Spain, 1929: when young people were happy and believed in the future (which overwhelmed them)

In the cafeteria, at almost nine o'clock on a cold Friday night, the whiplash resounds at the next table.

—That's how my fucking life has been —the young waitress says to a client her age—: From Monday to Sunday, working;

and the day off, to study.

And when they ask me in interviews why I want to work with them, she would answer: "Because the fridge doesn't pay for itself."

Almost a century ago, in 1929, youth breathed very differently.

That year the Football League was born, the cinema was experiencing a

, the economy was growing at 4% and the foxtrot or jazz entered Spain as a legacy of the passage of American soldiers through the Great European War.

Gone was the painful and Azorinian essentialism of 1998, now appeased by a nascent hedonism, the futuristic passion for speed or the irruption of a new woman.

Even the simple act of removing the hat, which congested and aged the ideas, smelled of change.

For this reason, the newspaper

promoted a youth survey.

To hear its heartbeat.

A total of 1,326 young people (almost all male) responded by letter, and the published responses aroused great interest.

Now, that valuable social thermometer —the portrait of a generation just before the start of the convulsive 1930s, with a republic of hope, a bloody civil war, a brutal and starving postwar period, and a dictatorship that would change everything and forever in life. of those young people- emerges in a singular book:

.

(Taurus), written by Juan Francisco Fuentes, professor of Contemporary History.

Fuentes has been a detective to see what happened to some of those boys —teacher, aviator, mechanic, farmer, civil servant, pharmacist, student, traveling salesman…— who dreamed out loud.

That they glimpsed tomorrow before the future brought them back to the past.

Or what is worse: to political reprisals, exile, prison or death.

The vision of that youth, almost coinciding in time with the Generation of '27, is synthesized by the author: they had "blind faith in the future, an Olympic contempt for previous generations and a captivating sensation of having been born in an unequaled era." in the history".

They trusted in the future.

And as Juan Francisco Fuentes summarizes: “The greater illusions, the greater disappointments”.

Student protest in Madrid, in 1929.ullstein bild Dtl.

(ullstein picture via Getty Images)

Something like that happened.

The fervor was enormous.

Ignacio Uría, 23, answered: "Our time is something formidable in terms of possibilities."

Nieves B. de Quirós, 21, wrote: “I don't trade our time for any of those in history;

I feel so good in it”.

Mainly, "because of the independence that women have achieved (...) without the need to resort to marriage as the only

".

José Capitán pointed out: “Our time is full of promises”.

Another 20-year-old student (DJBR) added: "Our time is exuberant, full of vitality, joy, self-sufficiency."

And Joaquín Sobrino, 23, opined: “It is not life that drags us, but we who go before it;

better, on her, marking in her problems the imprint of our spirit”.

Something like that didn't happen.

In the survey, Jesús Chasco, 27, a teacher at the Protectorate schools in Nador (Morocco), made a political harangue: "The homeland is Humanity, without distinctions or trifles, and the greatest work of our youth will be (what has begun to be) demolish this word letter by letter”.

Demolish the old idea of ​​homeland.

"The present?

It doesn't interest me as much as the future.

These moments of transition to a more perfect regime seem to me, which is already looming on the horizon and will arrive step by step, ”he said.

It came in the form of a Republic.

And in June 1936, Jesús was elected president of the Federation of Education Workers of Melilla, linked to the UGT.

That commitment had a fateful price.

Shortly after the outbreak of the war, the boy was shot in Morocco.

For 17-year-old student Matilde Ucelay Maortua, life was beautiful.

And she added: “I like the optimistic and renewing character of my time (…).

I wish that the ideas that would prevail tomorrow were of peace above all, of harmony between nations and individuals”.

A beautiful chimera.

Matilde became the first female architect in Spain in '36. General admiration, interviews, banquets in her honor.

But the war came.

And her previous trip to the USSR and a clear support for the Republic took its toll on her: a fine of 30,000 pesetas, five years of disqualification and a long peace with the aftertaste of death.

Matilde Ucelay, who participated in the survey, became the first female architect in Spain in 1936.

Idealism surrounded the response to

by Antonio María Sbert (Palma, 28 years old): a secularist, feminist, federalist, socialist, anti-fascist man and reluctant to communism.

“We believe the economic independence of women is essential,” Antonio wrote, “so that they live on an equal footing with men;

Without this independence being a fact prior to the marriage, the woman will not have, in general, equality in fact or in marriage if it is not for ethical consideration of the husband.

Almost a hundred years ago these words.

Later, Sbert was deputy in Madrid for Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, later Minister of the Generalitat de Companys and —after Franco's coup— he had to go into exile for life until his return, with Tarradellas, in 1977.

For the Cantabrian journalist Maximiano García Venero, 22, life was "an ark full of unexpected things" where "the will can reject and possess, it can shape."

After that survey, he himself shaped his convictions.

He went from the anarchism of the CNT to the Falange, within which he was head of the press and coiner (probably) of the expression "red-separatist" to denigrate republican Spain.

He later did not fit into the Franco system: perhaps, because he was too heterodox.

Juan Ramos Esbry, a 31-year-old employee, was a supporter of the Republic.

“We must not think about fatality;

our life is how we want to make it ”, he defended.

Years later, Juan would be prosecuted by the Francoist Political Responsibilities Liquidation Commission and his assets would be withheld.

The author of this essay-investigation in three stages (analysis of the time, exhumation of the testimonies and basic reconstruction of some of their lives) reflects how the future was altered for many of those surveyed by the

that "spirit of the time" so relentless in the 1930s. Two last examples.

First, that of Felipe Acedo.

Two years after the survey, he participated in the uprising of General Sanjurjo in 1932. For that reason he was imprisoned and prosecuted under the Republic.

He then joined the rebel side in the war, committed to Franco's repression.

First, as a prosecutor against the republican forces.

Later, as civil governor of Barcelona.

The other side of the coin is the cross of Ricardo Zabalza Elorga.

Political activist, Ricardo became a representative of the Popular Front.

He was one of the assailants of the Cuartel de la Montaña on July 20, 1936, the first Republican reaction against Franco's military insurrection.

Almost three years later, at the end of the war, when he was about to embark in Alicante for exile to save his life, he was arrested, imprisoned and executed.

In the farewell note that he left his parents, where he announced his imminent execution, Ricardo wrote: "When you read these lines I will no longer be more than a memory."

A memory.

Like the illusion that her generation gave off in the year 29, when the Charleston was danced and everything was possible and young Corina wrote to

: "I would not have wanted to be born in any previous era."

It's nine o'clock in the cafeteria.

Closing is coming.

The waitress, with a serious and tired expression, clears the table.

Who knows tomorrow.

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