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9 From Las Hurdes to Terre sans pain Las Hurdes (or Jurdes), a wild and mountainous region in the province of Cáceres at the northern tip of Extremadura, abutting on to Portugal and with some fifty centers of population, has traditionally occupied a special place in the Spanish popular imagination as a source of both attraction— because of its mythic potential—and repulsion, due to its atavistic misery. In 1614 Lope de Vega published the comedy Las Batuecas del duque de Alba, presenting the region, which he knew only by hearsay, as a legendary place covered in snow. The original population of that remote and rather inaccessible area derived from Jews fleeing Christian persecution and, later on, from bandits on the run from the law or from Protestants who, fleeing the severity of the Catholic authorities, took refuge there. Some of its place-names bespeak the passage of foreign communities, such as the Camino Morisco, or Moorish Trail, a reminder of the Muslims who crossed and occasionally took refuge in the area and who also gave a name to places like La Alberca. In 1834, with Isabel II’s arrival on the throne, Las Hurdes was freed of its feudal ties yet remained an isolated, miserable enclave. Moreover, the arrival of the new century—a century of electricity and techno-scientific revolution—demonstrated that its centripetal attraction had not diminished, since instead of trying their luck in foreign climes, many Hurdanos who emigrated to America to work on the building of the Panama Canal returned to their depressed place of origin after fulfilling their contracts. The study and scientific description of Las Hurdes took a huge leap forward in 1910 when Maurice Legendre, secretary of the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid (an annex of the Institut Français), began making an annual tour of the region, 153 154 From Las Hurdes to Terre sans pain  except during World War I and in the summer of 1926, when he wrote his lengthy PhD thesis, Las Jurdes: Étude de géographie humaine, published in Bordeaux in 1927. The following year the Frenchman gave a lecture at the Residencia de Estudiantes called “Some Data on the Historical Conditions of Las Hurdes,” of which Buñuel may have learned. In the highly detailed descriptions by Legendre (a Catholic fundamentalist like Jean-Henri Fabre, who also influenced Buñuel a great deal) there is something of the vision of the entomologist, a vision also cultivated by the future cineaste when he was a student of natural science in Madrid and one that would persist in many of his films. Legendre’s gaze is that of an enlightened ethnographer, one typical of a Regenerationist, as Jordana Mendelson has put it.1 Legendre took more than two thousand photos of the inhabitants, landscapes, and dwellings of that isolated and depressed area, forty-nine of which he reproduced in his book. Following a description of the features of the physical geography of the region, Legendre devotes the greater, and most interesting, part of his book to its inhabitants and their systems of subsistence. The positivist logic of his description appears to be guided by an ineluctable determinism or fatalism. Accordingly, Legendre writes on the opening page of his study: “Nature has denied Las Jurdes all that may attract man and permit him to subsist; it has surrounded the region with barriers that are difficult to cross. . . . Ringed on all sides by dense barriers, it must have seemed a refuge to the persecuted, the defeated and the outlawed, before revealing itself to them, all too late in the day, as a desert.”2 This idea persists throughout the book, in such observations as this: “One would say that the land has made a prisoner of man. . . . Man has walked into a trap; he is caught” (3). Legendre remarks that Malthus’s theory is unfailingly fulfilled in the region (161), and referring to the adaptation to their environment of the fugitives who took shelter in Las Hurdes, he detects a sort of inverted Darwinism, since the Hurdano “evolves, except that he can only evolve by degenerating” (487). The French scholar notes that “through misery, their humanity was distorted” (lviii), according to a sinister syllogism, for “poverty breeds sickness, which breeds poverty. Poverty favors alcoholism, which makes poverty worse. Poverty favors demoralization, which makes poverty worse. Poverty causes outbursts of wastefulness, which make poverty worse” (339–40). Legendre also observes that until two years earlier—that is, until 1925...

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