-legality of the black market on which he relied for survival. After an initial period of generalized confusion immediately after April 1939, the overwhelming presence of the military hunting down Reds and making every effort to generate a pervasive sense of fear quickly reversed the balances of the latter days of the Republic. Land in the Nationalist occupied zones had already been handed back to the old landlords and big tenants, and the Decree of November 1939 officially overturned all changes in land tenure resulting from Republican land reform. Catral’s owners and large tenants now reestablished themselves, while an incipient entrepreneurial group began to take advantage of the chaotic postwar conditions. Falangist propaganda notwithstanding, large fincas like Nonduermas, Lo de Vera, and Los Frailes (see chapter 4), which had been expropriated and run as collectives, were in better condition than they had been for a generation (Quilis Tauriz, 1992).6 As a result partly of good weather, partly of an enthusiastic and engaged labor force, harvests had been generally good; the church, which served as the main warehouse for the municipality during the war years, was filled to the roof with agricultural produce at the war’s end.7 Yet those, like Fernando, who had been active and outspoken progressives in the war years were now imprisoned or in hiding, and many

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others in some way associated with them were highly vulnerable. Still others were uncertain of just how their activities during the war might be judged. They therefore kept a low profile, retreating as far as possible into the private and discrete world of the immediate family and restricting themselves to the language of daily need imposed by the devastation of the area. And this devastation was not just a result of the war; it was also the result of the particular model of national economy the new regime sought to build (Malefakis, 1978, 1982). Consistent with the fears of Spain’s political and spiritual contamination, the regime strove for an autarchic and autarkic Spain immunized against the diseases from abroad and commanding a national economy within.8 This was to be a kind of fits-and-starts, deeply contradictory, domestic industrial development that reflected the regime’s ambivalence to city and industry—its suspicion of the modern yet its greed for wealth. The regime invoked romantic images of the pure peasant and bucolic countryside that expressed Spain’s “true essence” and might save her from the evils of an industrial working class. But in the absence of a rich primary resource base, a policy of autarchy could only mean imposing “forced saving” on agriculture and the countryside.9 Autarchy meant that agriculture suffered chronic shortages and poor fertilizers produced by domestic industry. To add insult to that injury, the industry was geared to produce a range of commodities that would otherwise have been brought in from abroad, including hemp. Moreover, these conditions—highly restricted capital inputs and the natural reluctance of a right-wing government to conduct a frontal war on the agricultural propertied classes—meant that increases in outputs could be achieved in only one way: increased intensity and length of work provided by agricultural workers. This was one arm of the yoke born by ordinary people in the countryside. The other was the dual economy it invoked. When an official economy of rationing was used to ensure that the countryside would subsidize town and industry, an off-the-books economy arose alongside it. So, to the official manipulations of economic autarchy were added the piecemeal manipulations of the less-than-legal economy. These then provided the conditions that would characterize changes to the Vega Baja through the forties and fifties. The production of hemp for industrial processing and a black market rural economy twice the size of the official economy set the stage for the particular changes that were to occur in the relations between working people and people of property. While the local authorities, the Guardia Civil, or the army might any day deliver a call to present oneself at their headquarters, or the


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squadrons of Falange youth might sweep through the streets on an evening, distrust and fear combined with daily economic hardship to produce an alternative kind of social regulation, one that found fertile ground in the already well-developed personalized authority structures of the region. The careful dealings with neighbors that might ordinarily have resulted from the generalized poverty of basic resources in a devastated rural economy took on a special edge as the official control of the production and marketing of goods meant that neighbors were also potential spies who could shop one another to the authorities for activities that were essential for survival. These were known as los tiempos del estraperlo (the times of the black market),10 a time when the unrecognized production and circulation of basic foodstuffs was twice as great as that in the official sector (Pitt-Rivers, 1957: 20; Richards, 1998: 135). We use the word “unrecognized,” rather than “illegal” or “illicit,” since to say that these activities were illegal would be to suggest that they were entirely hidden and that the forces of order—from the municipal authorities, to the Guardia Civil, to the legal apparatus—were set on eliminating them. This would be far from the truth. On the contrary, the position of these kinds of activities vis-à-vis the formal, official law and policy produced a particular kind of agency and a particular kind of freedom. Social regulation under these conditions was quite specifically not universalistic; estraperlo affected people very differently depending on their place in the social and political fabric, and it was meant to regulate people in this way. We have to understand the power of this sort of everyday petty fear in the context of the years of hunger after the war: the estraperlo and the ration books created a space for legal and illegal differentiation in basic nutrition. In the years of the estraperlo we can see how the scarcities, either because of insufficient rations allotted through ration books or because politically dubious people could not get ration books, forced people into patterns of consumption dictated by piecemeal networks that characterized the unrecognized economy. The effects were especially far-reaching for those who had been active in union politics during the Republic and the civil war years and now were forced to eke out a living largely through petty estraperlo11 and yet were especially vulnerable to denunciation, thereby putting their politics into a straightjacket. Estraperlo, then, was itself an element of repression through the regulation of food supplies and hence the selective manipulation of hunger. As such it had two consequences: it was discriminatory and, because the practical issue of getting food became the sole objective and thought in everyone’s minds, it closed down not just a discursive world

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of public participation but an interest in effecting political agency tout court. As to the discriminatory element, paradoxically the exceedingly regulated framework within which the estraperlo operated transformed the social relations of provisioning by making personalized networks of distribution essential. This was especially the case for the Reds, who over the previous few years had worked out a political culture of collective confrontation to improve their rights as workers and citizens. At that time their focus had been to improve their conditions through better wages—that is, at the point of production, wages at the time translating straight into consumption needs through transparent exchange. Now the new setting forced personalistic practices on them not only in production relations (which we see in a moment, through the practices of la hipoteca humana) but also in the social relations required for distribution, pushing them into personalistic agreements in the practice of everyday life and distancing them from the notion that a practical involvement in public politics could be tied to a betterment of their situation. Alongside the selectivity of discrimination, scarcity itself was a form of political silencing. For the vanquished in the war, as well as the poor more generally, scarcity had the effect of magnifying the importance of material items to the exclusion of any other more abstract ideas. Richards quotes a British government report—“Food has eclipsed politics as the universal topic of conversation” (1998: 143)—and argues that the sheer focusing on everyday survival was a form of political control (1998: 135). Official figures on the key item, wheat, show declines in consumption in each set of years, from 1931/35 to 1941/45 and again through 1946/50 (Richards, 1998: 134), while the high prices paid for bread and oil in the 1940s were not to be reached again until 1975. On the other hand, while the official prices of wheat and other cereals tended to be below those during the Republic, estraperlo prices soared to incredible heights—for wheat an increase from the mean prices during the Republic years (1931–35) to 1949 of fully 1,941 percent. Maize, oats, and barley followed close behind. Thus, while official prices were held down, real black market prices both constrained consumption for those that could not get ration cards and offered real opportunities for getting rich. The constant search for work, for basic foodstuffs and clothing, effectively made it the only arena in which human agency was effective, and insofar as this was taking place in technically illegal conditions there was a kind of enforced alienation from the public, political sphere. Fer-


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nando Nogales gives us some sense of these circumstances. After the initial period of chaos, Fernando was transferred from the camp at Albatera to a work camp, then tried and sentenced to twelve years imprisonment. He came out with a pardon (indulto) in 1945, six years after the end of the war. When I came back I went to work in the cáñamo and the estraperlo. People on the right wouldn’t give work to those on the left, even if they came crawling on their knees. Anyway a cousin of mine who worked with cáñamo [as a rastrillador] gave me work. In the business of the black market we went to buy things in Albatera and Callosa. (Fieldnotes GS 1979)

His younger brother, José, takes up the story: Apart from the small amount of wheat that came from the farmers here, most of it came on the “Granaino.” This was the Granada-Alicante train, an ancient and slow train that had to stop often, where the track was really bad. It didn’t only bring wheat but olive oil and other things. El Granaino started offloading in Murcia, in Lorca to begin with, then Jacarilla and then [the city of] Murcia. In [the province of Alicante] it stopped in Orihuela, Callosa and the station of Albatera, then on to Crevillente and Elche, before arriving in Alicante. As it travelled the price of the wheat went up . . . between Jacarilla [50 kilometers from Catral] and here the difference was between 11⁄2 to 2 pesetas a kilo, and then more as it got towards Alicante. (Fieldnotes GS 1979)

Fernando and his brother were forced into the petty estraperlo because of their lack of opportunity in the labor market due to their politics during the Republic. Throughout these years those who had been tried for war crimes did not have the right to move (one needed a permit) and could be accused of being part of the maquis (resistance), tried, and sentenced under one of many repressive laws. Both brothers go on to describe two ways goods entered the black market. In one scenario, there were what Fernando called mozos puestos (designated young men) who, when there was not much work in the cáñamo took their bicycles to Jacarilla and came back with 70–100 kilograms of grain or flour. “There was one who once brought back 224 kgs” (added José). They brought goods here on a daily basis. “In those days there were real barbarities. Me, in one day I managed to carry from the mill and hide 3,000 kgs of barley flour in trips of 40 to 60 kg sacks!” (José). A second, less systematic but more spectacular scenario was one in which people traveled in the train or on the roofs of wagons. “The Guardia Civil organized raids,” says Fernando, “But when they captured somebody everything had disappeared. Travellers [usually women] made

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previous arrangements with young kids (acuerdos con chavales). Before the train got to a stop where the Guardia might be, they threw their goods off the train to these kids.” José added an extra wrinkle: “Afterwards they would give the kids something and there were times when los chiquillos (the kids) robbed them.” Not all of those involved in estraperlo were in a situation of constant insecurity and fear. As Fernando recalls, some who had supported the Nationalists were able to maneuver and seize the opportunities the estraperlo offered. The church served as a warehouse. It was there that all the reserves were stored, to be managed by the collectivity [during the war]. Such that after the war, beside the altar there was a huge pile of sheafs of cáñamo up to the ceiling, as well as other goods that had been produced. When the dueños came back, it should have been divided up among them, according to the franquista laws. But one or two took it all and sold it [in the black market] and made a lot of money. (Fieldnotes GS 1979)

So besides the powerful image of repression and constraint, there is another—equally powerful—an era of opportunity and change: one a memory of control, the other a memory of freedom. They appear to be contradictory and yet they are deeply intermeshed. The unrecognized nature of the estraperlo also affected the beneficiaries of the war, but it positioned them vis-à-vis the public political sphere quite differently. For them too there was always the possibility of a spiteful neighbor or even a relative exposing their activities to such an extent that they could not be tolerated by the authorities. This led not to an alienation from politics but to an immersion in it, albeit in a highly personalistic way, for thoroughly successful economic activities were simply impossible without personal political ties. Initially, after the war, for the landed classes this meant getting land back into production as quickly as possible. For entrepreneurs it meant using political contacts to corner whatever surpluses there were and, until the policies of autarchy and rationing could take hold, to sell them to whomever could buy.

CÁÑAMO :

the bountiful years

As the chaos of the immediate postwar period gave way and Franco’s policy of autarchy took hold, the peculiar nature of the Spanish economy provided opportunities that were to change the property structure of the area. Spain’s relative isolation after the war gave a special impetus to domestic demand for hemp, which had long been grown in the


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area. There was also an official demand that 20 percent of cultivated land be devoted to wheat production but, as Pitt-Rivers (1957: 19–20) notes for Alcalá, in Andalusia, “The officials who are responsible in the town for countersigning the returns of the farmers are farmers themselves. Less than what is sown is declared, and upon the declared area only about half the harvest is admitted. It is always an inexplicably bad year.” Nevertheless, unrecognized production of foodstuffs and commercial crops such as cáñamo was so widespread as to put pressure on expanding the area of cultivation in the término. Again, this production meant different things to different people. For some it meant subsistence consumption and minor trading, for others it meant real advances from their ability to benefit from strategic opportunities. An earlier interest in citrus crops was curtailed as export demand fell and black market food production gave tenants and traders a special advantage. Nonetheless, black market production of agricultural goods combined with expanded production of cáñamo (which was also sold both officially and in the gray, if not black, market) provided windfall opportunities for those well placed to take advantage. Moreover, the gap between rents that were indexed to the official price of wheat and these unofficial prices put tenants, middle and large, in an especially favorable situation, and they pushed to produce as much as water and labor supplies would allow. This in turn led to both pressure to improve land productivity through better irrigation and pressure on the exploitative possibilities of both tied and jornalero labor. In effect, then, estraperlo produced a different kind of agency for these beneficiaries, and one with its effect on political culture. The fact that codes of interpersonal conduct that were shaped from one situation to another pragmatically outweighed adherence to the law or to public policy made elite conduct a kind of flamboyant hypocrisy—but one endorsed, albeit ambivalently, by Franco himself. This ambivalence is captured well in a story Richards (1998: 134) relates: Franco’s attitude is suggested in an oft-told anecdote recounted by the leading Falangist bureaucrat Dionisio Ridruejo who, when he complained to Franco in April 1942 about corruption and the extent of the black market, was told by the Caudillo [Franco]: “Look Dionisio, in the middle ages and also later, there was a custom of sharing out titles, lands goods, and even the hand of some maiden among the combatants who had excelled in battle. . . . However in our days there is no way of rewarding properly those who we think have efficiently contributed to the triumph of the Movement. Some are resigned to accepting this fact: but others listen to people who suggest earning some easy money through some commercial operation and fall into temptation.”

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Entrepreneurs whose politics had tied them to conservatives before and during the early years of the Republic were quick to exploit local opportunities.12 Initially, at least until regional production could be normalized, their success depended on trading with preexisting surpluses. Thus, after the war, José (Pepe) Iglesias took advantage of the stores of hemp kept in the church by the Republicans and was one of the people remembered today for making a quick fortune from selling it instead of turning it over to the authorities. When Pepe was twelve he had started to work in agriculture for his father, a large tenant who rented 300 tahullas and owned another 32 tahullas. Pepe was the second of three sons. When in 1932 Republican tenancy laws began to look threatening to the landowners, his family lost their tenancy and he took up a job, at twenty-six, as the salesman of a cereals and flour company in Alicante. He had sole control over their sales in the Vega Baja and in neighboring areas of Murcia. Soon after his marriage, the civil war broke out and Pepe’s job in Alicante collapsed. But he was able to seize the opportunities the estraperlo afforded. In fact, Pepe set up a cáñamo sales company in partnership with his ex-boss from Alicante, the latter putting up the capital and Pepe operating the firm. Pepe Iglesias was one of the big corredores involved in cáñamo black market operations. He was in a strategic position before the war, being the son of a large tenant and supporter of Franco’s rebellion (the family hid in Orihuela during the war). However, instead of following the lead of most large tenant families, buying land and entering the local social relations of production and dependency, he chose to exploit the commercial opportunities opened in the estraperlo, through the control of networks of well-positioned people in the new regime, building on the networks he and his brothers had started before the war as corredores of wheat, animals, and land. He was the type of new power broker that could emerge in the changing situation, although he never got to institutionalize his position and seems to have worked in an individualist manner to further his particular fortune.13 Pepe bought hemp in Teruel, the Vega Baja, Granada, and even Zaragoza and concentrated processing operations in Catral and Teruel. Reflecting on those days, he emphasizes that there was very little capital investment needed for machinery. As a trader he would buy hemp after it had been cured and the first stage of rendering it into fiber had been undertaken by the farmers themselves. His own point of contact with labor was through the skilled crushers of the crude fiber and the combers—


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the espadadores and rastrilladores. The latter were skilled workers who tended to head up teams usually made up of family members, one rastrillador requiring three or four espadadores as well as children acting as apprentices and women who did carrying jobs and worked with the shortest fibers to make sandal and shoe soles for the Elche alpargata industry. “The rastrillador phase was controlled by about seven families, each with two or three brothers. It was piecework and pretty much all the family worked including the kids. There were Los Sanchez, Los Luces, Los Crecencia, Los Pijares, Los Franchos y Los Conejos—about 40 rastrilladors in all,” Juan Manuel Aguilar Gómez told us in 1979 (Fieldnotes GS 1979). The use of nicknames to refer to whole families in this way, though common in other communities, was not widespread in Catral. They were applied to the rastrillador families because most of them had come to Catral from Callosa after the war. As we have seen, Callosa had been a hotbed of socialist organization. Rastrilladores in particular suffered brutal repression after the civil war. These families came to Catral out of necessity. Because their grueling and unhealthy work required skill and apprenticeship training, it produced a bottleneck to any increases in hemp production, making these workers very necessary to traders and large farmers alike. Thus, their skill and labor was in high demand, yet their political past affected their ability to benefit from this. Pepe Iglesias reckons he was employing some twenty rastrilladores (probably family work teams) in Catral at the height of his operations (early after the war). Especially significant is the way he was able to retain their loyalty. In response to questions, Pepe says that he paid the going piecerate, but from him they got “a special advantage.” Through his political connections he ensured that they got ration cards for their food and “government supplies” of tobacco. Unlike others in the area, in these early years Pepe was almost one hundred percent committed to foreign sales. Here the important relationship between economic activities and political connections again becomes manifest. There was a quota system on the sale of cáñamo, and Pepe persistently exceeded it. He was denounced to the Sindicato Nacional de Textiles (national textile guild) in Madrid. It was then that he got to know the secretary of the jute guild in Madrid, with whom he became good friends. He made an arrangement of mutual benefit with this man in which the latter would let Pepe know where pockets of demand for cáñamo sprang up. Then, in 1946, with the European war over, Pepe found his export market disappearing as Spain pursued its autarchic

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policies. The domestic hemp markets, which he had not focused on, now became the focus of attention. At this point Pepe recedes from our narrative. As the Franco government began to establish its autarkic policies, the demand for hemp grew, and this provided major opportunities for members of the elite who had retained control over production. One such was Juan Lara, a powerful member of the Lara family. Finished hemp was sent to industrial centers like Callosa (chiefly for ropes and fishnets), Crevillente (for carpet backing), or Elche (for sandals and shoes) through the activities of corredores or traders; the worst materials (las borras or el desecho) were transformed into alpargata soles by women in houses in Catral. By 1942 the government had set up cáñamo cooperatives throughout the region and set requirements for each year’s production. In 1943 the local delegation of the sindicatos verticales (Franco’s vertical unions) recorded 156 cáñamo cultivators on 1,835 tahullas, ranging in size from one farmer with 48 tahullas to one with 3 tahullas. By the end of the cáñamo boom, in 1958, it recorded 416 cultivators on 6,118 tahullas, ranging from José Mariano Lara with 200 tahullas to a smallholder with just 2 tahullas (Informe Anual, Catral Municipal Archives). These, of course, are the official figures; they do not reflect the full amount of cáñamo produced and traded. In this context of commercial opportunity, Juan Lara, brother of cacique José Mariano, got to set up an agrarian cooperative in 1942, using his political influence to get permits and credits (this was the general Francoist corporatist agrarian policy for commercialization, and it was heavily supported by the state through credits, etc.). The Laras were the largest cáñamo producers, with an official record of 200 tahullas on their own; the cooperative, a processing operation, had 117 members and controlled 75 percent of production (according to J. M. Aguilar Gómez). The cáñamo cooperative then sold its produce to commercial brokers such as Pepe Iglesias. Juan Lara controlled the cooperative, being its president and principal share holder. Through the dependency relations that tied small tenants working on his land to him and, more generally, through his long-time cacique control, he was able to command the total production of cáñamo in Catral. At one point during the cáñamo years this situation must have brought him magnificent earnings, as a day laborer told us: “For the owners, cáñamo was: open the bag and fill it with money.” Thus the Laras also managed to position themselves in an advantageous institutional location in the new state’s local structure. The coop-


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erative collapsed when the main commercial crop, cáñamo, failed in the early 1960s and alternative commercial networks were set up for fruit and vegetables in the area, through almacenistas (warehousers) and corredores marketing directly to urban marketplaces and exporters as the state’s regulatory policies loosened up. There were essentially two bottlenecks for cáñamo production, related to a need for ample water and to an unquenchable demand for labor. Maneuvering through official channels for increased access to water resources in this context was Joaquín Marín’s way of seizing opportunity. Marín was the largest tenant for Juana Aguilar Lara, who owned 460 tahullas in 1936 (Tax Registers). After the war he still farmed 260 tahullas of that land. In the political conjuncture that followed he was able to accumulate land, apparently through usury practices. As a local usurero (moneylender) he is said to have appropriated the land he required as a mortgage, hipoteca, when lending money to impoverished smallholders. But his land, at the end of the main acequia (irrigation channel), was not well irrigated and could not get high cáñamo yields. Through his position in the local Falange he was appointed president of the Comunidad de Regantes (1940–79) and turned to his private benefit the irrigation system enhancement the Francoist regime was putting into practice (Gil Olcina and Canales Martinez, 1988). Though the works on the acequia improved the irrigation system in general, they were especially beneficial to his particular landholdings. The improved infrastructure had great speculative value for Joaquín Marín, with land values increasing for a crop with high water requirements. At the same time, this use of Falangist credentials to position himself as a powerful landlord was despised by other local power holders. As for labor, the other bottleneck of cáñamo production, there was a huge demand for agricultural field labor for the intense three months of harvesting (late August to early December), and then another month during which the farmer’s responsibility for preparing the crop was carried out. After the war, Franco quickly returned the length of the jornal to its pre-Republican “from sun up to sunset,” but in Catral in the 1940s the hours were still longer. Cáñamo was harvested by cuadrillas (teams) of men from 4 a.m. (to avoid the heat of the day) until 1 p.m. and then from 3 p.m. until 9 p.m. The heat in the high cáñamo was a real discomfort, but it was nothing compared to the subsequent tasks. Once the plant was cut and left to dry, whole families including children ripped the leaves off the fibrous main branch (sacar la valilla). The bare plants were then left in the sun

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to dry and bleach before being thrown into large water tanks or pools for curing. Rocks were placed over them to prevent them from floating up into the sunlight, and there they were left for ten days or so. Large farmers had their own tanks and others rented them. Once thoroughly soaked, the plants were pulled out and placed in upright stacks (garmeras), the bases outward, the tops leaning in to form a kind of pyramid so that each plant could dry. Small farmers kept their garmeras close to their houses, where they could remain until they had time to perform the next phase of the job or until the price of cáñamo was especially favorable. Before the crop could be commercialized, the farmer was left with one more chore—to agramar the branches. This first phase in breaking down the wood into fiber made use of a tool much like an office papercutter with a dull blade. This was one of the many highly toxic jobs, because fiber was absorbed into skin and lungs. Up to this stage, the demand for labor came from the farmers themselves—the small tenants and tied laborers—who used as much family labor as possible but often still insatiably sought more from the jornalero pool, where they competed with the larger labradores and owners. Since demand was so intense for such a short period, longer-term tied labor arrangements had to be supplemented with bids for labor aimed toward the jornaleros. And the demand for labor grew from year to year, as more and more agriculturalists turned to cáñamo. How, at a time of high demand for labor, could low prices be maintained? The culture of fear outlined earlier, together with the capacity of those who had supported Franco to use irregular practices to their advantage, appears strongly in the practice defined by day laborers as the hipoteca humana, human mortgage. This was related to the system of social security established by the “new State.” The system was based on the 1923 social security provision established by the corporatist dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera with the support of the socialist UGT, which had seized the opportunity to establish some social provision for workers (García-Nieto et al., 1973; Ben-Ami, 1983). The system had been strongly opposed by employers at that time, who saw it as an unnecessary increase in the cost of labor but also as a loosening of dependency ties because the system accorded workers universal protection against general insecurity. The 1923 system used a booklet with numbered pages (cartilla numerada). On the first page was inscribed the name and affiliation of the jornalero. The other pages were used to attach the stamps of the social security dues employers had to give workers every day as a part of their


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salary. Once they became full, pages were deposited by the worker at the Caja de Previsión Social (social security institution). The Francoist state maintained this system, but now the political context changed its practice and its meaning. Every worker now had a cartilla (booklet) in which the employer had to place a stamp for every day the laborer worked for him. This stamp was in fact the recognition that there had been a work relationship—that the worker had effectively been working. The employer had to buy these stamps as his contribution to the social security dues. Without these stamps, the worker could not get health insurance benefits or a pension (many workers found themselves in this situation in the seventies when they retired). So day laborers depended on the goodwill of the employers not only to get hired but also to get the social recognition of their labor. Most employers, however, did not put the stamps in the cartilla. When a jornalero needed the stamps (e.g., to get medical attention or his pension) he had to beg for them and often pay himself to have them put in. Many employers used the stamps as a way to control labor, because labor existed officially only if the stamps were in the cartilla.14 Here, too, the leverage to ignore a law of universal application, to act illegally in a highly regulated context, became one of the main assets for employers to control workers in a market conjuncture otherwise favorable to labor. Having important people of the established order willing to put stamps in the cartilla or to sign on your behalf was essential for getting by in those days. Just as the avales of supporters of the rebellion had saved many Republicans and socialists from the death penalty at the height of repression, the system of endorsements became the linchpin of this more everyday kind of repression. Any change of situation needed certificados de buena conducta (certificates of good conduct) that the notables (mayor, employers, Guardia Civil, priest) had to sign, something very similar to the endorsements necessary when asking for a loan. For many things in the everyday business of life, one had to get the favor of a signature from those in power, who acted as moral as well as economic collateral, certifying people’s attitudes and work expenditure. One was then in the extreme situation of perpetually asking for a loan on one’s own person and identity, as the phrase hipoteca humana clearly expresses. Without these endorsements, physical movement and social mobility were very difficult, but even bare subsistence was tough. We see here how a system of repressive administration created a precise space where menace was an even stronger instrument of fear than effective application of the law. Especially notable in the exercise of this

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kind of power, combined with the postwar fear, the autarchy system, the estraperlo, and the ration books, was its use of legal and illegal means to generate lines of differentiation through the control of basic nutrition. Throughout this chapter we see how public politics was intertwined with social relations of production. One theme comes up insistently: the production of a culture of fear that took uncertainty to the extreme that one’s mere existence was always threatened. This was accomplished by the Francoist state by both widespread direct and violent repression and the invasive system of regulation employed through the autarchic economic organization. What made both sheer repression and this administered economy such powerful instruments of control was the fact that, in practice, in the estraperlo and more generally in the everyday practices of getting by, these formal regulatory instruments were consistently violated, so that the only way to partially bypass this constraining framework was to engage in extremely personalized networks. Using personalized relations to forward claims or simply to make a living was not new; tied laborers and small tenants had long relied on them. But in the “new State” there was no other space in which to voice even the smallest of claims. By building uncertainty and fear into the old pre-Republican cacique system, the new regime made public politics collapse completely into this dense web of multiplex personal relations.

chapter 4

From Insecurity to Dependency El que comía simplemente con comer era rico . . . Laborer, Vega Alta

Here is the setting of the 1940s and ’50s: The terrors (for some) and opportunities (for others) of the immediate postwar period gave way to the habitualization of personalized repression mediated through the semilegal workings of the estraperlo and the increasing predominance of the social relations of hemp production. Yet such a simply characterized setting runs the risk of obscuring a wide variety of experienced histories. By collecting together the disparate strands, by the act of packaging for the purposes of coherence, we run the risk of rounding out some kind of regional “culture.” Yet the substance of what we tell invokes many histories (Sider and Smith, 1997). By using “histories” in the plural we mean several things. The most obvious is the proposition that the chains of experience that enmesh people into the past do not necessarily tie together with a common link (though occasionally they do). But we understand history too as something vastly more material than what is invoked by the term “experience.” We mean the material currents of historical formation. Although commonalities undoubtedly cohere in the site of the region, this should not obscure the fact that these same material forces also generate classes, offer movement, limit access—and always unevenly. By acknowledging the fact of material conditions we need not be driven into the arms of either social determinism or rational-choice individualism. Historical ethnography allows us to see that, although the people we encounter in our fieldwork make choices, historically—over 75

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time—choices also make people. Hence, when we insist that the social world as we encounter it can be properly understood only by seeing it along the paths of incomplete histories, our purpose is to provide insight into the processes that have given rise to different kinds of social persons in the present. Our task in these next two chapters, then, is to recuperate these processes as they impacted working people in the Vega Baja, thereby enlivening the setting we have so far unearthed. But this journey back toward the recovery of lives has been confused because it has been unevenly illuminated. We have had to negotiate occlusions of memory— perhaps not quite silence but reticence, for example in the case of an old Republican survivor. And then we have had to negotiate around freeflowing, forceful and colorful assertions of what happened, for example from someone like Pepe Iglesias, for whom these were the glorious years. The subdued murmurs and strident assertions point to a complicated set of ruptures and continuities, fractures and connections that have in effect given rise to quite varied notions of what a person is and what they might strive to be, with or against the odds. Different contours of power have threaded their way through various people’s lives, invoking particular sets of practices the eddies of which have created their own flows in a stream. For one person or one household, a daily practice or longer-term pattern of linked practices touches on particular other people of relevance and marginalizes others of less relevance. Habits of choice or constraint arise, then circumstances change, and the norm of a practice needs pragmatic alteration—or, within the frame of real interpersonal power, is prevented from possible alteration. In the next chapters, therefore, we do not simply try to piece together the lives of various people; we try to do so in terms of the changing currents of power that enabled and constrained them. The setting we glimpsed in chapter 3 produced its own particular inflections of difference, which turned security and opportunity into a strange interaction between local embeddedness and a kind of “freeing up of labor” in Marx’s sense.1 A pervasive sense of binding, threading, and ultimately of fixity played off against its opposite: experiences of movement, of shifting—perhaps providing opportunity, but more often threatening disaster. Staying put and moving around play their part in most people’s lives, of course, but here their role as forms of social regulation to address the problems of labor exploitation gave them a distinctive patterned structure. These patterns emerge early in this chapter at a typical large finca;

From Insecurity to Dependency

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as the picture of Lo de Vera becomes clearer, the tar-like character of social relationships for people at the center of its operations emerges, catching on the boots, lifting one foot only to have the other stick the more to the surface. But a finca such as this, large and integral though it was, also drew on people less centrally involved in its operation, a more floating population as it were. To get at the ways these varying livelihood experiences embedded the social person into distinct kinds of collective worlds as a function of power relations, we resort to an albeit imperfect continuum. On it we place the aniaguero worker at one end and the jornalero worker at the other. In their simplest terms these refer to no more than the length of (a usually verbal) contract—a year (año) in the one case, a day (jornal) in the other. As with so much else in the Vega Baja, however, the real world of these relationships was highly complex and overlapping; a predominantly jornalero household might nonetheless have a very small piece of land through an aniaga contract, or an aniaga tenant might find himself working from time to time in the year for a daily wage. Yet the constraints and possibilities that faced one set of people or another pushed them toward the greater dependency of what we choose to call aniagatype relationships on the one hand or toward the greater maneuverability of jornal-type relationships on the other. A complex dialectic arises between the exercise of power as the control over other people’s conduct—stimulating certain kinds of practice, restricting other kinds of practice—and the imbrication of power within the structured ways people feel about themselves and the kind of world they live in. The one does not determine the other; rather, each conditions the other’s possibility. A historical sociology makes possible the exploration of specific forms of power in constituting subjectivities because it describes instituted practice and structured feeling as mutually constituting. “By the laws of nature,” a patrón remarks, “to those who work for one, one gives land a medias for when they don’t have work. . . . And these are then the people one seeks out when one needs work done.” And this practice of favoring one person or family over another—a personalistic kind of calling forth—must be understood as more than just the conscious intentions of the patrón or the docility it produces in the character of the aniaguero; we must also unravel its significance in terms of a particular set of power-inflected instituted practices that pervade the social landscape and, over time, become habitualized and made natural among some people while being fought against and denied among others.

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We wish to understand the historical path of ordinary life that makes it possible for a person unreflectively to begin the above remark with the expression “By the laws of nature.” We have already seen ample evidence of the insecurity of life for ordinary workers in the Vega Baja, insecurity that followed from an unstable economy, unpredictable climate, and certain kinds of social relations that were levered across (made possible by) the pain of hunger in the night and the perpetual call of disaster in the morning. We catch this sense especially strongly in the words of a laborer working in nearby Vega Alta del Segura: “He who ate, simply with eating he was rich, because the other (the jornalero) arrived at the point of not even eating.” (El que comía simplemente con comer era rico, porque el otro (el jornalero) llegaba incluso a no comer.) (Frigolé Reixach, 1992). We use this man’s observations as the epigrams for these two chapters, in which we first discuss how dependency and fixity became naturalized among certain families and then, in chapter 5, turn to the everyday nature of maneuverability and movement.

four generations Gavin is sitting on an upturned box beneath the sloping roof of the patio of Alicia’s parents’ house, talking to her across a floor scattered with part-finished shoe parts. It is the fall of 1978, and Alicia is seventeen. Gavin had fallen into conversation with her on the way back from dropping off his three-year old daughter at the nursery. Alicia had been visiting her friend, the woman who ran the nursery, and they had begun to talk. To Alicia, Gavin seemed especially interested in the intricate details of how to farm. She had seen him in conversation with her father: “Like a young communicant listening to the priest,” she had said jokingly; and just the day before her father, “El Podenco,” was late for dinner because he had pushed his mobylette2 home talking to Gavin instead of riding it. “You should talk to my grandfather,” she said, “if you want to really know about those kinds of things.” “Your grandfather? Tio Ciriaco?” “Yes, that’s him. You should talk to him.” Here was an all-too-rare opportunity for Gavin to insinuate his way into a few hours of the all-too-busy day of a homeworker. With a selfdisparaging smile and a shrug of the shoulders, Alicia sat down to work and let him sit on the box and talk to her. She was working “for my wedding chest,” she said, again laughing a little disparagingly, almost as


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though she thought it was a little silly to him—or perhaps for a slightly different reason: the chest seemed to Alicia a little too empty. She got work from her uncle, a work distributor. But that day, and in the weeks that followed, as Gavin dropped by occasionally (he pretended to himself and to Alicia that it was to relieve the boredom of her work) or met her in the street, he began to learn that Alicia strained at the yoke of her uncle’s imperatives. Weeks later she would say to him: He says I am lucky he lets me have the work; he could be giving it to others. When I started out I was slow and I made mistakes and perhaps then he was right. But now he gives me the hardest jobs and comes by late in the week with extra work he hasn’t managed to get others to do. On Saturdays he often makes me clean up the mistakes some of the other women have made on a week’s batch of jobs, before he delivers them to the factory. (Fieldnotes GS 1978)

Gavin knew her uncle Fernando and was a little surprised, some weeks later, when Fernando passed by Gavin and a group of young people and, seeing Alicia, said, “A girl more wild than wise.” A look of youthful disrespect passed among the group, and Alicia turned to Gavin and said, “I told him I’d had enough. He said I could find work elsewhere, so that’s what I’m doing.” A few days later Gavin visited her in the patio and she put a positive face on her decision: “I am getting work. It’s not as regular, but they pay more and he doesn’t make me do the upgrading the way my uncle Fernando did” (Fieldnotes GS 1978). It was clear that Alicia was nervous both about her future source of work and about having stood up to her uncle. Alicia is not an aparadora; she does a more menial job on batches of shoes. Her mother’s big, heavy stitching machine stands in the kitchen and she occasionally takes on work, but often she helps Alicia make up her designated batches. She is a big, strong woman, making Alicia look surprisingly small beside her. “I do it for her marriage chest,” she says. Alicia has two brothers, Isidro who is eleven and Victoriano who is two. Many times she finds herself caring for her younger brother and possibly a neighbor’s child too, as her mother takes on some day labor in the fields or helps her father on the land he works. Since this pulls Alicia away from the concentration she needs to meet her batch amount, there is an element of reciprocity in her mother’s occasional help. In any event, the meager flow into her marriage chest was not just the result of Fernando exploiting his family ties to her, even if Alicia drew the line at saying this in so many words. A look and a gesture were enough.

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Meanwhile, Isidro spent much less time at school than many other kids his age. When Alicia first introduced Gavin to him, he had just come in from rough housing with a couple of friends. “Isidro, the scarecrow (espantapájaros). He’s too much of a scarecrow,” she said, and Isidro sniggered and shrugged as though there was some conspiracy he was quite happy to engage in. It was his father who made clear that, indeed, espantapájaros did not refer to his sloppy dress but to a job he did only too frequently, missing school to do it. Alicia’s job as an unskilled homeworker was in many respects much the same as that of many women her age in the area in the late seventies and early eighties. But it also had it’s own rather particular inflections— the close intertwining of her industrial work and her household responsibilities, the dominant role of her mother and father in organizing her life and that of her brother. Indeed, the tension surrounding her uncle’s use of kin ties to constrain Alicia’s career choices was a constant refrain in the kind of dependent families she came from. In 1978 her father, El Podenco, had 67 tahullas of land a medias,3 but just two years earlier he had been put in a position like Alicia’s that tested family relationships, though this time different variables came to bear. Alicia’s father had gradually acquired his 67 tahullas over many years, not just through ceaseless labor, his own and his wife’s (and later his children’s) but through demonstrative loyalty to his amo. In this El Podenco’s farming career had been not unlike his father’s, Alicia’s grandfather, “Tio Ciriaco” (b. 1900), who until recently had himself farmed land a medias, though not from the same family as El Podenco. And Tio Ciriaco, for his part, had had access to his few tahullas of land because his father, Alicia’s great-grandfather, had been the coachman for the Lara family, the owners of Tio Ciriaco’s land a medias. And to complete the heritage as far as we know it, Alicia’s great-grandfather had secured his job as coachman through the good word of his mother, who had been the wet nurse for some of the children of his employer. Soon after the death of José Mariano Lara Fernández, Tio Ciriaco’s amo had decided to sell his land. As a sitting tenant, Tio Ciriaco was given first refusal and at an especially favorable price which, by custom and law, would have to account for the mejoras (improvements) accruing over his tenancy. He offered the opportunity to his son but, to the old man’s great disappointment, El Podenco turned down the offer. The reasons for El Podenco’s decision were complex, and their interpretation varied from one person’s point of view to another’s. His father told Gavin that it was because he did not have the money and (correctly, in

=

Isidro

Concepión

=

Victoriano

Pascual

=

Victoriano FUENTES (Lara’s coachman)

Fernando (homework distributor)

Civil Guard

Figure 1. Victoriano Fuentes family chart.

Alicia

“El Podenco”

Victoriano FUENTES Jr. (Tio Ciriaco)

Jornaleros/aniaga

Miguel FUENTES (Falange)

Jornaleros/aniaga

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the old man’s opinion) refused to become indebted. Reflecting back on this difficult decision in conversation with Gavin, El Podenco saw it in terms of a conflict over his responsibilities, to his father and to his own amo. It was not easily resolved but, in the end, he said, it came down to what you have long known and what you have not. In fact, the issue was dependency ties through kinship represented by Tio Ciriaco’s claims—and these had been sharply cut by the sale of land by his old patrón4—versus the ties El Podenco had built up through loyalty on the land he sharecropped directly himself (together with his household’s labor). “I have been working this land for over thirty years,” he said, “since I first went there as a peón at twelve years old. I met my wife there.” She had been just eight and had come to work with her mother, a casual day laborer getting a little help in the field from her daughter. Over the years both of us have come to know many young people, men and women, industrial workers, many of them not as embedded into an almost organic set of family ties as Alicia was. Their ties of dependency had never quite had the same hold. For households like Alicia’s, despite one or two daughters and possibly the wife doing homework, El Podenco’s presence at the head of the table at the evening dinner, Concepción’s (Alicia’s mother) frequent trips to the fields, and Isidro’s school absences to help his father all evoke the life of the farm. And the integral nature of the household family project that tenaciously embraces Alicia, producing its own field of dispositions, is itself a shadow whose shape derives in its most intimate ways from the instituted practices and structured feelings of a broader, integral work site. To get some sense of this, we accept Alicia’s invitation and go back to the younger life of her grandfather, Tio Ciriaco, by looking at the social world in which he grew up.

the world of lo de vera We left Tio Ciriaco just as he sought to induce his son to buy the 26 tahullas he had worked for years a medias. How did he come to hold such a tenancy? Put another way, what relationships and practices were condensed in that soil which he called, with assertive callousness, “ni bueno ni malo” (neither good nor bad)?5 We shift our sights to the place that has played such a major role not merely as the center of Tio Ciriaco’s social world but as the entirety of his world—from horizon to horizon.


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The owner of the 26 tahullas was the son of a once major landowner in the region, and the sale was just part of a process that saw the original finca sold off to more than twenty-five independent farmers. But at the beginning of the twentieth century the finca Lo de Vera, the property of Don José Mariano Lara Fernández, was among the richest four or five in the término of Catral.6 The Laras, like many similar Alicantino farm owners, had rushed to benefit from the wine boom of the late 1800s (see chapter 2), and most of the good land7 was devoted to vines. Olive trees too were widespread, and wheat and hemp took up the remainder of the good land. On the saladar—land that had never been irrigated and through heavy evaporation in the dry season tended to be saline—work animals, sheep, goats, and a few riding horses were kept. Seasonally even fighting bulls were brought down (by roving, mounted cowherds) and grazed on this land. In short, Lo de Vera was a typical fully operational finca grande (large landholding) of the Vega Baja. It grew a main crop (wine grapes and to a lesser extent olives) and also produced a range of other agricultural items—some, like wheat, barley, and livestock to be found generally on farms in Spain; others, like hemp, specific to the region. Though in many ways the quintessential large farm in the tradition of southern Spain, because of the nature of its crops this farm was also a manufacturing center. Virtually all of these products were processed in some way before leaving the farm: grapes into wine, olives into oil, wheat and barley into flour, and hemp into fiber. The “grandness” of the finca is clearly signified by two facts: a proportion of most of these products (except hemp) was consumed by the owner and his family and also used as currency in his relations to his workers; and the means of production for every one of the postharvest transformations was owned and controlled by Lara directly or by one of his relatives in Catral: wine caves, mills (for flour and oil), large balsas (pool, reservoir) for hemp processing, even a tomato canning factory run by José Mariano’s sister’s family.8 It is important to note the intertwining of noncommercial and commercial in these operations. In every case the operations and the people who worked in them had an appearance, a constructed culture, that evoked local groundedness. They existed to serve the local world of the Vega Baja. Not only did the Lara households eat the bread and cook with the oil made in their own mills, anyone else in Catral with wheat to grind or olives to press went to those mills too. In short, they were a fundamental necessity of the social reproduction of ordinary life in any

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agricultural year. We hesitate to employ the expression “reproduction of the economy” because ‘economy’ has come to be associated so much with commerce, and this public face was grandly set against economy in this sense. It was the way of an integral, organic rural life implicitly set against the life of towns and turmoil.9 And yet the reality of Lo de Vera absolutely was not these things. In no way could it be reproduced without its profoundly commercial dimension. As we emphasize in chapter 2, this was a thoroughly commercialized region. Success in the market mattered, and not just the regional or even the national market but often too the international market. And market movements presented just one of the many kinds of uncertainty that ran through the society from top to bottom. Don José, with his brother a regional cacique and by all accounts a huge figure in regional life in the first quarter of the twentieth century, lived in town. Each morning he was picked up by his coachman, who had taken the half-hour walk from his urban dwelling to the finca, harnessed the mares to the coach, and driven them back into town. Each day at lunchtime Don José was taken back to his house to eat and take his siesta, and each afternoon he was picked up and taken once more to sit at the table in the cool shade of the trees that stood at the entrance to the casa de la finca. The coachman was Victoriano Fuentes Sr., Tio Ciriaco’s father (Tio Ciriaco’s actual name was also Victoriano Fuentes). When Tio Ciriaco was born in 1900, Victoriano, his father, was a footloose day laborer searching for work wherever it cropped up (Tio Ciriaco describes him as “de ambulante de donde le buscaran”). His mother became the wet nurse for one of Don José’s children, and when Victoriano had an accident that damaged his arm, through this connection he was offered the job of being Don José’s coachman.10 When Don José arrived at the finca in the morning he would discuss the day’s business with Pedro Rico, one of the four labradores who lived at the finca. Don Pedro (as Victoriano Sr. called him), Tio (Uncle) Pedro (as Victoriano Jr. called him), or El Rociero (as his equals referred to him), was the labrador responsible for the daily running of the bulk of the finca. It is of the nature of integral social worlds like this, part of the oil that makes them work, that classifications of social positions are elusive of any single, clear definition. We have already mentioned, for example, the overlap between aniaga workers and people more emphatically referred to as jornaleros. A similar kind of plasticity in terms and positions was present with respect to people higher in the social hierarchy. El Rociero was undoubtedly a labrador, in its most general mean-


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ing an independent farmer. Yet he was not in fact especially independent. Where he did gain his power (and hence his status) was in his daily control over the finca. This led Gavin to ask old people if El Rociero was in fact an apoderado. The major fincas of the Vega Baja owned by aristocracy or other absentee landlords during the nineteenth century had been run by salaried managers of considerable status, most of whom lived in the old ecclesiastical town of Orihuela and traveled to the farms they managed perhaps three or four times a week. They were extremely important figures of power, but as the aristocracy sold their land to families like the Laras, the old apoderados were no longer necessary, though people daily managing the estate still were. As a result, most people hesitated over the term apoderado when speaking of El Rociero, though they slipped back into its use as they described what he did and how they related to him. agricultural occupations at lo de vera (in 1925, 1,000 tahullas) landowner apoderado, one of four labradores twelve to fourteen jornaleros (aniaga) jornaleros required for once-off jobs or seasonally three herders or shepherds mozos labradores (12–15 years old) yerbaceros (7–13 years old) Besides El Rociero three other labradores lived on the property. Two of these lived at the Lo de Vera casa, which they shared between their two (separate) families. El Rociero and the fourth labrador had their own houses, the old casas de finca of two smaller properties now absorbed into Lo de Vera. These were families whose livelihoods were entirely secure as long as Don José remained owner. They had sufficient land a medias from Don José to run them as small farms of their own, producing perhaps a third of their crops for sale and using the remainder for the family.11 Their responsibilities were various. Miguel Lorenzo, for example, supplied the “strong arm” of the finca, patrolling the grounds with a gun to defend the crops from roaming animals and thieves. Tio Ciriaco says of him, “Hacía de labrador pero no era labrador.” He took on the appearance of a labrador but was not, in Tio Ciriaco’s view, a proper labrador.

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The fuzziness of terms such as labrador, amo, even dueño (which would normally quite clearly refer to the owner/employer of an enterprise) reflects the role of status and hierarchy in the personalized corporate world of a finca like Lo de Vera. Though a very few of the larger fincas, like Lo de Vera, saw the daily presence of the actual owner, in this case Don José, in the majority of cases substantial fincas were run by large tenants who to all intents and purposes were treated by employees as owners and often addressed as such, as dueños. Yet because it was commonly known that they were in fact labradores, that is, ultimately in service to the landlord, the term labrador itself, when associated with quite specific people, could be used to refer to a person of the highest social rank, a person with power. To make matters still more confusing, this kind of labrador figure had gradually replaced the salaried stewards who used to run the large fincas on behalf of their aristocratic employers, and these people were called—quite literally—people with power, apoderados. Thus when Miguel Lorenzo strutted around Lo de Vera with his gun, he may have given himself as many of the trappings as possible of a man with power, a high-placed labrador. But Tio Ciriaco clearly felt that, to be treated as a high-placed labrador, one needed a great deal more substance than that. Because of the personalized nature of the contract, at the top of the social order at Lo de Vera security rested on the continuance of the owner’s interest in the property. Were he or she to sell, or merely to shift their resources and concerns elsewhere (e.g., to urban professions and properties), the future of their senior labradores would immediately be put in jeopardy. At the bottom of the social hierarchy, uncertainty was a much more daily affair. The demands of the finca as an agricultural enterprise changed according to the seasons, giving rise to the need for a floating population of day laborers, the more so insofar as (commercial though they were) these operations were poorly mechanized. These ups and downs in labor demand could have contrasting effects: occasionally making it necessary for aniaga workers to seek work in the open market, off the finca; occasionally bringing the floating population of casual jornaleros into the labor regime of the finca. Hence, as with the upper end of the social scale, so too at its lower end there was a fuzziness in the boundaries of social categories and, just as aniagueros found themselves from time to time in the plaza seeking a day’s work, so the floating jornaleros (discussed in chapter 5) could become quite familiar with the personalized and integral world of a large finca like Lo de Vera.


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In the eyes of Don José, El Rociero and the coachman, Victoriano Sr., were hombres de confianza, literally men he could trust. Such confidence defied all social hierarchy—at least to appearances. The humble Victoriano found himself for a crucial few days the purchaser and owner of the entire finca of Lo de Vera, when Don José wished to deflect the attention of land reform officials from the true extent of his property— a transaction that could be entrusted only to an hombre de confianza. As far as Don José was concerned, Victoriano was a man of good character—and no doubt Victoriano did much in his everyday life and in the pressures he brought to bear on his household to reassure Don José that this was indeed the case. Richard Sennett (1999) has noted the decline of the notion of good character in the context of work performance in current flexible labor regimes. In Victorian Britain, a person attained a document, usually a letter, called a “character reference” or more specifically a “reference of good character.” At Lo de Vera, though, as with other such fincas, good character was not so movable. Confianza was a unique, unreproducible, and therefore nontransferable relationship between one person and another. Indeed, the power of the notion derived from the monopoly of the more powerful partner over the well-being of the other.12 In this sense Don José felt more secure in playing his sleight of hand on the land reform official with the entirely dependent Victoriano rather than with one of his more powerful labradores such as El Rociero. Though different in particulars from notions of character in other forms of employment, the institution of hombre de confianza nonetheless was entirely about character—not just about the long hours of selfexploitation but the perpetual small and large demonstrations of selflessness vis-à-vis the person of the amo and the institution of his enterprise. Longevity, fixity, and continuity played the stabilizing role in the rough seas of hazard and betrayal in the larger world. It is significant that we use the term “build” when we talk of the formation of character—we build character, we do not build personality; the same would apply thoroughly to the notion of confianza when applied to the institution of the hombre de confianza. That is not to say, however, that all those with fixed employment at Lo de Vera could expect to become hombres de confianza in Don José’s eyes. Indeed, the parsimony of its usage and the scarcity of acquisition acted as a spur to others in the demonstration of their selfless work and loyalty toward the building of the character, not just of themselves but of their entire household.

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For those familiar with the literature on Mediterranean culture, it may come as a surprise that we associate confianza with (good) character rather than with honor. We avoid the latter term above all because we never heard it used as an element of character necessary for an hombre de confianza. Certainly Don José might hope that one of his hombres de confianza was a man of honor, but from another perspective this very relationship might make it impossible for a person to be a man of honor. The notion of being an honorable person has not one reading— hardly surprising in the wake of a civil war precisely over issues of the good society. But the central point is that honor, trust, or character cannot be understood in uniform terms as a shared feature of a local culture; rather, they echo the differentiations, distinctions, and conflicts that were and are part of the social landscape. Hence a casual day laborer might begin his catechism of what made a man honorable by noting precisely that he was in no way beholden to another who stood above him. We argue later that these unsettled perspectives on the practices and relationships that should constitute the responsible social person are not simple niceties of some anthropological fetish of “cultural dispositions” but profound role factors in the political culture of contemporary rural Spain. Here it is enough to note that the conduct of the hombre de confianza provided the ideal-typical elements of social practice for those wishing to make themselves worthy aniaga workers.

patterned agency and historical conjuncture Tio Ciriaco had started his working life as a yerbacero, supplying cut grass for livestock, first for one of the four Lo de Vera labradores, then for another. By the time he was about fifteen, he was working as a jornalero on the finca; so were his five brothers and, when needed, his sister. El Rociero, the apoderado-labrador, had three sons who also worked as jornaleros at Lo de Vera. There were in all some twelve to fourteen jornaleros, most of them connected in one way or another by kin ties. Tio Ciriaco recalls, “I worked but day labor. All of us worked in the finca but in day labor, perhaps one day by chance we could go to work for others, but when we didn’t have such a possibility, there was always something at the finca.” Here Tio Ciriaco seems to be saying that he was a day laborer, but he was not a day laborer—not at least in the narrow sense in which we employ it. As with other social categories, we need to confront the highly complex issue of the notion of jornal work as it applied, on the one


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hand, to people like Tio Ciriaco and, on the other, to people with no such firm ties to a finca or a pyramid of patrons that linked them eventually to the likes of Don José Mariano Lara. Recall the words of the worker from the neighboring Vega Alta: “He who ate, simply with eating he was rich, because the other (the jornalero) arrived at the point of not even eating.” When Tio Ciriaco says, “There was always something on the finca,” he is clearly placing himself and others like him at Lo de Vera among the first kind of workers (“he who simply ate”). And this was so, of course, because of his place in the series of dependent relationships that seeped down from the power of Don José. When Tio Ciriaco insists that he worked de jornal he is not alluding to the chance work that faced the jornalero who found himself each day in the town plaza hoping to be selected for work that day. Nor would that jornalero in the plaza think of himself as the same kind of jornalero as Victoriano Jr. He might allow himself a momentary smile at the knowledge that the hazards of personal whim—El Rociero’s, Don José’s—or a shift in ownership of the finca could well make him so quite suddenly. No: the jornal Victoriano is referring to is one that distinguishes him from his father, with the 26 tahullas en medias, or from one of the labradores. Victoriano’s worth as a responsible person was tied to his day’s work. But the security of his day’s work derived from another kind of relationship, the aniaga relationship, the verbal contract that was renewed yearly between a landowner and a tenant like Victoriano Sr. Let us bring some perspective to these labor agreements mediated by greater or lesser portions of land. The so-called aniaga tenant’s land was at best a leash tying him to his patron and perhaps, like a leash, as much a material tie as the expression of a relationship profoundly of power. Minute parcels of land were often involved, and in some cases no land at all, simply a shared pig’s litter or coopful of chickens.13 The older, married jornaleros undoubtedly held aniaga agreements of this kind with Don José, while the younger ones were simply dependents in households that themselves held similar contracts. In other words, the hierarchies, distinctions, and dependencies swept from the shaded trees under which Don José sat through every darkened corner of his employees’ households. The difficulty of distinguishing between the aniaga-jornalero like Victoriano Jr. (Tio Ciriaco) and the older long-established aniaguero, and then between the small tenant farmer and the more autonomous labrador tenant (still not a landowner), is not so much an issue of ana-

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lytic fuzziness as a reflection of the movement of these social relationships up and down the social world of the Vega Baja (and also in and out of agriculture, trading, and industry). This is not to say that the powerful effectively clamped down on the free agency of subordinates, reducing their choices to almost nothing. We have already indicated that we are not interested in dehistoricized notions of (rational) choice. Agency can be a misleading notion if it conveys the idea of free choice, or of historically disembedded voluntarism. Agency, choice, opportunity as experienced now need to be understood as embedded in quite particular histories that produce them materially, socially, and culturally. So the fact that we see restrictions of freedom or choice is for us less sociologically interesting than that, through history, instituted practices at Lo de Vera induced a quite particular structure of feeling and hence pattern of agency, that is, the horizon of which actions appeared potentially possible. We see this clearly as historical conjunctures smash into the side of “naturalized” life expectations, casting them off course, possibly sinking them. Perhaps the first signs of the unraveling of the integral world of the large Lo de Vera came as Primo de Rivera’s program for a corporate society faltered when he was replaced by an interim military regime through 1930–31 and then by the struggling Republic. For it was then that the astute José Mariano Lara saw the way the wind was blowing and disposed of his land to his four heirs through deed of sale. What then followed demonstrates clearly that the practice of opportunity among those who have it relies on a culture of dependency that precisely channels and restricts such opportunity for others; and it channels and restricts by rendering opportunity as of “this kind” rather than of “that kind”—laying out the course of what appears possible. It was fortunate, for both Victoriano Sr. and Victoriano Jr., that when José Mariano Lara died in August 1931 the son who took over the property did not decide to sell, as did José Mariano’s three daughters (to varying degrees, some selling all, some retaining portions.). El Rociero was less fortunate. He lost his position as apoderado and had too little land a medias to be able to use the principle of mejoras (improvements) to gain access to freehold. He and his sons never regained their once seemingly secure position. The particularities of these lengthy historical threads illuminate Alicia’s sense of obligation to her uncle the work distributor, since all these patterns are passed down, over time, to inform the construction of community and family responsibility. We note a political element in this construction too, one at first obscure to us but obvious to Alicia and her


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neighbors. The street on which she lives is Calle Miguel Fuentes. While one of Tio Ciriaco’s brothers (Pascual) had become a sergeant in the Republican army during the war and never returned to Catral, another, Miguel, had been the local head of the Falange and was killed in the war. In recognition of his services the old father was given a job in the ayuntamiento (town hall) in 1941, and that street—the one Alicia lives on— was named in his honor.

“ ME

PARÓ TODA LA VIDA ”

Perhaps Lo de Vera, because of its size and the strength of its owner as one of the Lara family, provided an especially closed and integral world in which Tio Ciriaco and his kin would be more firmly embedded than most. To move away from such a power-loaded case, we turn to a family who also grew up within the ties of an aniaga agreement, but whose amo was less able to monopolize their social world and thus constrain their movement and social relationships. Just four years younger than El Podenco, Jaime García started agricultural work at an even earlier age. He cannot remember quite when, though he recalls that prior to taking his first communion at eight he had to take four or five months off from his job pasturing sheep to go to ecclesiastical school (Fieldnotes GS 1978, 1979). Despite their similarities, there are two decisive differences. First, despite working aniaga as did Tio Ciriaco, Jaime’s father was unable to realize the same kind of security that was a powerful incentive to tie oneself to another in that way. This may have been partly because Tio Ponarro, Jaime’s father, worked for a much smaller amo than did Tio Ciriaco. Undoubtedly it was also because of Tio Ponarro’s persistent ill health. Also distinguishing Jaime from El Podenco is the way he kicked against the conditions that arise from being enmeshed in long-standing ties of dependency. Jaime himself ascribes this to the fact that he is an unusually reflective person. He sees this personal characteristic in a quite particular way. His horizons, he says, are a little wider than others “like him,” but then he immediately adds—and we had this conversation more than once—that to have utopian ideas beyond his immediate experience and social context would be a recipe for disappointment and indeed for unreasonable actions. The contrast he draws on is that of his teenage children, just a couple of years younger than Alicia. To him they seem unsettled largely because of vast and unselective horizons that create a yawning chasm between promise and possibility in their fu-

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ture. Many times we asked Jaime what he would like for his son’s future. Each time he resisted answering. One time, in exasperation he said, “I could reply that I want him to be an extraordinary surgeon, but he wouldn’t have access to that.” Jaime and his wife Sonia say that they run their enterprise, by which they mean their household project, on a fifty-fifty basis. Little by little they have acquired a house of their own, then a mobylette, then a car, and 3 tahullas of their own land in 1979. Each time, we made the decision together, they say. They farm 18 tahullas in all; 15 of these do not belong to them. In addition, Jaime frequently works as a jornalero, and Sonia has seasonal work in an artichoke boxing and canning factory, where she is paid on a piecework basis. She prepares a meal for Jaime and the two teenage children before she goes to work. Jaime begins to heat it up before she gets back for her lunch break. She usually leaves cleaning up until she gets back in the evening, since the children have to return to school and don’t do it. They keep five hundred rabbits, and Jaime’s son helps with their upkeep. Of the 15 tahullas they do not own, 6 tahullas Jaime has had for ten years belong to a friend who runs one of the bakeries. This person has another 6 tahullas he farms directly, and Jaime always does the jornalero work for him when he needs it. Another 3 tahullas belong to another friend who works in a shoe factory. The remaining 6 tahullas belong to the aunt of his compadre, a widow. Jaime had long worked as a jornalero on this land before its previous owner died and divided it up, leaving this part to the widow. At one point this owner faced Jaime with the same kind of decision El Podenco had to make vis-à-vis his father. Another person offered her a better sharecropping arrangement than Jaime’s, so the widow asked Jaime to meet the offer. Jaime replied that, if he were to make such an agreement, a day might come when he could not pay his share. He told her to give the land to the other man. She replied, “No, tu eres como uno de la familia” (No, you are like one of the family). In telling this story Jaime quickly added, “I’m not one of her family, but it’s true I am apegao a ellos [stuck to them], though we often have confrontations de tipo politico [of a political kind].” So all the ties that make Jaime’s and Sonia’s enterprise work are in some way through a kind of friendship. When they had married in 1966, they had begun by living in a third of Jaime’s family’s stable, until Sonia’s cousin lent them a house in town. Jaime says that he was not an especially attractive fiancé for Sonia because he was always saving, “working and saving, working and saving.”


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But Sonia says that it was because of the debts he had from his father’s illness, to the nurse and the pharmacy. “Entonces no había lo que hay ahora, el seguro de enfermedad” (Then there was nothing like there is today, sickness insurance), she says, and Jaime adds, “Pues, claro, estabamos liaicos . . . liaicos de una manera que yo nunca pensaba que se pudiera desenliar” (Well, clearly, we were entangled [in debts], entangled in such a way that I never thought it could be untied). Now, in 1979, Jaime with his sharecropped land, Sonia with her seasonal work and help in the field with Jaime, their house and car, they regard themselves as a success, more fortunate than many other workers. When he was eleven, Jaime moved from being a humble yerbacero, gathering mulberry leaves and grass for the animals and caring for them, to a regular job. It was as a mozo labrador (houseboy) to Tio Perico, the man who employed his father as an aniaga tenant. Tio Perico passed along to him a pair of shoes, to be renewed annually, and a propina— an allowance, or pocket money. Tio Ponarro, Jaime’s father, got 15 pesetas a day plus 60 kilograms of wheat a month. He was allowed to keep one pig for himself or two in medias with Tio Perico. He was also allowed to plant one crop of potatoes or sweet potatoes for one of the two crops of the year and hand the second crop over to Tio Perico. He was allowed twenty chickens to be kept in medias with Tia Inés, Perico’s wife. But Jaime’s father was a perpetually sick man, and when Jaime first began work for Tio Perico his mother had been in hospital with tuberculosis for a year. Besides Jaime, there was his older sister Elvira, a day laborer when she was not doing her mother’s work in the house, Miguel, ten, and Rosario, one. In these early years, before his military service, Jaime worked a sevenday week, often covering for his father and shifting as he grew older from animal care to work in the fields following the agricultural cycle. Meanwhile his friends were working as jornaleros, sometimes in the fields but occasionally in the larger towns as building workers, where they earned more per day than Jaime’s father earned in half a month. (Jaime’s own pocket money was given directly to his father each week.) Jaime recalls wanting to join his friends, but his father would not let him “because of his friendship with Tio Perico.” Jaime says he lost sleep thinking of the bad advice his father was giving him, but looking back he ascribes the situation more to his personal character than to lack of choice. “I was very timid,” he said, and then went on. “One evening when Perico was in the kitchen, I decided I must be bold.” He went on, as if in a play: “Perico! . . . ,” and he replied, “What?”

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But at that moment Tia [Aunt] Inés said to me, “Bring me a basket of hemp . . .” That stopped my entire life [from changing]. (Me paró toda mi vida.) Look, the number of times I have remembered that moment. I went and brought the basket of hemp and I didn’t say a thing then nor did I ever say it ever again. We are reminded here of the pervasiveness of power as it shifts from mere control over practices to embue the structure of feeling. Apart from that, Jaime’s assignment of choice to his situation derives also from his insistence that, even then, miserable though his circumstances were, attractive though the occasional wage as a builder’s assistant might be, he was better off than his mates: “I find myself still strong, thank God . . . I find myself fit to go, even though my work was punishing . . . despite the fact that in Tio Perico’s house the work wasn’t, like really hard. But I did lots of silly things.” There was humiliation and a great deal of stupidity in the work he was expected to do, he says. Nor did any bond of loyalty or fondness arise between Jaime and Tio Perico: “He didn’t interfere with me much. . . . he went his way and I went mine.” Still, on the one side there was a certain fixity and stability, and on the other side there were the needs of his always ailing parental family. When Jaime returned from his two years of military service, his father had died and his older sister Elvira had married. Jaime and Miguel now interspersed work on Tio Perico’s land with what day labor they could find. Tio Perico appears to have owned some 50 tahullas of his own and rented another 25 tahullas, not enough to keep the two young men fully occupied but a suitable arrangement for both parties. Jaime was anxious to get married but realized that he could not do so “to the detriment of the family.” In the early 1960s, “It was that era when so many people were migrating from the countryside”; a friend returned from working in Barcelona and Jaime were tempted to do the same. He was nervous about losing his long-term relationship to Tio Perico, but he gambled that his brother could cover for him, so in April 1962 he set off with his friend. He was quickly overwhelmed by Barcelona. Lasting less than a week in a factory (“I didn’t even wait for the pay check”), he bought two sickles and joined a cuadrilla of five other men who traveled round cutting the wheat harvest in Barcelona and Valencia. After two seasons cutting wheat in cuadrillas, Jaime began to think seriously of getting married. He had saved a small amount of money, but not enough, and he was continuously tugging and pulling with Tio Perico, who was strongly against his moving from the area for any


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length of time during the year, even when not needed on the farm. While in Barcelona, however, Jaime had met a cousin of his father’s who had left the Vega Baja soon after the war, never to return. He gave Jaime the name of a contact in France through which Jaime could get work in the grape harvest. This appears to have been a decisive moment for Jaime, a watershed between the humiliating years that went before and what he sees as the hard but constructive years later, after he got married. Jaime often alluded to the bad conditions of Spanish workers in France, though he tended to say that workers there were no worse off than in the Vega Baja, except for the racism toward the Spanish and the vulnerability one felt being away from home.14 He, however, was fortunate. At first he said that the good treatment was because the employer in France was almost as poor as he was: “Como era un patrón pobre, porque si hubiera sido rico no hubiéramos comido en su mesa como comíamos” (Since he was an impoverished patrón, because if he had been rich he wouldn’t have had us eat at his table as we ate there). Another possible reason surfaced. The small patrón was in fact a Spanish migrant. Only much later, and when talking about something quite different from the French experience, Jaime mentioned that the man in Barcelona who had given him the contact was himself a political refugee unwilling to return to the Vega Baja after the civil war. Speaking of his experience in France, Jaime paints this picture: He was Spanish, among those who went running away from here after the war. When I arrived there the first time he said to me “Here we don’t work such and such hours; here we are going to work in the family and live among the family . . . to live like [real] people.” For me that surprised me a bit but then he showed that yes [it was like that]. In other words there was never bread missing for anyone. (Then he alludes to his shyness) And me there . . . at first no [I wouldn’t do it like that]. No, because . . . because No. But after I had been there a couple of weeks I found that I could go to the fridge and take whatever I wanted to have with my bread and the bread too. In sum, me there, I went in and out of the house like the boss . . . like they had confidence in me to do things like that. (Fieldnotes GS 1979)15

This kind of atmosphere stands in stark contrast to Jaime’s experience with Tio Perico. The first trip to France may not have enabled Jaime to accumulate much money, but it allowed him to cover the family debts and emboldened him to ask Sonia to marry him. The problem with continuing or extending the migrations to France was the danger it placed on the delicate interpersonal ties on which Jaime, and now Sonia, continued to depend back at home. By both migrating for just thirty days one year and Jaime

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going alone the next, they managed to accumulate some money (35,000 pesetas when they went together; 20,000 when Jaime went alone) while also engineering a series of crucial sharecrop linkages on which they built over the years. As we have seen, in each case Jaime’s access to land was mediated by friendships, and these are the friendships with continuity. When Jaime talks of the “chums” who braved it through the cuadrillas of the Valencian wheat harvest, or those he sees as his more volatile and outspoken acquaintances in Catral, he alludes to their spontaneity and fleetingness—quite the reverse of the almost morose way he talks of his friends of long standing. Yet these interdependencies that pursued him into adulthood were an important resource when contrasted to the isolation from such ties felt by many of his jornalero peers. Even so, over the years he was able to distance himself sufficiently from those ties and that way of life to create a space to maneuver, which in turn opened for him a new perspective on the kind of person he was and the kind of public person one should be. He said at one point in 1979 that he had been “de la izquierda desde que nací” (on the left since he was born). Although this seems a retrospective self-image not endorsed by his unfolding story, it does indicate the degree to which his own view of what it is to be a responsible member of the community has changed. We have seen how El Podenco’s ties of dependency to his father and to his own patrón allowed him some opportunities while making other choices unthinkable. We have also seen the contradictory nature of some of his responsibilities, even as they appear as an organic reality. Contrasting his story to Jaime and Sonia’s illustrates multiple forms of dependency—and then different ways of getting out of them or getting locked into them. This along with the historical context and possible external links (even if quite limited) produce different forms of movement and fixity in these dependent workers. Alicia, for example, was proceeding somewhat like Jaime and Sonia when she turned down her uncle, but she probably had fewer external links to help her onto a new path. El Podenco, on the other hand, was concerned about switching the nexus of his older network formed with his wife, and thus he turned down his father—but this also reflects the perceived decline of the kind of large enterprise and large landowner represented by José Mariano Lara Fernández and Lo de Vera, and his ability to deal with it. Since the next chapter presents the kinds of possibilities open to the jornaleros, we develop our conclusion there, approaching agricultural workers’ realities from within a larger comparative framework.

chapter 5

From Insecurity to Movement . . . porque el jornalero llegaba incluso a no comer. Laborer, Vega Alta

For those, like Alicia Fuentes’s family, whose background lies in the corporatist dependencies symbolized by the aniago contract, the 1940s and ’50s are constructed less as a period of harsh repression than as a time of organic integrity and geographic fixity, with todo en su sitio (everything in its place), an expression often uttered with an air of satisfaction among such families. For others whose family histories are more closely embedded in the daily uncertainties of the jornal contract, the repression of this period is rarely discussed openly. The world of estraperlo though, often is. Since this too was a world of scarcity and want, we found this at first surprising, until we realized that the black market not only shows the shallowness and inauthenticity of the elite’s claims to longevity but also serves to emphasize a time when family and individual strategies and maneuvering exemplified the possibility of, albeit limited, agency. While it would be an exaggeration to claim that Catral is physically laid out to emphasize the distinction between those who embrace the world of corporatism we associate with the aniaga contract and another world of the jornaleros, it is nonetheless true that the long stretch of small and closely built houses that run through the barrio of Santa Agueda is occupied almost uniformly by jornalero families—people who would live uncomfortably on a street bearing the name of the Falangist Miguel Fuentes. One such household was that of Alba Gil (the same age as Alicia) and her parents José and Consuelo.

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Alicia’s work—not just what she does but the way she does it, the relationships she engages in as she does it, and the paths open for its future trajectory—stand in striking contrast to Alba’s and those of her elder sister, Marina. Marina, in her early twenties, who lives in a nearby village and studied commerce after high school, works in the offices of the Ivanshoes factory in Catral, with a six-month contract. This is not her first job; she had worked in a candy factory in Catral’s polígono (industrial development park) until it closed down, in a factory making sports shoes, and as a secretary in Alicante. Her present job ended a sixmonth period of unemployment. Alba, still living at home, works in a small local shoe factory doing aparado work. She works ten hours a day, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. with a two-hour break for lunch. She is paid on a piecework rate every two weeks and gets social security benefits. She has a yearly contract that ends at the start of the vacation period, but she is hired back in September. She has worked there since she was fourteen and gives all her wages to her mother, who manages them, partly for the household and partly in Alba’s savings account. Alba’s family history reflects that of working people who, unable or unwilling to resolve the problems of uncertainty through long-standing ties of dependency to landlords or other employers, depended entirely on labor contracted by the day. Unlike Tio Ciriaco and Alicia or Jaime and Sonia, such people were not within the embrace of a set of dependencies that effectively made expectations on their conduct; instead, their lives were more open to movement. They worked for more than one landlord; they worked in other villages, having no bond of loyalty that might be broken thereby; they migrated. What they often did, and what becomes important for us as we seek to understand the present, is slip between agricultural work and work in the local industries. This was not just a complementary seasonal cycle shifting people between industry and agriculture, it was also a response to the uncertainties resulting from national and international economic shifts as well as a highly unpredictable climate (Palenzuela, 1991). We need to understand this as the income-seeking project of a pluriactive household whose constitution was flexible (at key moments in the life cycle often involving other households; a newly married daughter and her husband, a recently widowed mother, etc). The domestic setting that emerges has important features that are quite distinct from those of aniaga-type households. In the organic unit, the authoritarian relations outside the household are reproduced in a patriarchal form within it, but here the need to respond daily to changing crises, shortfalls, and op-

From Insecurity to Movement

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portunities invokes a different set of instituted practices and cultural dispositions.1 Rather than reflect and reproduce the organic corporatism of its surroundings, the household unit works by distinguishing relations of respect and responsibility within from practices without. Women’s role in managing the domestic scene became important in part because their frequent involvement in homework effectively linked the agricultural household to nonagricultural sources of money, but it was even more significant because constant occupational shifts and the fact that each person might work in separate and diverse occupations put a high demand on the need for coordination, cooperation, and harmony within the household. Coordinating diverse activities made manifest a quite particular set of social dispositions. Because their lives could get better only through long hours of work, moving, adapting, pooling resources, and helping each other, a strong sense of intrafamily responsibility was essential. In the accounts we gathered from older men and women in Santa Agueda, we found that much of this was condensed in a strong need to be honesto in one’s dealings with friends and family. As we see in later chapters, the fact that the public sphere frequently embroiled a person in conduct that could not match this standard gave rise to an often unvoiced but nonetheless clear distinction between personal self-respect and honesty within the family and its opposite in the sphere of public politics.

interpersonal relations among

JORNALEROS

The need for movement, for shifting around in search of work, often as a result of the uncertainties inherent in agricultural work, began early in a person’s life. José Arroyo Iglesias, for example, talks of his work years before the civil war: From seven to fourteen I worked as a yerbacero gathering grass for rabbits and helping on the farm. After that I worked as a jornalero and during the times when there was less work I walked to and from Elche [14 kilometers away] every day for work making sandals. I earned by the dozen and according to class. I could make two-and-a-half dozen in a jornada of 11 hours. I also worked periods in the “guano,” August and September at CROSS [a company in] Alicante. (Fieldnotes GS 1978)

Not just the sons of jornaleros but also those of aniaga workers or even of the smaller medium-sized tenants might start their working life as child day laborers when they were seven years old. As we saw in chapter 4, some young men would then shift into some kind of servant sta-

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tus on a finca and, as they grew older, move from there into a longer kind of aniaga relationship. But clearly, even were such dependencies desired, not all workers had the networks and contacts to become so embedded. As infants they were hired at a special day rate and “worked with the women.” At a certain age, around fourteen, they began working “with the men” and were hired as regular jornaleros. Women from jornalero families also started to work young. Conchita Gamero recalls: My father was a day laborer. My mother had to help him. She also braided hemp and rope. I was the second of seven children, the elder was a boy. I took care of my siblings, I helped with the washing, ironing. . . . I pealed potatoes. Sometimes I went to school because it was close but whenever my mother needed me she took me out of school in order to help her. When I was eleven I went to take care of a child and stayed nine years there [in that house as a nanny and domestic help]. After that I got away and went as a day laborer to pick cotton. Cotton was a woman’s work. (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995)

Older sisters, early on, were responsible for caring for younger brothers and sisters and did most domestic chores. But as soon as they could work for a wage and were not needed at home they began earning something, which they gave to the mother—who was the main manager of the family budget (she collected all the wages, including the husband’s and sons’). Pluriactivity was the norm for jornalera women as it was for their husbands. They worked the land, planted wheat and potatoes, picked cotton, and weeded; they worked in the canning and bottling factories in neighboring Almoradí and Dolores; they braided the short fibers of hemp, making rope (soga) or sandal soles (trenza); they worked as domestic servants and did the household chores at home. We can see the family cycle drawing young women into the pattern of their later lives by going back to Alba and Marina’s grandmother. Their grandfather was a casual jornalero working mainly with hemp but also with potatoes and artichokes, or whatever there was, while their grandmother worked in the canning factory in Almoradí before getting married. Later she also went to work the land as a jornalera: women helped in some of the cáñamo jobs, but more generally they planted wheat or barley and potatoes, weeded, harvested wheat and alfalfa, or dug up root crops. Soon she became ill “from the heart” and could not work the land, so she turned full-time to cleaning the house, cooking, and managing the commonly pooled income, thereby trying to make ends meet. Wages did not come every day. (“No es un jornal diario.”)


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They had no shoes and very few clothes, so she had to repair constantly and make things last, and these jobs became her contribution to the household’s well-being. Even so, housework was not valued as much as bringing in a jornal, a wage. What value it had involved managing the jornales of outworking members. The breakdown of their mother’s health also changed the role of her four daughters (Alba and Marina’s aunts and mother). Amelia, the oldest, from the outset of her working life was directed into housework by the need to replace her mother in the care of her younger brothers and sisters; subsequently she passed this work on to a younger sister, Camila, when she moved on to begin earning a wage as an agricultural jornalera. But then she found a job in a warehouse (almacén) weaving raffia; a middleman delivered the material, and a dozen women wove it into raffia cloth used to make handbags or shoes. This was in the early fifties, Amelia recalls, when she was twenty-eight years old. The very early demands on Amelia to be an adult may well have cast the mold for her later life. She soon found herself increasingly caring for her ailing mother while taking in sewing at home, working mainly at night. Then, by the time her mother died, all her brothers and sisters were married and living on their own, so she stayed with her aged father and took care of him, now going to an underwear workshop to sew and bringing home batches to be prepared. For jornaleros, ill health combined with political persecution to add further to the uncertainty of livelihood possibilities. Besides Alba and Marina’s three aunts and mother, they have two uncles, Andrés and Manuel, the former invalided after working at very low temperatures without protection in the refrigerated rooms of a cannery, the latter also invalided as the result of a work accident while a migrant in France. Integral to finding work in this kind of floating environment is the need for friends and relatives who act as contacts, giving access to work possibilities, thus activating horizontal kinds of personalized linkages quite different from the more vertical ties of the aniaga workers. Many times this is simply a question of a friend with work putting in a good word for one without, but important too are linkages to people who themselves are encargados—men and women responsible for a particular job in a packing factory or shoe workshop—or mayorales—those responsible for hiring jornaleros. Camila, the third sister, found work in an artichoke packing warehouse through her sister Adela. Men hired on in factories in Elche or Callosa in the 1960s may have found themselves among 150–200 other workers, but the setting for

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women’s work, whether in the fields or elsewhere, tended to be much more directly personal and small in scale, and this often determined the attractions of a job. Though agricultural work usually paid better (though never more than two-thirds of the male rate), and cotton, for example, was always picked by women, often nonagricultural entrepreneurs tilted the balance in labor demand by appearing more immediately concerned for the individual worker than their agricultural equivalents. Camila tells a revealing story of how, even though she was responsible for her younger sister (Alba and Marina’s mother, Consuelo), she was coaxed into work outside the home: I took care of Consuelo. But my brothers were at that time working in the cañizo factory, and I used to go with them and Consuelo, and sit there looking at them work. The owner of the factory showed me how to work the cañizo while he took care of Consuelo for a while. My brothers told me I shouldn’t do that work because it ruined your hands but there were women working in the factory. There were in all 15 workers male and female. I was ten years old and I wanted to work, I wept for going to work, to earn something. I finally got in. I worked in the cañizo factory for two years. (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995)

Often it was precisely when workshops were located away from the personalized world of the immediate municipality that jornalera women found the conditions less oppressive. Amelia, talking about the shifting of a warehouse in which she worked from her own neighborhood of Santa Agueda to Callosa, says, “It was more decent even though they paid by the piece—so, so. The owners were from Callosa, they were good people, not lacking in respect.” (Estaba más decente, aunque pagaban a destajo—regular. Los dueños eran de Callosa, eran buena gente, no faltaban al respeto.) Work away from the immediate neighborhood called into play another crucial factor in the network of relations necessary for making life possible—the need for (usually older) family to take care of children in the mother’s absence. This was as much the case for day labor within the neighborhood as for work in small workshops farther afield, though the latter usually required slightly longer-term arrangements than the more piecemeal exchanges of favors that occurred as soon as a woman found herself offered a day of work in the fields. Such arrangements were more difficult in the case of long-distance migration, and this often dictated when the nuclear family would migrate as a unit, as opposed to just the husband going (usually for shorter periods). Thus, although Camila left her three-year-old with her mother-


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in-law after she got married (“Even though they were also stretched and needed to go to work as jornaleros”), it was not until the child was seven that the small family could migrate for three years to the town of SainteMarguerite near Nîmes (where many other local migrants also went). In fact, up to that time her husband had been a day laborer and worked mainly in the cáñamo, even though he could not find work every day. So the move to France was also the result of the collapse of hemp cultivation in 1959. Camila’s comment that her husband worked in the cáñamo as a jornalero “though by no means every day” and her remarks about her inlaw’s family “being stretched” though offering some child care allude to the fact that, through a relatively large network of this kind, periods of employment and the needs of child care (and other domestic tasks) could be shifted around in response to the varying requirements of each member household. Women’s role in managing these affairs was paramount and was to become of fundamental importance in the success of outwork networks once shoe and allied manufacturing expanded in the 1960s and ’70s (see chapter 7). This management function was recognized in the way dwellings or dwelling plots tended to be passed across the generations among jornaleros. Camila and Consuelo were both provided houses by their father adjacent to his, and one of these Amelia subsequently inherited, whereas neither Andrés nor Manuel, their brothers, acquired houses in this way. The proximity that often results in this practice also aids the reciprocal networking, not only with respect to non-monetary domestic chores but also in the arranging of collaborative homework on neighboring patios. We note here too the striking contrast between this female inheritance of (albeit very low value) housing and the passing of dwellings and land on to the labrador or aniaga. In the latter there was an absolute insistence (by the dueño) that the dwelling and land be received by the male head of an organically constituted family unit. Migration was also constrained by self-respect that set limits to what was personally acceptable to a jornalero. Conchita Gamero’s husband, Pablo, was a jornalero when they got married, while she worked in the cannery in Dolores. Then came the drought (sequía) which, together with the expansion of the shoewear industry in nearby Elche, moved many jornaleros to look for wage work in Elche during the 1960s. That is what Pablo and Conchita did. There Pablo got a job pasting rubber soles on shoes, while Conchita took care of their newborn baby. They were living with a cousin who rented them a room. After a few months

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of this industrial experience, Pablo decided that the salary was not worth the long hours of work (“day and night”) and the lack of childcare support that would enable Conchita to look for work. As Conchita said, “He realized that it was not good for us. And we came back to Catral” (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995). Back in Catral, Conchita used her mother’s help as a babysitter in order to get back to work in the cannery in Dolores, and Pablo went back to seeking an uncertain jornal. After a couple of years, however, they were finding it hard to get by, so Pablo decided to migrate to France during the grape harvest, leaving Conchita and their two children back home. This arrangement seems to have worked for two years, but then Pablo had a serious confrontation with his employer in France when he did not pay what had been agreed. Conchita recounts, “He [Pablo] argued [with the boss] that he was entitled to know what he was going to get paid by the hour in order to see if it was worth it to have left his wife back home, working in Dolores, and his children . . . because if he was to die of hunger he preferred to die in his village, he wasn’t going to die in a foreign country” (porque morirse de hambre prefería morirse en su pueblo pero no se muere en el extranjero) (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995). Back in the local area, Pablo started to get some work in construction in the slack agricultural season. Construction gangs often went away for the week but returned weekends and sometimes were hired locally. A few years later he was diagnosed with cancer and eventually died. Although the narrative comes from Conchita, Pablo’s widow, and the expression of anger is linked to her experience as much as to her husband’s, what comes through clearly is that even in extreme circumstances there was a limit to what these people were prepared to endure. For many a jornalero and his family, self-respect informed action (individual or political) and guided a particular mobile and confrontational way of dealing with a life of extremely constricted opportunity. This brand of self-respect was firmly grounded in material realities, be they access to a female kin support network that could help free a woman to earn income or the emotional costs of distance from home. It was also grounded on an idea that fair wages (an obviously elastic category) were the expression of the value of work, and that accepting wages below what was considered reasonably fair was not only against personal dignity but also an insult to workers as a whole. This is strikingly similar to Martínez Alier’s (1968: 103–30, 149–92) accounts of jornalero discourses of unión (acting in solidarity) and cumplir (the customary ratio of work to wages), and to Frigolé Reixach’s accounts of the opposition


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between ser cacique and ser hombre, where ser hombre (to be a man) “includes a series of customary norms through which the day laborers try to better their working conditions, and try to regulate the market. These norms are the usual mechanisms of workers’ defence from the owner, señorito or capitalist. The cacique is defined precisely by his rupture with these defence mechanisms and his willingness to be nonsolidary with his group” (1991: 556).2 Sentiments such as these emerge out of a history of rural laborers’ political struggles (Cucó i Giner, 1981). These struggles began to take institutionalized form partly through the unions that developed at the turn of the century and gathered strength in the first years of the Republic, and partly through the social regulations authorized through the various rural labor laws: Ley de Términos Municipales, Ley de Laboreo Forzoso, and finally Ley de Reforma Agraria. But they occupy day laborers’ memories especially in terms of the general strike of 1934. In 1933, the Republican president, Alcalá Zamora, angered at the reform policies of Prime Minister Azaña, had dissolved parliament and called for new elections. As a result, a conservative coalition came into power that immediately put a stop to school secularization and land reform, allowing the old landlords to reassert their control. In response, a general strike was called by the UGT on May 12, 1934. The government immediately responded with the withdrawal of the Ley de Términos Municipales (May 24, 1934). The general strike took hold in the countryside, and this was followed later in the year by the rising of miners in Asturias and a declaration of independence by the Catalan Generalitat (October 6, 1934) that was immediately repressed. Ribeiro de Meneses summarizes the response that autumn: The army, using troops ferried from Africa [and commanded by the young Francisco Franco], regained control of Asturias, where Anarchists, communists and socialists made a common effort to resist, in a bloodbath that cost over 1000 lives; Catalan autonomy was suspended; and thousands of workers, alongside leading socialist and republican figures, were arrested or forced to flee abroad. Labour conditions, especially in the countryside, were allowed to worsen further. (2001: 20)

Pablo’s and others’ inability to quietly accept extreme forms of exploitation must be related, then, to this historical moment of collective struggle that became hegemonic, even if only briefly. Pablo’s remarks make clear a whole way of living (within particularly exploitative contexts) as well as an understanding of where the limits to agency were to be encountered. Something like the broad set of understandings often

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called “culture” links Pablo’s agency and identity to those collective forms of agency and identity that took form through these quite specific past struggles, together with their institutionalization. This last point seems to be particularly relevant to the jornaleros’ construction of political agency: for a brief period (1931–33) a coalition of revolutionary socialists and the bourgeois Republican Left held legitimate power in the state, forming a historical bloc in Gramsci’s terms, and began institutionalizing reforms aimed at a deep transformation of the social relations of production (Gramsci, 1971). As it turned out, the situation did not reproduce itself; as we have seen, the Right was quick to resort to violence. With the collapse of the Republic, this violence was directed toward the elimination of the democratic regime and control over a sizable part of the national territory in order to gain control of the state. As a result, the next time the revolutionary Left was empowered was a civil war situation, in which the national leadership allowed defense priorities to push aside the objectives of political transformation. There is still another context to stories like Pablo’s here. After the transition to democracy, the rise to power of the PSOE in 1982 was (mis)interpreted by many jornaleros as a legitimate and peaceful empowerment similar to that of 1931—hopes that were only to be deeply disappointed by the increasingly neoliberal policies of those in power (Petras, 1993). Pulled in so many directions, with each adult in and out of a hodgepodge of jobs varying in type, location, and duration, perpetually threatened with the destitution that rises with dips in labor demand or family ill health, the jornalero household was greatly in need of good domestic management. Such household solidarities in these families were mostly tied around the mother figure. Not only did the mother manage the incomes of all those residing in the household—which meant being in charge of making ends meet, of pulling a group of people out of misery and very simply making their lives possible—she also had the vital role of caregiver for the grandchildren, a fundamental job if young women were to keep working full-time and retain a necessary mobility after marriage. So daughters tried to keep close to mothers and to keep in touch, and later in the life cycle they became the care givers for their parents. This was not simply because women were perceived as being the natural care givers; it was also because women themselves had experience of wage-labor relations and often crucial management and organizational responsibilities of homework groupings.


being

HONESTO :

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day laborers’ self-respect

For a system of interpersonal relationships like that of the jornalero to work, there is a strong need for an ideological component that associates it with honesty and responsibility, for both women and men. José, Alba and Marina’s father and Consuela’s husband, is a day laborer and always has been. Because he started working in the fields when he was ten, he did not go to school. Yet, as was the case with many of the day laborers in the region and indeed throughout southern Spain at the time (see Hobsbawm, 1959; Martínez Alier, 1968; Brennan, 1960; J. Mintz, 1982), José’s father placed a high value on education, and José was taught by teachers who roamed the countryside teaching usually for no more than the price of a meal. Though this practice predates the postwar repression, by the 1940s such teachers were invariably Reds who had been depurados (purged) through the Ley de Responsabilidades Políticas and were prohibited from teaching as well as returning to their towns of origin.3 It is not surprising then, that the Guardia Civil arrived one day to take José to the town hall on the grounds that he was not attending school and thus not getting compulsory national education. When they forcefully commanded that he raise his hand in the fascist salute of the Movimiento, he refused. They brought in his father and uncle, and they too refused to salute. His father then asked for Don José Mariano Lara, for whom he occasionally worked as a mayoral and who had a reputation for being a liberal. But Lara too told them to raise their arms in the fascist salute. They still refused. They were told they would be beaten up by Movimento strongarms the mayor used to make Reds understand who was in charge. José ended the story by saying, “Over the years, my father and I have had to bend in order to survive, but hombres honrados like us are a special breed.” Although it was rare in our years of fieldwork to hear people tell such stories about themselves, this is a significant narrative about the importance of self-respect as distinct from respect for authority or, more accurately, for authorities. Indeed, when trying to evoke this element of jornalero respectability, men would often interlace a similar story, not about themselves but about José’s father, who, as José says, represented a special breed. Eric Hobsbawm has written, “No term is harder to analyse than ‘respectability’ in the mid-nineteenth-century working class, for it expressed simultaneously the penetration of middle-class values and standards, and also the attitude without which working-class self-respect

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would have been difficult to achieve, and a movement of collective struggle impossible to build: sobriety, sacrifice, the postponement of gratification” (1984: 263–64). We are writing of a different place and time, yet we find his observations remarkably provocative. What Hobsbawm sees as two sources of respectability that split the worker’s personality actually produced two different kinds of person, albeit overlapping, in the Vega Baja during this period. Whereas we found more dependent families frequently referring to respect for those of higher social class, we also found the accounts of jornaleros to be littered with the need to be honesto. Moreover, though this need referred especially to daily interactions with one’s peers, it was also felt, at least ideally, as something not be diluted in one’s dealings with others outside the peer group. Being honesto became the main moral guideline for conducting one’s life. To be honesto meant to have self-respect and thus, dependent as it was on elements within and among the jornaleros themselves, it stood against exploitation and was also the ultimate means for judging situations of exploitation in which they were immersed. Although they were aware that they had to accept exploitative relations with those who had the power and resources, they were not prepared to go beyond the threshold of self-respect. It was, so to speak, the ultimate boundary they would not want to cross. Accepting exploitative relations means hardship, long hours, little pay, and poor health, but it should not invoke lack of respect. Work itself acted as a crucial element in this equation, for work well done was bound up with self-respect, while work in conditions that invaded the arena of personal dignity inverted that equation. Moreover, the association of dignity with the performance of physical work implied the worthlessness of a life spent idle; hence it inverted the hegemonic ideal of respect for the patron, who performed no such work. Although actual deference may be shown to elites, true respect is owed only to those who work.

hiring in the plaza: MAYORALES and HOMBRES

DE CONFIANZA

In chapter 4 we complemented our study of different aniaga families with one of a broader institution, the finca. No equivalent institution plays a permanent and integrating role in the lives of the jornaleros, but we can look at the major site of day labor contracting. Traditionally this was the main square of a town—the plaza. The recruitment process of


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these jornaleros took place through a mayoral, who was himself a day laborer, through a hombre de confianza, a man particularly trustworthy to the landowner, or directly by the landowner.4 The mayoral usually worked side by side with those he helped recruit, although he might have sharecropped some land for the dueño in an aniaga-type relationship in the past, or might still be doing so. The more dependent he was on the dueño, the more he would be described as an hombre de confianza as opposed to the more uncommitted mayoral, but the boundaries were fuzzy. Either way, he was in charge of getting work done and undoubtedly had power over the other jornaleros, mostly because he usually decided if they would be hired again or not. The mayoral himself was directly responsible to the owner or tenant. Some mayorales favored kin-related jornaleros in their hiring practices, others seem to have favored people with hard-working reputations. Adult men and women, children, and older people were hired at different occasions according to the tasks that had to be done and general availability. Women and children were hired by a mayorala, a women who recruited through door-to-door visits. Male mayorales tended to negotiate gangs on the public plaza. From what we saw in chapter 4, we can get an initial idea of who these people gathering on the steps of the church in the early hours of the morning might be. While you would certainly not find Don José Mariano Lara there, if casual work needed to be done at Lo de Vera, Victorino Fuentes or one of the other labradores would be found among the potential hirers. He might be exchanging gossip with the owner or labrador (tenant) of a smaller finca. Eventually such men would break up and descend into the plaza, moving among the workers and, looking the man in the face, utter the single syllable “Tú” (you) and then again a few steps farther on, “Tú” and “Tú,” until the number of men needed was reached. The labrador would then leave the plaza and return to the fields where the work was to be done, meeting his workforce shortly thereafter. There would, however, be another cluster of potential hirers, perhaps not themselves ascending the steps of the church, perhaps close by them, or perhaps even themselves already mixing among the jornaleros. Many of the smaller fincas relied almost entirely on the daily hiring of labor; they were not sufficiently large to support a body of fixed laborers, though in most cases they might have one or two aniaga workers. And it would likely be one of these men, himself an hombre de confianza of the man owning or renting the finca, who would be trusted to hire a

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team of laborers. Many times, however, and especially when a team of workers was required (e.g., at harvest or seeding), a labrador would contact an old and respected day laborer—perhaps the evening before— and make him responsible for choosing a group of workers. He too would be found in the square that same morning, perhaps taking a man by the elbow and saying “Tú, Ubaldo” and “Tú también, El Conejo,” and so on. Such men, the heads of teams of workers, were the mayorales, key figures in the labor regime of agricultural day labor. We have noted two rather different figures here: the aniaga tenant, seeking work for the person with whom he has an aniaga contract, here in the square to gather a team of workers (and hence to act as their foreman for the duration of the task); and the jornalero, chosen the evening before by a labrador in need of a team of workers. We can readily imagine what the aniagero, the landlord’s hombre de confianza, has to offer his employer in this respect. He will find willing workers and he will work them to the maximum, the better to impress his patron. But what of the other mayoral? Why is he rather than another selected by an employer? And what might his relationship to his work team be, as they sweat their way through a hot day in the fields? We might begin with that word, tú. It is often noted that, when a man of power addresses another of his own age with this familiar form of “you,” he is making a statement of rank. But to say only this misses the point: why does it become a statement about rank? Because it is— openly, brazenly, manifestly—an expression of disrespect. A man finds himself in the plaza. He needs work. So do his two sons who stand beside him. He is a big man, one who has worked many years. In the eyes of his sons he has authority sui generis as their father, but especially because he has got himself and them through—through the crises and hardships their family enterprise has weathered. Yet this paterfamilias is now addressed in the main square of the town as tú. It is an utterance that draws a powerful and deep line between the one man and the other. What about the aniagero, coming to the square as the hombre de confianza of a landlord or labrador. He is Don Fulano’s man, of course, and in this sense unlike the ordinary day laborer, but there are times as well when he too will need a day of work—when he is in the square like another—though, having his small plot of aniaga land, perhaps just a fraction less desperate, less starving. How does his tú sound. It probably depends on many things, but in the end one suspects it sounds, if not like a tú of identity, then at least one of equality. While there is little respect


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for the man committed to his aniagero labor relationship as the jornalero (by force of circumstance or by choice) is committed to his, there is a reciprocal balance: the one must return to his amo with a useful workforce, the other needs a day’s work. This returns us to our original question: what about the position of the ordinary jornalero on whom a farmer depends to find him a good workforce? We need have no doubt about what is conveyed by his use of the term tú. It may well be that in other settings some of the men he will be employing he would certainly refer to with Usted, showing them the respect of one grown man to another. But here he is about to go out to work with them as a colleague in the field. Tú is not a deep line drawn in the sand but a bond of identity and solidarity. Many older men who had been mayorales tried to convey to us the tensions caught up in this position, this interface par excellence between the world of respeto and honestidad and the world of authority and confianza. To his colleagues such a man says—silently, in what can be expected of him as a man of self-respect—that he expects from them a proper day of work, the kind work an honest man would give. Yet it is because he knows this to be the case—because he knows that Juan X or Antonio Y has this reputation—that the amo seeks him out the night before and selects him to be his mayoral. But, just as today he faces this direction, tomorrow he may face the other, returning to the plaza to seek work for himself. One or other of today’s fellow workers may tomorrow be selected as the mayoral for some other amo and will thus himself be employing workers. Knowing all these things, the mayoral also knows his task is to defend his workers against the abuses of the man who employs them all. Mayorales were usually very conscious of their awkward situation. They had the power to give work to some day laborers, the power to decide who would or would not work. They themselves were jornaleros but responsible in front of the dueño for the productivity and quality of the work done, so they had to control and press the rest of the workers to meet certain standards, and sometimes they had to do the hardest work themselves—the work regular jornaleros would not do but which still had to be done. José Gil Sr. describes his work as mayoral this way: “Unfortunately, I have been a mayoral, I have never been given anything and I have had my own throat cut and I have cut the throat of others— that’s for lack of culture” (Yo por desgracia he sido mayoral, nunca me han dado nada y me he degollado y he degollado a otros, cosas de la falta de cultura) (Fieldnotes GS 1979).

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We find this man in 1979, a socialist union leader, aware that he had a role in the chain of exploitation that structured social relations of production. Did he have the same awareness twenty years earlier when he was working as a mayoral? Did the political discourses of the socialist union and the Republican attempts to regulate agricultural day labor, through the Ley de Bases and the Ley de Términos Municipales before the war, help to produce a consciousness of being exploited himself while also being an instrument of the landlords’ exploitation of others? When José Gil Sr. points to lack of culture as the cause for the doublebind situation he was in as a mayoral, is he speaking of an ignorance of the complex articulation of exploitations? Is he thinking of culture as a specific kind of good that protects people from the hardships of being put into such terrible situations? Is he pointing to the pervasive idea upheld by the political Left that education gives freedom to the individual? As Martínez Alier (1968) has shown for Andalusia, the idea of culture as a way out of extremely precarious forms of livelihood is present in day laborers’ minds. Moreover, this idea of culture is complex, encompassing basic literacy as well as political awareness and other more expressive forms of art in a tense and contradictory way (we explore this in chapter 8). Translated into the language of the unionized factory floor, in a sense the aniagero-mayoral is like the worker who takes the role of foreman, while the jornalero-mayoral is more like the union shop steward. In many recountings of the past we find the older jornaleros bemoaning the way aniaga workers acted as the hole that let air out of worker collectivity. By the very nature of their contract, for example, they could not themselves refuse to work, for they were tied—just as the jornaleros were floating. Yet in one sense at least even the jornaleros associated themselves with the ties of place, for they knew that the price paid for their work depended on the size of the reserve labor available, and the one time the perceptions of movement versus locality were reversed was over the issue of the labor pool employers in a given municipality could legitimately draw on. When we turn to the different way female day workers were recruited, we see that the different gendered practices for hiring labor express a tension between mobility and fixity, between more private and more public spaces to establish work relationships. We see a tension within the jornalero household akin to that between the more mobile day laborers and the more dependent, fixed aniagueros, expressed spa-


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tially in the secluded realm of the finca or the household as opposed to the open, hierarchical but public space of the plaza. Unlike the men’s labor market in the plaza, the hiring of female labor was more private and hidden from the public eye. “A mayorala went through the homes in Santa Agueda, asking if the women wanted to work. She obviously had better predisposition toward particular people. The mayorala was a neighbor, she looked for street neighbors or family relations. She paid more attention to them” (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995). Like the middlemen employing homework for the shoe industry later on, the mayoralas visited the women they wanted to hire at night, knocking at their door when dark fell in the neighborhood of Santa Agueda, asking them if they wanted to work the next day in a particular job that had to be done in a particular finca and informing them of how much they would get for it. Women, then, were not publicly on the market (as men on the plaza were). Small children working with the women were also hired this way. Gender, then, was a distinct element of hiring practices. It was often the case that husband and wife got hired to work on the same finca but through different channels. At other times they could be working for different amos on the same day, and thus opening up the hiring opportunities of their household. This gendering of hiring practices gave particular meaning to a change in hiring in the 1960s. Because the contrast between the open public space of the plaza and the closed, opaque and private space of the home is constructed as gendered, when the hiring of men shifted to the less open, more private space of the bar, this was symbolically also a statement about the social power of the remaining jornaleros. They were now being hired more like women and were closer to hiring practices that seclude and personalize the contractual labor/capital relation.

conclusion The conventional work in Mediterranean ethnography refers to “the honor-shame complex” as a shared code in which different conduct is required of actors as a result of their position in a status relationship— patron/client, father/daughter, husband/wife, and the like (Caro Baroja, 1968; Peristiany,1966; Pitt-Rivers, 1979; Gellner, 1986). But in this and the previous chapter we suggest a much more active, discursive, and indeed conflictive understanding of what constitutes honor, honesty, and

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responsibility. Although the terms of culture may be shared, the meanings given to those terms arise from the multiple perspectives people have as a result of their different instituted practices. For the jornaleros, the honor that adheres to people with high status (and those who tie themselves and their families to them) is markedly different from an important sense among themselves that they are the only ones preoccupied with being honorable. This is a kind of honor quite particular to them; it is a coin that increases in value precisely because they lack so much else (Martínez Alier, 1968; Frigolé Reixach, 1991). Jornaleros’ only possession is their person, and the recognition that they are in effect the owners of their person is tied to the importance of self-respect. This contrasts sharply with what memories of the black market, petty political corruption, and open self-advancement tell jornaleros about the elite and those who tied their flags to them. Jornalero identity is almost exclusively tied to colleagues’ recognition of honesty and hence of being granted dignity. They might have to sell their labor power, but self-respect ensures that they do not sell their person. That is why practices such as the hipoteca humana (see chapter 3) that seem to erode this ultimate limit are so resented and come to form the core of class awareness and resistance practices. Emerging from the comparison of the lives of jornaleros and aniaga workers is a difference in the way mutual obligation and responsibility were constructed and served to guide personal agency. In the case of aniagueros, the construction of mutual responsibilities between employer and worker sets the pattern for vertical patronage interclass linkages that were reinforced through practice. This created a corporatist sense of mutual obligation and responsibility, one supported moreover by the social doctrine of the church. Here trust—confianza—is a topdown relationship expressed as deference and obedience between employer and worker and, by extension into the household, between father and son. In contrast, for the jornaleros mutual responsibility referred to a relationship among equals: in the family between spouses, among siblings and between parents and children, and beyond the family among work peers. The crucial concept is not trust, however, but honesty— which means building both personal self-respect and a redoubt of collective empowerment. Being honesto toward oneself (i.e., working properly), toward one’s family (i.e., helping get by), toward one’s peers (i.e., showing solidarity and acting with transparency) are central to the construction of horizontal ties, of a particular sense of agency and also of a collective sense of belonging.


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This contrast between aniaguero trust and jornalero honesty, we argue, is not usefully described as a structured cultural pattern, as is so often proposed for the Mediterranean (and more recently for regional economies). It is better seen as a construct of history—of the way social relations of production developed locally and were enforced, resisted, and transformed at particular historical moments by historical actors.

. . . In chapter 3 we saw how, in the years after the civil war, a harsh world of personalized repression and selective victimization was combined with the twilight transgressive world of scarcity and opportunity found in the estraperlo. In chapter 4 and this chapter we noted how the memories of different people highlighted different features of those difficult years. Random beatings, the proximity of a concentration camp where executions took place daily, the shunning of a suspect neighbor in the street—all these things are recalled in the narratives of some people as the difficult return to order, the merciful reestablishing of stability that could so easily be destabilized by threatening counter-forces. For many jornaleros in the neighborhood of Santa Agueda, however, it is not so much that this period of repression was given a different reading as that it was rarely spoken of at all. Instead, when we turned conversation toward the 1940s and 50s, people would remark on the picaresque strategies made necessary by the black market for one to survive. For ordinary folk who had been sympathetic to the Republic—or were simply suspected on the evidence of their class position as jornaleros—memories of the black market are at the same time memories of the ever-threatening extremities of poverty and of the individual and collective maneuvers that kept them from death’s door. Also contained in these memories, though, are the stories of fortunes made through shady practices and— significantly—always made possible through the use of political favors. So, viewed either positively in terms of the agency of the poor in the face of adversity, or negatively as the get-rich-quick slick practices of sharp dealers, these narratives were about using movement to take advantage of order. In short, the estraperlo symbolizes the ability to move as a means to manipulate one’s environment. The people who talked to us about the years of personalized authority or the estraperlo did not, of course, dwell exclusively on one or the other image, yet we feel justified in noting quite clear distinctions, which we have distinguished here by reference to two kinds of livelihood con-

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tracts. In both kinds of livelihood we find people deprived of stable resources for making a living, and thereby faced with the hazards and inevitable personal crises of uncertainty. In one case people address this situation by becoming tied to quite specific persons with property and power; in the other people shift through shorter-term relations of employment. In chapter 4 we saw that long-term vertical personalized ties effectively penetrate the relationships within families and households, while in the other the family household takes on its inner form through a need to face up against the various labor relationships of its members. We also saw how being fixed and tied to place was the linchpin for the exploitation of labor. In this chapter we find that it is, rather, movement that provides the conditions within which labor exploitation occurs. This is movement from one employer to another, between agriculture and industry, from one site to another, and so on—but also movement in a more symbolic sense, with all the uncertainties, uprootedness, and hazards that this implies.5 What are the implications of this history for the making of jornalero working-class culture? To begin with, what do we mean by “face up against” as opposed to “penetrate”? We are referring to the classresistant element of the jornalero household that is structured into the kinds of capital/labor relations inherent in the jornalero contract. The exploitation of labor occurs in the capital/labor agreements of the market. In the case of the jornalero, as opposed to aniaguero, there is a resistance in the extent to which capital is able to use family relations as the mechanism for exploitation. Domestic relations in jornalero families are shaped by production relations, but from the outside. Even where the purely contractual arrangement is modified by links of friendship, the friendships are used horizontally and hence reinforce class collectivity and serve to emphasize a distinction from the dominant classes. And this is so even when the gendered practices of hiring produce particular distinctions within class and family homogeneity. This is far from saying that movement serves always to reduce exploitation; rather, capital benefits in this case precisely from the size of the floating labor force and the fact that it is floating. We saw this variable in the struggles around the movement of labor in and beyond the plaza labor market. From this congeries of experiences people of jornalero background entered the era of industrialization led by the shoe sector in the 1960s. As we next shift to part II and the current era, we begin by following a winding path with often frustratingly curtailed trails. We still find the atmosphere of crisis, which is nothing new to the region. But the growing


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political culture of what we call neoliberal corporatism and the national government’s pursuit of ever greater integration into the modernist and technocratic European Union combine to obscure access to that past: a “New Man” is required, one who should find the struggles of the past irrelevant if not actually burdensome in securing the bright new future.

pa rt t wo

Regional Capitalism

chapter 6

Families and Entrepreneurs

In 1969, S. H. Franklin wrote an influential book on the European countryside titled The European Peasantry. Its subtitle captured the sense of the times—The Final Phase. Indeed, in his final chapter Franklin evokes the idea of the few rural smallholders left in the countryside becoming little more than park keepers, preserving the landscape for the urban folk who rush by on weekends and holidays. Yet, as we said at the opening of this book, for some areas of Europe the shift has been less a near-total exodus from the countryside than a shift from industry as an appendage to agriculture to agriculture as an appendage to industry. Here we discuss the ways these processes were experienced by people going through this kind of transition. By the last decade of the twentieth century, as the lines between industrial city and agricultural countryside, between urban factory workers and rural smallholding agriculturalists, and between industrial capitalists and unionized labor became fuzzier, social scientists themselves seemed to abandon an understanding of social process in terms of the force and counterforce of dialectics. Increasingly, an older discourse in which the play of interpersonal and intersystemic conflicts and tensions were understood to be inherent to the dynamics of history was replaced by a much more mechanistic understanding of social relations in terms of the potential productivity (Smith, 2004) of the “entrepreneurial worker” and of “social capital.” One result is that the cut and thrust of real people, as they try to make their way toward some kind of liveli121

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hood while the currents they float on hurl them here and there, is often hard to find. We have tried to recover these dialectical tensions in history by interweaving the broader currents—political, economic, and social—that swept over the Vega Baja with the forming, reforming, breaking, and reconstituting of a variety of people’s practices, relationships, institutions, and emergent subjectivities. Now, as we turn to the more recent past, we must make the tableau of chapter 2, which provided a survey of history and geography up to the 1970s, into a tableau vivant of the present; we need to explore the manifold lives of real people in southern Alicante as its congeries of elements became configured as a regional economy. We begin by focusing especially on the supposedly entrepreneurial types and those who might appear to be well-possessed of social capital. In doing so, we find them strategizing most certainly as they seek to provide for themselves and their families; we find them capitalizing too—both on opportunities and on other people, positioning themselves vis-à-vis others as peers, patrons, and competitors. In one sense there is a continuity in the present with what we have seen in the past, but now we find people working their ways through two kinds of transition. One of them is political and we deal with that later. In this chapter we deal with people especially concerned to negotiate their way through the second transition, as the long-standing fluorescent Alicantino agriculture—always interspersed with small manufacturing and services—is now displaced by the uneven march into dominance of dispersed industry—a shift we could characterize as from an agricultural-and-some-industry setting to an industrial-and-someagriculture setting. The extent of the change can be seen in the percentage of the provincial economy in agriculture, industry, and services. In 1962, before the boom began, Alicante’s breakdown—25 percent agriculture, 35 percent industry, 40 percent services—was almost identical to the country as a whole. By 1973, industry accounted for 42 percent of the provincial economy (7 percent higher than Spain as a whole), and agriculture had shrunk to just 9.3 percent—and this in a mere decade (Tamames, 1977). Between 1930 and 1960, the percentage of Elche’s economically active population in manufacturing doubled. Catering to an ever more urban and European-influenced national consumer market, the shoe industry boomed and output doubled over the same period. Then, in the early sixties, the Franco administration, realizing that it could maintain


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economic and hence political stability only by opening up the economy, devalued the peseta and negotiated improved import conditions on shoe sales to the United States. This shifted the industry toward production for the international market. Repeating a pattern we have seen before in the region, the swing in favor of the new conditions was reckless. By 1972, Alicante had increased shoe production from 13 million pairs in 1957 to 63 million, of which almost 90 percent was for export (Bernabé Maestre et al., 1984: 16)—70 percent of this to the United States (Benton, 1990: 78). Through 1978 and 1979, amid the fields of artichokes and orchards of orange trees, beside a carpet factory, or on a patio where a woman worked on batches of shoes, local people frequently talked of the crisis of agriculture. But it was not yet clear to them that this was to be any different from the myriad crises that had been faced before. So people responded as they always had—seeking out multiple occupations for household income earners, seeking some form of security through longstanding notions of patronage. But the continuity of crises and opportunities that had given rise to this kind of habit was to be broken by changes in the abstract forces that conditioned social reproduction for the region. The figures above reveal a reshaped provincial economy that radically changed the historical conditions within which households and individuals could make effective their habitual practices. With the opening of Spain to international currents, the labor-intensive, decrepit agricultural capitalism that had dragged on throughout the century in Spain, propped up by successive regimes that relied on the hierarchical manipulation of authority and on corporatist policies, was not sustainable. Just as with earlier shifts, this one was experienced variously as opportunity and crisis. But this almost tectonic shift invoked an unfamiliar tension in the experience of opportunity and the experience of crisis— that is, a sense of frustrated capacity, of indeterminacy. Tension arose not just in the social fabric—in the tensions and realignment of institutions, for example—and not just with households—as income seeking had a centrifugal effect on its members. More savagely, opportunity and crisis embedded themselves within individuals themselves: a young bachelor here, an old sharecropper there; a young, married woman here, a twelveyear-old child there. There was an almost palpable contradiction in the air, which many people actually talked about and puzzled over. Despite the important role of pluriactivity in the area’s history, and despite the shift from small

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manufacturing to the regimes of industrial production of shoes in Elche and carpets in Crevillente, the uncertainty of the changes served only to reassert the apparent security of the familiar—agriculture.1 Just at the time when people sensed an agricultural crisis, they invested savings and labor in land. Land meant security, but as its relative productivity declined, this was an ersatz kind of security, as we see in some of the cases that follow. In fact, it would have been impossible to live in this area through the late seventies and retain the fiction that this was an agricultural society. Apart from the presence of a carpet factory and a shoe factory in Catral itself, more and more young men and women went off each day to Elche or Crevillente to work in the factories. Then there were small workshops tied into the shoe industry as well as other small enterprises, one making boxes to pack fruit and vegetables, four producing bamboo blinds and brooms, and a small ironworks. Old cars and vans scurried by on the dusty roads, evidently loaded down with shoe parts or other similar products. Even if one found oneself talking to a family who described themselves as agricultores, gathered around the table in the evening when the head of the family returned from the fields, the anthropologist arriving for an informal interview inevitably found himself stepping over consignments of shoe parts in the patio on the way into the kitchen. Still, all this was not experienced uniformly. It meant very different things to different people. For some households, despite the presence in the kitchen or on the patio of one or two daughters and possibly the wife doing homework, the fixed world of an older agricultural set of relationships was somehow retained. For others, ties such as these had been resisted or the opportunity to make them had never been possible. As we have seen, the pervasive sense of binding, of threading, and ultimately of fixity played off against contrasting experiences of movement, of shifting—perhaps providing opportunity, but more often threatening disaster. These threads of the past became entwined in the shifting fabric of opportunity in the present, producing a wide variety of patterns in different people’s fields of action. Certain conjunctures in the present actualize latent connections, expectations, and subjectivities out of the past, thereby positioning some people to strategize in a way neither possible nor perhaps even visible to others. Then a quite different conjuncture arises in the course of another set of people’s lives, invoking quite other paths of history in an endless and open-ended series of practical engagements.


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industrial and agricultural intermediaries We now observe two paths undertaken during the uncertain years of the post-Franco transition. The first follows the family of Roberto, who provides a good example of the ubiquitous work distributors or jobbers who ply their trade from one end of the Vega Baja to the other. The second—Juan Manuel Aguilar and his relatives—gives us the case of the agricultural intermediary who shifts between agricultural commercialization and industrial small operations.2 When Gavin arrived in Catral in 1978, Roberto was a distributor of shoe parts to homeworkers in the local putting-out system. In 1995 he was doing the same job, although he reckoned that many other distributors active in 1978 were doing other things now. Roberto’s father was a jornalero and Roberto himself started to work as a jornalero when he was around ten; he went with the women and got a “women’s jornal.” He did not go to school but studied one hour every day with a private teacher. When he was fourteen he began doing “men’s work” and receive a “men’s jornal” (more than double that of women and children, 200 pesetas vs. 75 pesetas in 1958). He migrated seasonally for the wheat harvest; a cuadrilla was organized in Villena (in the nearby Alto Vinalopó), entered the Castilian wheat fields in Albacete, and toured the different wheat regions for a few months. In 1966 he did his obligatory military service, in the Sahara for two years.3 When he returned from service, the sequía (the drought) was hitting agriculture in the area. He worked one more year as a jornalero but in Murcia, not Catral, and he also worked for a while in a construction gang. At that time in Elche the shoe industry was booming. Roberto decided to go there in search of work. He was twenty-four and easily found a job gluing soles in a shoe factory, “because he didn’t know how to do anything” (says Mónica, his wife). He got married a year later. In 1995 his wife recounted his career in the following terms: When he started he knew nothing but he wanted to learn and he stayed over at lunch time and watched how they were doing the montado [the assembly, the most skilled part of the shoe manufacturing process]. A foreman taught him how to do it. Once he learned he was put in charge of a via de montado [an assembly line]. He was a hard worker, it seems that he worked very well. Then I asked him if he could find some work for me in Elche. Roberto asked around and the foreman told him that his son had a heel manufacturing factory and was putting out work for forrar [covering heels]. The foreman introduced Roberto to his son and told the son to give Roberto all the work he asked for because he was a hard worker. So the

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son of the foreman gave him lots of work for me. I did all the work myself at that time. (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995)

In the five years he seems to have spent in Elche, Roberto changed factories at least once, the second time getting hired as a qualified worker (obrero oficial de primera). By his third year in Elche (1972), however, he was clearly investing in getting a distribution infrastructure, mainly a small van. He had bought a car soon after beginning his work in Elche (1969), presumably to go back and forth to Catral where the married couple had set up house. It is not unlikely that this “capital” was one of the main factors that enabled him to guide his career into distribution, together with his village networks: family, friends, and neighbors. By 1971, when he entered his second factory in Elche, his wife was distributing work to neighbors and friends who, she says, came to ask her for work. This is an interesting pattern that comes up again and again: it is always homeworkers who ask for work, and Roberto “was very good and could not bring himself to say no,” recalls Mónica. Around 1973, Roberto had some problems in the factory he was working in. These seem to have been mainly labor issues of a personalized character, such as standing up for a fellow worker who was being unjustly laid off, but also paradoxically covering up for the foreman who had caused the trouble. His ability to play these two apparently incompatible roles might have developed into a useful asset in his new job as a distributor. We must remember, though, that this was a particularly troubled period, with strong unions and labor protest and unrest getting more and more active. It is difficult to know where Roberto’s labor problems exactly fit in. He finally decided to quit his factory job and fully enter his growing distribution career in the subsector of heel covering, which he has never abandoned. What does this work entail and what sort of capital is needed to get along? What sort of labor/capital relations does this middleman position involve? Clearly, the exploitation of each has to be passed down the line to the next stage. Roberto’s case is that of a person who distributes work not from the big factory but from the smaller outlets (industrial or commercial). This work requires a minimum amount of capital equipment or skill on the part of the women in the houses (as compared to the aparadoras). The competition to get this work on the part of the distributors is great. Although Roberto can get some regular business by being reliable and taking on extra work at the height of the season (thus doing a favor to the encargados—those in charge), generally he has to


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bid (subasta) for the work. In the morning he goes to Elche as early as six to beat others to the outlets giving out work. He bids for the work in competition with others. The factors on which they compete are partly price, partly the time required to do the job and the ability to assure that it will be done on the (usually short) deadline, and partly being there helping to pack the heels into the bags and getting off again. Because margins are so small, price often is not the most important element in getting the work— everyone has to bid around the same. Being there and getting the stuff out to the women as quickly as possible are often more important. This situation leads to a certain amount of unpleasantness, both among the different distributors and between a distributor and the outlet owner, or encargado. For example, many outlets have discovered that they need not have the consignments ready for the distributors; they can force the distributors to make them up in the early morning (which cuts down the owners’ in-house costs while giving them a reason to favor certain distributors over others). But since the prices are so slight, the distributors rely on volume and turnover rates, that is, they must move around to the different outlets fast each morning and then get the materials to their women as soon as possible. So they are obviously reluctant to do this extra job. They may reject work not properly sorted and go elsewhere. Often, though, they take unpaired batches and do the sorting work at home. That was Mónica’s work for a long time, and in 1995 her daughter, Montse, was reluctantly forced by her parents to take over the job. As in this case, often many of the bidding tensions between commercial ventures (the outlet, the distributor) end up being internalized as production relations within the family. The distributor is almost invariably someone who has worked in a shoe factory before and thus has a network of contacts. These could be people who still work in the shoe factory and can notify him about the volatile outsourcing market, or they could be workers who have left the factory, like the distributor, and are now operating a small factory or workshop. We see below that the owners of local workshops and factories all have previous careers as wage workers in the Elche factories or in a big local factory that closed down in 1980, Esclapés. Networks in the local shoe manufacturing industries are, then, pretty dense. It seems that Roberto acts as a classic middleman in many ways. In Elche he has to fight for work, and most of the outlet foremen seem to be tough operators trying to squeeze the maximum from workers. But in Catral it is essential that Roberto’s work be conducted in an honor-

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able fashion. He has to stretch himself not to appear dishonorable. For example, sometimes a job is done badly, but rather than throw it back at his homeworker, he and his wife may redo the job at night. Mónica, however has a different view of her husband’s “honorable” ways with his homeworkers. Sometimes the women do their job badly and she, Mónica, has to redo it from scratch, because Roberto does not return it for them to fix. She complains about it, to no avail. Does Roberto again give work to these “bad” workers? Yes, he only warns them to take care the next time. But he knows that the women need this money, and he can’t say no. . . . The one who works better you give her the more refined work to do. It is [the fact of being a better or worse worker] in the “culture” of the people, the poorer they are the sloppier (chapucera), the worse they work. You can try to explain it to them but their brains are not large enough (las mentes no dan más de si). I can show them how to do the work day after day, but I always have to end up redoing it before it goes back to the factory, because if not, when my husband brings the work back they treat him as a pig and he has to shut up (le tratan de cochino para arriba y se tiene que callar). (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995)

Mónica seems to resent that Roberto’s delicacy toward his workers transfers to her all the tension of his middleman position. This is real tension that leads to heated discussions between the spouses, discussions that never remain confined to labor problems but lead to personal grievances and heartache. This in turn is reproduced in the relations between mother and daughter with respect to expected work: homework—that is, helping Roberto in the garage warehouse with the pairing of batches and registering orders on the phone—versus housework—that is, helping Mónica with the household chores. These ambivalences around the sort of labor relations that apply to what young Montse is doing, together with the diverse ideological contexts that give meaning to their appropriate remuneration (whether wage, in kind, or as filial duty), are the cause of continuous strife between mother and daughter. The tensions sometimes get to be physically violent, with the mother slapping her fourteen-year-old daughter, and the daughter calling back names. Montse expressed to us her strong resentment about these conflicting expectations and responsibilities thrown upon her. Sometimes her resentment was expressed in class terms: she didn’t get a proper wage for her work, only pocket money (she did not acknowledge to us the marriage chest her mother was putting together for her). Sometimes it was expressed in gender terms: her older brother was not asked to work and


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was left alone to goof off. Sometimes it was expressed in affective terms: not being understood by her mother, not being loved. It is worth pointing out that Mónica’s resentment against the sloppy workers was expressed in class terms wrapped up in “cultural” discourse, while Roberto’s concern for “his” women was voiced in community mutual aid terms: “Sometimes it doesn’t leave you anything [benefits] but you support these women, because they need it.”

. . . The case of Juan Manuel Aguilar Gómez is both similar and different. Juan Manuel Aguilar is an almacenista, a fruit and vegetable warehouser, who buys in local markets from the small farmers and sells to large buyers in Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona who service the urban marketplaces. In 1978, buyers and sellers meet in a local bar early in the morning (the same is true for other villages in the area) and bargain for prices. Juan Manuel Aguilar usually has spoken on the phone with his clients in the urban marketplace to take orders from them, so he knows what prices they will pay and can bargain at the bar accordingly, taking into account his own costs. He will have to adjust to local prices, however, according to what other almacenistas are disposed to offer. Unlike the norm before the war with the corredores and after during the period of autarchy and estraperlo and the subsequent years, almacenistas do not usually control the produce of a set of peasants tied to them through dependency. Juan Manuel Aguilar speaks of the loosening of dependency ties between peasants and almacenistas. Another almacenista who used to be a corredor in the 1960s, Martín, tells us that he always buys from the same people (mostly kin-related), who always sell to him whatever his price. Juan Manuel Aguilar and Martín represent two different types of almacenista, one more responsive to orders placed by his marketplace clients, the other more responsive to his local providers’ need to market the product. Martín says that he works more like a cooperative4 in the long run because he buys the product from the farmers beforehand and might subsequently sell to his clients for a big profit or at a loss, but eventually he evens it up with his providers, splitting the gains and losses. Another almacenista, Mario, Juan Manuel Aguilar’s brother, buys in the local markets widely but sells to only one client, who has a cannery in Murcia. In his case the dependency ties run upward and tie the warehouser to his client in a very stable but risky relationship for the middleman.

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El Cubano is yet another type of almacenista, one who seems to buy at the lowest possible price in all the local markets and also sells widely; although 80 percent of his sales are to canneries in Valencia, he also sells to urban market wholesalers and even sells directly in the marketplace through a sort of sharecropping arrangement with the market stand owners.5 Moreover, he seems to have a fair number of occasional buyers who know that he usually commands larger quantities of produce and may have unsold merchandise. He says that peasants might prefer selling to him on a regular basis because he buys in such large quantities that in the long run this means security for the sale of their produce, whatever the conjuncture of the markets might be. Juan Manuel Aguilar Gómez’s labor structure arrangements are based on family labor—both classifying and packaging the produce and loading the truck for shipping at the warehouse and getting the produce from the peasants with the van. With variations, we find the same pattern with all the almacenistas, whatever the rest of their marketing strategies. Juan Manuel drives the van to get the produce, then takes it to the warehouse where he, his wife, two hired women, and sometimes his two sons do the work. He himself loads the trucks with the help of the driver. The two hired women are paid 100 pesetas an hour (in 1978 the agriculture jornal for a women was 850 pesetas a day). As were Roberto’s, Juan Manuel Aguilar’s margins are very small, and he relies heavily on family labor.6 In Juan Manuel Aguilar’s family background we see a father who was a labrador with 36 tahullas of property as well as some rented land. Juan Manuel probably started his working life helping his father with the farmwork, but when he got married he decided to do something else for a living. He did some cattle raising, which did not work, and then tried his hand as a corredor, mainly selling cattle. This was the early 1960s, just after the end of the autarquía when markets were opening in Spain. As a corredor he traveled around a bit selling cattle; he went to the big markets of Barcelona, Madrid, and Palma de Mallorca. This enabled him to meet the wholesale operators in those markets, and not only those interested in cattle but more generally in foodstuffs. He then seems to have reoriented his operation toward the agricultural market, buying local produce (artichokes, melons, lemons, etc.), and becoming what he terms an almacenista, a warehouser. Juan Manual says that his brother Mario was already working as an almacenista before him, and that he gave him the idea of getting into it. However, Mario told us that he had always worked as a labrador and


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had only become an almacenista eight years ago (i.e., a few years after Juan Manuel), in a much less risky business selling only to a major preserve factory in Murcia. In fact, although Mario certainly acts as an almacenista, buying produce from other farmers at the bar and packing and selecting it in the warehouse, he remains mainly a labrador with 120 tahullas (three-fourths of it bought recently, in 1973–75) and a warehouse business that seems to be basically tied to his agricultural endeavor. Most of his property is worked on a sharecropping basis, with the peasant tied to the owner for the marketing of his produce. The rest he transports directly with a permanent day laborer and obviously markets it himself. He probably has sufficient volume to profit from directly marketing his produce. Although he did not buy property until the 1970s, he must have taken over his father’s farm, including his rented land. If we compare Mario’s warehouse venture to Juan Manuel Aguilar’s, some significant differences can be underlined. Mario’s contacts (clients) seem to be regionally circumscribed (Murcia), and he seems to depend fundamentally on his own produce and a few related people such as his father-in-law or his sharecroppers, buying in the market probably just to reach a certain volume. Juan Manuel Aguilar, on the other hand, is completely dependent on his marketing abilities to make a living. His contacts are outside the region (Barcelona, Madrid, Palma de Mallorca) and cover a wide range of markets. He also tends to buy widely in the local markets (Almoradí, Cox) from different farmers. Mario relies much more on family and other dependency ties to organize his warehouse workload; he does not hire any extra labor for the warehouse work but makes do with his wife, his children, his permanent jornalero, and himself. He has only recently invested capital in the warehouse business by buying a van to pick up other peasants’ produce; he previously rented the occasional motocarro or van but did not have the necessary volume to make it profitable. He has not invested in a proper warehouse either. Juan Manuel Aguilar, on the other hand, invested from the start; in the first year (1967) he rented a warehouse and bought a van, and two years later he bought land and built a warehouse. In addition to family labor, he regularly employs hired labor for the selection and processing work at the warehouse. Coming from the same family background, Juan Manuel Aguilar and his brother express two different life careers—Juan Manuel Aguilar’s clearly entrepreneurial in nature, based on the production and use of marketing networks and on investment in the business, Mario’s mainly

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a modification of the use of large tenant’s dependency ties in the context of an expanding market economy. Juan Manuel Aguilar’s entrepreneurial spirit extends to his political participation in the newly founded Unión del Centro Democrático (UCD) and his leading role in the Cámara Agraria (see chapter 7).7 There is also some similarity, however. Like his brother, Juan Manuel Aguilar bought agricultural land in 1972–75 (25 tahullas) on the grounds that “security resides in the land.” Moreover, he rents land from his father-in-law in order to have some directly marketable produce—“He himself can market his products more easily than a normal farmer.” Land is undoubtedly an interesting asset that can be used as collateral to secure credit from banks, and small entrepreneurs in the area seem to use it this way. Compared to a shoe manufacturing middleman such as Roberto, Juan Manuel Aguilar, like most of the other almacenistas, comes from a very different social background, that of the middle labradores, some of whose children have branched out “naturally” into the corredor job during the estraperlo years and the early 1960s. His contacts with marketplace dealers were clearly tied on an equal basis (individual, contractual, but probably latching into local class-based networks) and were launched from a relatively secure position. By contrast, Roberto’s “natural” allegiance is with the women he gives work to, and his contacts with clients are tied to his previous position as a factory wage worker. He is not on equal terms with these owners of small factories or commercial outlets. His ties with them are dependency ties, whereas his ties with his providers of work are on more equal terms, although he reproduces aniaga-type paternalist relations. This makes Juan Manuel Aguilar and Roberto very different sorts of middlemen. One has the ability to take more risks and fully express entrepreneurial flexibility, leading to recurring reorientations of the business and larger profits; the other is tied upward by the dependent nature of his relationships and downward by his sense of solidarity with those to whom he gives work, together with the fragility of his livelihood to begin with.

from artisan to commercial factory We turn now from the distribution sector to business more directly engaged in production, taking as our example firms producing items of cane (cañizo). The history of these firms shows many elements commonly associated with successful regional economies. There is flexibility—both


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in the firm’s organization and in the application of labor (both time and task flexibility). There is inventive and responsive on-the-job training through apprenticeships. But most in evidence is the clustering of firms, the subject of much discussion especially with reference to the “Third Italy” (Sabel, 1989; Becattini, 1992; Cenzatti, 1992; Brusco, 1982; Storper and Walker, 1989). Yet our cases cast a much more complicated light on these instituted practices than has been previously suggested. All of them are important to the ongoing survival of (some of the) firms, as these writers have argued, but it would require a vast amount of selective use of evidence, sociological myopia, and sheer ideological chutzpah to render flexibility, skill, or clustering as we find them here in terms of the positive features of social capital. Immediately striking in the case of the cañizo firms of Catral are the multiple connections between the different businesses through family (kinship and alliance) and work (ex-workers) relationships. Striking too is the way family labor in some firms is used to expand the scope of the business, first through increased production and later through diversification in response to growing instability in the demand for the original products. For these firms, family labor also made possible flexibility in response to changing demand. But family labor in other sites of the cluster did not lead to these results, and the flexibility of the former firms had much to do with this lack in the latter. To unravel the highly complex nature of these elements, we delve into the dense undergrowth of families, firms, and workers as it unfolds over time. We show how a series of firms took shape over the generations from their origins in just one family enterprise to the forms of enterprises found in 1995, when we last studied them. This is an intricate and often confusing exercise; figure 2 illustrates the family and business cañizo manufacturing network. In 1908, Florencio Romero founded a broom (escoba) factory in Catral. He could find the main materials necessary for the production of these brooms locally: bamboo and palm fronds. Production was completely artisanal; a skilled artisan could produce thirty to forty brooms per hour once the raw material was prepared. Florencio Romero’s workshop employed his seven sons and a few other skilled workers, some probably apprenticed in the workshop. We do not know how much it produced, but it was certainly important in the local economy, though the civil war brought it to a stop. Florencio Romero lost two sons in the war. After the war he continued with a small workshop, employing himself and four sons. His son

Family firm

Head of family firm

Firm 2

Emilio LORENZO

A.L.

Fernando LORENZO

Firm 4

=

= C.W. Miguel Florencia ROMERO LORENZO

Figure 2. The Romero family firms.

Firm 7

=

C.W.

Firm1

Florencio ROMERO

=

Micaela VILA

=

Firm 3

Paulino ROMERO Jr.

Paulino ROMERO

Firm 6

= Marcos María Micaela ROLOÁN José

=

Florencia ROMERO

Julián ARIAS

=

Firm 5

Poldo ARIAS

=

Mateo


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Paulino founded a separate factory in 1939. One of his daughters, Florencia, married a craftsman in her father’s workshop, Miguel Lorenzo, and in 1940 he also opened a workshop of his own. We know nothing of Florencio Romero’s family background. What we do know is that the raw material he needed was readily available locally and could even be collected directly, by workers from the manufactory. As members of the family see it, the main capital lay in the skill necessary to manufacture the brooms. So in 1958 there were three broom factories in Catral, owned by kinrelated people. Florencio Romero’s original business still ran with four sons. Paulino Romero’s factory had eight workers, including himself and his sons. Miguel Lorenzo’s factory had twelve workers, at least three of them sons (he had nine sons and a daughter, but many were probably too young to work at this time). We previously met Miguel Lorenzo’s father in chapter 4, a guard at Lo de Vera. Miguel’s brother notes, “Mi padre trabajaba de labrador y de guardia” (My father was both a labrador and a guard). He received food, a wage, and a house on the finca but, as we noted about him and others like him, his status was somewhat ambiguous, one informant telling us that “hacía de labrador pero no era labrador” (he made like a labrador but he wasn’t a labrador). When the Laras divided Lo de Vera for the inheritance, the four labradores (including Miguel Lorenzo, the father) were dismissed. Well before that, though, before the civil war, his son Miguel Lorenzo was already working in the original broom factory. He had two other brothers, one a jornalero who had problems after the war because of his political ideas, and another who lost his job as an aniaga worker in the finca at the same time as his father. These three factories’ brooms were sold to clients all over Spain through a corredor. In 1962 a fourth broom factory was founded by three brothers, Julián, Mateo, and Poldo Arias, who had been apprenticed in Miguel Lorenzo’s (Julián and Mateo) and Paulino Romero’s (Poldo) broom factories. Moreover, Julián married one of Paulino Romero’s daughters, becoming his son-in-law. Poldo Arias says that his father was a jornalero and that he gave the three brothers 6,000 pesetas to start the business. An additional 21,000 pesetas was invested by a friend, who later pulled out. This new expansion of broom manufacturing seems to have been related to the opening of the markets and the general consumption boom that accompanied urbanization and industrialization in the 1960s. By the end of the sixties, however, palm and bamboo brooms were being restricted to outdoor

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use and replaced by non-artisanal industrial brooms. Miguel Lorenzo’s, Paulino Romero’s, and Poldo Arias’s factories then diversified production within the bamboo raw material base. They also started manufacturing cañizo products—reed blinds, fences, and the like. The greatest advantage of bamboo continued to be the very low cost of the raw material; the only labor involved was collecting and transporting the bamboo, since it was not cultivated. They started to manufacture the cañizo blinds by hand, although the skill required was far less than that necessary for the production of brooms. In fact, this process was far easier to mechanize. The market for this new product was wide, since its use was not as restricted as the brooms’. Originally blinds were sold in much the same way as brooms, with little emphasis by the producers on seeking new markets. But in the long run the new product also led to new ways of marketing. By 1978, Paulino Romero Jr. (his father died in the early 1970s and he took over the business) had come to think that the real difference between the old artisanal broom manufacturing businesses and the new mechanized cañizo factories was not the artisan versus labor-saving mechanization distinction but the commercial aspect of aggressively seeking new markets as opposed to passive fulfillment of demand controlled by middlemen: Artesanía is different from técnica. In artesanía, the business lies in the skill itself, the craftsmanship. Competition is not the key factor. What is profitable is the skill, the artesanía. In what I call técnica, or capitalism, what is key is not the skill of the worker, because this all rests with the technology of the machinery, since anybody can buy the machinery. Competition becomes the key factor where before the market was more or less fixed [with a given number of suppliers and a fairly fixed market of consumers]. This puts the emphasis not on production skills but on sales skills, finding or creating the market. The need to have iniciativa. (Fieldnotes GS 1978)

In these terms, business is driven by the possibility—inherent in the new product—of mechanizing and thus increasing production and by iniciativa (initiative), the active search for new markets, bypassing middlemen. Of these two aspects, market initiative pulls the rest. Paulino’s entrepreneurial vision was focused on the market, less on reducing labor costs. As the market for brooms shrank in the late 1960s, he had moved into producing other things with the same materials and craftsmanship in order to maintain their market share: In my view there is a transition period as producers seek something which can be sold to compensate for the diminishing market. In my view this is a


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crucial moment for the small capitalist, because while the master craftsman would seek something requiring his craft, the capitalist—or the incipient capitalist—is not so interested. If what he [the incipient capitalist] now produces in an artisanal way is, unlike the previous product, susceptible to machine production, then something can occur. (Fieldnotes GS 1978)

In Paulino’s case, his firm began to make cañizo blinds by hand, and these were sold in much the same way as the brooms. Most increases in sales were responses to the initiative of a particular (Catalan) middleman. When Gavin suggested that the big revolution for them was the purchase of machinery, Paulino disagreed: for that to occur, he countered, there had to be a significant increase in capital (because they could not borrow from banks, having little to use as collateral). Capital could come only with an increase in actual markets and a growing knowledge of potential markets. This occurred, in his view, with their growing concentration on marketing their own products. Then, and only then, the pressure to seek a revolutionary jump in production grew and could be resolved only by machinery. After the transition to técnica (or capitalism, as he also defines it) was accomplished, the pressures for new ways of marketing the product became still more important, and they began to bypass middlemen while trying to open up foreign markets. This in turn seems to have pushed them to diversify, producing all sorts of goods made from cane: ice mats for cars in Germany, mats for tobacco drying in France, and so on. Paulino was especially proud of convincing a Belgian auto route concession to buy fencing to prevent snowdrifts on embankments. To the degree that production now became flexible, it resulted from practices unfolding from Paulino’s idea of commercial capitalism. Gavin recorded in 1979: Significantly, they now see expansion of their company in terms of selling anything they can get from around here –dried plants, raffia, etc. And since they have now invested in trucks to transport their stuff, they are even talking about selling artichokes abroad—in other words, the sales outlets have become increasingly dominant over production itself: the classic capitalist pattern. . . . But it is also worth noting that this changes the fixed nature of the labor supply which is now far more flexible than hitherto.

It is surprising to see how close Paulino Jr.’s description of the transition from artesanía to técnica is to Marxist descriptions of transition, where “formal” subsumption leads to “real” subsumption and to the transformation of social relations of production. Let’s take a look at how in fact

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social relations of production were transformed by this new market-led expansion of the cañizo business. In the late 1960s, when the transformation described by Paulino Jr. and Poldo Arias started, there were three distinct but somehow related cañizo businesses in Catral, employing mostly family labor and some wage labor. The factories were headed by the household heads: Miguel Lorenzo, Paulino Romero Sr., and Poldo Arias, the eldest of the Arias brothers. When Miguel Lorenzo retired his son Emilio took over the business, and another son, Fernando, branched off to open a new factory. On the death of Paulino Sr. his oldest son, Paulino Jr., then only twenty-eight years old, took over his firm. The three firms have several things in common: 1. kin-based relationship with the founder’s broom factory, either through direct filiation or through marriage. It is interesting to note that the strongest factories (Lorenzo and Romero) had the more direct kin relationship with the original broom factory. 2. formative apprenticeships in the original broom factory, or, in the case of the Arias brothers and Emilio and Fernando Lorenzo, in the next-generation factories of M. Lorenzo and P. Romero. This is important for, as Paulino Jr. pointed out, skill is the main form of capital in the artisanal period, and “while property is inherited bilaterally, skill passes only through the male line. That is why, in order to keep the business, women have to marry someone that commands the skills.” Women who don’t marry skilled broom makers (such as two of Florencio Romero’s daughters) “sell” their share to those who continue the business, Gavin was told. This meant basically giving up any claims to the family’s industrial patrimony, although, as in other parts of Spain, this was done with the understanding that a dowry would be provided at marriage. So we can see a tension arising during the period when artisan manufactories were being formed—between kin relations and craftsmen’s transmission of knowledge. 3. extended use of family labor. As Poldo Arias explained to Gavin when defending the appropriateness of a partible inheritance system, meaning the eventual access of all the children to shares in the business, “Small business can only survive with the work of the owner’s children, and they would only work for nothing if they knew they were going to get part of the operation eventually.” Gavin commented in his fieldnotes: “In view of the fact that labor is by far the highest cost in the operation, Poldo sees this as a major saving which gives the operation a chance to save some money and expand.”


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Poldo went on to contradict himself when he said that relatives who work in the factories earn a salary similar to other workers (7,000 pesetas a week in 1979) and work alongside them8 doing manual jobs, plus they get dividends from the profits. This contradiction seems to reveal a question about how different members of entrepreneurial families perceive their position in respect to labor relations and in respect to affective, kin-based relations, a topic reminiscent of Roberto and Mónica’s household. What we are seeing here is that some members of the household are culturally or ideologically positioned in particularly powerful sites that enable them to extract surplus labor from their kin while others are positioned in particularly weak positions—a kind of center/periphery relationship within clusters of interlinked enterprises.9 This is especially the case for women. We know through Camila Pereda, who spent years in broom production, that women and men were working in the broom factory in the 1950s, and not just non-kin wage workers. So women of the family were quite capable of being apprenticed to the craft. If they were not, or were not acknowledged to be, presumably it is because from the start they had a politically weak position in respect to access to the means of production, be it capital or skill, and this the result of gender ideology. In fact, with the exception of Florencia Romero (daughter of Florencio Romero), who married Miguel Lorenzo, women in the family who did marry skilled men (such as the three sisters of Paulino Romero Jr.) did not get into powerful positions within the family network of the cañizo factories. The younger Florencia Romero (daughter of Paulino Romero Sr.) married Julián Arias, not the leading brother of the Arias business but more of a family worker; and María José and Micaela, the two other sisters, married two ex-workers of their brother and eventually tried to found the only artisanal broom factory left in Catral. But they could barely make ends meet and in 1979 were expecting to have to close down. This last-mentioned factory in the Catral broom/cañizo complex is interesting for two reasons. One is the remarkable fact that these skilled workers thought fit to open an artisanal broom workshop just as the market demand for artisanal brooms was declining enormously. If we situate Paulino Romero Jr.’s explanation of how this small artisanal shop could survive within his discourse of how market initiative was needed to get over the slump in demand, we can understand the power relations that enabled Paulino Romero and Poldo Arias to pass the last

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remains of the broom business on to these two brothers-in-law: they were using them as subcontractors to keep the broom network channels (middlemen, clients) open until it was clear that they would no longer be needed. According to Paulino, The production of brooms by the one shop that does nothing else in Catral is not necessarily destined to disappear. As more shops go into mechanized production and although the market for artisanal products diminishes, the few artisanal shops left can fill in the demand for there will be less competition, so some artisan shops can survive. (Fieldnotes GS 1979)

It is clear, however, in the context of what he says, that only a business with little initiative would be prepared to do this—that is, a business that traded a certain security—responding to a fixed demand—for risk taking against profits and growth. It is hard not to conclude that it was seen to be quite appropriate to leave the failing branch of business to the two female members of the family. This late-developing broom factory also suggests a certain turning point, probably from the early 1970s on, when corredores were becoming almacenistas and the stronger small shoe factories were being newly reformed. Skill was no longer the main capital asset, commercial networks were. The inability to have and use such networks implied a completely different set of social relations of production, emerging from a completely different position in the broader social field. Clearly neither Marcos Roldán and his brother-in-law from Albatera nor their wives, Paulino’s sisters, had any of the connections necessary to latch onto the cañizo business. In one of his first interviews with Marcos Roldán in 1978, Gavin wrote: When I asked Marcos if he had to compete with agriculture or wine harvest (vendimia) for his work force, he just laughed. “I don’t look for workers,” he claimed, “I’m just glad when temporary workers can find other (temporary) work. What I dread is not a loss of workers, but over-production.” As he sees it his market is pretty much fixed or declining. His chief competition is not other broom makers like himself—of which there are about 8 factories in Albatera—but other kinds of brooms, mass produced. He doesn’t think he can (or wants to) produce more cheaply, nor does he have the capital to (or want to) get machines and produce something else. He lives in daily terror of a truck returning saying that the almacenista can’t sell what they’ve got, and he gives his operation maybe a couple of years more and then it will fold. Thus he really turns the capitalists’ sentiments inside out: he likes underproduction and seeks the market that will buy what he’s got at his price. It’s not even true to say that he seeks a market.


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The market is there and he sells to it (fixed and known almacenistas who sell in Spain and the Canaries). (Fieldnotes GS 1978)

The role of the position of this enterprise within the cluster of family firms becomes especially clear in the case of Marcos, who had started working in a shoe factory in Elche in 1966 when he was sixteen years old. Because he was working ten hours a day and trying to follow up with his studies at the same time, this job did not last long. He then worked as an albañil (construction worker) for a while and also did other jobs such as being a waiter. In 1972 he married and then went into military service. When he came back (1973) he started working in his brother-in-law Paulino’s broom and cañizo factory. In 1976 he decided to found a broom factory with his wife’s sister’s husband. He speaks of his business in the following manner: We started working illegally (clandestinamente) and that lasted for two years, and I wish we hadn’t started at all. In the beginning, with the work of my brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my wife and myself the work was almost profitable. In the beginning the investment was low, some tools, two electric motors, a rake, two tables, wire and a plot of land for keeping the raw material. The plot was lent to us by my mother-in-law but we had to fence it. We also had to rent a house. We got that through Poldo Arias, it was located in San Isidro and it had no water or electricity so we had to invest 100,000 pesetas to get those put in. This man also provided us with a skilled worker (un oficial) who worked for us but was legally employed by the Arias factory and they paid him his salary and his social security dues. In fact I consider that it is as if we were workers that have become independent: my wife is the daughter of a broom maker, my brother-in-law and my sister-in-law both were working in brooms and I had also worked in that. (Fieldnotes GS 1979)

It was clear to Marcos that his broom factory was not an independent venture at all. It seemed to be particularly dependent on the Aguilar factory, which in fact had a wage worker working in its workshop alongside the two “owner” couples. As he saw it, “It is as if we were workers that have become independent”—sort of. In 1979 he had two oficiales and an apprentice working for him, and sometimes two other skilled workers (who now worked in a net factory in Callosa) worked for him in their spare time, as well as a few fluctuating part-time workers. He himself, his brother and sister-in-law, and sometimes his wife also worked in the workshop. The oficiales were paid piecework, 50 pesetas per dozen brooms. A skilled broom maker (they had one working for them) could make sixty brooms per hour, thus 250 pesetas an hour,

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or 2,500 pesetas for a ten-hour day; the male agricultural jornal was 1,500 pesetas for an (officially) eight-hour day. However, Pepito, one such skilled worker in Marcos’s broom factory, had to deduct from his wages part of what the apprentice who fed him the materials earned. The company paid him a minimum part-time wage, and then Pepito had to give him something out of his own pocket to round up his salary. Thus the apprentice was dependent on Pepito in a direct and personal way. The picture we get is one where dependency is strongly built in at every level of social relations of production. Although the family labor use pattern seems superficially to resemble those of the larger cañizo factories, it is quite different: here accumulation is impossible, and the factory seems to be completely locked into the marginal position bestowed on it and reproduced by the larger cañizo complex. Marcos recognized this: “With all the expenses we have [salaries, social security dues, and taxes make up 50 percent of the expenses], benefits are practically nil. We have been working for the wages, and we need the rest to buy the material to keep on working.” What we want to emphasize about the broom and cañizo complex family factories is not only the very different ways labor exploitation is built within family relations but also how rationalizations about craftsmanship skills or entrepreneurial skills such as having iniciativa are an important part of the actual processes of marginalization of certain family members in particular niches of work. It is particularly interesting to note that, while the Romero and Arias families were pushing some relatives into the margins of the cane business, they were at the same time actively promoting their family businesses in commercial export networks through a newly founded company, Catral-Export. In the early 1980s, Catral-Export was held on a 25 percent basis by the four cañizo factories, though the bosses seemed clearly to be Paulino Romero and Emilio Lorenzo, who switched off as president and vice-president every two years. Emilio Lorenzo’s eldest daughter was working as the secretary of Catral-Export. The objective of the company was to market products internationally, find new clients, and follow the trends in the cane business. The company centralized all orders and passed them on to its constituent companies in a strict rotation: when an order came in, it went to the first company on the waiting list, which then went to the end of the line, the next order went to the next in line, and so forth. None of the factories seemed to have a problem with the volume of orders, but Gavin was told that this system was good because “it is important that a producer be responsible for his


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own quality.” Emblematic of its extreme peripheral position, Marcos’s factory was not a part of Catral-Export; he seemed to use traditional corredores who took a percentage of the sale price to distribute the produce around Spain and also to get a feel for market demand. What have these cañizo and broom factories become in 1995? Predictably, Marcos’s broom factory no longer exists. Catral-Export and the four other factories are alive and well but have further diversified, now marketing (and subcontracting the production of) ready-made kitchen furniture (Romero) and furniture (Arias) while continuing with the more traditional cane business (Lorenzo). In 1995, Catral-Export declared 315 million pesetas income10 and twenty-five employees and was listed as one of Spain’s 30,000 most profitable businesses (Fomento de la Producción, 1995). As we said at the outset of this section, cane-processing factories in Catral show a considerable degree of similarity to the models of flexibility, skill acquisition, and firm clustering that have been discussed in literature on regional economies. It should be clear from our examples that these terms run the risk of obscuring more than they enlighten. At the opening of the book we argued that the idea that the region exhibited a shared culture of the “entrepreneurial worker” relied on a highly selective reading of the past such that common features of a regional culture were highlighted at the expense of an understanding of culture in which a variety of perspectives and positions produce a dialogical open-ended engagement with reality. To demonstrate this, we spent the first part of this book uncovering the heterogeneity of these perspectives and positionalities. This history too should help us situate the world of dependencies, the interpersonal expectations, and ultimately the intimate sense of personal and social responsibility that make possible the habitus of family, firm, and labor in artisanal-to-commercialized cane processing in Catral. We wish now to stress the way insecurity and risk are tied in dialectically to produce the kind of realities that have been glossed over as social capital and regional economy. As we pursued the entrepreneurial life histories of such people as Roberto, Juan Manuel Aguilar and his brother, Paulino Romero, his sisters and brothers-in-law, Miguel Lorenzo, Poldo Arias, and their sons and daughters, we saw a reality of linked dependencies and processes of differentiation that related to opportunities heavily constrained by gender and class positionalities. Roberto’s background as a jornalero and industrial worker gave him a particular kind of responsibility toward homeworkers. He had to nego-

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tiate his moral position as one where he retained a sense of participating in the homeworkers’ realities while enabling himself to exploit them. His sense of honor echoes the socialist jornaleros in the previous chapter, who made being honesto the guideline to their relationship with others, but it also echoes confianza, the trust that produced vertical links between aniaga and dueños of the large fincas. Like Janus he looks two ways, and his ability to take risks (about getting work from and getting paid by particular outlets) is constrained by the uncertainties in his life experience and his allegiance to workers. In the regional economy and social capital literature, he might be described as making use of both the binding resources of the community’s social capital and the bridging resources that enable him to in effect use them as capital (Woolcock, 1998), making him an entrepreneur. The reality, however, seems harsher, and is expressed by the extreme tensions that invade his family life, in fact almost a microcosm of his double-bind position. On the other hand, Juan Manuel Aguilar, Paulino Romero, and Miguel Lorenzo’s positions are predicated on a different space of responsibility, one thoroughly oriented to the market, responding to and creating demand while passing on the agonies of meeting production costs to others along the extended family network. Paulino Romero’s definition of iniciativa expresses precisely this unbound capacity to maneuver in the abstract moral space of the market, while his brother-in-law’s (Marcos Roldán) faltering artisanal venture recalls, although in an even more dependent way, Roberto’s concern about his workers (in Marcos’s case, co-workers) and the binding force of an experience of uncertainty closing the space, materially and emotionally, for risk. Social capital, then, the ability to turn particular nonmarket relations into capital, depends on a concrete social structure in which individuals and families are positioned in very different ways in regard to their capacity to access and claim local social resources through personalized networks.

chapter 7

Flexible Structures and Torn Lives

Thus far we have seen the effects of the shift from agricultural to industrial predominance on various kinds of small entrepreneurs. In this chapter we take up the story as industry has truly achieved dominance, and we focus on cases that exemplify the different kinds of people affected by these changes. Most of these people are involved in shoe production centered on Elche to the east of Catral and, to a lesser extent, carpet production in Crevillente to the north. After Franco’s death, union activity became bolder in Elche, and then through the 1980s smaller, nearby municipalities found that they could offer incentives to attract factories into their area. As a result, by the end of the century a variety of factors had driven firms out of their concentration on Elche, dispersing them through the smaller municipalities of the Vega Baja. Agriculture, whose historical volatility had long been a factor inducing some into fixed and dependent relations and others into movement, was now hit by droughts, by failures in the local irrigation system to keep up with land use, and by poorly anticipated shifts in market patterns resulting from entry into the European Union. It thus became an ever worse source of livelihood, and local authorities responded by trying to attract potential employers—relaxing health and safety inspections, offering the few tax breaks available to them, and, in Catral’s case, advertising the flexibility and technical skill of (mostly women) workers. As a result, the present-day structure of industrial production in the area comprises large factories, small family firms, un145

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regulated workshops, jobbers or work distributors, home-based workers, and industrial wage workers.

the “flexible” enterprise The recent dispersal of firms originating in Elche has effectively reoriented the pattern of manufacturing in Catral and towns like it in the Vega Baja. Yet going back to the late seventies, the town always had at least one large and dominant factory, starting with a rug factory, Todo Alfombras, which closed overnight and moved on in the early eighties. Then a shoe factory, Esclapés, originating in Elche in 1958, operated for a few years in Catral and then closed in the mid-eighties. These firms both generated a sense of continual shifting of factories and hence unreliability of formal wage labor while also providing at least some of the raison d’être for the local small workshops in the area and the continuance of skilled female aparadoras as well as other homeworkers and casual laborers. This fertile ground attracted the two large and apparently quite solid firms, both making shoes for export: Robins Shoes and Ivanshoes. The latter, much the larger and the more recently established, was the second largest exporter of shoes in Spain. Ivanshoes and the activities, propensities, and utterances of its owner, Jorge Alvar, were a constant topic of conversation as we talked to workers, whether or not they were directly connected to its operations. Aware of the short lifespan of the small workshops that employed, albeit haphazardly, much of the labor, local people placed great store in the idea that Ivanshoes was here to save the local economy—even as their past experiences made them worry about its long-term allegiance to Catral. The heads of both firms had originally been shop stewards in leftwing unions during the Franco regime. This is a recurrent pattern: exunion leaders in the large shoe factories becoming independent entrepreneurs and founding their own factories. Especially aware of the pragmatics of collective organization in concentrated versus dispersed settings, these new owners were quick to shift to rural locations. Jorge himself had been a shop steward in one of the largest shoe factories in Elche, Martínez Valero, representing Comisiones Obreras, the communist union that worked undercover from within the official Francoist union. For Jorge the growing social unrest of the 1970s was a youthful utopia when “young people had political aspirations” (la juventud tenía aspiraciones políticas). But he quit in 1978 to open his own venture, the


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start of what was to be a successful entrepreneurial career and representative of a pattern well known to today’s young people and affecting their attitudes to unions. Robins and Ivanshoes hold an almost hegemonic sway over people’s views of Catral’s present and future economic life, yet the very way they employ labor and their low commitment to fixed capital give rise to a kind of reciprocal causality. Employers search for labor that will avoid confrontation and accept lower wages. Local authorities play their role in reducing costs by providing cheaper industrial land, tax breaks, and lax application of environmental and safety regulations. Superficially this appears to set the stage for a long-term trend toward the settling of large and relatively stable factories in the locality, but factories are remarkably quick to shift their factory operations to another municipality once the initial benefits have been fully tapped. Factories are able to move with relatively low costs because much of their production does not take place on fixed machinery in the factory but through outsourcing to workshops and homeworkers. The constant moving of the main factories in turn creates unstable demand in one municipality and yet experienced labor in another that might become the site of the new operation. Knowing firsthand that if they do not comply with employers’ demands the factory will move to the next town, workers are induced to accept lower wages and worse labor conditions. If local patterns effectively generate a compliant labor force, the situation is aided by government programs to enhance the so-called flexibility of labor. The government has made available numerous variations in contracts—apprenticeship, first-work, part-time, seasonal, older unemployed, and the like—which give factories ample room for selecting from a varied workforce while retaining relatively legal contracts. In addition, as we see below, factories like Ivanshoes have recently begun to organize some parts of in-house production as a concentration of unregulated workshops where workers are self-employed, lack work contracts, and produce a targeted amount for delivery to the next stage of the production process. We could argue that what Ivanshoes and to a lesser extent Robins possess which other firms in the neighborhood do not is social capital, implying that the more the latter can acquire this apparently undifferentiated resource, the more likely they will be to emulate their successful peers. Yet the scenario we have described surely implies that the very success of the first kind of firm is predicated on other firms and other entrepreneurial workers remaining of a certain kind. Our discussion in

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earlier chapters of the mutual constitution of movement and fixity in the unfolding of capitalist reproduction now needs to be reiterated, but in different form. Referring to “the chronic instability to regional and spatial configurations,” Harvey (1985: 150) noted “the tension within the geography of accumulation between fixity and motion, between the rising power to overcome space and the immobile structures required for such a purpose.” This interplay has been facilitated by the crises that have passed through the region through history, both real and manufactured. Today owners frequently stress, as publicly as possible, the precariousness of their operations. Relocation policies are made possible precisely by the use of homeworkers who are rendered immobile by the interdependence of households on multiple incomes, and by the use of small unregulated workshops that are tied down by their small resources of credit, their semi-legality, and, like the homeworkers, the frequently personalistic nature of their contracts. The sense of crisis appears to rationalize moves elsewhere for the economic and political dominant classes while constraining others in the production system on which they rely through the manufacture of fear through instability. We turn now to Jorge Alvar, the owner of Ivanshoes, Olaf, a key figure in his marketing strategies, and Amanda, an equally key figure in his organization of production. It quickly becomes clear that a crucial feature of Jorge’s success has been his ability to maximize his mobility both from the factory down—through mastery of the production process— and from the factory up—by developing his skills in marketing. Esclapés, the now defunct factory, had limited itself to a few American clients, who provided designs and set quality standards. This proved to be a fatal error when the market collapsed in the 1970s. The owners who survived this crash and those future factory owners who, as foremen and union shop stewards, suffered its consequences emerged from the experience with a strategy to avoid dependence on a few large buyers. Jorge’s description of his learning experience is remarkably similar to Paulino Romero’s explanation of his own successful transition from artisanal manufacturing to true capitalism, in chapter 6: “Shoewear (el calzado) has never been sold, never. It was always bought. Now everybody is trying to sell and it goes badly (va mal). But that is what I am trying to do: to sell to all sorts of clients: other manufacturers, brands, large shopping centers, small shops, anything.” We can see that his objectives from the start were to latch onto the right commercial circuits and get a feeling for, and knowledge about, the export market.


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Jorge has been successful in combining flexible marketing with his flexible use of labor. In 1997 three of his firms had a declared income of 10,358 million pesetas, with 90 percent of production going to export— and all this with just 133 declared employees (factory workers with legal contracts). In 1994, when he was already the main shoewear producer in Spain after Reebok, with production valued at 5,123 million pesetas, he was declaring just 50 workers (Dun and Bradstreet, 1994, 1997). Here Jorge takes up his own account of his career: I left school in 1962 when I was 11 years old. My father was an insurance broker but I didn’t like school. I went to work in a workshop that did patrones [patterns or models for shoes] for the shoewear factories in Elche. From there I went to another shoe factory. In those days there was lots of work for everybody. There were factories with 100 employees. Lots of them. In the old days there were these big monsters [the large firms]. Starting when I was 11, I shifted through three different factories. In 1973 when I was 21, I got to Martínez Valero. There I was designated (nombrado) union shop steward for the Comisiones Obreras. I stayed there for 5 years. Then there was little work. We earned 1,700 pesetas a week; one could not live with it. In 1975 there was a strong union movement. There was a 22-day strike in Elche. . . . Then, when the crisis arrived [1978] I decided to set up on my own. I was sick and tired of working for others, of doing just little jobs in order to eat (pequeños trabajos para comer). In 1979 I decided to open a workshop in the countryside, in a finca of my father.1 I got two second-hand machines for 30,000 pesetas and started to do subcontract work, while my wife still worked as an aparadora in an Elche factory. I had to get out of the factory because the manager made my life hell because I was the union shop steward. . . . However, in 1982 this manager didn’t work for the factory any longer so I went to look for him and I offered to pay him for a trip to Germany [where most of the market was] and I promised him a percentage (una comisión) per pair [of shoes sold or commissioned]. I worked with him for a year but then he set up on his own. Then [1983] there was a representante, a broker, who was the best in Spain. His name was Olaf, he was half-German and he represented German interests [clients]. I really went after him and cornered him in order for him to work with me. I went to the Huerto del Cura [an elegant restaurant near Elche] all the time because the German brokers went there all the time. Then I faxed this guy Olaf offering him much cheaper products. And I guaranteed seriousness (seriedad). At first Olaf represented other factories, but after a while he was working only for me. In 1984 I started to do sandals for Olaf. In Elche I had a friend who manufactured sandal soles that he then sent to Germany to be finished. So I found out what sorts of sandals they were making in Germany and I copied them and I offered them to the representante. He told me he could not sell them but then he was told that maybe they could be sold after all. . . . So I

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went to my friend [the sole maker] and I asked him to make an exclusive contract with me and I guaranteed that I would buy a million pairs of soles from him.2 I thus could cut competition in this way because I could lower prices a lot. My products were destined for large shopping centers in Germany. After that I started diversifying my production, making different models. In Germany the factories were old, with old employees, they were not adaptable. We Spaniards are superior in that. So we started doing new models, new colors, etc. In 1990 we created our own brands and we now sell 30 percent with our own brand name. Now I sell all over the world (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Europe, United States, etc.) and they come to seek me out because I have a good reputation (buena fama) of being honest (honrado), of having good quality and good service. That has been my marketing. (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995)

Jorge’s narration reflects perfectly the current fetishization of consumption in its preeminent focus on his developing mastery of the world of retail. It is almost bereft of reference to the hidden world of production, and this is certainly how Jorge likes to see himself and would like others to see him. We had to turn to another actor to learn more about the factory-down side of his operations; it was only later, when he had seen us talking energetically to Amanda, that he discussed the challenges he felt himself to be facing in production. Initially the sandals Jorge manufactured consisted only of the cut material fixed to the sole. Thus he needed only the cortado (cutting) and montado (assembling) operations. He had avoided the aparadoras, the key figures in shoewear production. When he decided to diversify his production to tap larger markets and undercut German factory shoe production, he had to transform his whole production process, forcing him to seek out the (traditionally home-based) aparadoras. This was done through Amanda. Amanda’s access to this crucial labor force and indeed to a much wider force made her a key contact for Jorge. Subsequently her influence transformed her position into something analogous to one of the mayorales on the finca Lo de Vera we saw in chapter 5. It was probably important that Amanda was from a small settlement, Realengo, which lies on especially poor agricultural land midway between Catral and Crevillente.3 This made the inhabitants especially reliant on homework. Amanda herself started as a homeworker for a clothes manufacturer that sent the work home to her. By twenty-five she had become a shoe aparadora, working at home because it paid better, and she quickly made herself an apical figure as the primary work distributor for her vil-


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lage. Her husband worked as a trucker for the fruit and vegetable warehousers in the area. When Jorge moved from Elche to Crevillente, Amanda started working for him, and it turned out to be a perfect deal. She told us: I was looking for aparado work in Crevillente at the time and somebody told me about him. We reached a deal. I organized a small aparado workshop in Realengo and I also distributed work to homeworkers while also doing aparado myself. I also had to do quality control. I had the workshop in Realengo for three years, it grew from 18 to 40 aparadoras. Then we moved the aparadoras to Catral. The first year we had 80 women working in the workshop and then it grew to 120.4 But we also give lots of outwork in Catral. Almost all the aparado which is done in Catral is for us. The rest of the factory only moved to Catral last year. (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995)

Amanda is an important link in Jorge’s production structure. She organizes all the aparado outwork, which has become increasingly important. She controls quality in the in-factory aparado workshop (which operates as an independent workshop, not a declared part of the actual Ivanshoes factory, although it is located under the same roof) and decides who is to be hired or laid off. She and her whole family are, however, completely dependent on Jorge; her husband lost his job and was hired as a driver by Ivanshoes, and all her children work in the Ivanshoes factory. She says she gets along marvelously with Jorge, but, on the other hand, she could hardly allow herself not to. If we pause to look at the conjunction of circumstances at this point, we begin to see the way crises become integral to Jorge’s manipulation of opportunity, on the one hand, and to his regulation of sources of labor, on the other. It was precisely at a moment of crisis that Jorge shifted the shape of his operations. The socioeconomic conjuncture of 1986, when Jorge moved to market expansion and diversification and shifted production to Crevillente, was economically one of the worst years of the socialist government in Spain. Their attempts to use a reestructuracion industrial, a kind of structural adjustment program designed to liberalize the economy, were causing major social and economic disruptions. There was over 20 percent unemployment in Spain, large factories were closing, fiscal pressure was increasing, and agriculture in the area was faltering just when the economic downturn in the rest of Europe meant that migration was no longer an option. Yet Jorge sees this period positively as a time of opportunity compare to more recent government attempts to increase control and regulation of labor relations as well as firm accountability through fiscal regulations, which he resents. Despite the

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ways the state has actively facilitated a flexible and diverse labor force, Jorge sees both the state and the formal associations of civil society as antagonistic to his needs as an entrepreneur: The state is useless. But I am also against business associations. I am against all of it. I once made a plan for the INEM [National Institute of Employment] where I offered to apprentice people in aparado and cortado. But they offered me a ridiculous subsidy and also they forced me to hire 70 percent of the apprentices when the training was done. Instead of helping those that give work they tax them. State policies are terrible and subsidies are a sham, lots of paperwork for nothing. (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995)

Once we got Jorge to talk about the production end of his operations, he tended to concentrate on his current reformulations. A major trope at this point becomes his pursuit of control within the context of an increasingly flexible environment, for both factory-up and factory-down operations. He has been especially successful compared to similar large enterprises in the area. When talking about this, he emphasizes his control of diverse commercial channels and his policy of monopolizing all the output of the workshops he selects, making outsourcers exclusively his suppliers. He is quite clear about this; he wants to control production and distribution. Yet he does not want any of the more cumbersome parts of the process to become a liability if market changes require a new strategy. He is resolving this by centralizing many of the previous putting-out operations under the one roof in Catral, together with the marketing and managerial structure (ten people in all), though not integrating them into a single firm. Rather, they are set up as independent businesses. Jorge is very clear that marketing and production have the same weight and are equally important. But what he imposes on his suppliers is precisely what he has been so astute in modifying in his own selling operations. When he got direct access to the market through Olaf, the latter was limited to specific agents in Germany, who in turn sold to international markets, thus retaining some control over Ivanshoes and limiting Jorge’s movements—not a vast improvement on what had tied Esclapés to American agents in an earlier generation. Now he has been able to increase his own control as well as to diversify by eliminating Olaf and his agents and working directly through his own sales representatives, each selling directly to end clients in the different markets. His use of labor, designed to minimize risk while increasing his control, is not, he says, unique to him. And this is confirmed by union representatives, who point out that the older dispersed putting-out system


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is becoming too slow and cumbersome; with the relaxed laws on labor relations, firms are beginning to bring dispersed labor tasks—in workshops and households located in numerous towns—closer together, seeking to rationalize regional space for the benefit of efficient production.5 Jorge does claim to have invented a system of production he calls vías Catral, which consists of an assembly line system that enables him “to employ totally unskilled people and thus lower costs because of low salaries.” Every phase of the labor process is prefabricated to make them foolproof for new workers. Nevertheless, workers can learn many phases, Jorge claims, so that the best may eventually take charge of a production line. These bright people, the espabilados, who get to achieve mobility by shifting from the line to control jobs, always happen to be male—despite the fact that the line is mainly female. Jorge sees this Taylorist invention of his as one of the basic ways to be competitive, yet it does not stand alone. The workers are all paid on a piecework basis, with a minimal base paycheck supplemented by piecework wages. Jorge extends work hours whenever necessary: “Everything will work fine as long as everyone functions and people are willing to work up to 9 p.m. or midnight if there is a rush.” Or, if necessary, he makes widespread use of the putting-out system through local homeworkers and semi-legal workshops. Despite Jorge’s various attempts to rationalize production under one roof and his boasts about inventing a new system of production, Ivanshoes remains dependent on elements of personalism and selective regulation carried over from the older formulations under Franco to manage the dispersed putting-out system, both to small workshops and directly to homeworkers. We see the personalism in its most striking form in the relationship between Jorge and Amanda, just as we see its selectivity in the way workers’ networks are used for recruiting and then subsequently as a means to discipline individual workers. Such networks only partially overlap, so that the advantages accruing from features internal to a network can be compounded through competition between networks. Seeking a worker to fill a position, a foreman or owner might mention the need to a worker who considers himself or herself especially close to him—una persona de confianza—but also make the same information available to another worker drawing on a slightly different network of kin, neighbors, and friends. Recruited over the competing applicants, the new worker’s responsibility to the friend who found him the job, as well as the friend’s responsibility to the foreman or owner, is thereby redoubled.

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We noted earlier the prevalence of Ivanshoes in people’s conversations about jobs and the future in Catral. The glaring presence of the new firm and its potential, even its break with the past, were put on display by Jorge himself. He cut a striking figure, with bright silk shirts, tight pants, perhaps a silk bandana around the neck but never a suit and tie, heavy gold necklace and two fists heavy with gold and diamond rings. Jorge cultivated this image, putting an arm round a worker, winking at a young woman worker, behaving with any of his workforce much as a friend would. Even though we became used to this kind of Jorge, we were a little surprised when we met Amanda. Among the working figures of women in the factory, she stuck out, with her careful make-up, glamorous clothing, and sweeping hairstyle—almost as though she were a lower order of the Jorge species. The effect was to both distinguish Jorge and Amanda, in the factory and in Catral as a whole, and to place them together as alike in their difference. Amanda was frequently spoken of as the trusted person on whom Jorge relied for the work in those areas in the factory where women predominated (about 70 percent of the operation). “Jorge could not do without her,” people said, though usually with a slight sense that Jorge could certainly do without pretty much anyone. For that very reason Amanda’s relationship to him seemed the more special, the more in need of the remark itself—“He could not do without her.” For clearly Amanda was entirely dependent on Jorge and, as with the older aniaga relationships, this included Amanda’s entire household. Moreover, as the apical figure in an extensive workforce, Amanda’s dependence on Jorge was felt down through the hierarchy to those who relied on her good word for work. So, on the one hand, a network reached down from the factory into the homes of ordinary people in Catral, and, on the other hand, the top of this hierarchy seemed to operate in a visibly different cultural world. Amanda, after all, was running a shoe-production distribution system, just as Roberto and Mónica were in chapter 6. Yet they seemed visibly different. Like Amanda, Mónica controlled an important network of homeworkers, and she too had taken on the job of quality control. Like Jorge and Amanda, Roberto and Mónica mediated their economic and labor relationships through personalized ties—evocations of family, of loyalty, and of responsibility to dependents. But for them this mediation through family emotions of love and responsibility and community sensitivities of respect depend for their authenticity on being embedded in a certain figuration of the past and how ideally things should have


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worked then. Even as they tried to appropriate these ideals for the sake of productivity, the effect was to create huge stresses in their personal lives. But for Jorge and Amanda it is almost as though, through their clothing choices, they wished to communicate a reversal of these priorities (Collier, 1999). Their conspicuous consumption seemed to suggest that association with them offered a certain kind of future, one in which the marketing of the self—as entrepreneur and worker, as entrepreneurial worker, as worker-entrepreneur—would be rewarded with an abundance of material commodities. There is, however, a coda. Jorge Alvar had started out running a workshop in Elche, which became a small factory in 1979. Moving first to Crevillente in the 1980s, Jorge arrived in Catral in 1994, attracted by the town’s economic incentives. Three years after our fieldwork ended, he had opened a large factory in a town 25 kilometers away in Murcia. Whether he intended to expand or, more ominous, to shift operations we cannot say, for a year later Jorge died in mysterious circumstances. Appearances aside, it is clear that Ivanshoes was never as innovative as Jorge would have liked us to believe, especially in its fundamental need for old-style outwork of all kinds.

from homework to workshop and back again So we shift our perspective now, from that of Jorge and Amanda to that of the people who work at the receiving end of their outwork strategies. Clara Cardona is one of the owners of a workshop doing aparado work for Ivanshoes through Amanda. She and her sister Teresa put together a small workshop in 1993 after her sister was laid off from an important sports shoes factory during a slack period. Now there are five of them in the workshop: Clara and her two sisters, Teresa and Esmeralda, and two neighbors Nuria and María José, who work when there is more demand. All three sisters had previously worked in factories and were trained in different components of shoe manufacture. When fourteen years old, Clara went to work in Elche in a shoe factory (1972). It was easy to find work then. She was earning 700 pesetas a day at the beginning, but after two months she was earning 900.6 She had a trial period for about six months and then was given a stable job, although she had been happy with it not being stable because they did not deduct social security then. After a year she was put in the envasa, where the last quality control touches were given and shoes were packed; she was earning 1,200 pesetas a day. She worked four years in this factory in Elche

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(where she got married and had her children, and where her husband’s family lived), then changed employers a few times, got a job in the Esclapés factory in Catral for a while (though she still lived in Elche), quit to have her last child, changed residence, and came back to Catral where her mother helped her with the children while she worked cleaning houses. In the factories she always had a very flexible job, she was a comodín, just taking up whatever job had to be done. She pretty much knew all the jobs in the factory, although in none was she such a specialist as the people doing just that job. Then, two years before we met her, she decided to work with Teresa and then to open a workshop with both her sisters. The three sisters’ moved back into aparado as a small workshop in 1993 coincided almost exactly with Ivanshoes’s move of the aparado from Realengo to Catral, and thus with the expansion of the local demand for aparado. Of the three sisters, Teresa is the specialist in aparado; she has a good reputation and knows how to use double-needle machines, which increase productivity. The third and younger sister, Esmeralda, used to work in the Ivanshoes factory but left when she had her first child and then began working at home. She bought a machine in order to learn how to do aparado work with help from a neighbor. In the workshop, Clara takes the orders and deals with middlemen and factories, and she does the trabajo de mano, organizing batches, moving them around, cutting threads, checking quality, and repairing faulty work. Teresa and the others do the aparado, the actual sewing. Teresa is the one who tells them how a particular job should be done. This is important because it saves a lot of time and increases productivity accordingly. Although Clara and her sisters’ workshop does work for Ivanshoes, this is not their only source of work. Among the three of them they have a wide range of connections, including a distributor who is the husband of one of Teresa’s best friends and a German broker who places orders for specific models. “Having connections is good but if you are an aparadora who knows her job they also come and look for you. Last year there was lots of work,” said Clara. It is a fact that, as the industry is expanding in rural municipalities such as Catral, like the rastrilladores in the years of hemp prior to 1959, today the aparadoras are much in demand. And because this is the most intensive labor in the whole shoemaking process, factories have an interest in keeping it outside the firm and subcontracting it, keeping prices low and flexibility high. However, aparadoras, at least those with good reputations, are in a fairly good po-


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sition to reject some grossly cheap jobs: “It depends, if it is not worth it and we are not going to make any money with it we can reject the work. It depends on the need we are in. Just now they came and offered us a job for 5,000 pairs, but it had gone through so many hands [middlepersons] that we could earn nothing on it, so we rejected the offer. We prefer to go to the beach [this was mid-July]” (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995).

the

APARADORA

homeworker

Aparadoras who work at home do not have quite the same leverage as a workshop since their output is less. Still, their crucial position within the overall production process does give them more control than the less skilled homeworkers we discuss in the next section. As we might expect, aparadora homework is always shaped by the need to balance the changing demands of the household with the changing demands of the market. Unless they use family labor such as older parents, younger children, or unemployed husbands, they have nobody who helps with the trabajo de mano, cutting threads and so on, and so they produce and earn much less. Many women switch frequently between aparado work in factories or workshops and at home. Most, such as Marisol Gamero Vila, who was thirty-one years old in 1995, have industrial sewing machines at home that sit idle when they are hired in but are intensively used when they are hired out. The extreme volatility of well-being threading through the network of family relations becomes especially clear in Marisol’s story. She comes from a family who, on her mother’s side, were aniaga workers before the war and then after the civil war acquired a few tahullas (9) and rented 14 tahullas more while also hiring themselves out as day laborers. As the children came of age they started working as jornaleros and the father could concentrate on his land. On her father’s side were jornaleros with no land. Marisol’s mother worked as a jornalera until she got married, after which she was a homeworker braiding (hacer trenza) and later covering heels. As a neighbor of Roberto and Mónica, she used to take care of their daughter Montse when she was a child. When Roberto started bringing work back as a distributor, she asked him to give her some because it paid better than trenza. She would work until midnight every day because they needed the money. Now she cannot work because she has Parkinson’s disease. Her husband was a day laborer. He migrated to France,

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working three years in the wine harvest. In the 1970s, like so many others Gavin met in his early fieldwork, they bought a small plot of land (7 tahullas). Then the drought came and there was no work for jornaleros, so he became a mason in Murcia, then went back to being a jornalero for a couple of years and then back to being a mason for two years. He is now unemployed. Marisol started working when she was sixteen, in the Esclapés factory. She had learned to do aparado with the help of a cousin. After working in the factory for six months, it closed down. Her parents bought her a sewing machine and she worked at home. The distributor (the same who provided work for her cousin) who brought her work told her that if she had a double-needle machine he would bring her even more work. So in 1986 they bought the double-needle machine. Her mother, father, and brother all helped with the trabajo de mano when they had a free moment. But, as her mother said, “In homework the trabajo de mano is not paid. In the workshop a woman works alone, has a break for lunch, and ends her day at 8 p.m. Here we all worked and in the end we earned the same thing. And we stayed up until midnight or 1 a.m. working every day” (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995). In 1989, Marisol started working in a workshop with forty other aparadoras, and she still works there. The workshop is owned by the one-time almacenista El Cubano, who acts as a subcontractor for several low-quality sports shoe companies in Elche. She does not earn much more than she did at home, sometimes even less, but work conditions are easier and she feels she gets paid for what she does. As an aparadora working at home she got paid, but the work of the rest of her family did not get accounted or paid for. Now, in the workshop, the trabajo de mano is done by a worker who gets paid for it. It is clear that the pressure for higher productivity brought by the piecework rates paid in aparado generally does not affect homeworkers and workshop workers uniformly. The trabajo de mano and the organization and ordering of batches are key aspects of work that gets accounted for in one case and not in the other. But, even more important, in the workshops tensions that arise around how this work is done are set in the context of co-workers or worker-owner labor relations and specifically challenge the organization of labor in situ—even when, as in Clara Cardona’s workshop, most of the workers are close kin relations. At home things are quite different; there the tensions that arise are densely woven within family responsibilities and emotions. Marisol’s mother, for example, recounts that she would become “very nervous”


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when she could not help her daughter with her work because she had to take care of her aging father instead. Thus, tensions derived from a particular organization of production become part of family life in a very real way, quite similar to the situation in the work distributor household of Roberto and Mónica. This echoes the dependencies and tensions that arose in the aniaga households forty years earlier, but here we also see family sentiments becoming infused with the rationality associated with an enterprise’s productivity. It becomes clear to those involved that the weaker members of the family either are a burden on overall productivity (the sick, the senile, and the disabled) or are being exploited by employers through the member of the family who gets homework.

the unskilled homeworker Although homeworking aparadoras are in a relatively good position in the labor market, they still need to attend to their local reputation as good, not sloppy, workers since they depend on the local factories, distributors, and workshops. Other homeworkers in the shoewear manufacturing process are far less capable of even minimal strategizing. These are the women who cover the plastic heel molds with leather, the forrado stage in the production process—the women to whom Roberto and others jobbers distribute work. Conchita Gamero, sixty years old and a sister of Marisol’s father, is such a person. Her father was a jornalero and her mother a rope (soga) maker for the soles of sandals. Conchita, whom we met in chapter 5, started working when she was eleven years old. When she was twentyfour she married a jornalero and started working in a cannery in nearby Dolores. When the drought years came they went to Elche, but her husband had difficulty adapting to the routines of factory work and felt cut off from the network of friends and family in Catral. So they returned and she got the job at the cannery again. The interface between market openings and family pressures becomes clear at this point. When her husband began migrating to France as an agricultural worker, her mother took care of her children and cooked for her. Then, once again, her husband faced a strong sense of alienation, as he had before in his attempts to find work beyond familiar spaces. So he came back and started working as a mason because it was more stable work, she said. “It did not depend on the weather.” The factory in Dolores closed down and she took homework doing leather plaiting (trenza) for a while, but the work did not come in con-

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tinuously. After a few years of working as a mason, in the early 1980s her husband got seriously ill with cancer, and that is when she asked Roberto to give her work finishing heels because it was more secure and regular and she could earn more. She does not like the work—it hurts her hands, which are completely skinned because of the toxic glue—but she does it to help her son through teacher’s college. Conchita’s views of Roberto are probably a little ambivalent. She is quite aware of the extent to which he exploits her vulnerability, but she also sees the extent to which he is constrained by his respectability as a responsible man in the community. Her attitude toward the state is far less ambivalent. She recalls having lots of problems with the social security system throughout her husband’s illness, with the hospital, with the disability pension—since his social security dues had not been paid by his employers. After his death the problems continued, this time with her widow pension. During his illness her husband and her son had helped her with her work, so that she could get more done, but for her the days were long, often ending well past midnight. Conchita did this work not only to survive but to give her two young children better chances in life—through education. Her husband’s attempts to resolve the persistent shortfall in household income conform to the pattern we have seen for the earlier jornaleros. But Conchita expresses a strong feeling that they were caught in a frenetic cycle that was not moving them forward. Somehow her work had to be transformed into some longer-term investment in the future; for her this condensed into the idea of formal education: “My children are going to study . . . my children even if I have to drag my tongue in the dirt they are going to study, even if it is only to learn where their right hand is . . . because he who doesn’t know won’t find anything and he who knows will always find something” (porque el que no sabe no encontrará nada y el que sabe siempre encontrará).

the factory worker Most of the laborers we have discussed are women, reflecting the fact that woman make up the greater part of the workforce in the shoe industry. This is at least partly because women find themselves in the precarious position associated with homework, or its extension in a workshop. In one interview the mayor bemoaned the fact that men were unprepared to take on the aparado work traditionally associated with women,7 and in turning now to the case of a young male factory worker


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we begin to see a gendered perspective on mobility. We see in the career of Conchita’s nephew, Tomás Ramírez Gamero, that young men are able to use forms of mobility to turn initial job opportunities into a basis for the kind of longer-term career plans Conchita sweated to make possible for her own sons.8 During our fieldwork in 1995, tired after seeking out obscure workshops or persistently distracting harried homeworkers with our questions as they tried to meet their quotas, we would retire to a bar and find ourselves talking with some of our younger friends about what we had just experienced. One day, one of our friends suggested that we meet him and some of the others out in the huerta, where we would have a big paella and talk about work, politics, life, and . . . well, everything. It was in this relaxed and collective atmosphere that Tomás and his friends told us most of what follows. After telling us about his parents, Tomás stressed that, though generally one could say that he comes from a jornalero family on his mother’s side and a family of masons on his father’s side, in fact on both sides there had been numerous shifts of both jobs and municipalities. He then went on, apparently unaware of any repetition of this pattern in his own life, to tell us of his own work experience. He finished high school at eighteen in 1985 and found work through a friend of his father who had a small shoe factory. It was very small, some ten people assembling and packaging (montado y envasa). Young men worked on assembly while young women did the packaging, and they were paid piecework rates. He could make some 15,000 pesetas per week, all of which his mother put it in a savings account except for some pocket money for him. After a year he went to work in another semi-legal, small factory that offered to pay more: 15,000 pesetas per week as a base salary plus productivity bonuses. Though this increase was what attracted Tomás, it turned out that the owner did not pay regularly, did not pay what he owed, and was always asking for overtime, which he also did not pay. The way Tomás responded to this situation is interesting. He felt that this man was taking advantage of him, so he complained to the owner, who replied, “Well, take it or leave it,” Though he did not specifically use the term respeto, it was quite clear that Tomás felt his boss had put him in a humiliating and untenable position. Still, he did not respond to the challenge immediately; rather, he began to prepare his bags for a move. He had no contract and hence no real leverage, so he stayed for a year but began to spend some of his leisure time asking around among friends and spreading the word that he was looking for a move and now

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had useful on-the-job experience. Eventually a friend and foreman at the Robins factory got him a job on the assembly line. But, like so many factory workers, he was often approached—by his foreman friend directly or by others—to do other jobs. Many times he would come to work to find that his job that day was to be a driver, taking work out to small workshops and homeworkers. Tomás had to agree to work initially without a contract and rely instead on the good word of his friend the foreman, but eventually he got a six-month contract, and subsequently yearly contracts, though with conditions. He had to turn his contractual vacation pay into free overtime, for example, and he had to make certain under-the-counter social security payments too. He worked from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. with an hourand-a-half break for lunch. After two years at Robins, during which he began to see friends in his cuadrilla9 moving out to jobs in the service sector that required (minimal) formal certification, Tomás became impatient to do evening courses. He asked his superior for an extra hour off in order to study, and when he was denied he left. After a few months without work he was hired into another semi-legal, small factory. He was paid a fixed salary and could get off at 7 p.m. and go to night courses to finish his high school diploma and apply for college. He worked there for nine months and then went to the teacher’s college in León, his first experience of living so far from the Bajo Segura. Since we knew of the few resources available to Tomás’s family, we asked how he managed to finance this career move. He replied that he collected his unemployment benefits and also received a government grant. Now he is an unemployed teacher surviving by substitute teaching around the region. The particular nature of Tomás’s movement through jobs is worth commenting on. Unlike young women, who have a wider range of work opportunities in the shoe industry, young men have few job opportunities because the male gendered jobs (cutting, applying glue, assembling the shoe) are less labor intensive and can more easily benefit from technical innovation.10 Homework jobs are also unlikely to be done by men, further restricting their opportunities. Aside from such limitations, labor relations in the factory also produce confrontational situations. Conflicts seem to arise quite frequently between workers and employers in the factory environment: workers speak up, trying to claim their dues. Yet, even though the two biggest factory owners in Catral were once union stewards, the sense that unions might provide a resource under these conditions is poorly developed. As a result, young men carry around images such as this one from Tomás:


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If workers don’t complain it is because they are afraid of losing their job and not being able to get another one. If one complains one gets fired and then you cannot find work anywhere else because employers speak to each other about it (se corre la voz entre los empresarios). My cousin for example [this is Marisol’s brother] was working for a long time as a cutter in a factory. Then he and some other compañeros complained because they wanted to be placed in a higher category and be paid better. They were sacked. And he could never find a job in Catral anymore. Now he works in a factory in Crevillente. (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995)

This account of employers’ class solidarity responding to workers’ demands echoes landlords’ procedures vis-à-vis jornaleros and especially those associated with the Republic. But Tomás’s practice of moving between factories and eventually even moving outside the region—both to facilitate a minimal amount of leverage and hence empowerment and also simply out of necessity—is also evocative of jornalero strategies before the coming of the shoe industry. The role of this movement in Tomás’s work experience is in striking contrast to the structural conditions and hence subjectivities of women as they pursue job opportunities. Hearing Tomás talk about his movements in and out of various factories made us think of a couple we knew in a cuadrilla of friends, some fifteen years older than the people with whom we were eating our paella. Indeed, Gavin had known them for many years, and their son had even spent time learning English at the home of Gavin’s sister. We had just seen Celia, the wife, a week earlier, and Gavin had remarked how tired and dejected she seemed to be. He remembered her in the early days of his fieldwork as a spirited and effervescent person. Celia is married to Mariano, who works in a factory that makes packing cases for horticultural produce (tomatoes, artichokes, etc.). With the decline in local agriculture the owner of the original firm, finding orders drying up, decided to close down. This was in the early eighties and, encouraged by government cooperative policies, the workers used their own savings and credit to buy out the firm and began to operate as a cooperative. The hoped-for upturn in agriculture never came, however, and as the pressures grew Mariano became handicapped by health problems, the result of drinking and (pharmaceutical) drugs, themselves directly the result of the uncertainties of his job. Celia’s time had been taken up with their children, but as soon as their youngest son became a teenager she began to seek work for herself. Celia saw herself as an inexperienced housewife entering the labor market with little to offer. She began telling her story by continually

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evoking the generosity of people superior to her. She says that she was fortunate in being given a job in a shoe factory, through personal connections. Though this shoe factory was one of the largest in Catral, her specific job was sufficiently unskilled that she described it as “casual,” and she was not even eligible for the social insurance Tomás had secured. Even so, Celia worked full days and often overtime, always below minimum wage. Over the years we have known her, as her health declined, we began to see this deeply respectful and conservative woman recognize the degree of unfairness, as she put it, in the conditions of her employment. Yet she talked of this with extreme reluctance and never in the presence of other members of her cuadrilla. The contradiction between the reality of the conditions of her sweated job and the respectability she seeks precisely by means of the wage it provides is striking. As we left the field, Celia was optimistic. She had found a solution, she told us. Through the wife of the mayor, whom she met on Sundays at church, she had secured a marginally better paid job in another factory. Thinking of Celia and others like her, as Tomás finished the account of his working life, we commented that we were impressed by how Tomás had managed to become a teacher in the end, and we wondered if perhaps his movement through jobs would have looked different had he been a woman. People around the table immediately thought that this was an interesting and provocative question, and a lively discussion ensued. Esteban, another member of the cuadrilla, an unmarried man who was training to be a pharmacist and was one of nine children, said that nowadays all young people are pillado (trapped) by the mortgages on their apartments, the loans on their cars, and so forth, and that they fear losing their jobs. That is why they accept terrible working conditions. It is their new consumption habits, as Esteban sees it, that mortgages them literally to their employers, through the banks. Esteban quite explicitly uses the old term hipoteca humana here. Many younger people—with no direct experience of the old labor system—employ the term and thereby evoke the sentiments it alludes to. Then, as he speaks, he turns to his sister. Gema works for Robins. Gema has a “normal” contract. She is on the payroll (nómina) where you can see a certain salary according to her category, for example 80,000 pesetas a month. But in reality she is paid a destajo [by the piece] according to the work she does, to the number of pairs she produces. Moreover, the employer takes his part of the social security dues from her salary—he takes


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that from his workers’ wages. If there is lots of work then Gema can make more money than what is officially stated in her payroll, but if there is little work it can happen that she even owes money to her employer. (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995)

Esteban ends by saying that he thinks it is a scandal that people do not organize, that there are no union delegates recognized in the factories. “But people don’t want problems,” he says, “Because they are caught by the apartment, the car and all the other expenses and they cannot lose their job.” Here Esteban ties the issue of powerlessness in the workplace to consumption patterns and then mediates this link by reference to the notion of human mortgage. As he finishes he ties the creation of consent through indebtedness, itself encouraged and induced by a culture of consumption, to its effect on politics, on the way it inhibits the capabilities of people to make collective claims. It is very clear to young Esteban and his friends in 1995 that their ability to organize to claim their legal rights, regarding social security, for example, or proper salaries is mortgaged by the credit system that is inbred in contemporary consumption patterns. Much of the pressure that arises when the consumption required for social respectability and personal desire is severely constrained by low and insecure income falls on women. Thus Diego, apprenticing to be a veterinarian, picks up on Esteban’s comments by saying that his sister Pilar’s fear of speaking out is una forma de hipoteca. Pilar, who is also at the table, is one of a cohort who are determined to have a modern marriage and for her, like her friends, a marriage is made modern by the amount of consumer durables she can buy to bring to it. She says that, if she speaks out, she will lose her job and they will pass the word to other factories. After that she will need more things, not least the ongoing payments for her and her fiancé’s apartment. “She’s mortgaged herself to the market,” Esteban interjects, as Diego nods in agreement. As we talk more, it becomes clear that Esteban’s allusion to the old practices of hipoteca humana are more comprehensive; they extend beyond dependency on indebtedness for the purposes of consumption. And it is this comprehensiveness that makes him use the term hipoteca. In 1995 employers were obliged by law to pay a percentage of the social insurance for non-casual workers. Esteban and his friends took turns explaining how this works in practice in the Vega Baja.11 Most factories close down for two or three months, usually during the summer when there is slack demand, and this puts young female employees in a pre-

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carious situation. To prevent a lapse in their social insurance policies when they are laid off through these months, Gema and Pilar (and other young women like them) pay the full premiums themselves. Then, if that were not bad enough, when the season begins again, a condition for being rehired is that the employee pay two or three months of both their own and the company’s share of the social insurance. Most owners of small firms regard social security payments as one of their most oppressive expenses (and indeed many let them lapse and run up large debts to the government as a result; Benton, 1990), and they do everything they can to avoid or reduce their payments; illicitly getting employees to pay the initial few months of the company share is one form of reducing this expense. The summer payments during layoffs and extra payments to rejoin the labor force are effectively payments to stay in the system, and Esteban and his peers thus refer to them as hipoteca—a mortgage someone has to pay, not to keep their house, but to remain a fully viable social person.

conclusion As we worked over the material that forms part I of this book, we became impressed by the degree to which the dialectical tensions between fixity and movement provided essential arms of the process of exploitation. In part II we see these elements remaining crucial in the constitution of a regional economy—that is, an economy that employs locality as a feature of its reproduction—while nonetheless taking on quite different characteristics. We take up these issues more extensively in our concluding chapter; here we simply add our own reflections to the interpretation Tomás, Esteban, and their friends put on the current political economy within which they live. Let us hold within our minds the quite different experiences of Teresa, Celia, and Gema or Pilar. We are quite aware of the ways indebtedness has been used through history as a means of conditioning the degree to which labor is free as it comes to the marketplace to negotiate with capital—put simply, the use of debt to create dependency, to render labor unfree. Yet in this particular case it is worth noting a series of reversals, the first and most apparent being Celia’s sense that work is given to her as a gift by superiors to whom she therefore stands in a position of perpetual debt. Celia, unlike Gema and Pilar, has not bought herself into an illicit system for paying social security, something from which she is excluded by her marginality. She does not even qualify for it.


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What seems somewhat particular to the hipoteca humana in which the others are caught up is its insistent reversal of the economics of contract, so as to produce a social contract that ensures inclusion—obvious inclusion in the annually repeated labor market rehiring, but by extension inclusion in the broader social world, a major part of whose expression is mediated through consumption. Employers’ indebtedness toward the worker—the responsibility to pay a wage and a share of social security dues—is switched to become the workers’ indebtedness to the employer—extracting from their normal salary or through unrecognized piecework an additional 50 percent of the social security dues (besides their own share). Or, to reintroduce the practice of earlier decades, employers refuse to make their contribution for the stamps in the cartilla for a jornalero, who must then rely on a patron to cover for him in the event of an accident or ill health—that is, to get his social rights recognized. Entering the back-dated stamps in the book made possible the worker’s “entry” into the social contract of welfare. Thus, there is a first indebtedness set from the start as a part of the labor relation itself, and, as the phrase hipoteca humana clearly demonstrates, this inverts the labor/capital relationship in which labor power—a possession of the worker—has to be bought by the employer. Here, by an implicit or explicit contract, labor power is not a free possession of the worker, it is subject to a mortgage in order to reproduce itself. The state’s current encouragement of so-called flexible labor practices therefore reverses the very meaning of social security. No longer either a gift bestowed (selectively) by a corporatist fascist state, nor a right of the social citizen (Marshall, 1963) under welfare capitalism (Esping-Andersen, 1990), social security in the form of hipoteca humana invokes a debt on the subordinate whose payment goes toward starting the process that might ensure inclusion—in the labor market and hence in the consumer society—though still by no means guaranteeing it. We need only add the degree to which, in the context of a regional economy like that of the Vega Baja, this is a selective process, personalistic, and—essential for its effect—unstable. We have used the specific practices, past and present, encapsulated in the phrase hipoteca humana to make our case here, but any one of the relationships described in the preceding pages might be interpreted through this lens. This would allow us to speak of the genuinely social viability of a region, not just its viability as a (regional) economy. In this chapter we have tried to provide a sense of the variety of actors in the region and the complexity of their social relationships. After

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looking at earlier transformations in livelihoods in chapter 6—jobbers, agricultural-turned-industrial intermediaries, and family firms—here we have turned to so-called flexible production and commercialization operations, taking the shoe industry as our example.12 We believe that these vignettes of the lives of actual people working in a regional economy throw light on the usefulness of such fashionable descriptors as “flexibility”—of the firm, of the workforce, and of the individual worker—the ubiquitous and supposedly new “entrepreneurial worker,” and also the pervasive concept “social capital” (Putnam, 1993; Portes, 1998). As we might expect, each of the terms fits in some way or other. And yet each invokes a kind of homogeneity that fails to capture the particular ways social practices give rise to human relations or how the particular realities of history shape social reproduction and its inherent contradictions. By occluding and mystifying relations and contradictions, each of these terms becomes ideological—ideological (rather than critically analytical) because each serves the practical purposes of dominant economic and political agents more than it serves the heuristic explorations of social inquiry. That they are also used by scholars to analyze social reality therefore becomes problematic—because each term comes encumbered by its need to serve the programmatic goals of those with power to shape history, dominate people, and affect their subjectivities.

chapter 8

The Culture of Politics, the Politics of Culture Culture . . . is no longer a means of resolving political strife, a higher and deeper dimension in which we can encounter one another purely as fellow humans; instead it is part of the very lexicon of political conflict itself. Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (2000: 38)

political space and cultural invention One day in the mid-1980s Gavin was sitting in a bar with his friend Pablo. The conversation had come round to the civil war. Pablo was laughing and teasing his English friend: “Why is it the English love to write and talk about the civil war so much? All the fat books on the war are by English people.1 I’ve never met an English person who doesn’t eventually start talking about the civil war.” Pablo, a teacher in a design school in nearby Orihuela, was then a thirty-year-old married man with two young children who had spent his student years in Madrid dabbling in acting and the world of artists. He had recently been enticed into municipal politics (as a socialist). “Well that may be so,” Gavin replied, “But it’s a sharp contrast to here, that’s for sure.” There was a lengthy pause, and a slight shift in mood—from joshing to reflecting. Eventually Pablo, gazing out of the window as a dog lumbered lazily across the road, said: “There’s no real politics in Catral. That’s because there never have been. There has never been any political confrontation in Catral. That’s why nobody can get too involved in these political debates.” The previous chapters belie Pablo’s views of Catral’s political past, but they also make clear how deeply buried are the memories of political confrontation for most older people in Catral. For many people Pablo’s age or younger, such memories simply do not exist. What does this mean for the way politics plays itself out in people’s lives in the Vega

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Baja? It will be no surprise to learn that the answer varies from one person to another, but it is also true that by the time we reach the mid1990s we find many people dismissing politics in favor of the more real and manageable world of everyday life. Although the turn to the everyday out of a disenchantment with public politics is widespread in modern democracies, we note an important precursor for the people of the Vega Baja. Writing about “popular culture in the ‘Years of Hunger,’ ” Helen Graham notes, The space left by the self-repression of personal and collective memory was filled by an alternative mythology of things—white bread, olive oil, meat, “the food from those days before the war,” soap, a good cut of cloth, housing—unsurprising in such a materially deprived environment. This substitution process is what Manuel Vázquez Montalban has called the “orchestrated depoliticization of social consciousness.” (1996: 241–42)

Nevertheless, juxtaposed alongside this sense of alienation from politics among many ordinary people are the requirements of the political apparatus and economic planning called up by the institutions devoted to such matters—the municipality, the various larger firms in the region, the local union offices, region-level institutes, consultants, and so on. People finding themselves performing in these kinds of social spaces need to mediate between the politics their jobs require and the alienation from politics expressed in a focus on everyday life. A key bridging notion that performs this mediation is culture. That notion and that mediation are the subject of this chapter. We remarked in chapter 1 that the kinds of livelihood pursuits found in the Vega Baja and elsewhere—be they called informalization, flexibility, dispersed production, or whatever—have led to attempts to socialize economics. Enterprises and households, entrepreneurs and workers, markets and exchange networks—as we have seen in the previous chapters—are all distinguished, if at all, by extremely fuzzy boundaries. Conventional social sciences, especially those influenced by neoclassical economics, have sought to address this issue by making the market more “social” or by rediscovering the evident fact that the economy (long separated from the rest of social activity in their theories) is in fact embedded in a wide range of social arrangements and cultural practices. This kind of theoretical reformulation has arisen from, and been applied especially to, studies of regional economies. An analogous retreat from the formulaic has occurred among political analysts and, coincidentally or not, this has occurred precisely

Culture of Politics, Politics of Culture

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around the celebration of the very concepts we find so key in the Vega Baja: everyday life and culture. Frequently in anthropology and cultural studies it is suggested that hitherto we have paid insufficient attention to the taken-for-grantedness of everyday life. Too often, asserts de Certeau (1984), we have turned only to the big politics and the mighty figures of history, and this has blinded us to the life of ordinary people. Likewise it is often noted that political expression has become cultural (Melucci, 1982, 1996; Escobar, 1992a, b). Politics, it is argued, is no longer about maneuvering for power, or the traditional rhetoric of the hustings. An earlier literature had sought to discover what predefined categories of people might become engaged in a particular kind of political movement—middle as opposed to rich peasants, shoemakers but not hatters, urban working-class women but not rural middle-class women, and so on. The newer approach proposes instead that heterogeneous, often localized movements can themselves induce cultural identities. As Laclau puts it, “The production of an effect constructs the identity of the agent generating it” (1990: 211). Social movements become struggles over the cultural value of key features of the interactive world—the ability to make manifest one set of values against another that hitherto had prevailed (Touraine, 1992). It is within this kind of discourse that we can see how culture becomes such a key resource in the social and political marketplace. How does this apply to the Vega Baja? To what extent does local people’s (never mind the new social theorists’) emphasis on the everyday reflect a new kind of political praxis? To what extent does the persistent introduction of culture into politics (local, regional, and national) herald a new kind of politically engaged citizen? We have seen how the new economic sociology has sought to reformulate the notion of economics. To answer these questions, we need now to ask how the new political theories have reformulated an older notion of politics; we then need to position this older discourse vis-à-vis the historical moment we are examining in rural Spain. First, then, we visit an ideal typical version of what the newer cultural political theories have replaced. We might call this the liberal, Jacobin, view of politics. For the Jacobin the citizen had to be dragged out of the intimate life of the family to participate in the public sphere (Walzer, 1989). To be a fully responsible citizen was to participate in the public debates and formal institutions of the new, modern society. In such an image, what made a practice political was precisely that it was public and not nested in the private world of family or community. Indeed the liberal citizen was ca-

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pable of making rational choices precisely because he or she had been released from the primordial influences of family and community. Necessarily, to be rational was to be deracinated, stepping out of the rushing currents of history to stand on the bank and calculate coldly one’s best interests. And progress could be measured by the extent to which ever larger numbers of citizens were gathered into the cathedral of reason, sweeping ever wider swathes of the public sphere for civil society and driving the older world of community and religion to the margins. Such a liberal history of the path to citizenship has its equivalent in the marginalist economics the new economic sociology seeks to replace.2 But the danger of applying this newer, more culturally oriented kind of political theory to our own setting is that the liberal notion of proper politics it seeks to supersede is not the progenitor of today’s political world for people in the Vega Baja. We need to remind ourselves that it was precisely against both the ideal and the practice of liberal politics that the national Catholic cause was fought and that Franco sought to direct Spain’s future. This makes for a very different background to the current understanding of politics among the various actors to be found in the Vega Baja. We need, then, to think politics without the liberal teleology that normally comes with the term in our own usage. And we need to do this despite the fact that the neoliberal rhetoric of an essentially dirigiste political elite serves to suggest that indeed Spain is exercising the public politics of the liberal ideal. Given these rather particular conjunctures—the conjuncture of a new economic sociology and the rise of personalized livelihood arrangements, the conjuncture of a more culturally oriented political theory and Spain’s particular history vis-à-vis liberalism—the political landscape of the Vega Baja is filled with false markers that obscure the historically worn pathways of real life. We begin our exploration with three attempts to formulate a political culture for the region. Needless to say, this is not an exercise many of the ordinary working people we talked to engaged in spontaneously, and these accounts come from three differently placed organic intellectuals (Gramsci 1971; Smith 2004a, b): an economist familiar with the regional economy, two UGT local union activists, and the mayor of Catral. The Social Scientist Sometime in the early 1980s, after Gavin had finished his initial fieldwork, he was given an article on the informal economic activities in the


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area southwest of Alicante. It was by a local social scientist who had long worked in the area and had been active working for the unions that took the initiative after Franco’s death. The article described, albeit in broad strokes, the social price paid when working conditions are “informalized.” It addressed the lack of job security and safety conditions; it referred to the problems arising from homework and the difficulty unions had in protecting ordinary workers in these kinds of conditions. It also noted that, insofar as informal economic activities did not engender the kinds of social infrastructure normally provided by “noneconomic” institutions (banking credit, insurance, even road links, etc), so there were persistent limits to the degree to which small capitalist enterprises could develop into larger and more productive ones. Some ten years later we found ourselves talking to this same social scientist. Gavin’s original copy of the article had become tattered and worn over the years, and he asked if he might get another copy. The author replied that he certainly could, indeed the article was now published, and he handed us an offprint. Later that evening we read the article in its published form. The data were the same, the figures and columns the same, the broad description of the economy too remained the same . . . but unsafe working conditions had disappeared, as had job insecurity, the difficulties that arose with homework, even the limitations in capital growth. Instead we found an exciting world on the threshold of a new kind of economic life. Now there was potential for a wide variety of productive activities, great adaptability from one manufacturing activity to another, a workforce with a broad array of skills and a long-standing culture of work and saving, as well as municipal and regional bodies set to offer various infrastructural advantages. The article ended by noting a variety of issues that stood in the way of this potential, most notable among them the limited amount of investment capital within the region itself.3 The Union Organizers During our fieldwork we had attempted to talk to as wide a variety of people as possible—not just working people of all kinds, unemployed people, old and young, and so on—but also firm owners, distributors, farm owners, and traders. We also sought out union officials at all levels and, as a result, one day we found ourselves in a union branch office in Crevillente. Two young organizers sought to convey to us the distinctiveness of the labor process in the rug-making industry and sundry

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other small enterprises in the area. They talked of the work history of the average worker, in which he or she worked a year or so in one firm and then shifted to another, possibly in a different sector. They talked of homework, and they talked of long working hours. The picture that emerged was one of a household of savers: After a few years, [said one of them,] often a man will quit his job and with really almost no savings he will try to set up his own little workshop. He has almost no capital and has to use really old machinery, but he draws on the work of his wife and maybe a kid or two, possibly even a brother or a friend. This makes all these workers he relies on, work for very long hours, so they can feed into the venture this man has set up. This provides a strong motivation for the kind of long hours and high drudgery of the work you find around here. (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995)

Perhaps one of us looked puzzled, or unconvinced. For whatever reason, the other young activist said, “It is the special work culture you have here in this part of Valencia. We are talking of the entrepreneurial worker.” In uttering the last expression, he knew he was pulling from the shelf a new social science buzz word. As he talked further, it was clear that he was not especially happy with the term; he even noted that the entrepreneurial side of this family project required a self-exploitation side among other family members. But by uttering the term, it was as though something had been settled, something had been slotted into its place, even if the fit was not too perfect. The Small-Town Mayor A few days later, it was July 1995, we found ourselves in the office of the PSOE mayor of Catral. Initially we did not ask him what he was doing to enhance the economy of the area. Instead we began by talking about his life and family. Before becoming mayor he had been a secondary school teacher, and at present his wife worked in one of the local shoe factories. The discussion turned to working conditions, and he quickly slipped into describing the heat at the factory and a ventilation system that was so bad his wife was developing breathing ailments. This seemed a direct reference to the kinds of social conditions of ordinary people’s lives a socialist mayor might take quite seriously, yet when we asked him what he felt his major task as mayor to be, his language seemed to switch into an intentionally economistic lexicon. Above all, he said, his aim was to attract employers to Catral, and so “give” work to local people. Labor conditions, environmental problems, yes of


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course they existed, but they were the necessary mishaps of a functioning economy. As he saw it, his task as mayor was to gear public investments toward creating the needed local infrastructure in the town’s polígono industrial (industrial park) in order to stabilize and attract industry. He said that the underground situation was a general one in the area, one where workers would individually strike agreements with employers. There was no exploitation, he said. Firms gave work to people who had no work. One must understand the overall situation of firms: “Firms are trying to subsist. If we harass employers it will be a problem. We cannot ask more from them.” His priority was to create a stable industrial fabric, to create the conditions for industrial expansion: If there is work, there is money and the town functions. One has to leave the initiative to people. . . . We [the PSOE] are pragmatic. Conservatives [referring to the Francoist mayor of an earlier period] had the infrastructure question—roads, electricity, etc.—settled. But we must serve people. Even so one has to establish priorities. The economy has been good for the pueblo (people/town) during the last years. . . . we have to make it so that it benefits the pueblo. (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995)

His job is to get people work, and then to get those people to work. He illustrated this latter phrase by noting a specific obstacle to attracting more shoe firms to the area. For long the aparadoras of Catral had been a proud feature of the cultural map. But a key stage in the labor process—the work of the aparadora—had become a bottleneck due to the scarcity of female aparadoras. He spoke of training programs that might shift the many unemployed men into this line of work but then enumerated a series of difficulties in making such a program work: the reluctance of firms to cover the costs of training in a fluid labor market, the machista culture that preempts men from learning the job from women, and so on. We pointed out to him that the example of the aparadoras did not seem to sit well with the idea that it is firms that give work to people who need work; rather, it seemed that firms clearly needed aparadoras, and so it was the working people who were giving (or failing to give) something to the firms that they needed (see, e.g., Pollert, 1988). He found this imagery laughable. At this point we wanted to shift the conversation back to his wife’s working conditions and poor health. As we did so, his gesture immediately indicated how tasteless he thought it was to shift registers from his public project to (the contradictions with?) his family project, and, remembering pressing work, he asked us to terminate the interview.

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. . . These three incidents are not especially surprising. They all give evidence of the kind of language that arises with socioeconomic policies that focus on developing regional economies. If we were to go back to 1978 when Gavin first began working in the Vega Baja, we would find a rather different discursive regime. We can already see this in the trajectory of our first story, and we found this difference again and again in 1995 when we revisited people from earlier days. People who had proudly referred to their fathers, mothers, or grandparents as workers (perhaps aniaga workers, perhaps jornaleros) now shifted the frame of reference: no, that had only been the fall-back position—their grandfather or mother had once had a small farm or ran a small workshop, but when it failed they had been forced to be workers.4 This late-1970s discourse was also more accepting of the possibility of differing, even conflicting social currents as working people and small entrepreneurs gave clearly different accounts of the “best of all possible worlds.” At least at the local level, no model for the future had been worked out. In this chapter, we follow the path from then to our meeting with the mayor in 1995. We are interested in how the ubiquity of the kind of language used in these three more recent accounts masks the specificities of a multitude of potential political currents—the fragmented and hesitant nature of which, moreover, makes possible the broad acceptance of this language (even by a progressive social scientist, union organizers, and a socialist mayor). Much of what we have to say illustrates the conditions that make possible the silences, selectivity, and occlusions necessary for the invention of such cultural figures as “the entrepreneurial worker” or a positive and comprehensive “regional culture,” which in turn make possible the trope of a “regional economy.” The invention of a positive regional culture that sits so well with the new hegemonic discourse of flexibility and post-Fordism can be undertaken only by denying the historical realities that produce the present culture of politics. The three cases above show attempts by people involved in the public sphere of politics to produce a culture that represents the region as a functioning economy—this in the context of a widespread sense among ordinary people that public politics is at best irrelevant and at worst an active threat to the proper running of everyday life. The region as an economy—an economy analogous to a factory or business—requires a public culture despite local people’s alienation. The result is that virtual


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culture stands in for real history, and yet it works; it has a resonance and a workability not because of its sensitivity to the subtleties of everyday life but because the space for public politics has been so persistently infused with interpersonal, haphazard, and idiosyncratic forms of social regulation that a politics of culture can float away inflated with its own discourses and uncorrupted by the complexities of historically embedded social relations and practices.5 We must demonstrate this with historical evidence, but our point of emphasis here is that the making of the social conditions that give rise to a “flexible,” “responsive,” “adaptable” regional economy arises from specific—mostly not very nice—historical experiences. Experienced over time, those historical conditions both give rise to a fragmented and confused sense of common culture and make possible the implanting of a public version of what can then be called the regional culture.

“ TODO

HA QUEDADO ATADO , Y BIEN ATADO ”

One hot summer evening we were interviewing elderly rural working women about the socialist sentiments and activities of their youth, when a silence fell on us as though an angel passed. The two of us looked hesitantly at each other, and then one of the women laughed nervously and, hospitably gathering the two anthropologists in with the working women, said, “We’ll all be in jail again soon anyway,” and everyone laughed as we returned to our earlier conversation. But the allusion infused the atmosphere as we went on with our discussions. It was 1995, twenty years after Franco’s death on November 20, 1975. In between there had been the transitional years from 1976 to 1979 when the exFrancoist cabinet member and technocrat Adolfo Suárez had dominated the national political stage. Then there had been the years of PSOE rule under Felipe González. And, by the following March, the right-wing party of Aznar was to take office. If we are to share even the most fragmentary and inadequate sense of the everyday world of the people portrayed in this ethnography, we must try to suspend our sentiments of security, possibly of indifference, about large or small political transitions in our own lives. Indeed it is precisely this latter kind of thinking that has led to the dominant image of “the new Spain.” The period after Franco’s death is often presented as one of almost breathtaking change: Spain shifting from a totalitarian regime to a democratic one without bloodshed; Spain condensing into just a few years the historical journey to modernity and development

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that had taken other European countries centuries. And it was all (apparently) so perfectly planned right from the start. It was, on this reading, above all a series of tectonic adjustments to society made possible, not by selfish class interests and the clamoring insistence of pressure groups, but by intelligent technocrats and the modestly gentle guiding hand of an enlightened monarch. This interpretation suffers from at least two problems. One is that it is in essence a rather particular view of how democracy might properly become established in the political life of a people—what Michael Mann (2000) has called “organic democracy”—not a kind of democracy that has arisen as a result of the struggles of various classes and interest groups seeking their place in the body politic, but rather a democracy carefully honed and shaped by a hitherto authoritarian technocratic elite who see alternative views of their vision not as part of the discourse of open democracy but rather as a threat to the overall organicist project (see also Pérez Díaz, 1993). A second problem is that, for such an organicist vision of Spanish political life to attain any kind of authenticity, it must not only erase the past, denying the legitimacy of Republican struggles against Franco’s coup d’etat,6 but as result obfuscate the role of ordinary people’s political opposition in the present. Such a view of recent Spanish political history may fit snugly with the righteous authoritarianism of Europe’s present “third way” and the guiding hand of European technocrats; it accords well, too, with the chronic silences about the politics of repression in fascist western Europe shared among virtually all anglophone professional anthropologists of the region (but see Collier, 1987; Kasmir, 1996).7 But, putting the 1940s and 1950s behind us for the moment, does it accord well with the way Franco handed over the reins of power? The transition did not begin on the morning November 21, 1975. In fact, in keeping with his dogged and rather unimaginative life, Franco took an almost endlessly long time to die and spent much of the period arranging for his departure. In 1969, at seventy-six and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he named Juan Carlos de Borbón, son of the pretender to the throne, as heir and his (Franco’s) successor. Determined that his senility would not herald in a new and liberal regime, later that year he turned his authority over to the hard-line Carrero Blanco, who became premier. Two years before that Franco had issued his “Organic Law,” which allowed him veto over all reforms that might restrict his powers. Famously, as he handed the reins to others, he ended the year by assur-


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ing the Spanish people, in what was to become the nautical catch phrase of his twilight years, that “todo ha quedado atado, y bien atado” (all is lashed down and well lashed down) (Preston, 1993: 748). As we have said, the following period saw a series of temporary governments each of which, in different ways, sought to give respectability to Spanish political life by stressing the role of high-level compromises between different political, business, and union leaders and downplaying the degree to which the new openness would mean a widespread dialogue across conflicting political positions. This attitude to the present and to the future of Spain meant also a specific attitude to Spain’s immediate past—to the role of people who had supported the Republic, and to the legitimacy of the political views they may have held under the repression of Franco. None of these periods had been interpreted uniformly by the people of the Vega Baja. While outside Spain the transition was heralded in the press with almost uniform surprise that the Spanish could do things so calmly and so well, the atmosphere in Catral was one of nervousness and unease. For those better-off farmers who had not made the shift into commerce, it seemed truly to be the end of an era—their era. For those who had been using changes in property relations as opportunities for short- or longer-term gain, the transition seemed to be the public face of the kind of commercial civil society they were engaged in. They saw this as an opportunity to expand the arena of their economic and social practices into formal local and national politics. This is our topic in the third section of this chapter. For many ordinary people, however, the coming years appeared to be contradictory and confused, feelings that were by no means dispelled with the coming to power of the socialists in 1982, which we take up in the fourth section. For some, views of the new government were filtered through the past under Franco, which had made them almost preconsciously associate socialism with godlessness and disrespect. But there were others for whom the coming of socialism had for years seemed an impossible dream. Yet few of them saw the national PSOE government as an expression of their own agency as socialists. This had partly to do with their sense of what public politics meant (a sense subsequently confirmed with the ensuing waves of corruption that enveloped the PSOE nationally and provincially). But it also had to do with a sense of resignation in the face of Spanish history. Fearing the impending socialist defeat (to be replaced in 1996 by the conservative Partido Popular), an old

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jornalero leader commented, “That’s the way it is. Like the kids at school, we had a few moments in the play-yard, but the maestros will be calling us back into class pretty soon.” However remote it may seem to us as we read this, we should remember the retroactive nature of Franco’s bill of political responsibility years earlier, which had made any support for the Republic a crime retroactively punishable. We should remember too that, bloodless though the reformulation of Spanish society may have been, its technocratic dirigiste nature denied the history of those at the bottom of the social ladder (precisely the metaphor used by the old jornalero) who had struggled and suffered in an earlier generation, thereby delegitimating their politics and the kinds of repression they had endured in the Franco years. It was (and is) as though Spain needed no LePen to deny the collaboration of the Vichy regime, no Fini to endorse the years of Mussolini’s fascism. The work of the extreme Right in those countries was done here with a velvet glove by the technocrats of Opus Dei.8 Politics then, meant very different things to different people, and yet there was a common political atmosphere shared from the past—one in which the limbs of political expression had been narrowly constrained and lacked exercise. As a result, the more we have worked with this issue of politics, the more we have found it to be too elusive one minute, too complex the next. There were many people whose families had been deeply enmeshed in dependencies of aniaga relationships who were prepared to leave political management to those (the new caciques?) whose social position and personal inclination took them there, and to find political advantage by pulling on the chain that connected them to these people. The lines from national to provincial to municipal politics (and similar lines within unions and other political institutions) might be seen as corridors, winding and darkened but negotiable by those familiar with their use. Those, especially the jornaleros, who had not been so locked into ties of dependency may well not have denied this. But it was a truth that disgusted them. When, from time to time, we met such people who found themselves holding some more or less low-level and local formal political office, they always explained their position in apologetic terms, often telling how they had been “called out” from the proper world of their ordinary and very definitely working lives to perform on this most uncomfortable of stages. Many know this particular discourse; indeed it trips off the mouths of the most barefaced, self-serving politicians. But in these cases it was said with real feeling and honesty: the shame of politics, the honor of work.


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Still, this map is too simple, and the reader using it without occasionally consulting a local for directions will be misled. Above all we need to understand the culture of politics as the outcome of a historical trajectory in which praxis was always felt in terms of awful personal tension and inner conflict, a paralysis that has fallout for the collective identity of the region today. In this chapter’s fifth section, therefore, we discuss attempts at cultural reconstruction as a surrogate for political expression in a context where particularistic social regulation characterizes the region—both in today’s informalized economy and in the power relationships that preceded it and made the so-called regional economy possible.

technos versus demos As noted, the period of transition after Franco’s death saw a discourse that highlighted the importance of technocratic dirigistes in steering Spain toward liberal enlightenment, along with the necessary accompaniment that the leaders of society should negotiate an entente cordiale rather than having society, with its various classes and interest groups, explore the tensions and conflicts of open political discourse (in its broadest sense). This position, which might be called “neocorporatism,” contrasts with the notion that “class struggle and its institutionalization” are essential processes within liberal democracy (Mann, 2000: 23). In the Vega Baja, the uneasy tension between populist democracy and neocorporatist technocratic democracy gave rise to debate and conflict, but in so doing it exposed how the new kind of dirigisme became grafted onto older forms of caciquismo. At the national level, Adolfo Suárez, a Christian Democrat by persuasion, had been appointed prime minister in 1976 (to this point there had been no elections; this was a caretaker regime with a new constitution as its primary goal). Over the following year the various major parties went about the business of establishing themselves on the national and provincial stage.9 In June 1977, elections brought the center-right UCD to power. Throughout the period, Spain was facing an economic crisis; there had been waves of strikes through 1976. Against such a background, the guardians of public politics voiced the message that the politics of a democracy was one of negotiation, not one of confrontation. Parties had to reach agreements; government, employers, and unions had to reach agreements. Agreements, so the technocrats of the new Spain argued, were the basis of democracy; the slightest confronta-

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tion was a terrifying menace.10 Soon after coming to power, Suárez engineered the Moncloa Pact, in which the major political parties all accepted the necessity of an austerity package, one that inevitably affected the unions and their ability to put pressure on business interests, which long had the support of the nondemocratic regime. Nonetheless, the first elections had taken place prior to the formulation of the constitution. A constitutional referendum took place in December 1978, and then national elections, once more in March of the following year. The UCD again carried the day, and then the first municipal elections in Catral took place in April. This meant that in 1978 and 1979 there were some six months of political debate in Catral. As a result of the discourse within which the transition was being framed, political debate in Catral did not include the majority of the people in the municipality. Those who ran the PSOE and PCE felt strongly that now was the time to speak out about their programs and about the past, and they did their best to take advantage of a public forum that had been closed off for many years. But they had no chance of winning, for several reasons. To begin with, the political realities of the immediately preceding years worked against them. The long period of political repression combined with something slightly less ominous but almost as effective—the fact that the absence of democracy made political discussions always entirely abstract and without practical value—left it to the old hard-headed figures known for their sentiments, if not their actual political affiliations, to speak out. Then, the fact that there was no belief, even among the most wildly optimistic, that they had the vaguest chance of winning the elections lent an air of unreality to the PSOE and PCE campaigns. The general expectation was that the UCD was going to sweep into power. This was so in part because many people were easily persuaded of the dirigiste option; they felt that the newly streamlined and now squeaky clean technocrats of the old regime, those who were so central in setting out the rules for the new political game, were the only ones who would really know how to make everything work. In the Vega Baja this sentiment dovetailed with an older element of the political situation not far removed from the old patronage system, one in which the political infrastructure was imagined as an upwardly sloping corridor. Much more than the political platforms (most of which were irrelevant in the Vega Baja), what seemed decisive in choosing a representative was his ability to tug at the elbow of someone a little farther along the corridor. This meant that, above all, the political competition was seen as a game in which one had to bet on the win-


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ning team. Even the rank-and-file supporters of the PSOE and PCE cast their votes with this in mind. This view was so widespread that anyone with serious ambitions of gaining a political office had to get themselves on the UCD ticket. Primary among these in Catral was the energetic and vociferous Juan Manuel Aguilar Gómez, whose case illustrates well the situation in the Vega Baja. Much about the UCD suited highly vocal, entrepreneurially inclined people like Juan Manuel Aguilar. These included small industrialists and traders, but also those who had been investing across the economic sectors, trying to accumulate some land (for security, for speculation, or for its agricultural productivity) while also being active as almacenistas, or getting a foot in the door of the local industries. Yet in the UCD there was a tension over two competing views of the nature of representative democracy—the one populist, the other technocraticcorporatist. Juan Manuel Aguilar regarded himself as middle class and, as such, an exemplar of the future Spain.11 For him this was to be a democratic Spain—democratic in the sense of giving political voice to those who had already attained a kind of economic agency, entrepreneurs like himself who had not so much inherited land as used their various sources of cash to buy into medium-sized plots the running of which they combined with their nonagricultural operations. Yet, despite his enthusiasm for the new democracy, Juan Manuel Aguilar had a quite particular idea of what it meant. His view of those without the self-confidence and, as he saw it, without the political ideas to become energetically involved in political debate was that they were not really on the political map. But there was another tendency, which Juan Manuel Aguilar characterized as more to the right: insofar as “average voters” were not capable of assessing the region’s potential technical development, they were a threat to the new Spain, which they saw to be a technocratic kind of society. Juan Manuel Aguilar was the founder of the UCD in Catral. The party executive met to make a list of eleven names for the municipal elections. Candidates were to put up their names 48 hours before, and then all members of the party were to vote. The executive voted seven to five for Juan Manuel Aguilar’s faction, which favored possible compromises with the Left if that would assure victory. However, the other faction did not accept defeat. They read the statutes of the party and found that the lists of municipalities with less than 25,000 inhabitants were to be nominated directly by the provincial committee of the party (although in practice they would usually approve the list supplied by the

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municipality in question). What Juan Manuel Aguilar called the “rightist faction” then went to Alicante, where the executive was also divided, but in the opposite direction (thirteen to eight). So this majority voted for a new list, nominated from the provincial executive, which included none of Juan Manuel Aguilar’s faction. His ousted faction then resigned from the party, and half the local members followed them. They then campaigned actively against the new list, though not for any other party. Juan Manuel Aguilar sees two main issues here: first, the use of influence with those higher up in the political hierarchy against democratic support from the base, in other words, the difference between the old ways of doing politics and the new democratic ways; second, his own politics of compromise against a kind of command politics within one’s party (one accepts the guidance of those higher up) accompanied by exclusivism that can only be conflictual vis-à-vis those not in the party.12 We repeat, however, that Juan Manuel Aguilar and his opponents in the UCD did not hold dissimilar views with respect to the democratic voice of the majority of people in Catral—day laborers, workshop employees, and homeworkers. The past experience of the exercise of power and its effects on democratic voice provided the bedrock on which this new order was being built. This comes out when we see how similar his views were to those of the last surviving Lara landholder in Catral at the time, Emilio Muñoz Lara (who was also the town’s doctor): Still today there are people who are educated in a very traditional way and who ask me who they should vote for—for example those working in my finca, because they feel obliged to the amo. I tell them to vote however they think they should. I still have lots of influence because I had the most votes in the election for the Cámara Agraria [the local agricultural association] but I did not take the seat because it would not be nice to have a doctor interfering in everything. . . . In the last municipal elections, though, I could easily have been elected mayor. I would just have had to sign up on any list and go and visit friends. But I didn’t do it because that would have meant having to choose a side for the elections and afterwards I would have made myself enemies when I was obliged to deny certain favors. (Fieldnotes GS 1979)

Emilio, who regards himself as being ideologically close to the socialists, is aware that the party system implies a kind of public solidarity that would disrupt the personalized networks on which he has depended through his life. Despite the almost quaint idea Emilio has of himself and his role in contemporary Catral, his view of public politics is by no means idiosyncratic. We already know that during the long


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years of Franco an avoidance of the public sphere meant for most people almost complete silence. But during this period in 1978–79, we prefer to talk of a “politics of the middle ground.” In a sense, people were neither bored by politics nor did they think it irrelevant. But for most in Catral the very word “politics” was synonymous with a certain kind of will to power which, for that very reason, rendered dubious the personal character of those willing to act in the political arena. Those holding public political office through the 1950s and ’60s had been quite openly cavalier, corrupt, and abusive of power; it was a way of demonstrating the extent of their power. In the initial months after Franco’s coup d’etat, many members of the rural Movimiento tackled their job with a missionary zeal, bemoaning the fact that in many places old caciques were co-opting local positions of power instead of the true supporters of the cause. In many cases they failed to unseat them and, even when they did, the cynicism of the regime soon overtook local office holders everywhere; to be a fascist mayor was to be a person openly paid respect but privately held in contempt. There was an earlier model of the public political figure, those who had held office during the Republic, but through the intervening years most people had come to see such figures as irresponsible, uneducated idealists whose misguided political leadership had been the cause of distress and suffering (Robles Egea, 1996; Cazorla-Sánchez, 1999). Out of this past, a kind of avoidance maneuver now occurred vis-àvis public political figures. It was as though there were a field of everyday interaction and personal work in which the responsible person could act with a certain degree of integrity and personal responsibility, and another field that was either effective but dangerous or ineffective and flatulent, removed from what might practically be achieved. All this can be framed in the ambivalence of the past and the ambivalence of the future. On the one hand is the inevitable feeling of suppressed shame some people felt as they occluded the events of the past— the concentration camp just 4 kilometers away at Albatera where local people had been summarily executed; the fate of an elderly neighbor who as late as the 1960s was still unable to acquire travel documents because of his Republican past; the woman who says of her father, “He was an anarchist but he was a good father.” On the other hand are the persistent ways the hopes for the future were betrayed after Franco died. These may not have been clearly voiced or thought-out programs, but rather the clearing away of old ways for a fresh start, perhaps better working conditions, perhaps a more caring state, perhaps more dignity.

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The point is that in these few months at the end of the 1970s people were testing this new climate. Initially the most economically bold were drawn into the public arena, primarily because they saw the future of their own enterprises to be tied to the development goals of the new technocratic state. But it also opened up debates among those same people and, in so doing, in the years immediately following the UCD victory, drew others into the dialogue. As we might expect, the personalities of the past and the offices or social position they held were not easily distinguished: to attack the one was to attack the other. [November 1978] I was in the bar where day labour is hired this morning. The practice is that one is served—a coffee, a brandy and so on, and another and perhaps another—and only as one leaves does one pay. At this point the barman performs a superhuman feat of memory, keeping each person’s tab in his head. This is made more difficult by the practice of buying drinks for others and thereby establishing indebtedness. As one leaves one asks the barman for the tab. He tells you so much. You reply that no, you had a brandy then a coffee, then a beer, and he reels off to you: the first brandy has been paid for by Juan (who has left of course), the coffee is yours but the beer was bought by Fernando, and so on. In this way buying drinks both respects and establishes a pecking order and it is one that is carried out into the street as well. Buying drinks and drinking them enmeshes you in hierarchy whether you like it or not. . . . Today I was at the counter with Tomás Gómez [head of an old family of large labradores], and Balaguer, long the appointed [Francoist] mayor. When the two of them came to leave, they asked the barman for their tab. “It’s been paid,” he replied. They both looked surprised (In this worker’s bar, it had probably never happened before.) “By whom?” asked Balaguer, the mayor. The barman, gestured with his head toward an old jornalero leaning up against the far end of the bar. His face was stony, expressionless. Balaguer and Tomás, with as much dignity as possible strode—insulted— from the bar. After they left there was a sudden rise in ambient noise which turned to occasional laughter. The old jornalero now wore a sharp grin on his face. Times they are a-changin’. (Fieldnotes GS 1978)

While there is a certain attraction to this breaking down of the old order channeled through a taken-for-granted language of gift and debt, the very obliqueness of this maneuver limits its political potential. Yet everything about the personalized politics of the previous era invoked the sense that it was the person, not the hierarchy itself, that needed replacing. The deep ambivalence many ordinary people feel toward the past, an ambivalence that can best be dealt with by remaining unvoiced, as well as a confused sense of which promises of the future might best be acted


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on, gives rise to a kind of privatizing of political issues and a distrust of their being brought into the public sphere. Indeed, emically, there is a strong sense that politics, as something that occurs on public display, threatens the management of everyday social relations and practices. This gives rise to a deeply felt inner conflict for individuals, a sense of personal tension and distress that is by no means separate from the way the transition relied on denying the past and a specific notion of democracy as an issue of negotiation and compromise. The moments when such tensions arise may be few and far between. With careful management of one’s conduct, they may be avoided pretty much entirely, except perhaps for the occasional family argument between an old person and a younger one, or between a person long known to be close to an old-style dueño and another who now feels that he or she suffered hardships because of their casual labor status. Some people, for whom the coming together of the past and the possibilities for the future meant that old ways of regulation and control could easily recur, felt themselves being dragged unwillingly into the political arena where hitherto fragmented tensions and turmoils were now actualized—as we see in the next section by turning to the case of José Gil Jr.

politics and everyday life Coming to power in the 1979 national elections, the UCD was not the long-lasting solution for the new Spain that many anticipated, and by 1982 it was replaced by the PSOE, a change reflected the following year in Catral’s municipal government. The effect was to pull José Gil Jr. across the threshold of his small house in Santa Agueda into the limelight of municipal politics. His father, José Gil Sr., was a big man, a strong worker, frequently a mayoral whose small cohort of workers were reputed to be the best and most enduring, in all senses the toughest jornaleros in the area. Yet the outsider could have wandered the streets of Catral throughout 1978 in search of the key political players and not known that what made José Gil Sr. especially well known— among some people notorious—was that throughout his adulthood he had been a socialist, eventually a discrete member of the UGT, and then openly its local representative. Such an outsider would have been introduced to Balaguer, the welldressed mayor with a job in a fertilizer firm in nearby Murcia; to betteroff farmers like Tomás Gómez or his brother-in-law Matías Giner, who were known to mandar en el pueblo (rule in the pueblo); or to Joaquín

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Marín, who headed the powerful Comunidad de Regantes and was the biggest farmer in the término. After some persistence one might even have been steered toward Juan Manuel Aguilar, who spoke of a new kind of politics, or toward a couple of the young sons of the better-off labradores who had trained in agricultural schools and had plans for the Sociedad Agrónoma. Perhaps a result of the long-standing discretion of the past, though, it would be a long time before an outsider was brought to José Sr.’s door. His growing influence as the figurehead of the jornaleros, made especially manifest when he negotiated the raise of the jornal to 1,500 pesetas, was in many ways an inwardly focused matter. José made no attempt to address himself to any other but the day laborers. That not only meant dismissal of the opinions that traders, shopkeepers, or labradores may have had of him; it also meant a sharp disdain for the broader arena of politics. Because José would not seek the outsider, as Juan Manuel Aguilar had done, to test out his persuasive powers on a new quarry the outsider would have to seek out José. He would be surprised to find that a man of such strong political views was largely indifferent to having a discussion with him. It was the reputation of such a father that led to José Jr. running on the PSOE ticket in 1983. It was a distressing period of his life, as he recounted to us in 1995: We had been working and talking with other people in other villages [about organizing a workers’ party] for a long time even before Franco’s death. We finally decided we wanted to constitute ourselves as a political party within the ranks of the PSOE, and we did so and in the first municipal elections [1979] we won but with a simple majority. We were eight founders, four of them were old timers, amongst them my father. When Franco died, my greatest desire was to install a democracy, but to go from a dictatorship to a democracy without firing guns as we did here is very difficult . . . not so much for people my age [he was born in 1940] but for older people. On either side they still had open wounds . . . but we started to work in order to bring the rest of them over to our way . . . it was difficult but the fight for democracy was my job. . . . We had this fight with older people. . . . I had these terrible discussions with my father and often we didn’t speak to each other for several days. . . . I wanted them to see the way of realism. . . . What we could not have is a situation where if twenty years ago you threw a stone at me, now I throw it back at you. I couldn’t understand that. . . . We had to think of a way . . . but it was very hard because he [his father] had suffered and endured a lot in those years and he couldn’t forget it. . . . But nowadays things have changed a lot and one has to recognize it. . . . what I allow my daughters he didn’t allow me


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to do. . . . we all give in and the socialists have done the same because if they hadn’t given in they would have got nothing. . . . And one has to be democratic. (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995)

José Jr.’s view that a genuine transition to democracy was occurring and that it could occur only if the past was put aside (buried? silenced?) was not simply his own personal view; it was the hegemonic program of those at the center of power who had managed the transition. In this agenda, democracy could be attained only by keeping the practices of the old regime off the agenda of public discussion. If the figure of a person is at least partly, if not mainly, the stuff of his past, then this forgetting of history made what José Sr. had been in Catral essentially invisible. This seeing and not seeing from one generation to the next—José Jr. insisting on not seeing the historical figure of his father, and then José Sr. refusing to see the future potential of his son—was voiced across a second element of the hegemonic program for the new Spain. This was the notion, not that compromises were a necessary preliminary for entry into democratic ways, but rather that democracy was essentially compromise. This notion contrasts sharply with José Sr.’s position, which was based on a need to come to terms with class issues that during the Francoist regime had been repressed both physically and through the discourse of corporatism, and was now to be further obscured in the discourse of the new technocratic and democratic corporatism.13 Collective strategies and class solidarity were central to politics for an older breed of socialists like José Sr., whose livelihoods had given them a particular kind of daily experience. Indeed José Sr. was the walking symbol in Catral of the 1980s of the untied jornalero we describe in chapter 5. That had been a world where personal deals were foreclosed—at first because of circumstances (of past political activity, or of recent outspokenness, or simply because of exclusion through inheritance) and then as a collective choice that inhered in being a proper jornalero. (In contrast is the aniaga who had made deals and as a result found the compromises imperative to extra-household relations, penetrating his world of personal dignity.) This was the kind of collective sentiment that profoundly informed José Sr.’s political culture. There were, however, many others whose personal and family histories drew on a different positioning within the regional social relations, and José Jr. sought to bridge this gap. In so doing, he appeared to his father to be working not so much in terms of the individual commitments inscribed in the rules for the new political game as in terms of those in-

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voked in an older kind of politics. This comes out clearly when Gelardo’s father wants José Jr., after he has been appointed mayor, to inform the party of everything that happens in the Ayuntamiento. José Jr. refuses on the grounds that he has made an oath that binds him to secrecy when accepting his public charge: [Gavin asks, Did your father have any political ambition for you or your brother? José Jr. responds:] He always thought in terms of a whole, a bloc. . . . He never opposed me or favored me within the party by saying “my son should be candidate,” his hope was not that his son would be candidate and that’s it. . . . no, he wanted a situation where the candidate who was chosen could find solutions. . . . But aside from that he liked to be in control. . . . But it is very clear in the oath “jura o promete guardar secreto.” . . . I couldn’t tell anybody, neither you, nor a neighbor, nor my father what happened, things that could not be talked about, my father wanted me to inform him about all the movements but I only did it up to a point. After, when I said I couldn’t anymore, he was furious because he liked to control a lot and in a democracy, you cannot play that way because if democracy was about being in control (poder dominar) . . . no in a democracy you cannot play thus. . . . A person because of his honesty can be the candidate of a municipality or a Diputación or a Parliament, but not just because he drags (arrastra) other people along, no, no, no.

José Jr., who subsequently left municipal politics, has for some young socialists (like Pablo, with whom we opened this chapter) taken up the symbolic position held by his father (who died in 1989), but for most people his trajectory into politics and then out again has a kind of fatalism about it. The tensions he felt, the conflicting pulls of the personal self-respect of a worker with honor and another that called him to engage with the political currents of the area, may in his case be especially acute, but they are felt broadly across Catral. They surface occasionally in a variety of ways. Often this happens within families and often in situations where it is we the interviewers who drag up an old family relic hitherto closed up in the attic by unvoiced agreement. We should remember the daughter of a Republican mayor in Catral who we met in chapter 4, and how her mother entered the conversation to invoke a far more political (and politically divided) Catral than her daughter was prepared to imagine. Another example is Virginia Nogales and Ismael García, a working-class couple in their early sixties. Virginia is the daughter of Pedro Nogales Pereda, the socialist mayor during most of the civil war. One evening we were sitting in the front room talking to Ismael about his life as a factory worker. Ismael is one of the few union members in Catral, long a


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member of the UGT. Gavin remembers a strike at a textile factory (Todo Alfombras) now (1995) closed and thinks Ismael can help jog his memory (Fieldnotes SN-GS 1995). “No,” says Ismael, “There were disputes between a worker or two and the owners, that’s all really.” “I’m sure there was a strike there,” says Gavin, now confused. “Perhaps . . .” At this point there is a loud clattering of pans in the kitchen and Virginia enters. “Of course there was a strike,” she says, looking angrily at Ismael. “You don’t have to worry. Tell us about it.” “No,” repeats Ismael, “There was no strike . . .” and Virginia shrugs her big shoulders as she sits at the table. Ismael continues, “It was a lockout. We heard they were going to close up and take the machinery out at night. Most of us had not been paid. We kept a watch around the plant. In the end most of us got paid.” Ismael then goes on to what at first appears to be a non sequitur: “Young people nowadays all go together, play together, there are no differences between right and left. There is no política.” It is almost as though he is trying to tell us how little relevance such an action would have if told to his children. But Virginia intervenes to oppose. “It is not true!” she says. “Rightist parents don’t let their children go with those on the left. And my children know there is a difference. They have ideas.” After the war, Virginia’s father was in hiding for a time, first in the Cuban consulate in Alicante, then near Catral in a relative’s house until a sister-in-law denounced him to the authorities. Then he was publicly taken through the village while his name was announced and everyone in the streets called him an assassin. After a trial he was sent to prison and later exiled. When he returned no one would give him a job. Because he was a teacher, he went around the huerta teaching young jornaleros from house to house. Virginia recalls the very bad time they suffered when her father was imprisoned and exiled for many years. Her older brother and mother pulled the family through those years. “Ideas are hereditary,” she says. “My sons Ismael and Pedro are very políticos. Pedro is a fanatic. Javier [another son] is more moderate. But they have their ideas.” Her sons Ismael and Pedro are both working in the shoe factories in Catral and have a history of confronting their employers about salary and working conditions. They have had to change workplace several times. Being político, participating in public politics on the Left, is a social practice whose expression was severely repressed after the civil war;

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anything beyond a focus on getting food or the latest danger confronted on the black market was thought to be “having ideas.” “Having ideas” became a synonym for political dissent, and therefore a dangerous activity. For Virginia the necessity of not losing these socialist political inclinations is expressed in the notion that they are hereditary.14 But this heredity seems to suggest that the ideas themselves do not need to be discussed; rather, they are transmitted in some way that avoids any agency on the part of transmitter or any relationship with wider structural forces. Moreover, this discourse may echo the same culture of repression it opposes. Indeed, because of the organic, unitary, and spiritual idea of Spain held by Franco, political opponents on the Left during the Republic were conceived as a poisonous substance for the body politic, infused by foreign malignant powers: part of the anti-Spain. It is the way Virginia insists on her children having ideas that is important. This is clearly a statement in the face of opposition—that having ideas is inherently bad, that they disturb the peace. José Jr. made this clear to us over the time we knew him. Eventually he withdrew from the public politics of municipal government. As he explains it, he had journeyed reluctantly from his home, his neighborhood, and his workmates to get involved in politics. In so doing he had tried to act with honor. As he understood the new times, this meant laying down one’s enmities and negotiating for solutions. But the very act of using words, of negotiating, put him at a disadvantage, and he resented some of the orders handed down by the PSOE in Alicante. By contrast, there was the everyday world he knew. He felt that precisely by entering politics he was threatening that. He began to lose his sense of being respected by the people who mattered to him. To fulfill certain duties of office, he had used up some family savings and felt his children were being asked to sacrifice, and above all there was the attitude of his father. We see with José Jr. the realpolitik of the new order pushing him toward what he sees to be a new world where possibilities arise out of persuasion and compromise while at the same time hegemonically denigrating the world of the Left as experienced by those associated with the Republic and the survival of political alternatives to the Franco regime. José Jr.’s attitude to lo político, to the political, was echoed time and again among people in the area. Many did not find themselves facing the kinds of contradictions and tensions José faced, but many felt that the very act of entering politics or, still worse, having outspoken political ideas, rendered one’s personal character suspect. Given the nature of public politics in the preceding period, this is hardly surprising. But what


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in effect it does is open a vacuum in the public sphere of collective expression. The local distaste for politics combined with the emphasis on the social development of regions—at both the national and European Union levels—has produced various attempts to invoke—or invent— culture.

cultural versus political expression Earlier in this chapter we gave three rather different examples of invoking/inventing culture: the academic committed to improving the economic possibilities for the region; union workers employing a discourse of the entrepreneurial and flexible nature of the new labor, adopted from a wider arena of political and economic discourse; and the municipal mayor working with a selective imagery of local capitalism. Common to these three cases is that they are invoked to address an outside audience—to provide a kind of respectable public persona to the world beyond, from Alicante to Valencia, to Madrid, to Brussels and the broader world. But how are the politics of culture played out within and toward the people within the region itself? The length of our field study has allowed us to provide snapshots of the mid-1970s, the late 1970s (Juan Manuel Aguilar Gómez), and the mid-1980s (José Gil Jr.), but we are hard pressed to find the kind of maturing toward liberal democracy that the entire packaging of the transition trumpeted. Instead we get the sense of fragmented political narratives and deep ambivalence toward agency exercised in the public arena of politics, in favor of private and everyday tactics of maneuver. Undoubtedly many people’s distaste for politics and insistence that the appropriate site for agency is in the arena of family or individual work strategizing are products of the kind of political culture we saw so vividly in our discussions of the civil war and its aftermath—products, that is, of memories and the reluctance to give shape to those memories. But past politics has also embedded practices that oil the wheels of the regional economy in the 1990s and, thereby, provide a very present logic that favors individualist, ad hoc agency and preempts the kind of political dialogue that might give dynamic force to a collective political agency (see Smith, 1989, 1999: 53–87). Clearly then, as in many other parts of Europe,15 the public space for political action during the Franco regime gave way to an institutionalized form of political representation that delegitimated direct collective action. But the public political sphere is curtailed in an even more in-

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sidious manner. Individual participation has been limited to the casting of votes to elect representatives who have already been appointed by the higher-level professional politicians in the parties and unions.16 In such a context, distrust of the public sphere of politics results for many leftists—jornaleros, shoe industry wage workers—in a retreat from public politics. Actions of protest—claims for salary raises or better working conditions, for example—become personal, individual struggles in the same way that political identity has become a personal, individual, and private affair. Collective identity cannot be construed through political praxis, as it was before the civil war and even during the Franco regime, through strikes and public demonstrations of opposition (however repressed they were).17 Here too we sense the tension between public and private political expression when the memory of a collective identity becomes private and loses its force as a culture, a shared space of communication. For some people, such as José Gil Jr., this means a retreat into a moral honesty regarding his everyday responsibilities— work and family—an honesty based on memories of the past, of being a socialist and a son of a socialist and “having ideas,” but geared to personal commitment, not to collective transformation. Thus, a distaste for public politics translates into an inarticulate collective culture (Bermúdez, 1992; Ibáñez, 1992). In a sense this might be seen as a failure of civil society—a kind of disenchanted cultural vacuum. This, at any rate, was what brought Pablo (whom we met at the outset of this chapter) reluctantly into the arena of public politics.18 Hitherto he had shown no interest in political discussion; when a young married man in 1979, he was entirely disdainful of the elections and the issues raised there. By 1995, however, we found him occupying the position of vice mayor in charge of cultural affairs, a position he had apparently more or less invented for himself. Pablo says that he was drawn into the political arena precisely because of the alienation from any kind of political collectivity he perceived to characterize the region, and which he had felt himself. He had watched with dismay as he saw the hopes he had pinned to José Gil’s entering of municipal politics shattered when José retreated to his home. What Pablo thought he saw were a few socialist políticos possibly with authentic socialistic (if not actually quite socialist) principles but with limited interest in changing the convictions of ordinary people. Meanwhile, by turning their backs on even the minor issues of local politics, the ordinary people themselves were both relinquishing even their smallest hold on their future and sinking into a world that Pablo described as uncultured (inculto).


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In 1979, during the municipal election campaign, the regional PSOE representative participating in the local meeting had also emphasized the need for culture, but not “high culture”—rather, a culture emerging from the sharing of experience through public interaction: We have been told that culture is theater, painting, sculpture and that a particular sensibility was needed in order to understand it. . . . but culture is not only that, that’s only a parcel of culture that the dominant class shows us in order to make us feel how difficult it is . . . to reach, they say you need four generations. . . . Workers have been given a subculture, in a corner of your home with the television, not sharing with others our experience. . . . That is a passive culture. . . . We need to use spaces that we already have, such as schools after hours, as forums, a workers’ library, a place to speak about the problems that affect us, so that we can develop our critical capacity . . . because culture is understanding. . . . we have to develop a culture that is not repressive, that takes us toward equality and justice, a culture of freedom and responsibility. Culture is like a ferment that can germinate and transform society. (Fieldnotes GS 1979)

Here he was speaking of culture as a space for communicating experience, that is, a space that would give workers the collective ability to transform society “toward equality and justice.” He was also speaking of a culture that was mainly information and debate about real and concrete problems “that affect us,” not “theater, painting, sculpture.” Just as an older generation of socialists had thought of education, the 1979 PSOE representative saw culture as politics, part of building class politics. In 1995, from the perspective of his municipal responsibility for culture, Pablo had a somewhat different idea of what a progressive kind of culture would be. His objective was to persuade the municipal council to provide money for him to carry out a cultural renewal campaign in the area. Since this could easily be packaged into the national PSOE cultural programs, money was relatively easily found. But what kind of culture did Pablo envisage? During his tenure a municipal sports center was built with a large swimming pool, tennis courts, and other facilities including a bar and café. He also began screening old films—from Buñuel to Fellini—in the plaza on weekend evenings. He set up a theater group for young people and had the municipality finance trips to regional historical sites. For Pablo, culture was a means to bring people out of their houses into the public sphere, where they would find a new kind of space—a kind of liberal, European cultural space that would fill the vacuum left by the personalized and hierarchical public space of the past.19 Pablo’s was an attempt at creating a local space for public interaction around culture. But he was co-opted by the official definition of culture

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as art and sports. He did not seem to think that culture could emerge from local people just talking about their experiences in the school building. His cultural project for Catral directly echoed the policies of the PSOE government in power, but also, unacknowledged by him, older policies that had been adopted by Fraga Iribarne during his appointment as minister of information and tourism in the 1960s (1962– 69) when he actively endorsed “modern” abstract expressionist art and moderate sexual liberation as two forms of apertura (opening up) of cultural expression of political dissent. During the transition, again, when Fraga was home secretary (Ministro de Gobernación, 1975–76), he insisted that his aim was to “strengthen authority” while he simultaneously would “broaden freedom” (cited in Naredo, 2001: 57). It is hard to characterize the effect these initiatives had on Catral— though perhaps the reader need only turn back to earlier chapters for guidance. Catral and the neighboring towns had not been notable for their public amenities during the Franco years. Libraries were scarce, swimming was left for tourists, and the most respectable public place besides the church was the casino, a café reserved for the elite. By seeking to attract teenagers to sit in the open and watch films once banned, in the very space that so emblemized the power of the old elite, Pablo was clearly making a statement—as he was by having an attractive café and bar for socializing alongside the swimming pool. In a context where public politics was shunned, Pablo saw culture as providing a means through which people would interact and thus be drawn out from the culturally impoverished lives of their small houses and apartments. This in turn would invoke a certain kind of enculturated politics—liberal and European. He was not alone. Increasingly in the Vega Baja political position is coded through public culture. In the hills of the hinterland bordering the Mediterranean littoral on which the Vega Baja rests, for years numerous towns have been famous for their annual celebration of the festival of the Moros y Cristianos (Moors and Christians).20 When Gavin first lived in the Vega Baja, as Lent approached neighbors would advise him to take his family to visit one of the famous sites where the old battles of Moors and Christians were played out. Cofradías—two or three “Moors” and two or three “Christians”—would don their respective costumes, have colorful and noisy parades, host open-air meals, and—of course—fight. When asked if there were nearer sites that might save the long and arduous journey into the hills, he was frequently upbraided with the response, “No, no. We are much more modern than that. We have never had that kind of thing here.”


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So it was with some surprise when he returned in the early nineties, after a few years’ absence, to find numerous lowland towns now proudly celebrating the festival of Moros y Cristianos, apparently reinvigorated from past times, with the full institutional organization of cofradías, though the costumes were conveniently (though very expensively) rented from an agency in Alicante. In Catral this was largely the initiative of the young Opus Dei priest. On his arrival in Catral some five years after the PSOE had been in office nationally, he found a town of hard-working people, strongly attracted to consumer goods and increasingly oriented toward Europe and, to a lesser extent, America. Like Pablo, he found such people to be incultos, but for quite different reasons, and he set about to rehispanize public space (and resanctify the private space of the family too). With the help of local small and larger firm owners who sponsored each cofradía, he encouraged the celebration of the “old” festival of the Moros y Cristianos. It need hardly be said that the people attracted to Pablo’s culture were not the strongest supporters of the priest’s culture. Early in the 1990s, a club de música was opened in a space behind the church and a block from the plaza. Known simply as the música, the club had been funded and built by local employers and subscriptions from prospective members. Whether by design or habit, it became the alternative to the café at the swimming pool and was clearly an attempt to reinstitute features of the old casino culture. Despite their clearly different cultural orientation and political agendas (the employers who funded the música were open supporters of the opposition, Partido Popular), participation in the various activities and sites associated with each was by no means mutually exclusive. People who drank at the música also sent their children to pass a weekend afternoon in the pool, and the dictates of food and drink patronage made sure that most people who would have gone to an evening showing of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie would also be hosted at one or another of the open dinners held by cofradías during the celebrations of Moros y Cristianos. (Older jornalero families would not be found at either and certainly not welcomed at the latter.) Indeed the point is precisely that when politics becomes a politics of culture, as it does here, it effectively separates sign for signified in a manner that makes most people at least relatively comfortable. Those deeply involved in the música would make snide remarks about the pretentiousness of Pablo’s kind of culture, and others, even among the old landlords, would find the flash of the Moros y Cristianos costumes or the faux gothic architecture of the música to be garish and offensive, but remarks like these were sim-

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ply the stuff of local banter. The interest for us is that, apart from the few weeks before a regional or national election, these different versions of public culture constituted the entirety of Catral’s open politics. Both, of course, are inventions—the one more openly an invention insofar as its purpose was a turn to the new Spain, the other only a little more covert in its insistence that it was a re-invention of the past. Both too are purposely managed projects by easily identifiable intellectuals. Far from being the grassroots emergence of some deeply buried regional culture, these projects arose precisely as political attempts to find a culture for uncultured masses. In other words, both were local expressions of the dirigiste politics of the new Spain. Nonetheless, it is important to note their differences. In the use of previously banned films and a nod to Europe, the one kind of culture was not just an attempt to belittle if not exactly critique the political atmosphere of the past; it was also to “globalize” Catral, to place it on the map of Europe and a larger world. The other was both a respectful glance to the past—now dressed in the brighter hues of what David Harvey (1989) nicely calls “Guv’nor capitalism”—and a celebration of fixity, plagiarizing the more authentic culture of the dry hinterlands. This recapturing of some public action in order to create civic involvement was now focused on styles of consumption for the production of some form of collective identity; while those on the Right became involved in the Moros y Cristianos festivities, those on the Left went to the public high-culture film sessions and theater festivals Pablo organized. This was, however, a much looser expression of the situated self, one that seemed to be autonomous both from the realities of presentday livelihoods as expressed in a strongly informalized and exploitative regional economy and from the memories of a past of collective political action and collective suffering from repression. In fact, the politics of culture becomes an ersatz of collective identity and of culture as politics, a mere aggregate of individual consumption tastes, one, moreover that effectively voids of political intent the sharing and communicating of experience. These manifestations of new civic engagement have little connection to the lived histories or memories of those called to participate in them, and also little connection to the everyday duress of their lives. If collective political action is situated in shared everyday experiences, these cultural expressions of difference and even mild confrontation are many times removed from what motivates people to patronize one cultural activity over the other. They express, in fact, the real closure of the public space for real political action.


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Pablo’s cultural project fits well with the European Union’s politics of culture expressed through the Culture 2000 program’s aim “to improve the knowledge and dissemination of the culture and history of the European peoples, to conserve and safeguard cultural heritage of European significance, to support cultural exchanges and artistic and literary creation.”21 The process of creating a “selective tradition” for European history is designed to reify conflictive memories of the common past, so that history becomes definitively situated in the past (Damiano and Bayo, 1978).

conclusion Early in this chapter we made brief allusion to two (related) bodies of literature, one proposing a turn away from the major figures of history and the sweeping political movements toward the study of the everyday, the other advocating a way of studying political movements that attends to their cultural dimension—the spaces they opened and the practices they made possible for the constructions of cultural subjects. And here we have people, pressed by the demands of their livelihoods, apparently putting this agenda into practice. In the earlier stages of fieldwork, only peripherally aware of these emerging literatures, Gavin often found himself entering into his fieldnotes “the frequent focus on the mundane,” “the acting through of the particularities of everyday negotiation,” “political dystopia,” and so on, as well as keeping a burgeoning file on “the self-conscious use of the term ‘culture’ ” or “the political uses to which ‘culture’ is put here.” The authors of the above literature might remark that what we have described above is not at all what they mean by reference to the positive features of studying the everyday, or of introducing the notion of cultural production into their studies of political expression. But isn’t that a bit like eating the pizza and leaving the crust? Here we have people engaged in the daily hazards, detours, bits of information, decisions, and uncertainties of livelihood practices that from one day to the next are becoming more informalized and, as a result, more penetrating of their personal spheres. As a result they almost fetishize the everyday and denigrate what they refer to as lo político. Here too we have various kinds of politicized intellectuals (in the broadest sense of the word) who are self-consciously aware of their own attempts to direct politics toward the constitution of culture. Rather than dismissing this kind of “identity politics” because it is not quite as cosmopolitan as feminism, queer theory, or hybridity, we need to ask what

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the sociopolitical conditions are that have pushed discourse and practice along these lines. The “regional” in “regional economy” performs a statelike function for a dispersed, flexible economy, that is, what has traditionally been referred to as an “informalized” economy. And just as states call on more or less successfully imagined national cultures, so regions call on more or less successfully imagined regional cultures. Likewise, just as state versions of national culture have a closure quality that deadens the real history of conflicting collective identities, so too at the regional level. But there are differences, one external and one internal. The first has to do with the political economic conditions that give rise to “regions,” the second to the particular nature of a dispersed, flexible organization of production. The first has to do with the post-Fordist role of suprastate combines, like the European Union, which invoke a new kind of corporatism that strides right across any one state—a form of top-down stewardship matched by bottom-up (regional) subsidiarity. Dispersed regimes of production require extra-economic elements of coordination and regulation, but their very shadow (informal) nature means that these cannot be quite statelike. Instead they call on various preexisting local principles of coordination and regulation that look very much like culture—forms of personal responsibility, inducements to reciprocate claims and responsibilities, and so forth. Yet culture does not fall neatly into its proper functional place as social capital. Part of it might, but much of it flies off, defying coherence and confounding corporateness. These conflicting histories act against strategies of cultural invention. In Raymond Williams’s (1977) terms, the selective tradition is not just the willed practices of those in charge of selection—as though present-day actors exercise their will over the history they choose to invent. The material forces of history, as we have seen time and again through this study, select; they divide, they combine, they classify or deny classification, they refuse the comfort of coherence. All this means that if culture is to take on an important role in providing the oil that keeps a regional economy grinding along, then work has to be done constructing such an invented tradition. This is indeed a process of selection of the willed type, undertaken by people working on a compartmentalized kind of culture, as we saw in the case of Pablo. It can even involve invention from scratch on a tabula rasa, as we saw with the case of the Moros y Cristianos festivals. But we need to recognize that, when culture becomes so specifically a kind of virtual reality in this way, it does not just impoverish a more complex sense of the term,


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it also cauterizes the collective possibilities of the people to whom it is applied. This is not to say that even this sort of virtual culture cannot become part of reality, since its practice implies creating and expressing relations among local people. In some cases, when grounded in more politically oriented claims, certain forms of culture can produce a sense of collective belonging that gives strength to organized confrontation. This is brilliantly argued by Isidoro Moreno (2001) in his discussion of the uses of flamenco festivities and other personal nonutilitarian social intercourse in forging a “culture of resistance” to forms of exploitation and subalternity in Andalusia. However, the possibility that the politicization of culture will develop from selective histories is a function of the specific cases that might be studied. In this case, culture (of the entrepreneurial flexible worker) works precisely against that notion of resistance.

chapter 9

The Power of Ethnography

three-dimensional ethnography We have written this book to explore how ethnography might be used as an important tool in understanding society at the current conjuncture. Contemporary society seems to dart from one crisis to the next and seems to have done so for so long that “crisis” and “the present” are beginning to seem almost synonymous. And the same goes for anthropology. Throughout our careers we have been told that anthropology was in crisis. More recently this sense that the discipline is unable to meet today’s challenges has focused on despair about the practices of ethnography— both in its fieldwork form and in its written form. By contrast, our view is that the need for ethnography has never been greater. It has been argued that the limitations of ethnography arise from the specific historical conditions we now face, disorganized capitalism (Marcus, 1989) and globalization (Appadurai, 1991, 2000) being among the most frequently voiced challenges. Tentative proposals have been made for reconstituting anthropological inquiry, from closer attention to the textual devices of exposition (Clifford, 1997; Tylor, 1986; Taussig, 1999), to multilocational fieldwork (Marcus, 1998; Rouse, 1991; Holmes, 2000), to a reconfiguration of inquiry in terms of “scapes” (Appadurai, 1991, 2000). We too feel that ethnography faces challenges in the present (though perhaps we are less sure that disorganization, cultural membership, or globalization are the most salient features of this

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present). Yet for us, ethnography—the intensive study of social phenomena in their historical specificity—promises to offer a crucial starting point for reconstructing an effective project for social inquiry and ultimately a politics of praxis. The latter, this Gramscian emphasis on the relationship between praxis and theory formation, however, has provoked us to try to reconstitute the ethnographic project in much more historical and realist ways than the anthropologists just cited. Taking history first, one element of the historical dimension refers to the way the current figuration of society authorizes intellectual disciplines—“the place [they] occupy within . . . such a figuration . . . and the role [they] perform in the reproduction and development of the figuration” (Bauman, 1987: 19). Seen in this way, perhaps the ethnographic approach (albeit reconstituted) is to the early twenty-first century what the sociological approach was from the late nineteenth through the twentieth. Sociology, and here we use the term broadly to embrace what became a hegemonic modernist project, was driven on by what its intellectuals identified as the crucial issues of the period and then shaped by the concepts developed for understanding their character and causes—thereby, incidentally, configuring the kind of society being described. “Industry,” which once had meant simply hard work, now meant mass industrial production; though rarely stated explicitly, “society” was synonymous with the polity (France, Germany, etc.); and the programmatic feature of sociology became more manifest as the management of these polities was understood under the rubric of the welfare state. Beneath these massive infrastructures were workers in factories and citizens in welfare societies, and the methods and conceptual apparatus of sociology were mobilized in full force to gather knowledge appropriate to a social world of interlocking systems and interchangeable actors; “social facts” could be understood in terms of numbers, charts, and formulae (Hacking, 1990). Today this brave new world of a single society mass-producing standardized goods for a homogeneous citizenry has wavered and faltered— and with it the concepts designed for its understanding and mastery. There appear to be multiple forms of capitalist production and a congeries of subjects asserting social membership on the basis of claims quite different from the original model of the collective worker and the rational citizen. It is this historical figuration that makes ethnographic and historical (as opposed to positivist) inquiry so key—reconstituted, though not along the lines proposed by the aforementioned authors. Instead we have sought a reconfiguration along realist lines. As aware of


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the impossibility of holism as anyone in today’s world, we nonetheless argue for the responsibility of the ethnographer to try to cover the bases—even when some of those bases are difficult to access and take us away from the immediacy of the everyday world that seems so clearly around us in the fieldwork setting. The way an ethnographer positions herself with respect to the world around her during fieldwork and in terms of the narrative she produces in subsequent accounts needs to attend to the multiple fields through which history unfolds. Faced by a proliferation of texts that celebrate the acute and intensive gaze on just one feature of an ethnographic setting, here we argue that the social inquirer needs intentionally to shift the angle of his or her gaze, bringing into focus first one element of social reality, then another—and always with a historical sense of the social world’s dynamism. For explanatory purposes we have disaggregated elements of reality that become operative only in intricate combinations as, over time, production of and for life is shaped through the exercise of power. We need always to understand power within the specificities of social production and reproduction, over a given period, something that can be done only by characterizing the complex interplay of concrete abstractions, instituted practices, and interpretive sensibilities. And just as this needs a kind of holistic ethnography, so also it needs history. A historical ethnography enables us to see power threading its way through the Siamese twins of production and regulation over generations to give to a social figuration a certain resilience, a kind of landscape of the real. In the particular case that concerns us here, a regulatory state intricately woven through an underground, close-to-the-ground, or informalized cluster of production and distribution relations produced a particular dialectic between intimate and public fields, sites, or practices. The particular configuration of state regulation and interpersonal practices these kinds of economies invoke has varied through history, and this variation on a repeated pattern has produced a particular person’s sense of what is possible, responsible, claimable—in short, their sense of themselves as social persons. It is hard to see what analytically and critically is to be gained by calling this “culture.” Indeed, if we are to understand culture at all in the way E. P. Thompson (1968) used the term to describe the making of the English working class, then what seems striking here is a kind of cultural deficit—a failure in the dialogical possibilities of collective culture. Yet this actuality stands in contrast to something potential in an earlier—though terribly brief—period during the Republic, one that is called forth by the way the older socialist jor-

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naleros saw culture—as a critical awareness of their lived reality, consciousness almost in a classical Marxist sense. This absent collective (or collective absence) makes possible the invention of something called “culture,” vividly exemplified in the fiesta of Moros y Cristianos but found too in the selectivity of the club de música or in the marketing of the region’s native entrepreneurialism. It arises in the context of a social science discourse that seeks to supersede the older sociological imagery outlined above; and, as with that earlier project, as it enters policy so it shapes the reality as much as it describes it. Since the way place and collectivity are constituted seems to us to be a shared interest for both ethnography and recent work on regional economies, it is on this latter that we focused our attention. Even so, in doing this we began to feel an unease that had already beset our more postmodern colleagues vis-à-vis older forms of ethnography. Increasingly, scholars who began with the goal of understanding regional economies became intent on invoking them.

regional economies as knowable communities With its dispersed production, mixed agriculture and industry, and clustered small-scale units of production, the Vega Baja was described by Ybarra (1991) as a “regional economy” and has since increasingly become the object of policy initiatives framed under this rubric. What then does such a rubric invoke? Students of regional economies have produced a particular understanding of their specific features. This started with Bagnasco’s original work on what he termed the “Third Italy.” Bagnasco (1977) argued that the informal economy to be found in places like Emilia Romagna was in fact a fairly uncontrolled kind of free market condition, that is, it arose beyond the regulations of the state and indeed found its existence because of the handicaps created by state regulation (see also Bagnasco, 1981). This can be seen clearly in the costs that arise for producers as the result of safety regulations and social insurance programs, for example. The question then became, in lieu of the state, how is such an economy regulated? Bagnasco’s answer lay in his notion of the “social” market. The culture of interpersonal relations, people’s expectations of each other, were not compartmentalized from the market as an economic arena; rather, they infused market relationships with social features and cultural values. Subsequently, Bagnasco and others (Bagnasco 1994) were able to contrast this so-called cultural feature of the Third


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Italy with the trajectory of Silicon Valley, where the same kind of unfettered regional economy did not give rise to a social market but rather to highly litigious and contract-crazy relations. In the work of Granovetter (1985), Bagnasco’s notion of a social market was expanded to include the idea of an embedded economy. Claiming to follow Polanyi, Granovetter argued that economies must be understood within their social context. By referring to this context as a whole variety of “externalities,” he argued, economics was missing major features of these kinds of economies. Then came the notion of “social capital” (not to be confused with Bourdieu’s usage; see below). Here the idea is that the social phenomena Bagnasco had only lightly touched on in his notion of the social market were now to be more thoroughly quantified and introduced as real economic variables. Certain social practices, social connections, social positioning, as well as cultural dispositions (here quite distinct from Bourdieu’s more complex argument) within a region could now be characterized as good for the economy or bad for the economy—and hence good or bad in and of themselves. Entrepreneurial attitudes, flexibility in work practices, inventiveness on the work site, all these were to be measures of social capital. As we have said, people at first wishing to understand a regional economy were increasingly becoming intent on invoking regional economies wherever suitable territory could be found and the flag planted. So it is important to recognize what happens when such imagery of the social world is not just confined to the relatively harmless corridors of universities and research institutes but energetically sold to policy institutions by scholars. We argue that, as a result of this alliance between technocrats and academics, a new kind of corporatist state has come to be advocated, one in which regional economies play a crucial role. It is not hard to see how this arises. If the means for regulating the market are to be relinquished by an older welfare state and passed over to the various resources of social capital present in a region, then regulation becomes intimately tied to a functioning organic kind of society. Moreover, insofar as such a society becomes the stuff of technocratic design, so corporatism faces off against democracy. One way this played out in the European Union is in the notion of subsidiarity, which works perfectly as a political expression of regional economic development. Subsidiarity is an extremely fuzzy but crucial legitimating notion for the Union (see Holmes, 2000). At its simple and most formal, it refers to the principle that decisions should be made close to the site at which they will have an effect. Its more corporatist

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flavor, however, arises from its origins in Catholic doctrine and an earlier notion of paternalism in which the subsidiary or subaltern warrants the good will of the dominant only when it acts responsibly. In the terms of an economistic kind of corporatism, civic responsibility means evidence of one’s contribution to the productivity of the overall regional economy. But what has happened here? Certainly “subsidiarity” seems a concept that expressly takes account of social power. And yet its corporatist heritage makes it appear that there is something thoroughly responsible and normative about power differentials. It is a way of talking about power so as to preempt and delegitimate any other sources of power— to besiege the dangerous power of uncontrolled collectivities of ordinary people by surrounding them with the deep trenches of programs for their own “betterment.” The effective reshaping of otherwise potentially critical and analytically insightful concepts by the current alliance of academic scholarship with social managerialism is nicely illustrated by the way Bourdieu’s original insights regarding social capital were, first, co-opted by the American sociologist Coleman, then, via Putnam, transmitted to policy institutions to become a key tool justifying programs of rule.1 On careful examination, Bourdieu’s notion of social capital, while certainly stretching Marx’s term, remains faithful to the principles Marx spent so much time exploring. Capital is not just the strategic accumulation of money, nor is it that money now turned into machines in factories. Nor, when we preface it with the term “social,” is it simply the accumulation of a whole variety of social resources, as Coleman, Putnam, and the now multitudes of their followers seem to think. Capital is a relationship, a relationship only conceivable—or certainly only workable—in a capitalist society, that is, a society whose reproduction depends on the circulation of capital with profit seeking as its direct and socially accepted goal. Bourdieu is thoroughly aware of this; indeed his entire argument with respect to the relations between his various forms of capital (economic, social, cultural) and the emergence of classes (a term he insisted on until his death) depends on such a reading. Capital refers to a relationship between people in which the ownership of value-producing property by one group makes possible the extraction of labor from the other. Bourdieu retains this sense when he notes how social resources are inherently linked to capitalist class relations, that is, relations in which resources are part and parcel of relations of exploitation. As Narotzky (n.d.: 62) notes elsewhere, his “concept is thoroughly inserted within the dialectic of social


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reproduction, . . . in the tension between structure and practice in the reproduction of a class society” (see also Bourdieu 1977, 1984; Rankin, 2004: 38–39).2 In Bourdieu’s own words, The primary differences, those which distinguish the major classes of conditions of existence, derive from the overall volume of capital, understood as the actually usable resources and powers—economic capital, cultural capital and also social capital. The distribution of the different classes (and class fractions) thus runs from those who are best provided with both economic and cultural capital to those who are most deprived in both respects. . . . Once one takes account of the structure of total assets . . . one thus discovers two sets of homologous positions. The fractions whose reproduction depends on economic capital, usually inherited . . . are opposed to the fractions which are least endowed (relatively, of course) with economic capital, and whose reproduction mainly depends on cultural capital. (1984: 114–15)

Bourdieu is referring to quite different social agents from the ones we discuss in this book; the point of our brief diversion is simply to demonstrate the inextricable way Bourdieu’s notion of social capital is related to the dialectics of social reproduction and to differentiations of class. Thus it is important to critique the notions of social capital and embedded economy by those unprepared to understand these in terms of the use of power and social regulation for the purpose of exploitation. We have shown in this study that instituted practices and structures of feeling—a combination many would be quick to gloss as “culture”—are the crucial elements of social regulation in this regional economy. But if culture is to be seen as a form of social regulation, then surely it is impossible to talk of regulation without power. When we talk of the ability of a social actor to mobilize the capital of his family (and let’s be specific—his daughters, his grandparents), we must surely be referring to power. When we go further and recognize that this control is specifically directed to economic ends, it is hard to escape the need to configure this in terms of class. Yet this is far from obvious. The complexity of power relations makes it necessary to find ways of working through this maze. We do this by starting with the roles movement and fixity have played in social regulation and agency. This then brings us to the close interweaving of a kind of regulation that effectively targeted particular people and the practices of a close-to-the-ground economy. With this behind us, we return to the issue of public political discursive regimes versus intimate and private discursive regimes.

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movement/fixity We argue here that the materiality of a place, as well as the actuality of physical movement, cannot be neatly separated from the endowing of the concrete landscape with sentiments of locality or from metaphorical uses of movement and stasis. Gradually, as we talked to people over the years in the Vega Baja, we began to notice the prevalence of the idea of movement in their narratives. Sometimes we heard that people had returned to Catral after the war but later found that they had never in fact physically left. We know of the Franco regime’s use of the notion of exile, with which, we believe, they were tapping into a profound anxiety in Spanish rural life. Later on, we hear of migrations and migrations prevented; more narrowly, we hear of people tied to a particular job and a quite particularized set of social relations, then we hear of young women in households doing homework, and all these accounts work on some notion of movement. We do not, however, propose the existence of two quite different practices—one to move, the other to stay settled; rather, we wish to work through the more difficult idea that buried in the idea of movement is an idea of fixity, both ideas with their own counter-sentiments. To move is to renounce a certain kind of security and local knowledge; to stay fixed is to acknowledge a particular kind of limit to agency. These are not necessarily conscious elements; they reside within the very nature of the way these elements take form in practice. By reference to moments in our stories, we show how attitudes about movement and fixity played themselves out as means of regulation in different ways over time and for different people. But it is important to note what such a regime means for the notions of person and place. Personal identity comes to be associated with the way one uses space and conversely how space is denied one. Think, for example, of the attitude of the dueños to the evils of Elche or Callosa in the 1920s, or of Jaime García being at first unable to move away because of his father’s ties to Tio Perico. Think of the role of the mobile schoolteachers who moved through the huerta offering education to adults and children, and of the priests’ and the Laras’ opposition to the practice. We have seen the dueños trying to develop a contingent of tied labor in order to better extract surplus value and at the same time free labor’s ability to use mobility as a means to get a better hold on the labor market. This was expressed in the early 1930s around the Bases del Trabajo debate, in which the control of space was much at issue. Whereas


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employers wanted to maintain a free and entirely open labor market, allowing them to hire labor in whatever municipality they chose (even as they also retained the tied aniaga relationships, which effectively imbued a particular locality with social character), jornaleros wanted to force employers to rely on the local labor pool before they could move out in search of labor. The same issue was expressed in the workers’ plea for universal wage rates across the wider region, so as to undercut the advantages that movement gave employers in cutting labor costs through taking advantage of local differences. The jornaleros wanted to restrict local employers’ ability to move in search of labor before all local jornaleros had been employed, while retaining for themselves the ability to move if they had no local employment. In effect then, the aniaga-jornalero-employer triad were continually strategizing and fighting about the issues of movement and fixity. During that period, in advancing their claims as union members, workers made public political statements that their mobility was forced on them by the employers. This was because of employers’ ability to play with mobile hiring practices for some of the labor they needed while relying on restricting the mobility of others. The new law restricting local labor markets would empower labor’s position vis-à-vis capital. So mobility and fixity were dialectical forces setting up specific fields of power. The relevance of this dialectical tension in the context of the presentday regional economy of the Vega Baja can likewise be seen in the practices of firm owners such as Jorge Alvar and Paulino Romero, who use embedded notions of family and locality to tie workers through personalism, thereby undercutting wages, precluding conflict, and better extracting surplus value. Then, conversely, they seek to free themselves from their dependency on local brokers in regard to their commercial strategies, articulately linking growth (in capitalist terms) to their ability to tap fluid marketing networks internationally. Moreover, as we saw in the case of Ivanshoes, the “social” nature of labor relations and embedded care values lasts only as long as it serves the purpose of reducing labor costs. When this positive effect is lost, the firm quickly moves to another location. The play between mobility and fixity, then, is similar. From the standpoint of the workers, mobility is also now perceived as a forced strategy; we might here recall the conversation with Tomás, Esteban, and their friends in which conflict between labor and capital is always resolved by the worker having to move not only to another firm but often to another municipality.

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What we see here is a series of differentiations. At a structural level, we might speak of these as inhering in the particular way the various relationships clustered through the region are reproduced through time. But in speaking thus we obscure the way practices, infused with different degrees of power, over time bring about differentiations. At any given moment these may appear as cultural differences, even as emergent differences between kinds of (collective) social identity, but this quick resort to “culture” obscures the extent to which these differences are produced out of dynamic relationships of class. An earlier generation of anthropologists tended to do ethnography in places whose “placeness” was largely taken for granted. As we have said, our original attraction to recent studies of regional economies was that initially we saw their project to be one of problematizing the issue of place in the context of contemporary capitalism. Like other anthropologists (Appadurai, 1996; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997a, b), we felt that ethnography should investigate how “placeness” comes to take on its specific characteristics (Smith, 1999: 133–66). But this discussion has entered anthropology somewhat dualistically. On the one hand, the important influence of David Harvey focuses on the material forces of varying kinds of capitalist reproduction that produce different kinds of place and different kinds of flows between them. On the other hand, work by Appadurai (1991, 1995), Dirlik (2001), and Gupta and Ferguson (1997a, b), among others, leans toward understanding localities in terms of the way they are experienced by the people who live there. The way “place” is produced in the Vega Baja would seem to fit uneasily into either end of this spectrum. We see in our argument so far that familiarity and security play off against opportunity and insecurity to produce a place that is fully described by reference to neither the forces of social reproduction nor the way it is experienced by particular actors. The two ends of the spectrum work against each other. The place that emerges is not a hidden dimension of “placeness” that arises behind the backs of the actors, nor is it simply produced in the subjective notions of local people. It is a place of classes and a classlike place. This cannot be overemphasized, since it flies in the face of a tried and true binary in social science discourse—that sentiments of place-belongingness glossed as “community” and those of collectivities in terms of class are mutually exclusive. In seeing the shaping of locality in this way, we are able to show the extent to which the emergence of regional economies in Europe (or anywhere else) is a historical process of the same order as differentiations


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of class. If we are right on both these counts, then a great deal of literature needs reinterpreting. Anthropologists invoking the constitution of locality and its inverse, transnationalism, as well as new economic geographers (Storper and Walker, 1989; Cooke and Morgan, 1998; Amin, 1999) and sociologists of regional economies (Sabel, 1989; Bagnasco, 1994; Becattini, 1992), we believe, achieve the clarity of their arguments through an exclusion—not just of very real processes of cultural differentiation and socioeconomic polarization, but of the way they work on each other. The dialectical tension between the two seems to us to be an essential arena where power is acted out and produces a particular experience of class. Space, the control or lack of control on movement, and real local embeddedness are strong forces that produce the kind of collective identities we have seen unfolding in our ethnographic narrative. They cannot be neatly wrapped up in the idea of social relations as discourse and hence the primacy of cultural performance in producing locality. The idea of an entrepreneurial local culture of the region completely misses the tensions of power versus powerlessness that arise within individual agents as well as within more collective senses of identity, tensions that are in an important way determined by the ability to control mobility. Accordingly, one must acknowledge that differentiations among socalled developed regions and more impoverished regions arise out of the characteristics of uneven development on which capitalist profits thrive (Smith, 1984; Hadjimichalis, 1986; Harvey, 1982, 1985). This, of course, is an element in the very material conditions of capitalist social reproduction we referred to earlier as concrete abstractions. Our painstaking attention to the economic history of the region represents one element of our attempt to come to grips with this. A second dimension of social reality, instituted practices, should draw our attention toward the ways the constitution of a region—filled with sentient human beings—arises out of a history of the regulation of movement through the uses of various expressions of power. Finally, we have seen the way distant sites—from the factories of Elche to the migratory targets of the French vineyards—as well as the unregulated “movement” of rural school teachers are constituted as dangerously destabilizing, so structures of feeling too serve to constitute this very specific sense of place. Our responsibility is to accept the challenge of these multiple dimensions of place formation and various kinds of identification with locality. To select just one—to say, for example, that people of region X have a natural propensity to work long and flexible hours—and thus to

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downplay other elements of reality and thereby give (false) weight to the first, can only serve ideological purposes at the expense of insightful critical analysis.3

ideological spaces of the state and the economy We began by talking about the role of the state as a regulatory body and the role of the economy as a set of productive and circulatory instituted practices. But we now feel that this leads to a false compartmentalization: on the one hand, a Spanish state in the era of Primo de Rivera and later Franco that used personalistic and locally practiced forms of domination and repression; on the other, underground, supposedly economic practices that were beyond this authority, where agents intentionally set up informal kinds of instituted practices supposedly parallel to those of the state. Yet neither the corporatist state Primo de Rivera attempted to construct nor the corporatism of fear that was the project of the Movimiento can be understood distinct from the forms social regulation took on the ground—in some kind of (not so) civil society. In our discussion above of movement and fixity, we dispensed with a rather descriptive notion of class and reminded ourselves of the principles on which the method of class analysis were constructed—as Marx famously and colorfully put it, “the [historically specific] principles through which surplus value is pumped out of one body of people to be employed by another.” We might follow a similar approach here. Rather than begin with an assumption of the state as something that can be described with the help of a textbook in political science, we prefer to ask what multifarious instituted practices of social regulation in a given era, taken together, give form to the state.4 In these terms a distinction between the regulating state and the informal economy become untenable. Thus we dispense with informal “economy” and black “market” and think instead of the practices of one body of people directed toward accumulation and the practices in pursuit of livelihood of another body of people. We then consider these practices not simply as outgrowths from, or responses to, the (stateinduced) forms of social regulation but rather as inherent in them. This allows us to see the dialectical entwining of modes of regulation and informal practices—with certain forms of regulation shaping informality, the semi-legal nature of practices giving rise precisely to the character of regulation.


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This is especially clear when we juxtapose the personalistic selectivity of the dueños just after the war with the maneuvered world of the estraperlo. Those who were not tied into fixed labor relations like the aniaga system, especially those whose activities in the war had pushed them to the margins of acceptable society, were especially reliant on the estraperlo. As such, they were always in danger of being targeted and punished. This was a personal kind of sanction and the more isolating for the fact that neighbors could not be trusted. We know of the pervasive fear engendered by a Stalin or a Hitler, but what is striking here is the way regulation worked by targeting those who were most vulnerable. The process worked through selection and was cultivated in the well-fertilized garden of uncertainty. Aniaga relationships worked as a counter against uncertainty; policing of the estraperlo makes clear that uncertainty could be politically induced. Paradoxically, while scarcity and fear may be experienced commonly among all ordinary people in the countryside, the actual practices that result from such a setting are fragmented. For ex-Republicans and others working with small quantities in the black market, a certain kind of niche activity could occur, a trader catering especially to a small group of people whose failure to secure a ration card made them rely on him—an economy of shadows in which the shadows were cast over one set of people and then, as the regulatory light changed, were cast over another set. But here we are talking about the bare pursuit of livelihood through the estraperlo. By contrast, the estraperlo by no means had the same effect on a corredor de tierras whose fortune was made in land transactions after the war, or on someone like Pepe Iglesias, who used political connections to secure consignments of Argentine wheat. The uncertainty of others provided these people precisely with the leverage they needed for the risks they themselves could take. In this early period, then, we have a specific interweaving of state regulation and economic movement—a quite particular constitution of the “responsible” state and the laissez-faire economy. How then does this work itself out in the current conjuncture? Here we see a receding from formal regulation of the neoliberal state, once again producing uncertainty and insecurity, which themselves become crucial elements in social regulation in the supposedly civil society. As we move into this later period, again, in modified form, the selectivity of the regulatory system gives rise to uncertainty for some and hence provides leverage for the

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opportunities of those who can exploit risk. In an economy of low productivity, the uncertainty of some becomes a means of extraction for others. The informalized regional economy of the Vega Baja through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s may have many differences from the estraperlo that preceded it, but this particular kind of leverage remains. The semi-legal nature of numerous practices essential to the economy combined with the volatility within any one sector produced conditions of uncertainty—just the leverage necessary for Jorge of Ivanshoes or Paulino Romero to exploit needy workers while themselves maneuvering through the wider spheres of commerce in Belgium or Germany. We describe these situations as we have, to draw attention to their classlike nature. In some of the previously mentioned works on regional economy, Jorge’s or Paulino’s or even Roberto’s “successes” would likely be seen as the outcome of their social capital. If we were to go back to Marx’s insistence that capital is not a quantitative amount of material but a relationship, we might agree with the usage, but we would keep sight of the essential feature that turns ordinary money into capital—its exploitative component. In so doing we would draw attention to the historically specific workings-out of the complex dialectic that makes capital possible, that between productivity and regulation.

scholarship and politics We have seen that, for those seeking a livelihood, the collective experience of regulation can be one of uneven uncertainty that gives rise to fragmented agency. This was especially clear in the pluriactive pursuits of jornalero households. Such a spatially constricted arena of agency in turn gives rise to a sense of the public sphere as dangerous. People may, for example, have a strong distaste for politics and for those they refer to as políticos; they may even feel that they could well get on with their daily lives without any reference to politics as it is carried on in the public realm. But they cannot simply deny the existence of politics. This, in effect, means that everyday life has to be situated in some way vis-à-vis politics and políticos. And often this is done by obscuring the relevance of public politics. There is a sense in which people seek to maneuver through the crises they face through personal strategies that seem unconnected to the changing currents of public politics. This has a provocative parallel in academic circles. It has become fashionable, following the work of de Certeau, to place special empha-


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sis on the nature of everyday life. History and sociology, it is argued, have been full of the big issues of politics and the public sphere, to such an extent that the nature of the minutiae of domestic and intimate relations are rendered invisible. A version of de Certeau’s invocation of everyday life arises among people in the Vega Baja. It is not hard to imagine how this manifests itself among regional elites, the beneficiaries of personalistic politics, who use the social imagery we have described above. One gets things done by talking to the person one knows. One does not make grand public statements that claim universal validity; rather, things are done this way here, and that’s enough. We have also found jornaleros contrasting their own daily felt and locally discussed socialist sentiments (until very recently, nearly always experienced in the context of a memory of repression) with a different kind of perspective on los políticos. A part of them shuns politics, just as one avoids getting into a bar fight. But occasionally there is no other option—one simply has to act and act politically. This forefronting of everyday life and pushing away of the more public and open arena of politics forms a fundamental leitmotif, one that parallels the academic move of social scientists away from a preoccupation with public politics to a more pervasive and private domain of power (see Scott, 1985). We believe that this local attitude has much to do with the character of local social regulation combined with state laws and policies that have not been especially sympathetic to ordinary people and have flowered into periods of severe repression. On the other hand, from dealing with our ethnographic data and listening to the words of actual people talking about public and private ways of enacting politics and about what being político means, we get the disquieting feeling that we have to be very careful of the way our analytical concepts seek to explain social reality. This is because these selfsame concepts often provide the legitimating frame for programs of rule that then become powerful conditions within which the people we study must live. As we have noted for the way regional economic development achieved respectability, as policymakers rely increasingly on grassroots processes and meanings—“local culture”—to push forward a particular idea of economic development, people in concrete places have to adopt this hegemonic discourse. Within such a process for the production of knowledge-as-power, local people must find a way to make sense of (some element of) a social program so as to strategize and forward their claims (to the exclusion of others less able or less inclined to thus empower themselves).

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Under these conditions conceptual categories used for analytic purposes by the social scientist can take on normative value for the actors in situ. Thus, when a socialist mayor of 1995 or local representatives of the Comisiones Obreras in Crevillente speak about the regional economy in terms of a particular local culture of entrepreneurship, they are changing a descriptive category into a performative utterance. And because such terms are used this way, they have more power. This expresses nicely the power of hegemony. Yet clearly the mandated definitions of reality are not consumed uniformly. When two people like José Gil and his father voice very different ideas of what it is to be a socialist and to act democratically, we can begin to see the possibility for dialogical developments of these locally used terms. As social scientists we should not adopt the stance of the outside expert or that of the local discourse in trying to get hold of the actual discursive forces that produce a social space, particular structures of feeling and opportunities for political agency. We have to retain the complexity of reality—the continuous interaction and incorporation of different dimensions of categories social subjects use—and discern within that complexity both the dominant hegemonic forces and the subaltern responses. As we do this, we should never underestimate the power of sheer physical force and its corollary, fear, in shaping the arena where this categorical struggle takes place. Even for those who had been political activists before the Franco regime, for example, político became a derogatory term implying the expression of publicly endorsed political dissent. If, as we have argued, the naming practices of intellectuals have powerful implications for the self-perception of the people they study, then the responsibility of a more revindicative kind of intellectual engagement might be to challenge the authority of the programmatic sociological concepts that emerge from a corporatist social figuration. Wolf (2001: 375) once noted that “the relation obtaining between signifiers and signifieds is never fixed but is always potentially unstable; symbolic work must be done continually to safeguard the integrity of concepts and to undo possible alternatives.” The reordering of certain analytic categories can itself serve important destabilizing purposes. Conflict, for example, far from being swept from the page, becomes central to our understanding once we acknowledge that people pursue the leverage they need to make their own history. Throughout our ethnographic account we have uncovered the pervasive presence of conflict. Expressed in different forms through what we


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have analyzed as concrete abstractions, instituted practices, and structures of feeling, conflict appears in a frontal way as constitutive of reality. At the same time, equally as pervasive is the ideological attempt by those in power and many social scientists to expel conflict from the models of social life they produce—through organic and corporatist visions of society, through cultural homogenizing categories of agency such as the “entrepreneurial Valenciano,” through such concepts as “social capital” which seek to integrate forms of economic exploitation into acceptable forms of social relations that bind people in coherent and hence “good” and “natural” communities. We have indicated the responsibility of social scientists in producing them and then feeding them back onto reality. Yet the categories we produce as social scientists may not just feed into policy; they may also contribute to the struggles of local people on the ground. We are not interested in asking, in the present-day conjuncture of a flexible, disorganized, globalized capitalist reality, whether class is still relevant as an analytical concept. Rather, we pose the need to reinvent the crucial usefulness of class as a category of reality that captures the pervasiveness of conflict and struggle as constitutive of social relations. If, as we think, the political space has been depoliticized through the production and implementation of some of the very analytical categories social scientists have produced, it is at least possible that the reverse could also be true. In fact, the original Marxist intellectual tradition is proof of it: certain categories, such as class, feed into concrete struggles of social transformation.

Notes

1. toward an anthropological framework for studying contemporary europe 1. Thus Wolf (2001: 375): “We are dealing with structural power, abilities that flow from positions in a set of relations, positions that are strategically endowed with the power to control behavior by governing access to natural and social resources.” 2. “Knowable” needs ironic quotes, since for Williams this knowability is constructed and illusory. 3. The economist Josep-Antoni Ybarra (1998, 2001) is a vocal advocate of a regional economic model (“economic nationalism”) that stresses the relevance of regional development of policies supporting differential identity traits such as language and other aspects of local culture. 4. Multi-occupational peasant households had long interested analysts of rural societies in the Third World (Shanin, 1973; Long and Roberts, 1978, 1984). Pluriactivité, a French neologism, increasingly came to be used in the literature on European agriculture throughout the sixties. 5. The question for historians of that region—as opposed to national and European Union planners—had always been why Valencia, unlike its neighbor Catalonia, failed to achieve industrial take-off (Giralt, 1986). Nonetheless, these remained the questions of specifically economic historians; thus, despite an audience and language different from those of the policy-oriented literature, their questions were also about capital, enterprise, and viability, less about the experiences of working people. A subsequent generation of economic historians challenged this perspective and pointed to the idea that an endogenous capitalist development based on small firms had evolved in the region quite successfully (Lluch, 1976; Picó López, 1976; Nadal, 1990). It is interesting to note that the

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newer perspective was influenced from the start by the early developments of the “Third Italy” models (Lluch, 1976). 6. In search of a field site with precisely these features in 1978, Gavin had frequently been told by social scientists based in Barcelona and Madrid—with complete confidence but with no tradition of empirical study or fieldwork— that, like Quixote, he was in search of something that no longer existed. The more radical even pointed him to Engels and Lenin as evidence for their assertions. 7. Nor was the conversion from sandals to leather shoes especially recent. Driven initially by the demands of the armed services and subsequently by the growth of industry in other parts of Spain, leather shoe production began to take place alongside the continued production of alpargatas early in the twentieth century. 8. We use the loose phrase “positions of power” because these were not just the holders of formal political office. Included too were priests and employers as well as the vigilante militias of the Movimiento Nacional youth. To understand how the subsequent informal economy of Valencia operated in the sixties and seventies, it is important to recognize this tradition of an informal politics too. 9. Note that in this imagery—in which the labor/capital relationship is replaced by that of human capital and hence workers are simply minifirms within firms—the concept of exploitation in its technical (as opposed to pejorative) sense makes no sense.

2. the histories of the regional political economy 1. One effect of irrigation improvements in the early twentieth century was that land prices went up. This was especially so for areas, like Catral, where there was some irrigation water in the winter but usually none in the summer; and also for lands between Catral and Crevillente on one side and Elche on the other, where water was obtained through pumps and wells that benefited from the Guardamar (not the Segura) River. Land prices in the former area (uncertain but irrigated) increased from 8,000 to 10,000 pesetas a hectare between 1923 and 1930, while prices in the latter area often tripled or quadrupled (Monbeig, 1930: 599) as the land shifted from animal pasturage to agriculture. The people of Catral sat on a second threshold then. Where land pertained to the old irrigation system, water supplies and land ownership were one and the same. Where lands were newly irrigated, water was bought separately from a state-regulated company. The former acted to conserve old tenancy systems, since the larger landholders were also those who owned land best placed in the irrigation system; the latter, being newer and separating land from the price of water, made possible a quicker transfer to petty capitalist commercial farming. We see later that these different conditions gave rise to great social complexity in the area. 2. The family associated with this finca are commonly given the nickname “the Oriolanos”—the family from Orihuela. This refers not just to their arrival from that city but also to the association of Orihuela with the old aristocracy and the most conservative elements of the church. This account makes clear the strong presence of Orihuela in Catral’s past.


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3. A local measure still used today. In Catral, 1 hectare is equivalent to 8.479 tahullas. But the tahulla varies in size from one término to another. 4. For information regarding local archival sources, see the explanation that opens References Cited. 5. Steeped in traditional Catholicism, Carlism was set against such features of modern society as urbanism, industry, and religious tolerance. Above all, the Carlists opposed social and political liberalism, seeing in them the breaking of ties which, paradoxically, assured a basic existence. They were also opposed to Bourbon administrative centralism and were defeated three times through the century. Revived during the Second Republic, Carlism was eventually absorbed into Franco’s Movimiento. 6. El Hondo, still a place with shadows of decay and the vague hint of adventure (for those who fish and hunt), provided a good share of the cañizo for Catral’s matting manufactories. 7. Between 1890 and 1920 the production of shoes in Alicante went from 100,000 to 1,500,000 pairs, and then up to 7.3 million in 1935; a total of 8 million were produced in all of Spain (Bernabé Maestre et al., 1984: 16). 8. In this part of Spain wine was stored in large clay containers, cántaras, rather than in barrels. 9. Again we emphasize less the role of the diffusion of this experience than the unevenness of regional developments. For example, as capital and workers were thrown out of commercial vine production, alpargata production was just on the threshold of the shift into shoe manufacturing. Yet, though some agricultural capital did make its way eventually into the shoe industry (Bernabé Maestre, 1976), much more went into urban property (in Valencia, Barcelona, and Madrid). In the huerta more aggressive agricultural capital shifted into orange and hemp production, and irrigation improvements were greatly stimulated as a result. As for labor, Martínez et al. (1978: 108) note that much migration was directed to France and Algeria rather than to local industrial centers. 10. Though nine people registered themselves as shepherds in Catral at that time, all but one was charged with fewer than fifty animals. The exception herded more than five hundred animals for Rafael Lara in San Miguel. 11. In fact he had lost his arm in a workshop that processed cáñamo; see chapter 5. 12. We became aware in trips throughout Valencia, beyond the Vega Baja, that its inhabitants were commonly referred to as especially incultos— uncultured.

3. regulating social life through uncertainty and fear 1. Fernando Lorenzo served seven years in prison. He was released under Franco’s 1952 indulto. He did not receive his passport for travel within Spain until 1968. 2. Garbada Cebellán (1993) suggests that the figure went as high as 30,000 before the camp was closed in October 1939. For a personal account of the camp, see Guzman (2001: 175).

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3. “Joaquín Marín” (Hernández Moreno; see p. 71) had been in prison, but so widespread was his reputation for cunning that it was generally accepted that he had himself imprisoned to avoid being drafted into the army on either side. 4. A reminder of an observation George Collier (1987) makes of his own fieldwork in Andalucia: The fact that many fled then or migrated later means that the numbers involved here are undoubtedly greater than anything we might discover by talking to present-day residents of the area. 5. In neighboring Callosa del Segura, eight people were killed in 1940, thirteen in 1941, twelve in 1942, and two in 1943, and these are only the official records. We know especially from the Albatera evidence that many deaths were simply not recorded (Garbada Cebellán, 1993). 6. Even our most Francoist informants were unanimous in this assessment. 7. Ironically, this was not entirely the result of good management and favorable weather. Demand for foodstuffs, after all, was just as high as supply. But, as we see below, much of Catral’s agriculture was devoted to the growing and processing of hemp, and domestic demand for it was curtailed by wartime slowdowns in the industrial sector. 8. Autarchy, from autarkhos (autocratic, Gk), has two meanings, one referring to self-government or self-rule, the other referring to unlimited autocracy. Autarky, from autarkes (self-sufficient, Gk), stresses just the one: a system or policy of economic self-sufficiency aimed at removing the need for imports. When we refer to the system of autarchy, then, we stress the connection between Spain’s isolationism and the draconian command economy whose illegitimate twin was the estraperlo (see Richards, 1998). Since the English “autarchy” retains the two meanings, we use this term throughout the text. 9. Of total 1949 budget expenditures, the ministries of the army, navy, and air force received 32.74 percent while the ministry of agriculture got just 0.85 percent (Richards, 1998: 145). 10. The term estraperlo is not translatable into English. It is the name given for these kinds of activities only during this period. Black market activities have occurred in other periods and continue to occur in Spain, but they are referred to by the direct translation—mercado negro—while this is rarely the case for reference to these years. 11. Our allusion here to petty estraperlo is taken from the expression “petty capitalism,” and we later contrast the small-scale, non-accumulating economic practices of these kinds of actors with full-scale estraperlo. 12. In many cases considerable footwork was required to travel the rough ground of the inquisitive and vindictive regime. Many entrepreneurs in southern Alicante had been supporters of the Republic, often as moderates in the PSOE (Forner Muñoz, 1982). 13. Pepe was unable to adapt to the new commercial context after the end of the estraperlo, but he managed through his connections to get hold of the telephone service in the town, a key information post conceived in the sixties to be a reward to people who had done faithful services to the Francoist regime but had later become uncomfortable allies in the new “technocratic” and modernizing context of the sixties.


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14. Calling up a habitual use of the expression in the area, in 1979 UGT workers referred to this system as the hipoteca humana, the human mortgage, because their work had to be certified by the employer in order for it to exist and give them access to some of the social benefits that could be legally claimed.

4. from insecurity to dependency 1. Marx uses the term ironically, noting the necessity of “freeing” workers from ties to land in order to make them respond to the siren call of the wage. 2. A pedal bike with a small engine. 3. Conventionally in the literature en medias is translated as “sharecropping.” In the early years of working in the area, Gavin was surprised and frustrated by people’s insistence that there was either negligible sharecropping in the area or none at all. Initially he took this to be a reflection of the fact that sharecropping tenancies had no legal recognition, and hence were better not talked about. We now realize that the relationship alluded to by the expression a medias is far broader, serving a far more extensive area of social phenomena than simply the amount of the share of a crop to be divided between the two parties. Evidence for this view takes up most of the rest of this chapter. 4. As an old and faithful tenant and supporter of his amo, Tio Ciriaco was sharply aware of what was due him, but sale of the land ruptured his unquestioned faith in the good intentions of his patrón. Gavin: “When you left the land, did they pay you mejoras?” Tio Ciriaco: “They paid me 130,000 pesetas. It was worth more, but the owner didn’t want to pay me at all. I said to him, ‘You know that you can pay me more, think about what you are doing, we don’t have to get into bad feelings’ (buenamente infórmese Vd, no tengamos que ir a malas).” 5. We should begin by noting that, throughout our interviews, Tio Ciriaco exhibited a strong nostalgia not merely for Franco’s Spain but for an era still farther back, for the days of the 1920s just before he married and the early years of his marriage, the years when Primo de Rivera sought to frame Spain into a Catholic corporate society. Indeed as a younger man he had been an aggressive, even violent, Falangist. 6. Referred to broadly as “Lo de Vera,” the finca actually included at least two other smaller fincas. Officially 780 tahullas, the fully running enterprise was really more than 1,000 tahullas. One effect of having more than one finca within the overall operation was that there was more than one “main” farmhouse— three in fact. This may or may not explain why Lo de Vera is always referred to as a finca that had four major labradores. 7. “Good land” is vague yet covers a variety of features. Land quality varied according to soil depth from one microplot to another, but crucially by access to irrigated water. Lo de Vera was well situated in this respect, but despite the annual repair work undertaken by teams organized by the Comunidad de Regantes, lack of concerted investment in infrastructural repairs meant that the irrigation channels worked well below their operative possibilities. Of the crops we know were grown at Lo de Vera at this time, only hemp and horticultural

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crops such as artichokes and tomatoes required intensive irrigation. Vines were irrigated only three times during their cycle (once early on and twice later, to engorge the grapes), wheat when needed but not systematically, olives not necessarily at all. Underinvestment was built into the social relations of production described here and reflected in the crop choices. 8. This sense of the totality of production at Lo de Vera is enhanced when we remember that buckets and spades were made there, carts were built and repaired, tanned leather was bought and then cut and stitched for harnesses, and so on. Lo de Vera had many of the features of a rural, mini-industrial community (see Terradas, 1995). 9. For extensive implications of the concepts “integral” and “integralism,” and the links to Catholic corporatism and political conservatism, see Holmes (2000). 10. The common practice among the elite of having their children wetnursed was one of the strongest linkages between poor women and elite patrons, a linkage that extended to their children. Tio Ciriaco says, “Mi madre crio de leche, a media leche al hijo de Don José.” Wet nursing was not only the means through which Victoriano got his job as coachman; the child who shared his milk with Don José’s son would have an especially close, fictive “blood” relationship with the Lara family. 11. The four labradores appear to have made different arrangements with Don José. This may have had to do with the arrangements their parents made with the owner, which were passed on to them. El Rociero, for example, appears to have had only a small amount of land (8 tahullas) sharecropped and probably relied more on a direct cash payment from Don José and a certain percentage based on the success of his management of the finca. The other three had larger amounts, as much as 50 or 70 tahullas, though always on poorer land. 12. Recall the role of personal interventions of “good character” in the wellbeing of prisoners just after the war, in chapter 3. 13. In numerous ethnographies of the Mediterranean we learn of the role of gifts given to the patron, usually at feast days. The fact that these would have made a significant hole in the food supply of an impoverished aniaga working family and barely been noticed on the table of the patron again reinforces the symbolic role of this custom as the expression of simple power. We must be careful here not to think of aniaga tenancies as equivalent to the subsistence plots of Kautsky’s (1988) Prussian peasants living alongside the big estates or Meillassoux’s (1977) suggestion that African peasantries retained their subsistence plots to reproduce the labor force cheaply for capitalists. We were initially attracted to some similar idea but quickly became shocked when we discovered the absolutely miniscule size of aniaga plots. 14. Jaime’s experience of migration was shared by many others in the region; it would be hard to live for any length of time in any part of southern Spain without confronting the issue of migration and its role in people’s lives. By the time Gavin started work in the area in 1978, however, the waves of migration first to agricultural work in southern France and later to northern Europe and industrial work, both for quite extensive periods (2–10 years), had all but ceased.


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15. “Era español, de los que salieron cortando de aquí después de la guerra. Cuando llegué la primera vez me dijo, Aquí no vamos a trabajar tantas a tantas horas, sino que aquí vamos a trabajar en familia y vivir en familia . . . y vivir como las personas. A mi aquello me sorprendió un poco, pero luego me demostró que si. O sea que allí no había pan perdido para nadie. Yo allí pues . . . a lo primero, no; no porque. . . . porque no. Pero cuando estaba allí quince días sabía que podía ir al frigorífico y tomar la clase de companage que me gustara y coger el pan que quisiera. . . . En fín, que yo allí entraba y salía de la casa como el amo. . . . o sea que me dieron la confianza para eso.”

5. from insecurity to movement 1. We use the term “organic” to suggest that family members were closely involved in each other’s work: a father’s aniaga contract compels him to incorporate his son into the operations of the finca where he works; he sees his household as essentially in service in its entirety to the amo. This is quite different from households where each member works in a quite separate jornal job. 2. Here “cacique” refers not to political patrons but to workers who use patronage links for their personal benefit, undercutting class solidarity and struggle. 3. Pedro Nogales, who had been a socialist mayor of Catral in the Republic, was one such teacher. These teachers, perpetually in motion, beyond the synoptic eye of both amo and police, condensed within themselves all that the elite saw as the dangers of movement, bringing with them “ideas” and contaminating the still (but potentially dangerous) pond of local life. At Lo de Vera, Don José Mariano Lara Fernández was sufficiently troubled by these wanderers to set up his own school to be attended freely by his dependents and other “people of good repute” every Tuesday. Even in this, he showed himself to be more enlightened than his peers, who would have preferred a populace relying only on the local priest for their “betterment.” 4. Subsequently, day labor contracting shifted to one or other of the larger bars in town, a shift viewed by many jornaleros as a reflection of the informalization—the more shadowy and less public nature—of hiring practices. Beyond the transparent gaze of so public a place as the plaza, then, certainly the bar, where individual workers drifted in early in the morning in the hope of bumping into somebody in need of workers, presented a far more elusive and individualized picture than the plaza, where the large body of workers clustered together on the side opposite the church, while the employers stood on the church steps talking among themselves before making their selection of workers. 5. We note the powerful role of exile and return in post–civil war narratives. It is not simply that released prisoners were forbidden to return to their own villages and thus either returned secretly or did not return until many years later; important also is the symbolic idea of banishment and return. We frequently heard stories of such and such a person returning to the area in a certain year, only to discover later that this person had never literally been away. The idea that Republican sympathizers after the war (and to a lesser extent Falange sympathizers during the war) simply disappeared socially—moved out of the ambit

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of public acknowledgment—and then at some moment apparently returned was a frequently formulated notion among people we spoke to. Conversely, there was a strong sense that some people simply disappeared into a void. The brother of the leading Falangist, Miguel Fuentes, for example, a sergeant in the Republican army, was said to have “moved away.” Despite frequent queries as to his whereabouts, we could get no further than the idea that he had disappeared over the horizon—into a wilderness of anonymity.

6. families and entrepreneurs 1. Not only were these centers shifting from small manufacturing to industrial production, they no longer shared their magnetic forces with the older centers of Orihuela and Callosa del Segura. With the end of cáñamo production, Callosa went into rapid decline. Orihuela, an old aristocratic and churchdominated city, retained some dominance in the citrus markets but was otherwise of ever less influence. 2. By providing evidence of a variety of life experiences, we sought in the early chapters of this book to show how such universal categories as “entrepreneurial worker” and “regional culture of flexible work” derive not from a common set of historical experiences but from conflicted and divergent pasts. This is our point. We do not subscribe to a kind of historical version of methodological individualism that would have us try to match up the people we now encounter with their appropriate “ancestors” in the past. 3. The Sahara destination was a particularly hard one, often reserved for people who had been somehow related to the political Left; however, we have no evidence that this was the case for Roberto. 4. Cooperatives were the preferred means of commercialization during the Franco years. 5. El Cubano had been a corredor since he was sixteen years old and an almacenista since 1968, probably responding to the change in the political economic environment. In 1995, however, he was no longer an almacenista but a shoe manufacturing workshop owner, owning two facilities and putting out considerable aparado work. Did some agricultural distribution networks branch into shoe industry networks in the region? Or was it that the capital (material as well as social) needed for the industrial venture was the same as that needed for the warehousing business? 6. We do not know, but we suspect that the women hired would be kin or neighbors with other social ties to the family or would be the wives or daughters of providers. 7. This was true in 1978–79. By 1995, Juan Manuel Aguilar had abandoned politics and agriculture and reoriented his career toward the shoe industry. 8. The exceptions are Emilio Lorenzo, who is a schoolteacher and does the management part of the business; Paulino Romero, head of the commercial venture Catral-Export, and Poldo Arias, a full-time salesman. 9. This is akin to what Cook (1984) calls the “endofamilal accumulation” of petty commodity production families. 10. And in 1997, 420 million pesetas (Dun and Bradstreet, 1997).


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7. flexible structures and torn lives 1. He was using this workshop, which had expanded into his parents’ house, until 1986, when he moved to Crevillente, where he stayed until 1994. By 1986 he had two hundred employees in the factory. Because at this stage he was making sandals, he appears not to have used homeworking aparadoras. 2. After a couple of years he had to begin manufacturing the soles directly because this friend did not want to depend on an exclusive client himself. 3. Given the poor quality of the land, it is ironic that Realengo came into being through a resettlement scheme under Franco’s land reform program. It offers a miserable perspective of rigidly squared-off streets, no proper center, and few areas for public meeting. It is also significant that, lying between Valencianspeaking Crevillente and Castilian-speaking Catral, its population feel themselves to be members of neither community. 4. When there is less work, near the end of the season (in August the factory closes), the aparadora workforce goes down to seventy. Amanda says that these are usually those with more seniority (but this probably means also those who have remained faithful longest or are not looking for work elsewhere) and those who are the “better” workers. 5. We see below that some homeworkers have also found means of “rationalizing” the older putting-out system in a similar way. 6. Catral salaries are lower: a man with the same job earns 625 pesetas per day. The agricultural jornal for women at that time was set at 825 pesetas. 7. There is an interesting contradiction in the accounts we got from Jorge, the major capitalist in the area, and from the mayor, the major political leader. We have already seen that Jorge claims to have taken the initiative in instituting some kind of on-the-job training at Ivanshoes. But the socialist mayor, José Ramírez Muñoz, claims the initiative for himself, telling us that he thought of starting a training program for men to learn aparado work, not only to help clear the bottleneck in production but also to fight male unemployment: “I have tried to talk some empresarios into this idea of giving formal aparado courses so that men could learn the trade. But the empresarios prefer to get young girls and teach them in the factory to do just the work they need and nothing else. Then they only know how to aparar what they have been taught to and nothing else, so that when they don’t need them anymore [in a particular factory] they don’t know how to aparar any other kind of shoe. I wanted to do a complete aparado course so that one would know how to do any type of aparado for any shoe.” We pointed out that this would mean that such a workforce would be formally qualified and would have to be hired at a higher wage, which did not seem to be in the interest of the empresarios. Not only do both men claim to have taken the initiative toward on-the-job training, but Jorge argues precisely the opposite of the mayor—that he did not want to be obliged to find work for all those he employed. In saying this, he hints at the mystification both are involved in, since Jorge refers to a national program for initiating this kind of training that would have obliged him to hire those he trained. The point to be stressed, though, is that what drives a possible solution is not a social issue but a bottleneck in production, in the economy. It is the

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smooth running of the overall shoe production process in the region that is seen to be the high priority. The real problem is the production bottleneck, and only incidentally might some men find employment. 8. We have noted, too, that within the factory itself it is men who are selected for the more senior jobs, suggesting that mobility even within the factory tends to be more possible for men than for women. 9. The cuadrilla are formally constituted groups of friends, usually formed in high-school and having a high degree of solidarity over time (see Cucó i Giner, 1990). 10. This is the case with the cutting and pattern-making process, which can now be done with computers and CAD/CAM devices. 11. The following account is based on material gathered throughout our fieldwork, not just that heard on this occasion. 12. Though shoe production is by far the most widespread in the area, we could equally have looked at the rug industry or toy and doll manufacturing, which are also prevalent in the area.

8. the culture of politics, the politics of culture 1. Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War (1977) was first published in Spain in 1961. When Ronald Fraser’s Blood of Spain was published in Spain in two volumes in 1978, it was widely reviewed and talked about. Pablo knew vaguely about these books but could not name them and had not read them. What he knew of the war, he said, came from reading occasional magazine articles and what had been talked about when he was a student in Madrid. 2. Indeed, neoliberalism simply argues that interests can best be served through unencumbered access to market relations, and expression can best be voiced through consumer choice. 3. For reasons of collegiality, we do not provide the citation here. 4. Often in 1979 Gavin had found people insisting that they had spent their entire lives as agriculturalists; only as their life stories unfolded did their winding path through agricultural day labor, in a hemp workshop, and then possibly in a factory in Elche or Crevillente get revealed. Now it was almost as though the reverse was happening. 5. Although we speak here of regions and regional economies, we believe that a similar process can be seen in the use of cultural politics at the national level. Just as we find “good” cultural features of a region, so too we find “good” characteristics of Spanish national culture set against the “bad” characteristics of, for example, Basque or Catalan culture. 6. In May 2001, the ruling party abstained from a parliamentary vote that described Franco’s coming to power as a coup d’etat (Guardian Weekly, May 25, 2001). 7. Taussig (1999), who apparently applauds the mystery surrounding what he refers to as “public secrets” and chastises those whose hubris leads them to wish to explore their raison d’etre, reminds us of the way Pitt-Rivers (1971) managed to rewrite the purpose of his ethnographic endeavor in Spain to sug-


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gest it was in fact all about secrets and dissimulation, after Hobsbawm (1959) had criticized his collusion in Fascist silences. Drawn in as we all are to Taussig’s cryptic style of exposition, it is surely a shame that he takes the one case where an anglophone anthropologist was caught in the act, rather than exploring the far more vast failure to explore the repression of memories of political opposition in postwar Mediterranean Europe of which anthropologists seem especially guilty. For a discussion of Taussig, see Dunk (2000) and Narotzky (2006). 8. Opus Dei is a Catholic lay religious order whose influence in the Partido Popular Spanish government (1996–2004) is widely known and occasionally criticized. 9. From Right to Left, these included Alianza Popular (AP), Unión CentroDemocratica (UCD), Partido Socialista Obrero Española (PSOE), and Partido Comunista de España (PCE). Several extreme Right parties as well as some splinter Left parties also established themselves. The former were able in the following years to voice the political agenda of those who did not accept the new constitution or the idea of a democratic Spain. Fuerza Nueva, for example, regarded Franco’s regime as middle-of-the-road from the start and moving toward the loose agenda of liberalism for the previous twenty years. In the attempted coup of February 1981, elite members of Fuerza Nueva had hit lists of leftists in their area, who they were to round up as soon as they received the word. 10. In the early 1970s, before Franco’s death, the Communist Party, headed by Santiago Carrillo, had coined the phrase Pacto de la Libertad to explain its willingness to ally with bourgeois, monarchist, and other forces in order to accomplish democracy in Spain. This politics led to numerous meetings (asambleas, mesas, juntas, etc.) of políticos who wanted to put an end—for various reasons—to the Francoist regime (Preston, 1993). 11. Recall from chapter 6 that Juan Manuel Aguilar is an almacenista, a fruit and vegetable broker. He owns 32 tahullas of land, a warehouse, an empty lot near the warehouse, a tractor, some farming machinery, and an apartment. 12. Juan Manuel Aguilar’s dilemma appears to be a repetition in a new guise of disputes between the new and old corporatism as Franco came to power in 1936. As Juan Manuel Aguilar sees it, he is the new kind of UCD man, while the rival faction are opportunists employing an older kind of cacique politics. The tension within the UCD was particularly strong because it represented both continuity with the previous regime and change toward a new supposedly democratic regime. In the years following 1936, complaints were frequently voiced by Franco’s Movimiento-appointed prefects in the provinces that his victory was being used as an opening for the old local caciques to seek power. One of the founders of the Falange in the province of Alicante wrote to the party secretary that, “in the villages political life is hell. . . . The landscape is one of immorality and discredit to both party and Authority” (quoted in Cazorla-Sánchez, 1999: 896). Juan Manuel Aguilar took an almost identical view of the “rightist” faction vis-à-vis the moral crusade of the new UCD. 13. Martínez Alier (1985: 32–35) defines the new political regime as “liberal parliamentary corporatism.” For a more general discussion of organic forms of democracy, see Mann (2000) and Stolcke (1995).

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14. Passerini (1984: 17) mentions an informant, Maddalena, forcefully saying: “We were born socialist. And we were born socialist! My father was like that!” 15. Consider, for example, Margaret Thatcher’s war on the unions in Britain, very much continued, though with a velvet glove, by Tony Blair. 16. “When one votes one signs a contract renouncing political action in its strongest sense: that of confronting conflicts and reaching agreements in a continuous and communitarian way. . . . Through this democratic contract one yields the prerogative of action . . . to a political caste” (Bermúdez, 1992: 69). The issue of the journal Archipiélago in which the Bermúdez article appeared was titled La ilusión democrática and appeared because the radical Left felt totally betrayed by the socialist government, which was being tried for corruption and for organizing paramilitary actions in the “dirty war” against the ETA. But Article 6 of the 1978 Constitution is clear: “Political parties express political pluralism, they contribute to the formation and manifestation of the popular will and are the main instrument of political participation.” 17. During the transition period and the beginning of the new democratic regime there was a saying that captures the Left’s sense of loss of the ability to generate collective identity through political action: “Contra Franco vivíamos mejo” (Against Franco we lived better). 18. Pablo uses much the same kind of language as José Gil Jr. to describe his reluctance to become political. The son of a notorious black market trader and fascist sympathizer, Pablo visits José Jr. in his home at least one evening a month. He appears to see these visits as a kind of reciprocal arrangement in which he absorbs political aura from José and his socialist heritage while assuring the older man that he, Pablo, seeks to bring Catral through to a more enlightened socialist condition, despite itself. 19. By “hierarchical public spaces” we refer chiefly to the church and plaza in front of and proximate to the houses of Catral’s old families. This area of rectangular open spaces with shade trees contrasts strikingly with the long, narrow street that forms the jornalero neighborhood of Santa Agueda. It is significant that Pablo chose the plaza for the showing of old films, all of them banned at the height of Franco’s era. The placement of the sports complex—close by Santa Agueda—is also significant. 20. Moros y Cristianos is a folk festival of the Valencia region in which local people join “Moor” or “Christian” associations, dress up in traditional costumes, and stage on the streets the medieval confrontation between Arabs and Christians at the time of the Reconquista (the seven-century struggle to expel the Arabs from the Iberian Peninsula, ending in the conquest of Granada by the Catholic kings in 1492); see Ariño (1988). 21. See http://europa.eu.int/comm/culture/overview_en.html. It is particularly revealing to look at the 2002 call for proposals within the Culture 2000 program. The main sectors addressed are visual arts (2002), performing arts (2003), and cultural heritage (2004). In this last sector, actions should involve the following: virtual cultural itineraries, the implementation of touring exhibitions, and conservation/safeguarding of monuments or objects. See Official Journal of the European Communities, August 15, 2001.


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9. the power of ethnography 1. See Bourdieu (1986), Coleman (1988), Putnam (1993). Bourdieu notes: “I have shown that capital presents itself under three fundamental species (each with its own subtypes), namely, economic capital, cultural capital and social capital (Bourdieu, 1986). To these we must add symbolic capital which is the form that one or another of these species takes when it is grasped through categories of perception that recognize its logic” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, 118–19). As we note below, unlike the writers we criticize, for Bourdieu social capital—like all forms of capital—is fundamentally a relationship, not an isolated endowment of an actor or actors. As we see here, his concern is with the symbolic nature of these forms of capital. This is so because a science of the economy of practices is above all concerned “to uncover the laws that regulate [the different capitals’] conversion from one to another” (1992: 118)—a far cry from the concerns of those currently celebrating the value of the notion. 2. For extensive discussion of the differences between Bourdieu’s usage and more recent, often policy-embedded, uses, see Narotzky (n.d.). 3. For a brilliant discussion that argues for the complex interweaving of cultural categories with concrete abstractions in capitalist reproduction, see Sider (2003). 4. Our interest is with the historical reality of the Vega Baja. But we recognize another moment inherent in the state, which might be referred to as the “idea of the state.” Such issues are taken up by Abrams (1988). In their detailed discussion of the formation of the English state, Corrigan and Sayer (1985) speak of the fundamental historical role a “cultural revolution” that inscribed the state in the populace. Though it goes well beyond the scope of our study, we think it important to note how Gramsci might discuss the English case in terms of state building as hegemony, contrasting hegemony with the way physical domination requires less hegemonic work on the part of the state. Ordinary people’s attitudes toward the state in contemporary Vega Baja should not be seen as anything like this kind of hegemony, but rather as something closer to the outcome of state building in terms of physical domination. The linchpin becomes fear rather than what Williams (1977) and the Comaroffs (1991) refer to as the “naturalness” of historical conditions felt by citizens living within relatively pervasive state hegemony.

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Index

agency, 5, 6; fragmented, 216; political, 106 agriculture: commercialization of, 39, 40–41; crisis/decline in, 7, 121–24, 145; intermediaries in, 129–32; occupations in, 84–87, 88–89. See also hemp (cañamo); irrigation; land tenure Aguilar Gómez, Juan Manuel (pseud.), 56–57, 129–32, 183–84, 231n12 Aguilar Gómez, Mario (pseud.), 56–57, 130–32 Alegre, Arnalte, 14 Alicante, 33–34: economic transition in, 122–24; shoe production in, 123, 223n7 Alicia (pseud.), 78–80, 82 almacenistas, 129–32 alpargatas, 39–40, 49, 69, 70 Alvar, Jorge (pseud.), 146–47, 148–55, 229n7 Amanda (pseud.), 150–51, 154–55 aniagueros, 77, 89, 91, 215, 226n13; as mayorales, 109–12; responsibility of, 114 aparadoras, 150–51, 157–59, 175 apoderarados, 85 Arias, Poldo (pseud.), 135, 138–39 Arroyo Iglesias, José (pseud.), 68 autarchy, 62, 224n8 avales, 59, 60, 73 Bagnasco, Arnoldo, 206–7 banishment, 227–28n5

Bases del Trabajo, 210–11 Bauman, Zygmunt, 204 Bermúdez, Xavier, 232 black market (estraperlo), 21–22; Franco on, 67; jornaleros and, 115; opportunities of, 66, 67, 68; postwar, 62, 63, 65–66; as repression, 62, 63, 115; uncertainty and, 215 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5, 208–9, 233n1 cacique system, 70, 74, 180, 181, 185 cañizo (cane), 132–44 capital: class and, 208–9; culture and, 4; economic, 209; human, 25–26; skill as, 138, 139, 140. See also social capital capitalism, 2; historical embeddedness of, 15–16; social reproduction of, 5, 9, 11, 12, 168–69, 208, 213; uneven development and, 213; Valencian, 52 Cardona, Clara (pseud.), 155–57 Carlism, 37, 223n5 Casanova, Julián, 3 Castells, M., 15 Catral: cañizo firms in, 133–44; irrigation in, 34–35, 222n1; pluriactivity in, 50–51; polarization of property in, 35–38; in Second Republic, 42–43, 45–49 Catral-Export, 142–43 Celia (pseud.), 163–64 Certeau, Michel de, 216–17 choice, 90

247

248 class, 9–10; awareness, 114; Bourdieu on, 208–9; capital and, 208–9; crucial usefulness of, 219; placeness and, 212–13; production of, 28; reinforced by production relations, 116; reproduction of, 209; solidarity, 163 Coleman, John S., 208 collective identity, 194, 198, 212, 213 concrete abstractions, 4, 5–6, 205, 213, 219 confianza, hombre de, 87–88, 109 conflict, 211, 218–19 corporatism, neo-, 181; neoliberal, 22–23 Crevillente, 18, 20, 52, 53, 124, 151, 163, 173 culture: as bridging notion between politics and everyday life, 169, 170–72; capital and, 4; deficit of, 205; of dependency, 90; invention of, 200–201, 206; lack of, 111, 112; local, 3, 17, 24, 26, 28, 217; political agency and, 106; as social regulation, 209; virtual, 201, See also public culture; regional culture culture of fear, 72, 74 day laborers. See jornaleros(as) debt, 166 democracy: corporatism vs., 207; organic, 178 Dolores, 38–39 Eagleton, Terry, 169 economies, 84; developed, 11; embedded, 207, 209; externalities, 207; informalized, 7, 12, 15, 16, 200; transition from artisanal to capitalism in, 121, 122, 136–38. See also capitalism; regional economies Elche, 51, 52, 122, 146–47 El Podenco (pseud.), 80, 82 entrepreneurial worker, 26, 121, 143, 174 entrepreneurs/entrepreneurship, 52–53, 66, 68, 102, 131–32; local culture of, 213, 218 Esteban (pseud.), 164–66 ethnography: historical, 2–3, 75–76, 205; holistic, 205; multi-sited, 4; need for, 203–5; place in, 1–2 European Union, 199, 207 everyday life, 3, 73, 216–17 exploitation, 105, 108, 112, 116, 142, 209; “social capital” and, 209, 219;

Index uncertainty and, 215–16; within families, 142 factory work, 125–26, 161–66; artisanal, 133, 135–37, 139–40, 141–42 Falange, 57, 58, 61, 63, 71, 91 family labor, 130, 131; flexibility and, 133; partible inheritance and, 138–39 fincas, 108, 109. See also Lo de Vera Ford Motor Company, 13–14, 17 Foucault, Michel, vii, 24, 25 Fraga Iribarne, Manuel, 196 France: Spanish workers in, 95–96, 103, 104 Franco, Francisco, 19, 21, 56; on black market, 67; change after death of, 177–80 Franklin, S. H., 121 Fraser, Ronald, 57 Fuentes, Victoriano, Jr. (pseud.), 80, 81, 82, 88–89, 225n5 Gamero, Conchita (pseud.), 103–4, 159–60 Gamero Vila, Marisol (pseud.), 157–58 García, Ismael (pseud.), 190–91 García, Jaime (pseud.), 91–96 Gil, Alba (pseud.), 97–98 Gil, José, Jr. (pseud.), 187, 188–90, 192 Gil, José, Sr. (pseud.), 111–12, 187–88 Graham, Helen, 170 Granovetter, Mark, 207 Gutiérrez, Roberto (pseud.), 125–29, 132, 143–44 Harvey, David, 1, 4, 5, 9, 198, 212; on movement and fixity, 148 hemp (cáñamo), 18, 19, 39, 66–67; processing of, 48–49, 68–69, 71–72. See also alpargatas hipoteca humana, 64, 164, 165, 166, 167, 225n14 historical realism, 2, 3–4 histories, 5–6, 75 history: dialectical tensions in, 121–22 Hobsbawn, Eric J., 107–8 Holmes, Douglas, 4 homework: in alpargata production, 40, 48–49; aparadora, 150–51, 157–59; inability to see extent of, 53, 55; tensions of, 6–7, 158–59; unskilled, 159–60 honesto, 99, 107–8, 111, 114–15 households: as income seeking enterprise, 53, 98–99; pluriactivity of, 40, 50, 51, 98–99

Index Iglesias, José (pseud.), 68–70, 99 Iglesias, Pablo (pseud.), 194–99 industrial district, 3, 35 insecurity. See uncertainty/insecurity instituted (social) practices, 5, 205, 209, 213. 214, 219 irrigation, 18, 34–35 Ivanshoes, 146–47, 148 jornaleros(as) (day laborers), 77; in Bases del Trabajo debate, 211; black market and, 115; in cáñamo processing, 72; child, 99–100; female inheritance of housing of, 103; at a finca, 88–89; hiring of, 108–13; honesty and responsibility of, 99, 107, 108, 113–15; interpersonal relations of, 7, 98–106; migration of, 102–3; pay of, 47, 125; percentage of, 36–37, 47; pluriactivity of, 100, 216; in politics, 188, 189; role of mother figure in, 106; self-respect of, 99, 103, 104, 107–8, 111, 114, 190; uncertainties and movement of, 98, 116 labor: flexible, 147, 149, 167; floating, 53, 116; immobility of, 148; laws, 105; power, 167; surplus, 139. See also exploitation; family labor labradores, 45–47, 84–85 Laclau, Ernesto, 171 land tenure: in Catral, 35–38, 43, 45–47; in Dolores, 38–39 Lara, Juan (pseud.), 70 Lara Fernández, José Mariano (pseud.), 83, 84, 85, 87, 89 Law of Political Responsibilities, 60 Lo de Vera (finca), 77; agricultural occupations at, 84–87, 88–89; local groundedness of, 83, 226n8; sale of, 90; underinvestment in, 225–26nn6–7 Lorenzo, Miguel, Jr. (pseud.), 135 Mann, Michael, 178 Marín, Joaquín (pseud.), 71 market, social, 206, 207 Marx, Karl, 5, 9, 23–24 mayorales, 109, 110, 111–12; hiring of women by, 113 migration, 53, 104, 226n14; exploitation and, 116; of jornalero families, 102–3; origin of, 41–42; pluriactivity and, 41; of young men, 95–96, 161–63. See also movement/fixity Monbeig, Pierre, 39–40 Moreno, Isidoro, 201

249 Moros y Cristianos, 196–97, 232n20 movement/fixity, 19–20, 53, 124, 148; dialectical tension between, 211; exploitation and, 76–77, 116, 166; regulation and, 210, 213; repression and, 210. See also migration Muñoz Lara, Emilio (pseud.), 184 Narotzky, Susana, 8–9, 208–9 Nationalist cause, 54, 59–61 neoliberalism, 23, 24–26 Nogales, José (pseud.), 65, 66 Nogales, Virginia (pseud.), 190–92 Nogales Cardona, Fernando (pseud.), 61, 65–66 Ortner, Sherry, 1, 2 Partido Comunista de España, 44–45, 61, 182, 183 Partido Socialista Obrero España (PSOE), 44, 54, 179, 182, 183, 188, 195 past: ambivalence toward the, 186; denial of the, 17 Pereda, Camila (pseud.). 102, 103 personalism, 153 phylloxera fungus, 41 piecework, 153 place, ethnography and, 1–2, 3 placeness, 212 pluriactivity, 11, 123–24; household, 40, 50, 51, 98–99; as income seeking, 50–51, 98; in jornalero families, 100, 216; migration and, 41; in regional economies, 33 political parties, 231n9 politico(s), 191, 194, 216, 217, 218 politics: culture and, 169, 170–72; distaste for, 192–93, 194, 216; Jacobin view of, 171–72; jornaleros in, 188, 189; memories of, 169; “of the middle ground,” 185; practical issues close down interest in, 63–64, 170; retreat from public, 193–94; shame of, 180, 185 Portes, Alejandro, 15 power, 208, 209; historical ethnography and study of, 205; human capital as, 25; labor, 167; of labradores, 86; of mayorales, 111; monarchical, 24; regulation and, 17, 209, 213; structure of feeling and, 94 Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 44 public culture, 195–99 public spaces, 198, 232n19 Putnam, Robert, 208 putting-out system, 6

250 Ramírez Gamero, Tomás (pseud.), 161–64 rationing, 63 regional culture, 75, 176, 200 regional economies, 4, 10; corporatist state and, 207; emergence of, 212–13; informalized, 206, 216; language used to discuss, 173–77; pluriactivity in, 33; social capital and, 3, 143, 144, 207; Vega Baja as, 206 regulation, 74, 216; for exploitation, 209; histories of, 20–25; movement/ fixity and, 213; social, 63, 209, 214 Reixach, Frigolé, 105 repression, 21, 60–61, 74; black market as, 62, 63, 115; culture of, 61; longterm effects of, 182; movement/fixity and, 210; shunning of politics and, 217; social security and, 72–73; uncertainty and, 215, 216 respectability, 107–8 responsibility, 185, 200; of aniagueros, 114; civic, 195, 208; of jornaleros(as), 99, 107, 108, 113–15 Ribeiro de Meneses, Filipe, 105 Richards, Michael, 64, 67 Rico, Pedro (pseud.), 84–85 Robins Shoes, 146 Roldán, Marcos (pseud.), 140–42 Romero, Florencio (pseud.), 133, 135 Romero, Paulino, Jr. (pseud.), 136–38 Sabel, Charles F., 16 Second Republic, 44–45, 178; Catral during, 42–43, 45–49 self-respect. See under jornaleros(as) Sennett, Richard, 87 sharecropping (en medias), 80, 225n3 shoe industry, 13, 40, 51; aparadoras in, 150–51, 156–59, 175; boom in, 122–24; in Elche, 146–50, 155; intermediaries in, 125–29 Shore, Cris, 3–4 Silicon Valley, 207 Smith, Adam, 25 Smith, Gavin, 7, 8–9, 11 social capital, 121, 133, 216, 219; Bourdieu on, 208–9, 233n1; regional economies and, 3, 143, 144, 207 socialism, 69, 105, 106, 112, 189, 217 social practices. See instituted (social) practices social relations of production, 137–38, 142 social reproduction. See under capitalism social security, 72–73, 165–66, 167 sociology, 204; new economic, 171, 172

Index Spanish Civil War, 54–55 state, the, 160, 214; “idea of,” 233n4; social regulation by, 214 structure(s) of feeling, 5, 94, 209 Suárez, Adolfo, 181, 182 subsidiarity, 207–8 surplus value, 23–24, 214 tariff protection, 52 Taussig, Michael, 230–31n7 teachers, 107, 210, 227n3 Third Italy, 206–7 Thompson, Edward, 9 tradition: invented, 200; selective, 199, 200 transition: from artisinal to capitalist production, 40, 143, 144, 153, 154, 160, 167 tú, 110–11 uncertainty/insecurity: of day laborers, 98, 101; exploitation and, 215–16; manipulation of, 19; risk and, 143–44; in Valencia, 19–20 underproduction, 140 Unión Centro-Democratica (UCD), 181, 182, 183–84, 231n12 unions, 13, 20–21, 63, 105, 146; general strike of 1934, 60, 105; lack of interest in, 147, 165 Valencia Autonomous Community, 6, 11; economic history of, 50–53, 221– 22n5; Ford plant in, 13–16; history of movement in, 19–20, 53; history of regulation in, 20–21; lack of power elite in, 52; uncertainty in, 19–20 Vargas, Julio de, 41 Vega Baja: at end of Civil War, 56–61; local groundedness in, 83; map of, xxiv; volatility of economy in, 18–19 Wacquant, Loïc, 3, 233n1 Williams, Raymond, 4, 5, 200 wine grapes, 41, 83 Wolf, Eric, 5, 218, 221n1 women: as factory workers, 154, 161; hiring of, 113; pay of, 102, 130, 155; politically weak position of, 139. See also aparadoras; homework; jornaleros(as) Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 4 Ybarra, Josep-Antoni, 221n3

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