The stewardess at the check-in counter at Malaga airport receives the documentation from the two reporters with a return ticket to Madrid.
Checking her identity cards, she looks at the photographer and says:
-Congratulations.
"No, my birthday is tomorrow.
"Yeah, but I'm not going to see you tomorrow...
They want to stay.
It is the first conclusion after seven days of traveling through Andalusia, from Isla Mínima, that overwhelming landscape in which the film director Alberto Rodríguez recreated life in the Guadalquivir marshes, to the Tabernas desert, where Indians who were actually Gypsies without the need for makeup put their ears to the ground to find out if the Seventh Cavalry was near.
Sara Pasadas del Amo, who is a researcher at the Institute of Advanced Social Studies, dependent on the CSIC and based in Córdoba, says that sociologists also listen to advertising to find out where the shots are coming from, and that when she saw Cruzcampo's ad in which Lola Flores asked Andalusians to feel proud of their accent —"touch your roots, good things always come out of it"—,
he thought there was a key to keep in mind.
And it turns out that, for some time now, as if from the ashes of old clichés, it has emerged in the younger generations of Andalusians —precisely those who, if they decided to vote, could cause a surprise in the regional elections next June 19—a cultural and protest movement around the accent, the roots, the passion placed in the right place.
If you can not beat them, join them.
If you can not with the topic, pimp it.
they could cause a surprise in the regional elections on June 19—a cultural and protest movement around the accent, the roots, the passion placed in the right place.
If you can not beat them, join them.
If you can not with the topic, pimp it.
they could cause a surprise in the regional elections on June 19—a cultural and protest movement around the accent, the roots, the passion placed in the right place.
If you can not beat them, join them.
If you can not with the topic, pimp it.
Nightlife in Pedro Antonio de Alarcón street in Granada.
Samuel Sanchez
In Andalusia one thing leads to another.
It sounds like an excuse, and yet, perhaps there is no other place in the world where the corridors to unforeseen places are still so open.
Despite globalization, the social distances inherited from the pandemic and that permanent hypnosis exerted by the mobile screen, in Andalusia people continue to look each other in the eye, sometimes even up and down.
"You're not from here, are you?"
-Nope.
How did you find out?
"It's just that we all know each other here."
The Metropol Parasol of Seville, known as the Mushrooms.
Samuel Sanchez
So, to undertake this pre-election trip through Andalusia, a region so large that it multiplies the territory of Catalonia by four and that of Euskadi by eight, there are two options.
One, buy a map and, once unfolded, become aware of the magnitude of the challenge: how to cover a territory with eight provinces in a week, if in some of them the sun caresses the snow of the Sierra Nevada and the hammocks at the same time of Salobreña, and in others the coast of Morocco can be clearly seen from the balconies of Tarifa while, on the route of the bull above, it rains like nowhere else in Europe?
So the way chosen to face this trip is the second option: set a starting point and, if anything, another arrival point, and let yourself go, almost adrift, seeking the opinion of some experts, yes,
First stop.
Ten O'clock in the morning.
Bar terrace on Luis Montoto street, a few meters from the AVE station that arrived in Seville 30 years ago and is almost the only legacy of the 1992 Universal Exhibition that does not accumulate dandelions and oblivion.
—There you have it, the coffee and the toast with oil and ham.
"Excuse me, I only ordered half.
"Yes, yes, that's half.
The 'instagramer' Cristina Silva, at the Jerez de la Frontera Fair (Cádiz).Samuel Sánchez
If there is something that is the backbone of Andalusia, it is breakfast.
Or, better said, the habit of having breakfast in the street, but not at the bar, hurrying and running, but sitting, on a terrace most of the year, alone or in company, before or after going to the market. or with colleagues in the office, to talk about the last game or the one to come, about the boss's mood or whatever else is needed.
And, almost always, in the same place, where the waiter already knows by heart who accompanies the coffee with a tortilla cover and who with a muffin.
The tortilla and the muffin.
There it is, gathered in a breakfast, the political history of Andalusia.
The tortilla generation —embodied in a photo taken in 1974 by Pablo Juliá's camera and in which all the socialist leaders who would govern for decades after the dictator's death appear— and the muffin generation, the current one, the one that has baptized in a book by the political scientist Jesús Jurado and the one that in some way replaced the previous one at the end of 2018, when Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, thanks to an alliance with Ciudadanos and the support of Vox, snatched a 37-year hegemony from the PSOE by in front of the Junta de Andalucía and gave power to the Popular Party (PP).
Male hairdresser in Las Norias de Daza (El Ejido, Almería). Samuel Sánchez
"Do you know the Dehesa de Abajo?"
-Nope…
"And the curve where Juanete was killed?"
To enter the area of Isla Mínima is to plunge, without borders or customs, into an impossible, magical labyrinth, the one filmed by Alberto Rodríguez for the film of the same title under the inspiration of Atín Aya's black and white photographs.
Simple characters, with a profound gaze, like these two workers who, faced with the total confusion of strangers, resort to patience and the dust that covers the rear windows of their van to draw a map of the area with their finger: “It is a pity that they have come now.
Within 15 or 20 days this will be another world.
The water will be poured through the canals, the rice will be planted with a plane or a tractor and in 10 days it will begin to green.
If there was water, you could record a flock of flamingos, and also the birds that come from Doñana.
But now everything is dry, and this without water…”.
"It's pretty, too."
Yes, but it's a wreck.
An aerial image of Isla Mayor (Seville).Samuel Sánchez
Isla Mayor, a town of 5,800 inhabitants, is the geographical center of the Guadalquivir marshes, a kind of water country that is home to the largest rice field in Europe and whose red crab production is only surpassed by China and the United States.
Also, if the expression is allowed, it is one of the spiritual reserves of the agrarian and socialist imaginary that is attributed to Andalusia.
Towns whose economy depends almost exclusively on the countryside or fishing, with hardly any right-wing councilors sitting in their town halls, places where the memory of Franco's regime —which is made present here by the proximity of the Canal de los Presos, built between 1940 and 1962 by thousands of republican prisoners—and the illusion of autonomy full of freedom and progress allowed the PSOE to govern with hardly any opposition.
But that hegemony and that cliché —Andalusia is already more urban than rural— were broken in 2018, when the socialist Susana Díaz won, but not with enough votes to stop the right wing led by Moreno Bonilla.
It was not, in any case, a simple change of government.
Rather, it meant a change of era.
Eduardo Moyano, leading researcher at the Institute for Advanced Social Studies (IESA), explains it: “Andalusian society, like all societies, changes as generations change.
And the current one is very different from the one of 20 or 30 years ago.
Half of Andalusians did not experience the autonomy referendum of February 28, 1980, which was what marked Andalusian politics for the next 40 years, nor did all the mystique of the left in Andalusia,
that of an autonomous community permanently aggrieved by the political and economic forces of the right.
This mystique of grievance, which has served to fuel many left-wing votes, including mine and that of my generation, no longer exists.
Time killed her, but also the absence of a code of behavior consistent with the purity of those ideals.
On the way back to Seville there are two pictures that attract attention and that, when viewed well, represent the failure of a generation that lost power harassed by corruption cases.
One is at the height of Coria del Río, right in the place where a 40-meter-deep tunnel was to be built so that the SE-40 ring road would pass under the Guadalquivir.
The works are suspended.
A young man from Las Palmas who came to Seville for love guards a large white tent.
Inside there, for 10 years, a tunnel boring machine 150 meters long and weighing 2,200 tons has been sleeping, which was bought in France and brought by ship for a work that immediately proved impossible due to the configuration of the subsoil.
Now it will be sold for scrap.
Wasted money, the reflection of an era, hopefully the king's last shot with gunpowder.
Manuel, at the door of the booth at the Seville Fair where he worked as a doorman. Samuel Sánchez
The following picture is given in the avenue of the Flota de Indias in the neighborhood of Los Remedios in Seville.
The operators strive to dismantle the booths of the April Fair.
In front of one of them, sprawled out on a beach chair and with a blank face from many early mornings, is Manuel:
—I'm used to being looked at where I live.
-And where do you live?
—In the Three Thousand Dwellings.
And on top of that I'm not even a gypsy...
Manuel is 25 years old and today is the last day he works as a doorman at the Fair.
Tomorrow, who knows.
He boasts that he has not yet had to tell his three-year-old son that there is nothing to eat, but admits that those of his lineage - born in cursed neighborhoods, with little education and not even the pride of race - are condemned to work “whatever comes out” and to always be looked at over the shoulder.
Days later, almost at the end of the trip, the reporter will remember Manuel when, right next to the El Ejido greenhouses, he meets Gilberto Lorenzo, an almost 40-year-old immigrant born in Guinea-Bissau who, out of 14 years he has been in Spain, he has only had a residence permit for two.
"And what is the difference between having papers and not having them?"
Gilberto could have answered what a stupid question, but instead, his face lights up with a smile of happiness, and without any rancor he recounts his life during those 12 years that he had to become a shadow, a shadow of a bricklayer in Madrid, a shadow temporary worker in Almería, earning shadow wages, tucked under the plastic in the middle of summer —"you suffer a lot down there, it's logical that the Spaniards don't want this job"— as long as they can send money to some children who grow up so far away.
And when he is told that what a shame, how can we treat them like this, he lights up his face again and says:
-Don't worry.
It is not a question of the Spaniards.
There are people with good hearts and bad people.
Nothing can be done.
That is God's thing.
—You always smile, Gilberto.
-Is better.
If you are angry all the time, your brain is not working.
You have to have joy and patience.
Pepe and Juan José, two former employees of Santana Motor, next to the door of the old factory in Linares (Jaén).
Samuel Sanchez
The patience of Manuel, that of Gilberto... Also that of Pepe and Juan José.
They are sitting on the terrace of the bar in front of the Santana Motor factory in Linares (Jaén).
Or of what remains of it, which is practically nothing: a sworn guard that the Junta de Andalucía has placed at the door so that the remains of a corpse whose slow agony swept away an entire city cannot be seen.
"Even El Corte Inglés has closed, with that I tell you everything," says Pepe, who together with his old friend Juan José recounts in front of two bottles of Victoria the buoyant times when they and 3,000 other workers were part of Santana, and then, with a lump in the throat that transmits to the interlocutor, the slow economic and social drama, also personal, that led to the fall of the factory.
—The Japanese from Suzuki left, but the Junta de Andalucía did nothing to keep them...
From the kitchen of Lola Valverde, who lives on the fifth floor of an 11-year-old building and paints some beautiful pictures of flowers that she then hangs in the living room, you can see the battered pavilions of La Santana and, a little further to the left, a roundabout that wanted to be a tribute to the old Land Rover, but due to abandonment it seems rather that the driver of the SUV could not brake and was left stranded there in the middle, about to be devoured by the spring bushes.
Murals painted on the buildings of Ronda (Málaga).Samuel Sánchez
With these issues still pending after so many decades of socialist power —young people without a future in neighborhoods without a past, day laborers from other countries without regularization for years, thousands of retired workers of working age— Moreno Bonilla has had to do very little to reach to the new electoral call with many possibilities of a resounding victory.
“It is a conservative government that has been characterized by moderation”, explains the sociologist Eduardo Moyano, “Moreno Bonilla is a man who does not twitch, it seems that he is talking to you sitting in the living room of your house.
He has a smooth leadership and a better image than that of his own party, that is why in the campaign his name will prevail over that of the PP, as Manuel Chaves did in the worst times of the PSOE”.
—After the political change, what went wrong, continues to go wrong, and what went well, continues to go from strength to strength.
It is, broadly speaking, the opinion of the economist Diego Martínez, professor at the Pablo de Olavide University and associate researcher at Fedea: “If we look at the budgets of the PP Government in 2020, 2021 and even in the one that has not gone ahead in 2022, we realize that they are very similar to those presented by the PSOE: the spending structure, the same policies... There is a fairly intense continuity between the policies that were made before the change of government and those of now”.
Are you from Loja?
"Yes, tell me, what is offered to you?"
-Could you recommend me a place to visit?
"It's already late afternoon...
An Andalusian flag on a balcony in a street in Loja (Granada). Samuel Sánchez
The question remains as to what happens in Loja in the mornings, but the landscape that this Granada city of 20,000 inhabitants offers at sunset is that of a place anchored in time, halfway between everything, the past and the future, tradition and modernity.
It is perhaps the destiny and function of agro-cities, as the sociologist Eduardo Moyano explains: “Cities with 20,000 or 30,000 inhabitants, such as Montilla, Puente Genil, Priego, Osuna… They are surrounded by countryside, but their behavioral patterns are urban.
It is a very interesting phenomenon, because it is what gives Andalusia a safety net in terms of settlement, cohesion and services, which makes it very different from empty Spain”.
In the heart of Loja, right on the corner of Plaza de Joaquín Costa and Calle Sin Casas, the passer-by is assailed by a metaphor.
On the first floor of a house that seems empty, next to a no entry sign, there is a balcony from which hangs a faded Andalusian flag devoured by a couple of cacti.
The image would serve for the cover of a book about the end of the Andalusian feeling, but it would be a false cover.
If something stands out in this pre-election trip through Andalusia, it is the feeling of pride that spontaneously emerges in the conversations.
The first who has managed to arrest him, and who has even dared to baptize him, is the political scientist Jesús Jurado in his book
From him The generation of the mollete.
Chronicle of a new Andalusianism
(Rag Language, 2022):
—There is a new generation that has a tremendous disaffection towards institutional politics, but at the same time is being very active in the field of feminism and a vindication of Andalusian cultural identity, including political identity.
Although there is also a sector, especially young men, who sympathize with Vox because of its rebellion against what is politically correct.
But on Instagram and other social networks, content creators have a lot of strength —designers, tattoo artists, people who make videos, humour…— who are marking an identity that is proudly Andalusian as well as feminist.
Ximénez lighting factory, in Puente Genil (Córdoba).
Samuel Sanchez
Gilberto Lorenzo, a worker from Guinea-Bissau, next to the greenhouses of El Ejido (Almería).Samuel Sánchez
In Jaén, just before a concert, the members of the group Califato 3/4 confirm the political scientist's intuition:
—The feeling of inferiority has accompanied us Andalusians for many years.
And it is true that there is now a movement, in which we participate with our music, that seeks to recover our self-esteem.
In Malaga, the city of fashion, Manuel Agustín Heredia has become one of the most successful young entrepreneurs.
He is the owner of BeSoccer, the world's leading digital encyclopedia of soccer.
He is also committed to competing from here and with young people from here:
—Perhaps due to education, or due to cultural or historical connotations, the Andalusian is usually a humble person, who finds it difficult to have ambition.
But I think humility and ambition can go hand in hand.
Surroundings of the desert of Tabernas (Almería).
Samuel Sanchez
On the way to the Tabernas desert, the only one in Europe, an inhospitable place where, however, the palm trees that were planted in 1962 for the film
Lawrence of Arabia
still survive , there is time to have dinner in Granada.
An old friend, poet and jurist, says that, to explain certain peculiarities of the Andalusian character, let alone this change of era that is perceived in the environment, there is still no precise definition:
—You have to resort to the cowardice of examples.
There is something floating in the air.
Something that does not even have the category of example.
I don't know what Cruzcampo's publicists perhaps suspected, that sociologists are beginning to intuit, that politicians still don't even smell and that musicians try to rhyme.
It's a very strange mix made from old traditions stuffed into the Thermomix.
We will have to listen again to what the earth says.
Perhaps it will all come to nothing, and it will just be a fashion that the desert wind blows away.
Or maybe not.
A woman dressed in a gypsy costume at the Feria de Jerez.Samuel Sánchez
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