"Being politico " in Spain: An Ethnographic Account of Memories, Silences and Public Politics

This article focuses on attitudes toward participation in public politics (being político) in contemporary Spain and the ways in which they have been affected by the violence and fear generated by the Francoist regime (1939–1975). Social memories and silences are an important part of the processes that produce a social space for public politics today. Strategies and agency regarding basic everyday struggles in the present are deeply embedded in the history of the practices and meanings of being político after the Civil War. We will use an ethnographic approach based on fieldwork carried out in 1978–1979 (Gavin Smith) and in 1995–1996 (Gavin Smith and Susana Narotzky) in the area of the Vega Baja del Segura, the irrigated plain in the basin of the Segura River on the southeastern Mediterranean coast. ¹

The Background: History and Regional Work Relations

At the turn of the twentieth century the Vega Baja, south of Alicante, presented a mixed pattern of agriculture and manufacturing that was strongly interdependent. Social relations of production in agriculture were structured through a series of links of patronage that articulated landowners with large tenants, and the latter with landless workers. However, the degree of “dependence” and political submissiveness was very different for “free” labor (i.e. day laborers without land, jornaleros) and “dependent” workers who were “favored” with tiny plots of land on informal annual leases. For these, the tension of having to blend personal, affective and work uncertainties and responsibilities was a very important aspect of their everyday livelihood experience and tended to particularize problems and the strategies designed to cope with them. By contrast, “free” day laborers were highly mobile, which made them aware of wider regional and national labor struggles organized around trade unions and the use of public politics to advance their claims.

In the contractual setting of “free” market relations, struggle took place mainly through strikes and revolutionary action, that is through public politics and the use of organized collective confrontation. In the “dependent” relations setting, making a living or forwarding claims took, for laborers, the form of personalized relations, the construction of affective and reciprocal ties of patronage responsibilities. Likewise, these affected employers who chose to rely on household labor organization, kin and friendship networks to secure and control labor and capital. Thus, two very different and overlapping processes were linked in a dialectical tension between security and uncertainty, private vs. public politics, in the social reproduction of this (proto-)regional economy.

With the advent of the Francoist regime in 1939 the National-Catholic organic model of social relations was imposed on all aspects of society, supported by violent repression and a closed and state-administered economy, the autarquía (autarky). In this new context corporatist institutions, economic policies and an ideology imposed through fear supported highly personalized networks of social relations of production. This produced a totalitarian closure of the public sphere. In the later years of the regime things began to change in part due to the Cold War and the U.S.’s increasing and open support for the Franco regime. Large-scale industrialization of a “Fordist” type took place especially after 1957, class unions began to organize within the “vertical” corporatist state-unions of the regime, and collective spaces of dissent slowly opened at great personal risk. Then, over the past 30 years the particular mix of agricultural and industrial activities that had characterized making a living in the Vega Baja since the end of the nineteenth century has strongly tilted toward the industrial sector, particularly shoe manufacturing. During the 1960s and early 1970s large factories were established in the towns of Elche and Crevillente, although home-based piecework remained a complementary device to increase production capacity during peak production seasons. ²

The present-day structure of industrial production in the area comprises large...