The Village Against the World (22 page)

Thousands of microcosmic acts of quotidian resistance were already taking place, Delclós observed: ‘citizens refusing to pay outrageous fees for public transportation and toll roads, doctors refusing to deny free health care to undocumented immigrants, and police refusing orders to assault protesters – while people all over the country are referring to taking a Robin Hood stance on shoplifting as “pulling a Gordillo” (via the hashtag #HazteUnGordillo)’. To this we can add the firefighters and locksmiths across Spain who have refused to evict families foreclosed by their banks, and even the widely recognised explosion in
dinero negro
, the black market; cash-in-hand work has ballooned since the crisis.

Of course, poverty in Spain was not invented by the crisis – even in the heyday of the economic miracle, there were people living on the streets and families struggling to feed their children. The crash catalysed an explosion of that misery across parts of the Spanish class system which had never before experienced it. According to a 2013 report
by the FOESSA Foundation looking into social exclusion and the crisis, 380,000 Spanish households had been without a single employed member before the crisis: by the end of 2012 this number had more than quadrupled, to 1.8 million. The numbers continue to horrify, but they do so in the abstract. The great significance of Sánchez Gordillo’s latest intervention was that it highlighted what no one else in power would dare: ‘that the crisis has first and last names, faces and ID cards’.

I never encountered
Schadenfreude
in Marinaleda directed at the architects of the collapse, much less, of course, at its victims. The response of the villagers, like that of Sánchez Gordillo himself, was sombre and pessimistic: this is what capitalism does, this is what any kind of centralised power does. The Spanish people, who have suffered so much in the past, even the relatively recent past, are now condemned to suffer again. One 15-M activist in Seville told me that one of the main reasons there had not already been a revolution was cultural: Spaniards were stoically resigned to the fact that their earthly life would be a ‘valley of tears’. And like the good Catholics they were, they would endure the pain.

By 2011,
marinaleños
were seeing the effects on their friends and relatives in neighbouring
pueblos
and farther afield: the girlfriend in Casariche whose business had folded; the friends in Estepa who could only get odd jobs, or a couple of months of seasonal work in the
mantecados
factories; the cousins in Valencia facing eviction from their home.

By 2013, they were starting to notice the effects inside the village, too. In among my scrawled notes from the Marinaleda February
carnaval
, the pages in my notebook swollen by beer stains and dusted with loose threads of rolling tobacco, I found one sentence that stood out, underlined three times, from a middle-aged local called Pepe: ‘It’s a bad time for Marinaleda – but it might be a good time for the revolution.’

8
The End of Utopia?

In retrospect, things got a bit out of hand in August 2012. The supermarket expropriations and ensuing media mayhem, as well as the surrounding three-week march and land occupations, catapulted Sánchez Gordillo into the public eye. He was a major problem for Rajoy’s government and their allies – even for their parliamentary enemies in the PSOE – because he made it clear the crisis was not an unavoidable act of God, but a consequence of their economic and political system. Therefore it was something that could be contested, perhaps even defeated. With the Robin Hood mayor in the spotlight, more and more people were talking about Marinaleda, and what it stood for.

While the message that propelled him there had been deadly serious, the danger is, when you reach a certain level of recognition in contemporary pop culture, that the message canbe obscured by the spectacle. His fame reached its first peak of bathos in September that year, when the global youth clothing chain H&M created a Sánchez
Gordillo t-shirt. Appropriately, the design was part of their new ‘Zeitgeist’ collection, and showed a hand grasping an ear of maize, accompanied by the words ‘Food to the people! No world hunger’ – Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo’. H&M withdrew the design within four days, issuing an official apology that they hadn’t intended ‘to take sides’ and were ‘sorry if any customers have felt offended’. It was a sign of how charged the supermarket raids were, in the context of capitalism’s crisis, that a message like ‘food to the people’ might be deemed controversial, or even offensive.

In the winter that followed, Sánchez Gordillo was to receive the ultimate accolade in Andalusian pop culture: he was honoured in a
chirigota –
a unique, phenomenally popular form of satirical folk song, emanating from the province of Cadiz. Traditionally,
chirigota
groups comprise around ten to fifteen people, who sing chorally in the streets and squares, in costume, performing a repertoire of self-composed songs about the state of the nation, the government, or society; sometimes pruriently, always laced with wit. Suppressed by Franco, they have made a huge comeback in recent decades, and the annual knockout competition for best
chirigota
group, as part of the Lenten carnival in Cadiz, has become a national cultural and TV event.

But Sánchez Gordillo wasn’t just the subject of a satirical song, as politicians often are – he was the model for a group’s entire repertoire: Los Gordillos, they called
themselves. Every detail of their outfits was based on how he had looked in the news reports the previous August: twelve adult men dressed in white shorts, red check shirts, green keffiyehs, sun hats and desert boots, wearing bushy grey beards, and incorporating props like supermarket trolleys, Andalusian flags, and loud-hailers into their performance. They were one of the hits of the 2013
carnaval
, reaching the quarter-final of the official competition and winning the hearts of many aficionados with songs about the supermarket raids performed in front of a giant Mercadona backdrop.

While his notoriety was skyrocketing and the media requests continued to flood in, the day-to-day operations of the village were not disturbed by this Sánchez Gordillo mania – Marinaleda was robust enough to withstand controversies over t-shirt slogans and irreverent comedy songs. They had endured worse. But the economic crisis was starting to have an impact on the village in less visible ways.

Two weeks after Spain’s second general strike of the year, on 30 November 2012, a three-day ‘march of the women’ from Marinaleda to Seville was due to arrive in the city’s historic Plaza de España for a rally, and to seek an audience with the regional government to discuss the crisis and its effect on farming communities. It was an expression of the sporadic feminist orientation of the village’s politics. ‘Everything we have won here, has been thanks to the women’, Sánchez Gordillo once told me, and although some aspects of Spain’s old-fashioned gender roles persist
(especially when it comes to housework), women are over-represented on the village council and in general assemblies.

The square was almost deserted at midday on a Thursday out of season, with just a few tourists inspecting the mosaics and an ice-cream seller in a daydream, untroubled by custom. Into this tranquillity arrived SAT and the
marinaleños
: a couple of hundred marchers, most of them women, accompanied by two large, slow-crawling vans with numerous speakers strapped to their rooves. Chants about revolution and the bankers rang out into the empty plaza as they parked up outside the Andalusian regional government offices.

Their march over, packed lunches were distributed: mortadella sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil and cartons of orange juice. A local TV news crew and a couple of regional newspapers arrived. There were a lot of keffiyehs, a lot of SAT flags, a lot of sensible walking clothes, and smiles all round – ordinary people who are used to struggle as a way of life. A woman wheeled a buggy past me, and it took me a moment to notice it was being used to transport a bundle of Andalusian flags. When you routinely go on three-day marches to make a point about farm subsidies, it’s fair to say it comes with a uniquely intense attitude to political engagement, to the way politics sits in your everyday life.

The speeches began, and Diego Cañamero proceeded to explain – in as fiery manner as is possible, given the subject matter – why it was necessary to abolish
the
peonadas
, the daily record-keeping system by which
jornaleros
receive social security payments. ‘We must eliminate the rural employment plan, and eliminate capitalism,’ he continued. With his SAT t-shirt and jeans, cropped silver hair, and reddish-brown skin, clean-shaven and weathered like old leather, he always makes a good partner to Sánchez Gordillo.

I hadn’t noticed
el alcalde
at first: he did not seem to be one of the four speakers on the podium, and I thought perhaps he had skipped a march for once. Then I spotted him deep in the crowd, about halfway back – an unusually modest position for a man who is normally always at the forefront, in good times and bad. He was not talking, but listening; not giving, but receiving instruction and inspiration. The scene looked slightly askew.

After the revelation that no, no one from the government was going to come out and talk to them, they held a ceremonial burning of the
peonada
forms for the cameras, accompanied by a chant of
contra el paro, lucha obrera
(against unemployment, worker’s struggle), followed by a rendition of
Andaluces, levantaos
, the Andaluz hymn, sung powerfully and slowly, right fists raised high.

As the crowd mingled and dispersed, and Cañamero did a few interviews, Sánchez Gordillo just seemed to slink off quietly. Some of the SAT trade unionists from outside the
pueblo
, who hadn’t met him before, asked to have their photo taken with him. He graciously agreed to each request in turn, shook hands and kissed cheeks, smiling a little
wearily, but content to hear their expressions of admiration. He carried the aspect of a jet-lagged celebrity being whisked through a mob of fans to his hotel. And before I could approach him myself, he was gone.

The
Plan de Empleo Rural
(PER), the rural employment plan, is a government social security scheme introduced in the 1980s, designed to subsidise the lack of work in the fields outside of harvest time and prevent another mass exodus from Spain’s rural areas.
Jornaleros
who have worked in the field at least thirty-five days, and thus picked up thirty-five
peonadas
, are entitled to six months’ social security payment of €400 per month. The olive harvest had been particularly bad that year, however, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for some people to meet that thirty-five-day minimum, and thus, to survive.

The spectre of the early 1980s, and rural families going hungry, was returning with a vengeance. Even the Andalusian PSOE joined SAT and the
marinaleños
in a call on the government to address Andalusian rural poverty and reform the PER, instead of, as Andalusian PSOE number two Mario Jiménez put it, just ‘asking the saints and virgins’ for salvation.

Eventually, in January 2013, they lowered the qualification for the subsidy to twenty
peonadas
per person. But even that was not enough; and again, it was not just SAT saying so. Spain’s biggest union, the CCOO, was also convinced many would not be able to put food on the table. The
peonadas
became the only discussion topic at a number
of general assemblies in Marinaleda at the start of 2013. The mayor’s CUT colleagues from the local council explained they could fight, and perhaps they should fight – but they must be prepared for the fact that they might not win this one. Calling for across-the-board welfare payments for all poor Andalusian
jornaleros
, irrespective of whether they’d met the twenty days quota, was ideologically and practically necessary; but they could see how bad government finances were – the trend was to make swingeing cuts to social security, not expand it – and the mood in the village was not optimistic.

One thing stood out about these bleak messages about the lack of money coming into the village, something I first noticed at a general assembly in December 2012: the messages weren’t being delivered by Sánchez Gordillo. He wasn’t in the Sindicato that evening, leading the discussion, as he would have been normally, and he was absent again when the
peonadas
were discussed at further general assemblies in January. I didn’t realise it at the time, but Sánchez Gordillo’s unusually demure presence, buried in the crowd in Seville that day, was one of his first and last public appearances for months.

Spain is a country that lives to gossip, and the Spanish press and TV had fixated on the Robin Hood mayor all summer – yet they had not yet realised anything untoward was going on with him. It was only when I arrived back in Marinaleda that titbits of information slowly started leaking out of the tightly-bound social networks of the
pueblo.
The first thing I heard was from someone in Palo Palo, who said when I showed them Sánchez Gordillo’s book that they’d heard
el alcalde
was a bit unwell, but were not sure what the problem was. Is that why he didn’t seem to be chairing the general assemblies then? I asked León. ‘He’s not doing them for the moment, no,’ León said curtly.