Rebordering the Mediterranean

Boundaries and Citizenship in Southern Europe

Liliana Suárez-Navaz

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781782381907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Offering a rich ethnographic account, this book traces the historical processes by which Andalusians experienced the shift from being poor emigrants to northern Europe to becoming privileged citizens of the southern borderland of the European Union, a region where thousands of African immigrants have come in search of a better life. It draws on extended ethnographic fieldwork in Granada and Senegal, exploring the shifting, complementary and yet antagonistic relations between Spaniards and African immigrants in the Andalusian agrarian work place. The author's findings challenge the assumption of fixed national, cultural, and socioeconomic boundaries vis-à-vis outside migration in core countries, showing how legal and cultural identities of Andalusians are constructed together with that of immigrants.

1. PEOPLES OF ALFAYA

The Relocation of Peasants in Southern Europe

The overall theme of this chapter is the analysis of the transformations of Andalusian peasants’ identity and class position over the last fifty years in the Valley of Alfaya. First I review the abject situation of jornaleros, or day laborers, in post–Civil War Spain (from the 1940s thorough the 1950s); their experience of stigmatization during their forced emigration, and the changes emigration brought upon autochthonous notions of rights (from the 1960s through the early 1970s); and their newly won economic autonomy through innovative family-based intensive agriculture (in the 1970s). By the early 1980s, class positions had equalized. Civil, political, and socioeconomic rights definitively replaced the previous politics of fear, and a progressive social majority representing many of the dispossessed of earlier years began to assume power at the local level (and soon in the central government as well). By the late 1980s the “social vision of the village” appeared to be possible, though it would soon be followed by disappointment. As a solidary class consciousness and a vibrant public sphere have been lost in an increasingly capitalistic Alfaya, peasants have begun to assess what they refer to as the price of modernization. They find themselves in a new relationship with the state, dependent on subsidies and informal economic practices to maintain their new standard of living. Today they see themselves as vulnerable people with rights. Peasants see those rights as strongly fought-for consequences of their own actions and work. Very soon they will be forced to reconceptualize and negotiate them anew according to new criteria of belonging, criteria such as nationality, culture, and citizenship.

Analysis of the emigration period shows that one cannot assume that autochthonous notions of rights and the legitimacy of law correspond to political philosophy manuals. Nor can one assume as a given the social criteria of belonging to an imagined community (in particular whether these are conceptualized as culture or ethnic difference). Rather, one must study how these criteria are created and changed. For this purpose, in the last section I examine the village’s narratives of origin, where much of villagers’ self-conception as a community is embedded. I show that many of these narratives expose an inclusive criterion of belonging based on “being a person,” implying respect for certain core values in the relationship with others and in work; this self-conception sets the stage for the initial reception of African immigrants in the valley as described in chapter 2. At the same time, one can find the seeds of certain exclusionary criteria that will prove crucial for later developments in the relationship between villagers and African immigrants.

Although Spanish peasants did not yet realize it, immigrants coming from Africa beginning in the mid 1980s were to become a force in relocating them as peasants of southern Europe: as citizens with rights more extensive than those of foreigners; as reluctant enforcers of the European Union’s southern frontier and its closest point to Africa; as newly privileged nationals. Class, for peasants, ceased to be the defining factor of their social position; at the same time, peasants came to see and actively contribute to the marginalization of a new “wretched class” (Carr and Fussi 1979, 8), now defined along the lines of ethnicity and legal status.

Peasants in Francoist Times

I will begin with a brief description of the social panorama in which most adults in Alfaya were raised. It is worth remembering that this period began after a traumatic civil war: two generations matured in times of famine, ruralization, and class polarization maintained through an authoritarian ideology based on national Catholicism.¹

Peasants became a political force in Spain, and especially in Andalusia, a region dominated by a few latifundistas (quasi-feudal owners of large landed states) from the second half of the nineteenth century. Anarchists, communists, and socialists struggled for years to achieve agrarian reform, involving redistribution of the land and reforms in the relations of employment. Some of their claims found political channels during the Second Republic.² The establishment of the Francoist dictatorship, which existed from 1939 to 1975, meant the destruction of organized labor, the repression of those who had sided with the Republic, and an economic nationalism of autarky.

The governments of western Europe ostracized Spain as a fascist state, while the Franco government legitimated its isolation with a nationalist demagoguery that emphasized the need to “save” the unity of Spain as united by its imperial past and cultural uniqueness, one that was symbolically opposed to that of the Europeans.³ Meanwhile, the regime conjured up the category of “peasant” as the essence of the “Spanish race” [sic], as “noble and rightful,” and as the “moral reserve of the nation.” This idealization of the peasantry (or soberanía del campesinado, in the words of Sevilla Guzmán 1979) coexisted with an otherwise “agrarian fascism” that reinforced the class-based rural social structure. Famine and rationing lasted for over a decade. Regional disparities increased, and while Catalonia and the Basque Country slowly became industrialized, the laborers of Andalusia continued being “the most wretched class in Europe” (Carr and Fussi 1979, 8).

Well after the Spanish Civil War, by the end of the 1950s, the social structure of the Valley of Alfaya consisted of three main groups: (1) a small and traditionally powerful group of caciques (political bosses) who effectively controlled economic, political, and legal institutions;⁴ (2) a preponderance of small-propertied peasant families whose domestic economy had to be complemented with salaried work on the lands of elites, either as day laborers, land renters, or sharecroppers;⁵ and (3) a heterogeneous group of day laborers without land, or jornaleros, in the strict sense, also known in the valley as choceños, or cortijeros.⁶ Elites used discretionary power to keep smallholders tied to the land yet dependent on their power to contract them.⁷ The lack of autonomía, as powerfully demonstrated by G. Collier in his work in Huelva, united jornaleros with or without land in their subordination to caciques: “autonomía epitomized the proprietor’s prerogative of protecting his family honor and developing his family interests as he wished, free from others’ control” (1987, 5; see also the concept vivir de lo suyo, or “live on their own,” used by García Muñoz 1995).

Law and order was locally controlled through representatives of authoritarian power, the caciques, the administrative civil servants, and the Civil Guard. Caciques and civil servants traditionally used their power to engage in clientelism, patronage, and paternalistic relationships with their subordinates, exchanging “favors” (influences, documents, promises of help, access to social benefits such as health care, education, and subsidies for the most needy people) for submission and exploitation in labor relations.⁸ Caciques used political power to obtain the “circulation permits” required to transport wheat, selling this surplus production in the black market. They controlled and restrained alternative strategies of survival for those who lacked autonomía (see first section of chapter 3; see also Fraser 1979; Martínez Alier 1971).

Little could be done to undermine this agrarian system at the time. After the dramatic repression of anarchists, communists, and socialists who struggled in the Second Republic for agrarian reform, an imposed “apoliticism” prevailed among the offspring of the vanquished in the postwar years (Collier 1987). The poor were forced to maintain a submissive attitude, humble and obedient to the wishes of employers, political bosses, and state security forces. In general, it was the employer who gave references attesting to a worker’s “ideological purity” or whether or not he was “trustworthy,” thus condemning those who did not submit to employers’ rules to permanent hiding, emigration, or nomadism (Sevilla Guzmán 1979, 176). As one of my neighbors in Alfaya put it, such social positions were maintained through the forces of fear: “There are still rich and poor people, but now things are different because we have leveled off [nos hemos igualao]. Before, there was that tremendous fear; one could not say a word to the cacique—we had to talk to them with the head bent downward. We coped with everything because we were afraid of their power, of the possibility of reprisals” (R.G., summer 1995).

I wish to highlight three basic features of the agrarian system that, although redefined, still play an enduring role in the rural landscape of the 1990s. First, we find deeply embedded practices supporting an underground economy and conscious fraud against the state that conform to a historical habitus shared across classes. Second, class differences are maintained and reproduced through a politics of fear based on an authoritarian political system that used security forces against poor and ideologically suspicious people. Third, the system effectively linked forced nomadism and hiding with chronic poverty to create a reserve army of agrarian labor to keep wages down. As I will show in detail in the third chapter, reproduction of these features in today’s rural Andalusia also maintains a symbolic form of domination based on the naturalization of these latter groups as different from or marginal to the imagined community.

Rights and the Experience of Emigration

In this section, I examine preexisting notions of rights and cultural difference among Alfayan peasants in relation to their experiences of migration, as a necessary preliminary task to understanding the way African immigration was received in the late 1980s. The ethnohistorical material collected among Granadan peasants of various generations prevents us from projecting upon them a liberal and individualistic notion of justice produced in democratic systems governed by the rule of law. Rather, debates about rights among Andalusian peasants in the context of today’s immigration should be understood as being shaped by the peasants’ historical experience of migration and their position in the social structure. Their understanding of cultural difference is not mainly related to “exotic” cultures; rather, it is constructed from a bitter experience of recent emigration to Europe. The assimilationist⁹ idea that prevails among peasants is not informed by a strong and historically rooted notion of what makes a citizen, as in France, for instance, but rather by a painful experience of having being excluded from rights warranted to nationals in the European countries where Andalusians lived as emigrants in the 1960s and 1970s.

Most people I knew in Alfaya’s valley withstood humiliating treatment during the Francoist regime because of a lack of food or lack of autonomía. As we have seen, agrarian fascism managed to keep both small landowners and jornaleros without land linked to Alfaya, dependent on a labor market fully controlled by caciques. Those who were forced to emigrate outside Alfaya before the 1960s did so only temporarily because they were not welcome to stay longer than needed in the Andalusian agrarian sites where they were hired. These emigrants, many of whom I interviewed in the 1990s in Alfaya, lacked basic human rights and experienced only an authoritarian regime, if not the horrors of the Civil War that brought it. As late as the 1960s, nobody paid taxes or believed in institutionalized justice as being neutral and fair; nor did they consider the state as a guarantor of general collective interests.

The early 1960s marked a shift in Francoist policies away from autarky and toward new economic policies to foster industrialization and create a market economy in Spain. This shift, Franco told the nation in his 1964 New Year’s message, was the beginning of a “new era” (Carr and Fussi 1979, 54). Rapid, uncontrolled growth produced economic polarization and the impoverishment of rural regions such as Andalusia. Poor peasants began the rural exodus to more developed areas, participating in the broader “Mediterranean reserve army of labor” for northwestern European countries. Andalusians’ experiences with Catalan or European racism against them have been extensively reported by novelists and social scientists.¹⁰ In this context, Alfayans began a forced emigration, which once again spread the community across the bounds of the local territory, this time across Spain and Europe. Some of the people who left definitively settled abroad, changing their permanent residence, though most still come to the valley during vacation periods. But most Alfayans returned to the valley in the 1970s and 1980s, coinciding with a general national trend of return of former emigrants and exiles.

In the Valley of Alfaya, and more generally in Andalusia, the battle for rights is a long-standing affair. As peasants and as Andalusians, many of them have been discriminated against, exploited, and alienated. They have been characterized as the most folkloric, Catholic, and rabid nationalists (Burgos 1972), as well as quintessential the perfect examples of the backwardness and ignorance of southern Europe and of the cultural difference of Catholics and Mediterraneans (Castles and Kosack 1985).¹¹ Peasants’ notions of “basic rights” are closely related to the notion of autonomía referred to previously: autonomy for feeding one’s family and for refusing orders that endanger the pride and dignity that every person is entitled to defend. As a neighbor in his thirties told me: “This valley has witnessed the most essential Andalusian struggle, that of the jornalero, not even for land but for bread. For us, emigration was a blessing because those in power here wanted us tied. My family would go to beg to [a friend’s grandfather’s] house, and sometimes they would not even look at us. As if we were animals, I say! That is what is not fair.” Listening to such a young villager, one can imagine the situation during Franco’s dictatorship, when the majority of the village, small landowners or day laborers who could not live on their own, were faced with the attitudes of those in powerful classes, as masterfully articulated by Arguedas: “God made man with a destiny that men would have to split into two groups of individuals, one superior to the other. The superiors have the duty and the right to command, to write laws, to dictate orders to which inferiors must submit so as to keep social peace” (1968, 204f.).

Because of the labor exploitation, political submission, and all-too-frequent personal humiliation they have experienced, peasants have historically developed a profound egalitarianism based on the notion of being a person. The struggle for recognition as “persons” is thus the most basic fight for human and civil rights, as they are conceptualized in the autochthonous tradition of Andalusian peasants. This is not an abstract or individualistic notion, in contrast with the current notion of citizenship and human rights. On the contrary, being a person refers to a set of communal rules and values that affect all members of a given collective and the...