José Antonio Labordeta, in an intervention in the Congress of Deputies.EFE
Naming José Antonio Labordeta in Zaragoza is like invoking a secular saint.
He was in life, but that identification that only some people manage to have with his land multiplied with death.
“Dust, fog, wind and sun/ and where there is water, a garden;
/ to the north, the Pyrenees: / this land is Aragon”.
Without a doubt, he was the architect of awakening the pride of a land that felt forgotten, where its inhabitants were resigned to postponement in a Spain in which conflicts were always led by others.
Labordeta, together with other young intellectuals, generated in the sixties and from Teruel, where they had obtained their first position as teachers, an incipient movement of unruly poets, who gradually opened up to various artistic professions, until they established their base in Zaragoza,
In this environment, the voice of Labordeta prevailed, possessing the severe and deep timbre of the maños, and composed jotas or albadas, songs of the land, with lyrics that vindicated that ignored population of the small Aragonese towns.
The teenagers of the seventies began to listen to his songs with surprise, because they had nothing to do with the style of the protest song of that time;
Those of us who had lived with the traditional jota as children were moved by the popular melody, but we also celebrated the rebellion of the lyrics.
More information
Labordeta continues to bother 12 years after his death
Watching the documentary dedicated to his figure,
José Antonio Labordeta.
A man without more
, various emotions are experienced: that of observing how the desire for freedom overcame fear and how some intellectuals were convinced that culture was an effective weapon in the struggle to awaken desires for change in a population that had been well off for decades to a regime that was dying at the same time as its dictator.
The life of this man without more, who was really unique, is a paradigm of the vital and political path that the anti-Francoists traveled.
The main narrator of the story is the singer-songwriter's wife, Juana de Grandes, also a teacher, who appears to us as an attractive, intelligent and sparkling woman, a counterpoint to the sometimes tormented man that Labordeta was.
Her three daughters contribute to the portrait of a man surrounded and loved by his women who follow the steps of a life guided by the diary that the father and husband wrote in secret, as a relief and with no intention of being published or read.
That man who invented, together with other traveling comrades, a pride of the Aragonese land that in no way resembled exclusive nationalism, but rather consisted of claiming the right to intervene in the decisions of the great homeland from the girl, came to have a seat in Congress.
They were eight intense years of work, but the media that ended up turning the anecdote into a caricature summed up the intellectual's political career at that moment when the singer-songwriter told the PP deputies to hell, who with insults and ridicule did not let him speak. .
It is an important scene in the documentary because it explains that stage in its full dimension.
It happens in the legislature in which Aznar had won the absolute majority and with dreams of rancid imperial Spain he had entangled us in the ignominious war in Iraq, from which, surprisingly, he is still taking advantage of, despite the fact that its promoters are considered architects of having altered the fragile international balance with lies.
Well, it is in that environment that one day Labordeta reads some anti-war verses by Miguel, his poet's brother, while Aznar listens to him with a gesture of contempt from his seat.
He never saw fit to greet this man without further ado, says Labordeta.
And it is in those days when the foundations of parliamentary
hooliganism
were laid : Labordeta tried in a session, well late at night, to be heard without success: a group of deputies laughed, shouted, sent him to Teruel to fry asparagus with his backpack;
It was then, when the man, already lost patience, expressed with a cunt!
he fed up with him and he sent to hell that group, self-styled as the boars, who based and base their political task on undermining the spirit of the adversary, on ridiculing him, until he explodes.
Although it is unfair to reduce a vital, cultural and political trajectory to an outburst, Labordeta was then the voice of the people.
How good tacos sound when said by a proper man, a man without more and, therefore, extraordinary.
Subscribe to continue reading
read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber