Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia: 1800s to Present 3030988600, 9783030988609

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Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia 1800s to Present Edited by Obdulia Castro · Diego Baena María A. Rey López Miriam Sánchez Moreiras

Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia

Obdulia Castro  •  Diego Baena María A. Rey López Miriam Sánchez Moreiras Editors

Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia 1800s to Present

Editors Obdulia Castro Department of Modern and Classical Languages Regis University Denver, CO, USA María A. Rey López Department of Modern Languages Metropolitan State University of Denver Denver, CO, USA

Diego Baena Department of Language and Culture Studies Trinity College Hartford, CT, USA Miriam Sánchez Moreiras Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Regis University Denver, CO, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-98860-9    ISBN 978-3-030-98861-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98861-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword: New Routes for a Global Field: Transatlantic Perspectives on Galician Studies

Like other area studies fields, Galician Studies remains more important than ever in the face of a neoliberal globalization that promotes ‘culture-free zones’. (Sharon R. Roseman, “The Production of Galician Space,” 2017: 102) Galician literary studies both inside and outside of Galicia have yet to create a well-defined line of criticism, let alone a school, on the trauma inflicted by fascism… The presence of Francoism is so pervasive that it must be examined in any study that claims to produce a rigorous analysis of contemporary Galicia. (John P.  Thompson, “From the Island of Trauma to Fantasy Island,” 2017: 109) What remains unresolved is the place of Galicians themselves, in this revivified Road. Are they to find their image as the Road’s participants, or simply as perennial hosts, exploiting touristic interest in ‘monumental time’ and producing convenient narratives about their communities as ancient builders of these monuments? (Eugenia Afinoguénova, “Places / Non-Places: Galicia on the Road of St. James,” 2017: 145–146) Through a myriad of narratives, ethnographic poems, and documentary photographs, we teach Galicia in Appalachia, bridging people and regions that previously may never have known one another, but once encountered can never be forgotten… It is in relationships that stories are both birthed and bridged... We have re-imagined Galicia in the context of our home in Appalachia… We invite other scholars to do the same. (Heidi Kelley and Kenneth A. Betsalel, “Teaching Galicia in Appalachia,” 2017: 240)

This new edited volume on Galician Studies—Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia (1800s to Present)—is a timely intervention v

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that both illustrates and assesses the persistence of an interest in this field beyond Galicia itself and, more specifically, within English-speaking academic circles. The book follows the steps of Rerouting Galician Studies: Multidisciplinary Interventions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), jointly edited by the authors of this Foreword, but it also serves as its supplement in several distinctive ways, expanding some of the theoretical proposals already advanced in the previous publication. Most notably, this new book brings a distinct focus on gender issues, while amplifying a determination to put into conversation authors reflecting and writing from within the academy (in Galicia and in the US) with others doing so from other professional areas of expertise and discursive approaches. Like our earlier volume, Rerouting Galician Studies: Multidisciplinary Interventions, the current book engages with cultural practices and cultural practitioners that are often not yet the subject of academic study in Galicia but that—through their innovative commitments—are closely connected to other artistic practices and creations at a global level. This is exemplified in the essays by Germán Labrador (“The Forest for the Tree: Artist Wily Taboada and the Galician Transition to Neoliberalism”), Palmar Álvarez-Blanco (“Notes on the Cultural Policy of the Commons in a Cooperative Framework: NUMAX’s Presence in Santiago de Compostela”), and Miriam Sánchez Moreiras (“Emilio Araúxo and the Foundations of a Galician Poetic Ethnography”). Meanwhile, the complex approach to the identity question of the Galician diaspora is tackled with original formulations, such as the analysis offered by María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar (“A Place to Live and a Place to Die: Displacement and Settlement in Contemporary Galician Culture”), and through a diachronic unfolding across other essays which engage with nineteenth-century Galician migration (as assessed in the figures of María Vinyals, José Arriola, and Pilar and Carmen Osorio Rodríguez), as well as with current “transmigration” approaches, to use a term coined by Galician Studies scholar María Alonso Alonso (2017) and addressed in some of the essays, including the one by Dosinda G. Alvite (“Alma e o mar: About Love, Myths and Landscapes in Galicia”). Various articulations of gender cut across the essays in this volume. This is the case for María Reimóndez’s contribution (“Semellantes as feridas? Feminist De-colonial Readings of Galician Fiction”), and the two studies on nineteenth-century canonical works by the Galician writer Emilia Pardo Bazán, by Diego Baena (“‘Seducible’ Souls, ‘Bastard’ Republics: Fear of a Literate Demos in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La Tribuna (1883)”)

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and Susan Walter (“Motherhood and Social Progress in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Los Pazos de Ulloa (1886)”). Also marked by a gender approach is the essay by M.ª Ángela Comesaña Martínez (“Displacement and Rediscovery of a Multifaceted Galician Woman: María Vinyals (1875–?)”). Finally, the chapters by María Elena Soliño (“Lobos sucios: Nazis, Meigas and Mouros in the Galician Wolfram Mines During WWII”), Dosinda G.  Alvite (“Alma e o mar”), and Julia María Dopico Vale (“The True Story of Three Musical Prodigies from Ferrol: José Arriola, and Pilar and Carmen Osorio Rodríguez”) all touch on gender issues, albeit not necessarily as a central feature. The twelve chapters which comprise this book are arranged in four parts. Part I, which consists of two chapters, is entitled “‘Displacing’ Galician Studies: Diasporic and Linguistic Perspectives”. Parts II and III mirror each other and are, respectively, titled “Bodies, Sexes and Genders I: Intimate and Political Bodies” and “Bodies, Sexes and Genders II: Seductions, Motherhoods and Rebellions”; they are structured around three chapters each. Lastly, Part IV, “Folk Arts and the Professional Art Circuit: Artistic Production and Cultural Dissemination” envelops the last four chapters of the volume. The sections on “Bodies, Sexes and Genders” thus form the backbone of the book, as they provide and consolidate its decidedly gender-oriented approach. These six central chapters analyze specific traditions, films and literary texts as case studies. Yet Parts I and IV of this volume, if at first glance seemingly more disperse, are also more encompassing in that they are tasked with opening up the book to other important fields, beyond literary and film studies. Together, these two parts cover theoretical analysis of the politics of identity, linguistic studies, Galician cooperative enterprises in the realm of culture, plastic arts projects and sculpture, poetry as ethnography, museum studies, and music. This wealth of fields helps to generate a comprehensive approach to Galician cultural studies, while examining a chronologically broad range of subjects from the 1800s to the present. In Chap. 1, “A Place to Live and a Place to Die: Displacement and Settlement in Contemporary Galician Culture,” María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar ponders the diasporic nature of contemporary Galicia. She articulates her essay around three structural axes, which can be metaphorically conceived as the three musical movements of an ongoing reflection on Galician culture. After the first formulation of regional identity by pivotal nineteenth-century figures of political and cultural romanticism, a second, essentialist view of culture took hold throughout the twentieth

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century, largely based on Heidegger’s intellectual influence, as we can see reflected in the Galaxia publishing house; faced with this still-prevalent territorial conception of culture, the critical geography of authors such as Massey and Latour now provides new, dissident models of spatiality, that allow us to support a conception of Galicia not as a territory but as a network. Xosé Luís Regueira, in Chap. 2 (“Language as Object of Research Versus Language as Political Object: Old and New Horizons in the Study of Galician”), moves from the assessment of essentialist notions of Galicia to language politics. The emergence of the study of Galician language from a linguistic perspective occurred quite late (between the 1960s and the 1970s), compared to the other languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, but its development has now allowed Galician to be considered a legitimate object of study at the local, national, and international levels. This essay highlights the distinction between the effects of works of linguistic research (language as a research object) and works of political interest (language as a political object), while describing the new developments in the study of Galician linguistics which identify Galicia as “an authentic linguistic laboratory” for studying the situation of minority languages in contact with languages of power. The six essays which comprise Parts II and III of this volume—“Bodies, Sexes and Genders”—engage with films, novels, contemporary literary traditions, female archival correspondence, and the works of Emilia Pardo Bazán, respectively. In Chap. 3 (“Lobos sucios: Nazis, Meigas and Mouros in the Galician Wolfram Mines During WWII”), María Elena Soliño assesses the first feature-length film by Galician director Simón Casal, Lobos sucios (2016), a drama set in Galicia during the Second World War which revisits some aspects of Spain’s participation in the European conflict: namely, the German control over Galician wolfram mines, and the presence of SS officers in Galicia hunting down Jews as they attempted to escape to Portugal. The film debunks the myth of Spanish wartime neutrality and underscores the Franco regime’s complicity with Nazi Germany. It also challenges a narrative that erases the history of Galician women’s active participation in anti-fascist movements. As Soliño suggests, Lobos sucios provides a new window onto the Galician landscape and the region’s unique traditions: what makes of this film a cultural landmark is not only the way it recovers Galicia as an arena of conflict during World War II, or the fact that the film revises the conventions of Francoist cinema, but its sophisticated use of themes and imagery drawn from Galician folk

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traditions (mouros and meigas) to invest its narrative with stunning symbolic and even mythic significance. Moving from film to literature, in Chap. 4 (“Alma e o mar: About Love, Myths and Landscapes in Galicia”), Dosinda G.  Alvite examines from a cultural studies approach “Chisco” Fernández Naval’s novel Alma e o mar (2017). The protagonist’s analyses of several aspects of her identity have led her to value a female-centered historiography and a feminist conception of life. Alvite’s research looks at anthropological studies that consider possible matriarchal practices in the Costa da Morte, revises female-centered historical myths stressing the importance of creating new ones, and finally presents a feminist perspective that highlights a relational conception of the subject. It also incorporates Bataille’s conceptualization of eroticism in order to analyze the protagonist’s evolution and Tuan’s notion of “topophilia” to understand the female characters’ relation to the landscape of Monte Pindo. In Chap. 5 (“Semellantes as feridas? Feminist De-colonial Readings of Galician Fiction”), María Reimóndez asserts that Celso Emilio Ferreiro’s poem “Irmaus” offers a good example of how the Galician literary (and to some extent political) establishment has understood its relationship to the colonial Other. Given Galicia’s position as a non-hegemonic nation within Spain and Europe, discourses about Others in Galician fiction have tended to emphasize the fantasy of a common struggle or “similar wounds”. A political reading of contemporary Galician fiction might, however, suggest that the Galician national identity has been partly built on gendered and racial interpretations of self and Other. María Reimóndez draws on Orientalism, and on Indigenous and Black studies, to explore how the internal colonial “wound” (i.e., the painful hegemony of the Spanish nation-state over Galicia) has been used as an alibi to avoid critical engagements with the representation of the colonial Other in the collective discourse of Galicia. She also examines the current resistance to these forms of discourse formation, favoring strategic alliances across non-hegemonic nations. Diego Baena’s Chap. 6 (“‘Seducible’ Souls, ‘Bastard’ Republics: Fear of a Literate Demos in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La Tribuna (1883)”) focuses on the novel’s protagonists: the young factory worker Amparo, and her illegitimate child, born the same day as the proclamation of the First Spanish Republic (1873). Baena seeks to analyze the unsettling implications that are produced through the intersection of several of the book’s central themes: popular literacy, women’s education and participation in

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the industrial workforce, and Pardo Bazán’s moral judgment of the labor movement and the demo-emancipatory imaginaries of Spanish republicanism during the period of the Democratic Sexennium (1868–1873). Inspired by the work of cultural theorists and labor-movements scholars such as Jacques Rancière, Roger Chartier, Jean-Louis Guereña, Aurélie Vialette, and the sociolinguist James Paul Gee, Baena suggests a reading of La Tribuna that takes into account its complexity as a cultural artifact and as a “national-catholic bio-political treatise”. It also situates both the action and the novel as such in their proper sociohistorical contexts, within a period of transition between the suppression of a largely frustrated left-­ wing political project (the democratic federalism and bourgeoning socialisms of the First Spanish Republic) and the advent of a new authoritarian and oligarchical political regime (that of the so-called monarchical Restoration). Susan Walter’s engagement with the same literary figure in Chap. 7 (“Motherhood and Social Progress in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Los Pazos de Ulloa (1886)”) explores the differing value systems that are imposed on the working-class and aristocratic female characters in Pardo Bazán’s seminal novel and addresses the representation of gender dynamics, motherhood, and social progress. Since much of the novel is set in the natural environment of a Galician country estate, some distance from the watchful gaze of bourgeois society in a provincial capital or Madrid, this text offers—in Walter’s view—a unique perspective on the interplay between social expectations for women of differing social classes and the environments in which these female characters live. Her chapter suggests that if the bourgeoisie and aristocracy hope to contribute to social progress that will aid Spain in fully embracing modernity, they must do away with the outdated model of the “angel in the house”. In Chap. 8, the last in this thematic cluster, M.ª Ángela Comesaña Martínez’s essay (Displacement and Rediscovery of a Multifaceted Galician Woman:  María Vinyals  (1875–?)) engages with a figure also known as the Marquesa de Ayerbe and the Marquesa Bermella, due to her left-wing social and political ideals. Vinyals was a writer, a feminist pioneer, and a social activist who, from a very young age, having received an elite education as part of her noble upbringing, became an advocate of education as a means for women to attain a certain degree of independence. Even though she wrote her works in Spanish, Vinyals, proud of her Galician heritage, occasionally included Galician expressions, paragraphs and dialogues in her writings, a facet of her work which can be seen not

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only in her published work but also in manuscript samples preserved at the Museo de Pontevedra. Her story is one of displacement, from nobility, social recognition, and prestige to poverty and practical invisibility. As was the case for many Galicians of her generation, circumstances forced Vinyals to move many times in her life: from Galicia to Madrid, then to Cuba, then briefly back to Spain via Mexico and the United States, probably dying in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Using documentation preserved at the Museum, this essay attempts to recover part of the history of this once well-known but today largely forgotten Galician woman activist. Part IV of the volume, comprising its four final chapters, engages with artistic production and various forms of cultural dissemination. The section opens with Palmar Álvarez-Blanco’s reflection “Notes on the Cultural Policy of the Commons in a Cooperative Framework: NUMAX’s Presence in Santiago de Compostela” (Chap. 9). This text, within the broader frame of the movement of and for the Commons, seeks to bring attention to the limits currently confronted by those taking part in the cultural cooperative NUMAX, and the obstacles to its survival, as well as its function as an instrument capable of propagating a cultural and institutional climate alternative to that imposed by capitalism. This chapter is followed by Germán Labrador’s essay “The Forest for the Tree: Artist Wily Taboada and the Galician Transition to Neoliberalism” (Chap. 10). The study engages with the cultural transformations that took place in Galicia at the end of the twentieth century, in the context of the transition from Franco’s dictatorship to neoliberal democracy and, within this cultural and political frame, the works and life of a singular artist, Antonio Taboada, also known as Wily (1962–2006). His early death and the bohemian legend surrounding Wily—from Lalín (a small rural region in the province of Pontevedra)—have complicated the contemporary reception of his art, but this essay proposes reading his work as a collective document with political implications for the cultural, economic, and ecological metamorphoses that occurred in Galicia during his time. In this sense, the essay locates Wily’s trajectory in relation to a time marked by the consolidation of the Xunta de Galicia and the birth of a new development model based on cultural tourism—characterized by the 1993 Xacobeo—and ecological extractivism. Within this frame, Wily’s art suggests an alternative countercultural project which animated a generation that grew up during the transition from Francoism to democracy. This project was shaped through a series of complex artistic dialogues in at least four areas: first, in an intense conversation with the popular tradition of

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carnival, festivals and peasant art; second, with the local artistic tradition, and specially with the painter Laxeiro; third, with the remains of the Galician republican heritage broken by the war; and, finally, with the brut and outsider art. In this way, the author of this essay proposes to see the forest for the tree, an expression suitable for the sculptures that made Wily popular, manufactured with a chainsaw on the deadwood of the rich local forests, historical common lands which were, by the time, subjected to ferocious economic speculation and environmental degradation. Finally, Germán Labrador suggests that, through a supposedly minor work, it is possible to observe the major transformations of a culture (in this case, contemporary Galician culture) and to be reminded of the costs and victims of an unsustainable model of economic and ecological exploitation that we call “progress”. Moving into Chap. 11 (“Emilio Araúxo and the Foundations of a Galician Poetic Ethnography”), Miriam Sánchez Moreiras focuses on the extensive work of Emilio Araúxo in the field of Galician culture. His role as publisher and translator stands out for its dissemination of French philosopher Alain Badiou’s thought and that of international poets such as Claude Royet-Journoud and Philippe Beck. Araúxo’s activity in the fields of anthropology, photography, and poetry is characterized by the practice of a “poetic” and “dialogic” ethnography that uses the poem to give an account of the almost extinct practices and voices of the Galician rural world, such as the Galician carnival entroido and the felo mask. This is quite unique in Galicia, and even in the Iberian Peninsula, but in line with the new writing proposals of postmodern anthropology. Far from dwelling in nostalgia, Araúxo’s poetic-ethnographic gestures become updating devices of the progressive potential of memory. Lastly, in Chap. 12 (“The True Story of Three Musical Prodigies from Ferrol: José Arriola, and Pilar and Carmen Osorio Rodríguez”) Julia María Dopico Vale introduces the reader to the little-known work and life of a family of Galician musicians: José Arriola and his half-sisters Pilar and Carmen Osorio. In the process of recovery of these three musical figures, we again find ourselves face to face with the Galician diaspora, this time in places as different and as far away from one another as Germany, Iraq, and Iran. All those experiences have unavoidably added richness to their musical performances and compositions. Simultaneously, we can see the Osorio sisters as a representation of an early and passing presence of women in the history of Galician music.

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The twelve chapters of Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia (1800s to Present) address several pressing needs within the fields of Iberian Studies, Gender Studies, and the growing body of scholarship on Galician Studies within the English-speaking community. The theoretical approach of most of these essays resonates with current trends in gender and cultural studies analysis, while the wide chronological coverage—from the mid-nineteenth century to the present—provides a longer range than most recent English-language scholarship on Galician Studies. The book also succeeds at putting into conversation essays by university scholars in cultural studies, on the one hand, with practitioners and specialists from multiple areas of expertise and institutions, including music conservatories, museums, the Galician Association of Translation and Interpretation Professionals, and the Galician Language Institute. But the reflections on which the transatlantic perspectives on Galician Studies in this book rest also have a history of their own and a genealogy in English. In 1995, before scholars began referring to the field of Spanish philology as Iberian Studies, Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi published Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction, a seminal work which included essays on cultural policy and Galician cultural studies. The book contributed in new and alternative ways to reshaping the field of Spanish studies through the articulation of a series of materials and objects of academic inquiry that, although not new, were still alien to the dominant discourses, emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary dialogues on texts, their contexts, their production and dissemination. Above all, this study placed the concept of culture, and even popular culture and mass culture, at the core of gender and class analysis, understanding different cultural practices within those parameters as an integral part of the formation, redefinition, and consolidation of their own values and subjectivities. Graham’s and Labanyi’s Spanish Cultural Studies had an immediate impact in the redefining and modernizing of curricula, scholarship, and interdisciplinary partnerships, fostering collaborations between area studies, gender studies, and visual and media studies, among other fields. Its specific articulation of concepts such as popular culture, and the inclusion of new subjectivities in dominant academic discourses, planted the seeds for new approaches in Galician Studies. In 2006, the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies published a special issue entitled “New Spaces, New Voices: Notes on Contemporary Galician Studies,” edited by Kirsty Hooper, which broke new ground in Galician Studies scholarship in English. Through the contributions by Silvia Bermúdez, Timothy

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McGovern, Eugenia Romero, and Hooper herself, this monographic issue built a discourse in which the most orthodox discussions about culture and identity within Galician philology were challenged and reframed through theorizations deeply rooted in diaspora, queer, and postcolonial studies. This line of scholarship on Galician Studies in English was expanded in a second special issue, coordinated by Helena Miguélez-Carballeira and Kirsty Hooper, entitled “Critical Approaches to the Nation in Galician Studies”, which was published in 2009 by the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. The contributions by José Colmeiro, María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, Joseba Gabilondo, and the co-editors themselves addressed the concepts of national and postnational peripherality, deterritorialization, and sentimentality in Galician Studies. In the aftermath of this special issue, theoretical approaches in line with postcolonial and subaltern studies, as well as philosophical and deleuzian concepts such as rhizome and deterritorialization, became regular terms through which scholars of Galician Studies engaged with culture, nation, and identity in English. For its part, Kirsty Hooper’s and Manuel Puga Moruxa’s collective volume Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies: Between the Local and the Global (2011) engages with a revisionist history of Galicia, remaps literary traditions, and drafts new itineraries for the study of language, identity, migration, and gender debates, as well as with Galician film, television, and performance practices. Following in this trajectory, there then appeared with Palgrave Macmillan the predecessor to the present book: Rerouting Galician Studies: Multidisciplinary Interventions (2017), jointly co-edited by the two authors of this foreword. The twenty-one essays in this earlier volume offer a transatlantic, transnational, and multidisciplinary cartography of the expanding intellectual field of Galician Studies in the English-speaking context. With contributing scholars based in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, the book engages with queer theory, Atlantic and diasporic thought, political ecology, hydropoetics, theories of space, trauma and memory studies, exile, national/postnational approaches, linguistic ideologies, ethnographic poetry and photography, Galician language in the US academic curriculum, the politics of children’s books, film and visual studies, the interrelation of painting and literature, and material culture through the history of the iconic Galician ceramics of Sargadelos. Structured around five organizational categories and theoretical concepts—Frames, Routes, Readings, Teachings, and Visualities—and adopting a pluricentric view of Galicia as an analytical

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subject of study, the chapters seek to pursue cutting-edge debates in Galician Studies today. Some of the lines of inquiry pursued in Rerouting Galician Studies: Multidisciplinary Interventions are now amplified and supplemented through the twelve essays of Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia (1800s to Present). The contributions by María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, María Reimóndez, and Dosinda G. Alvite explore new perspectives on coloniality, space, and nation building in Galicia. Regarding discussions on exile and diaspora, M.ª Ángela Comesaña Martínez and Julia María Dopico Vale undust archives worthy of revision and engage with the transatlantic and diasporic nature of Galician cultural production, at the same time that new studies such as Pablo García Martínez’s Un largo puente de papel: Cultura impresa y humanismo antifascista en el exilio de Luís Seoane (1936–1959) (2021) are being published in Spanish. Furthermore, Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia (1800s to Present) provides pivotal contributions to the ongoing discussions on Emilia Pardo Bazán’s works and the role of women artists and creators in the evolvement of the Galician culture field. Parts II and III of this volume echo, in English, reflections simultaneously published in Galician by María Paz Gago (“O feminismo de Emilia Pardo Bazán”), and the latest special issue of Grial: Revista galega de cultura, devoted to “Emilia Pardo Bazán e a deconstrucción das categorías de xénero” (2021), edited by María López Sández, Marilar Aleixandre, Eva Acosta, and Álex Alonso. These efforts to incorporate alternative perspectives on current historical and contemporary debates within the Galician cultural field, and ongoing exchanges with gender, postcolonial, and transatlantic studies, anchor the present collective volume within the tradition of the scholarly works outlined in this genealogy. Yet as we have seen, the book also introduces elements that complement and enrich these prior publications. Through the participation of María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, Xosé Luis Regueira, María Reimóndez, M.ª Ángeles Comesaña Martínez, and Julia María Dopico Vale, it establishes a fruitful and much needed collaboration between scholars of Galician Studies on both sides of the Atlantic. This plurality of perspectives accentuates an understanding of the epistemological and thematic wealth that a transatlantic field such as Galician Studies can bring to the table. It embraces, and builds on, the transatlantic and global collaborations that have been fostered over the last decade by international conferences, professional associations, and scholarly journals such

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as Galicia 21: Journal of Contemporary Galician Studies; Abriu: Estudos de Textualidade do Brasil, Galicia e Portugal; Madrygal: Revista de estudios gallegos; Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies; Grial: Revista galega de cultura; and the new Revista Clara Corbelhe. The routes toward this globality—well beyond the English-speaking world—have been paved by the work on Galician Studies of scholars such as Ruy Farías from Argentina, Silvia Facal Santiago from Uruguay, Pilar Lago e Lousa from Brazil, Maria Filipowicz Rudek from Poland, and Gabriel Pérez Durán from Germany, among others. It has also been further consolidated by the ongoing transatlantic collaborations between the Consello da Cultura Galega and many institutions in the United States and in Latin America, and by the international partnerships between institutions such as the Secretaría Xeral de Política Lingüística and the Xunta de Galicia with the Instituto de Estudos Ibéricos e Iberoamericanos at the University of Warsaw, working together in funding and publishing new academic volumes such as the recent Identidade(s) e xénero(s) na cultura galega: unha achega interdisciplinar (2018), jointly co-edited by María Boguszewicz, Ana Garrido González, and Dolores Vilavedra. Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks in Galicia (1800s to Present) is a collective project that offers a new scholarly route to non-­ academic authors, and it addresses subjects well beyond the academic mainstream of Galician Studies, including contemporary countercultural artists, cooperative projects, and practitioners. The essays in this volume actively engage with recent efforts to theorize Galician cultural practices, to reassess gender studies, and to bring the English-speaking reader closer to new Galician cultural initiatives, resources, and collectives not fully acknowledged in the dominant narratives and channels of Galician cultural, political, and material history. Galician Studies remains more vibrant than ever; echoing the epigraphs that precede the reflections in this foreword, we contend that this book extends a new invitation to research, teach, and reimagine Galicia in new contexts and geographies. Hofstra University Hempstead, NY, USA Southwest Minnesota State University Marshall, MN, USA

Benita Sampedro Vizcaya José A. Losada Montero

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Bibliography Afinoguénova, Eugenia. 2017. Places/Non-Places: Galicia on the Road of St. James. In Rerouting Galician Studies: Multidisciplinary Interventions, ed. Benita Sampedro Vizcaya and José A. Losada Montero, 139–150. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Alonso Alonso, María. 2017. Transmigrantes. Fillas da precariedade. Rianxo: Axóuxere. Boguszewicz, María, Ana Garrido González and Dolores Vilavedra. 2018. Identidade(s) e xénero(s) na cultura galega: unha achega interdisciplinary. Warsaw and Santiago de Compostela: Instituto de Estudos Ibéricos e Iberoamericanos and Secretaría Xeral de Política Lingüística da Xunta de Galicia. García Martínez, Pablo. 2021. Un largo puente de papel. Cultura impresa y humanismo antifascista en el exilio de Luís Seoane (1936–1959). Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Graham, Helen and Jo Labanyi. 1995. Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity. London: Oxford University Press. Hooper, Kirsty, ed. 2006. New Spaces, New Voices: Notes on Contemporary Galician Studies. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 7 (2). Hooper, Kirsty, and Manuel Puga Moruxa, eds. 2011. Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies: Between the Local and the Global. New  York: Modern Language Association of America. Kelley, Heidi and Ken Betsalel. 2017. Teaching Galicia in Appalachia: Lessons from Anthropology, Ethnographic Poetry, Documentary Photography and Political Theory. In Rerouting Galician Studies: Multidisciplinary Interventions, ed. Benita Sampedro Vizcaya and José A.  Losada Montero, 225–242. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. López Sández, María, Marilar Aleixandre, Eva Acosta, and Álex Alonso, eds. 2021. Emilia Pardo Bazán e a deconstrucción das categorías de xénero. Grial: Revista galega de cultura 230 (April, May, June). Miguélez-Carballeira, Helena, and Kirsty Hooper, eds. 2009. Critical Approaches to the Nation in Galician Studies. The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 86 (2). Paz Gago, María. 2021. O feminism de Emilia Pardo Bazán. Eduga: Revista galega do ensino 81. Roseman, Sharon R. 2017. The Production of Galician Space: Ethnographic Interventions. In Rerouting Galician Studies: Multidisciplinary Interventions, ed. Benita Sampedro Vizcaya and José A. Losada Montero, 93–107. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita, and José A.  Losada Montero, eds. 2017. Rerouting Galician Studies: Multidisciplinary Interventions. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, John P. 2017. From the Island of Trauma to Fantasy Island: The Renovation of San Simón. In Rerouting Galician Studies: Multidisciplinary Interventions, ed. Benita Sampedro Vizcaya and José A.  Losada Montero, 109–126. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Contents

Part I “Displacing” Galician Studies: Diasporic and Linguistic Perspectives   1  Place to Live and a Place to Die: Displacement and A Settlement in Contemporary Galician Culture  3 María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar  Language as Object of Research Versus Language as Political Object: Old and New Horizons in the Study of Galician 27 Xosé Luís Regueira Part II Bodies, Sexes and Genders I: Intimate and Political Bodies  63 Lobos Sucios: Nazis, Meigas and Mouros in the Galician Wolfram Mines During WWII 65 María Elena Soliño Alma e o mar: About Love, Myths and Landscapes in Galicia 91 Dosinda G. Alvite

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 Semellantes as feridas? Feminist De-colonial Readings of Galician Fiction121 María Reimóndez Part III Bodies, Sexes and Genders II: Seductions, Motherhoods and Rebellions 149  “Seducible” Souls, “Bastard” Republics: Fear of a Literate Demos in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La Tribuna (1883)151 Diego Baena  Motherhood and Social Progress in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Los Pazos de Ulloa (1886)187 Susan Walter  Displacement and Rediscovery of a Multifaceted Galician Woman: María Vinyals (Galicia, 1875–?)211 M.ª Ángela Comesaña Martínez Part IV Folk Arts and the Professional Art Circuit: Artistic Production and Cultural Dissemination 233  Notes on the Cultural Policy of the Commons in a Cooperative Framework: NUMAX’s Presence in Santiago de Compostela235 Palmar Álvarez-Blanco  The Forest for the Tree: Artist Wily Taboada and the Galician Transition to Neoliberalism261 Germán Labrador Méndez

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 Emilio Araúxo and the Foundations of a Galician Poetic Ethnography281 Miriam Sánchez Moreiras  The True Story of Three Musical Prodigies from Ferrol: José Arriola, and Pilar and Carmen Osorio Rodríguez301 Julia María Dopico Vale

Notes on Contributors

Palmar  Álvarez-Blanco is Professor in the Spanish Department at Carleton College, MN.  She is the co-founder of the International Association ALCESXXI.  Dr. Álvarez-Blanco’s research focuses on the transformation of cultural paradigms in the frame of capitalism and its crises in contemporary Spain. In addition to the publication of many articles on contemporary Spanish film, literature, and culture, Dr. Alvarez-­ Blanco has coordinated and co-edited two collective volumes on the topic: Contornos de la narrativa española actual (2000–2010). Un diálogo entre creadores y críticos (2011) y La imaginación hipotecada. Aportaciones al debate sobre la precariedad del presente (2017). Her latest work, In Route with the Commons, was published in 2020 as part of her project The Constellation of the Commons, a research project concerning self-­managed communities of practice spurred on by the exposure of the neoliberal financial sham within the Spanish territory. She is working on her next book project. Dosinda G. Alvite  (PhD, University of Michigan) is Associate Professor of Spanish at Denison University. Her research and teaching interest focus on representations of migration, historical memory, and gender issues in contemporary Spain, with special attention to Spain-Africa connections. She has written on these topics in various journals such as Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Hispania, Bulletin of Spanish Studies along with several book chapters. Diego Baena  is Assistant Visiting Professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He received his PhD from the Department of Spanish xxiii

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and Portuguese at Princeton University in 2020. He also holds an MA from Princeton and a BA in History and Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago. His doctoral dissertation (La literatura y sus pueblos) explores the intersection between popular literacy, various forms of popular media, censorship, and dissident political cultures in the nineteenth-century Spain. While one part of Dr. Baena’s research has focused on representations of urban and transatlantic migration and working-class caring economies in the works of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Rosalía de Castro, his more recent interests include the commemoration of republican and socialist political cultures over time; the history of Spanish feminisms; the relationship between Cuban, Spanish, and Puerto Rican republicanism and the international abolitionist movement; representations of class, race, and revolution in the Spanish-speaking Avant-Garde (with special focus on the works of Federico García Lorca, Langston Hughes, and Luis Buñuel). Obdulia Castro  is Professor of Spanish, Linguistics, and Culture at Regis University in Denver, CO. Her primary research areas are in Spanish and Galician phonology and morphology and sociolinguistic processes related to minorized languages  and dialects. Her first book, Aproximación a la fonología y morfología gallegas (1998), was the first in the field to incorporate a generative and auto-segmental phonology approach to the study of Galician phonology and morphology. Some of her recent essays published in peer-reviewed journals look at the importance of experiential activities in language learning: “‘Finding the unfamiliar in familiar places.’ The Regis Community-Based Spanish/English Exchange Project: Journeys in place” (2014) and the effects of language policy in language maintenance and change: “The Orality-Literacy Continuum in Galician: Language Choice, Cultural Identity, and Language Policy at a Crossroads” (2015); “The Perceived Presence/Absence of Galician accent on Galician TV Newscasts.” (2017); “El continuum oralidad-‘literacidad’ en entornos biculturales y bilingües: el gallego y el español nuevo mexicano tradicional”, (2018). Dr. Castro was a founding member of the MLA LLC Forum in Galician Studies (2014) and the head of the organizing committee of the Third North American Symposium of Galician Studies: “Galician Studies Moving West: Galician Language and Culture at the Crossroads” in Denver, CO (October 18–20, 2018), co-sponsored by Regis University, Metropolitan State University, and Colorado College.

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M.ª Ángela Comesaña Martínez  is the Publications Coordinator of the Museum of Pontevedra since 1997. She has a degree in Geography and History from the University of Santiago de Compostela (1991). She was a collaboration fellow of the documentary archive of the Museum of Pontevedra from 1993 to 1995, when her interest in the Galician feminist pioneer María de Lluria (born María Vinyals) started. She has written several articles about María de Lluria and about the documentary collections of the Museum of Pontevedra, as well as a monograph titled O Tombo do Hospital e Ermida de Santa María do Camiño de Pontevedra (1995). She has participated in the project coordinated by José Luis Basanta Campos Marcas de agua en los archivos de Galicia (1996, 1998, 2000, 2002). In 1997, Comesaña curated, together with Professor Aurora Marco, the exhibition De María Vinyals a María de Lluria. Escritora, feminista e activista social, with the same title as the first biography of this woman, edited simultaneously. She continues to work on the legacy of María de Lluria and preparing a project about the medieval documentation of the Santa Clara de Pontevedra convent. Julia María Dopico Vale  holds a BA in Piano by the Joaquín Rodrigo Conservatory of Music (Valencia) and in Musical Language by the Manuel Quiroga Conservatory of Music (Pontevedra). She is a Music and Musical Language High School Teacher; an interpreter of instrumental groups (having recorded the CD’s “Galicia na Memoria,” “Rosas para Galicia” and “Tango”); as well as a composer, premiering her musical work at the III Symposium of Galician Studies (Denver, CO, 2018). Her music was performed, among others, at the Fundación Juan March (Madrid), Sala Mompou (SGAE, Barcelona), and Casa de América (Portugal). She is a musical writer for the journals Diario de Ferrol, Galicia Ártabra Digital and Galicia Digital, as well as the author of poem books and short stories. Her awards include the “Álvaro Paradela” Short Story Award, “Camilo José Cela” Journalistic Essay Award, and Gregorio Baudot Music Award (awarded by the SAF). Her musical research focuses on recovering the figure of the pianist and composer José Arriola, a work published in Álbum Galicia by the Consello da Cultura Galega. She is also the author of the notes to the recording program of the Galician Royal Philharmonic “José Arriola. Orchestral Music.” Germán Labrador Méndez  is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. His interests span various fields

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and encompass literary and cultural history, memory studies, poetry, social movements, and urban cultures. He has written numerous articles, critical editions and two books: Raptured Letters. Poetry and Pharmacy in Spain (2009) and Guilty of Literature. Political Imagination and Counter-­ Culture in the Spanish Transition to Democracy (2017). He is working on a new book project, The Cultural Production of the Crisis in Today’s Spain (2008–2020), devoted to the importance of culture in the understanding of the 2008 global crisis and its consequences today. He is also one of the curators of the exhibition Poetics of Democracy. Images and counter-images of the Spanish Transition (2018–2019) at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar  is Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where she works as a researcher for the Grupo de Referencia Competitiva [Competitive Reference Group] GI-1371. Her main lines of research comprise the theory of the poem, the comparative study of poetry anthologies in the Iberian Peninsula and the narrative of the nineteenth century, topics that have been the subject of book chapters and articles in journals such as Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Rilce, Revista de Literatura, Romance Notes, Hispanófila, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista Hispánica Moderna or Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea. She is the author of the music anthologies Damas negras. Música e poesía cantada por mulleres (2002) and Te seguirá mi canción del alma. El bolero cubano en la voz de las mujeres (with Yolanda Novo 2004). She has authored, among others, the monographs As antoloxías de poesía en Galicia e Cataluña. Representación poética e ficción lóxica (2004), Dámaso Alonso award for Philological Research, Fogar impronunciable. Poesía e pantasma (2011) and Canon y subversión. La obra narrativa de Rosalía de Castro (2012), in co-edition with Helena González. Together with Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, she co-directed two funded research projects on the work of Rosalía de Castro. Xosé Luís Regueira  is Professor of Galician and Portuguese Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela. His research interests focus mainly on phonetics and variation and change in Galician. He is the author of several publications, such as Dicionario de pronuncia da lingua galega [Pronunciation Dictionary of the Galician Language] (A Coruña, 2010), co-author of Gramática galega [Galician Grammar] (Vigo, 1986),

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director and co-author of Os sons da lingua [The Sounds of Language] (Vigo, 1998). He has written articles in specialized journals and chapters in books by Galician and international publishers on topics of Galician phonetics, language change, standard language, and linguistic ideologies. He has also written articles on historiography and bibliographical works on Galician linguistics, such as Guía bibliográfica da lingüística galega [Bibliographical guide to Galician linguistics] (Vigo, 1996), of which he is director and co-author. Since 1993 he has been a contributor to Linguistic Bibliography, currently published by Brill, for the bibliography on Galician. He is director of the Institute of Galician Language and member of the Royal Galician Academy. María Reimóndez  is a Galician feminist queer translator and interpreter, writer and scholar. She holds a PhD in Translation and Interpreting, specializing in the translation of feminist postcolonial anglophone literature into Galician. Reimóndez has been a guest lecturer and speaker in different universities and countries, including Hofstra and Colgate University in New  York, University of Warsaw in Poland, University of Madras in Tamil Nadu, University of Bologna in Italy, Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3  in France, and University of the Philippines Diliman in the Philippines, to mention a few. Her academic work focuses on issues related to feminist and postcolonial translation and interpreting, language hegemony, feminist and queer literature, and Galician cultural studies. She is also the founder of the feminist decolonial organization Implicadas no Desenvolvemento and the Asociación Galega de Profesionais da Tradución e da Interpretación (AGPTI) and has worked extensively with movements both in Galicia and in the global South. Her award-winning fiction has been widely read and translated. María  A.  Rey  López  is Professor of Spanish at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, where she has worked since 2001. During her tenure at MSU Denver, she has developed a research interest in language and culture pedagogy and methodology and has been a pioneer in the creation of service-learning and community engagement opportunities at the university. Although her main interest continues to be Spanish Medieval and Golden Age Literature, she has also collaborated with the Galician Studies Research Group and studied the topic of contemporary poets from Galicia. Benita  Sampedro  Vizcaya  is Professor of Spanish colonial studies at Hofstra University and Dorothy and Arthur Engle Distinguished Professor

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in Literature. Among her most recent publications on Galicia and Galician Studies are the essays “Traducindo as loitas das mulleres. A nosa negra de Harriet E.  Wilson” (Mazarelos: Revista de historia e cultura, 2021) and “Puntos de encontro: Redes migratorias e rutas coloniais a propósito da exposición Os adeuses / Fotografías de Alberto Martí” (Revista Clara Corbelhe, 2021). She is the co-editor, with José A. Losada Montero, of the book Rerouting Galician Studies: Multidisciplinary Interventions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Miriam  Sánchez  Moreiras is a Spanish Term Instructor at Regis University in Denver. She received her PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her main research interest focuses on contemporary Galician, Spanish and Latin American poetry from the perspective of Alain Badiou’s “Inaesthetics,” Poetics of the New Speculative Materialism, Ecopoetics and Decolonization. Her publications include “El fiel ejercicio de la inminencia: Palmas sobre la losa fría, de Andrés Sánchez-Robayna” (2020), “Translation Practices of Kalandraka and OQO Publishers and Their Multi-Local Dynamics: Two Cases of Pride, Profit and Success in Galicia” (2019), “Poesía e veredición. Unha aproximación ao pensamento de Alain Badiou” (2018), and “La palabra en la intemperie: ella, los pájaros, de Olvido García Valdés” (2012). Her most recent research in the field of Galician Studies examines the resources of future and resistance in Emilio Araúxo’s ethnographic poetry. She is also a published author of poetry and fiction. María Elena Soliño  is Professor and Chair of the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. She is the author of Women and Children First: Spanish Women Writers and the Fairy Tale Tradition (2002) and Alegorías de la nación: La mujer en la producción cultural española (2017). Her research explores the intersections between literature and film with painting, with special focus both on Galician Studies and Sephardic Studies. Soliño is currently completing a manuscript on the representation of women in Spanish film from the early Franco regime (1939–1945). As a result of being awarded the Cátedra Miguel Delibes by the University of Valladolid, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and the Junta de Castilla y León, she is also completing the book manuscript Mujer, censura y nación: género y producción cultural durante el régimen franquista y sus secuelas en la España democrática.

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Susan Walter  is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Denver, where she teaches courses on Spanish literature, film, and culture. Her main research interests include nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spanish narrative, women’s writing, film, narratology, and representations of gender. Dr. Walter has written essays on these topics in several academic journals, including Decimonónica, Letras Peninsulares, Hispania and Romance Notes. Her first monograph, From the Outside Looking In: Narrative Frames and Narrative Spaces in the Short Fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán (Juan de la Cuesta, 2010), analyzes the intersections of gender and narrative design in Pardo Bazán’s short stories. She was the co-editor with Margot Versteeg of the MLA Approaches to World Literature volume on Emilia Pardo Bazán, which was published in 2017.

List of Figures

“Seducible” Souls, “Bastard” Republics: Fear of a Literate Demos in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La Tribuna (1883) Fig. 1 Anonymous French political cartoon, circa 1871, of a female communarde “amazon” orator (Anonymous, “La Grrrrande Orateuse du Grrrrande Club d’Amazones de la Commune.” Paris Sous la Commune. Dépôt central de l’imagerie Populaire. Paris, Moronval Impremeur, 1871. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris. https://www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/ musee-­carnavalet/oeuvres/la-­grrrrande-­orateuse-­du-­grrrrand-­ club-­des-­amazones-­de-­la-­commune)

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Emilio Araúxo and the Foundations of a Galician Poetic Ethnography Fig. 1 Old farm kitchen and Cádido Caneiro’s sculpture for the “Poemuseo,” by Emilio Araúxo. Images courtesy of the author Fig. 2 Isolina Pumar (the “muse”), by Emilio Araúxo. Image courtesy of the author Fig. 3 Felo mask and Madamita mask, by Emilio Araúxo. Images courtesy of the author

291 292 296

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PART I

“Displacing” Galician Studies: Diasporic and Linguistic Perspectives

A Place to Live and a Place to Die: Displacement and Settlement in Contemporary Galician Culture María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar

1   A Cultural Translation of a Heidegger’s Work In 1933, after being invited for a second time to apply for a professor’s chair position at the University of Berlin, Martin Heidegger decided to publicly reject the offer with a journal piece: part essay, part open letter and part transparent apology for his own position. The piece is titled “Schöpferische Landschaft: Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz? [Creative landscape: Why do we remain in the provinces?],” and despite its occasional appearance, it establishes some polarities still present in contemporary debates on culture and space. I mean, particularly, those dealing with

Translation from the original Galician text by Celeste B. Smitz; editing and translation revision by Miriam Sánchez-Moreiras. M. do. C. Rábade Villar (*) University of Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Castro et al. (eds.), Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98861-6_1

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the opposition between the urban and the provincial scales often polarized with terms such as “inside” and “outside,” “high” and “low,” “small” and “large,” or “local” and “global.” 1 All these terms are eloquent examples of what the critical geographer Doreen Massey (2005: 165 et seq.),2 referring to the abstract use of topographic patterns, has called “spatial fetishism”; the consequences of which, as I shall try to prove here, are often very discouraging. To these categories we could add many others which any analysis of the relationship between space and culture must inevitably face—for instance, terms as familiar to Galician studies as those of provincialism, regionalism or nationalism, which depend less on an a priori definition of scale than on the degree of autonomy that is recognized in the cultural formation that holds, or aspires to hold, the respective term in each case. We will also look at how these categories are framed in complex relationships, as is the case of globalization, internationalism and cosmopolitanism. These are difficult words to refine because of the variation in their uses, domains and disciplinary dependencies, both throughout history and presently. As such, it is no coincidence that the task of translating makes these difficulties particularly visible. Bringing such problematic categories here from their roots and doing so with a reflection on the text of Heidegger, a very distinguished author, is also no coincidence. The aim is to provoke critical reflection in the field of Galician cultural studies, in the form of a criticism of its traditional methodological articulation as studies of the relationship between the center and the periphery. As is well known, the institutional reconfiguration of Galician culture in territorial Galicia from the 1950s found a fundamental stimulus in the form of the German philosopher. The text “Creative landscape,” of which the first title is often omitted, illustrates it very clearly: it is not necessary to remember the weight that the aestheticization of the landscape has achieved in the theorizations of the Galaxia group on Galicia, called to consolidate a territorial imagery that authors such as María López Sández 1  The first systematic contribution to the way Heidegger asserts the opposition between provincialism and cosmopolitanism in this text is attributed to Albert Borgmann, “Cosmopolitanism and Provincialism: On Heidegger’s Errors and Insights.” Philosophy Today 36 (1992): 131–45. David Constantine, on the other hand, had explored the imprint of the concept of locality in Hölderlin’s poetry, which is, as is well known, one of the drivers of Heidegger’s thought about being (Constantine, The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. Londres: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1979). 2  Massey, For Space. Londres: Sage, 2005: 165 et seq.

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(2007) have successfully debunked, and that prevails even in the most critical conceptions of the disarticulation of the rural world.3 However, perhaps the concrete influence of this brief essay by Heidegger on the establishment of polarity between the center and the periphery and the implicit assumption that Galicia should be thought of from the periphery has not been sufficiently considered. Indeed, Heidegger’s text was translated into Galician shortly after its exhumation carried out by Guido Schneeberger,4 after nearly three decades of being ignored. The Galician version, translated by the author Domingo García-Sabell and dedicated to Professor Rodrigues Lapa, was published in 1964 in the fourth issue of the Grial magazine, one year after the first Spanish version was published in Latin America by Jorge Rodríguez (1963).5 The close network of relationships the Galaxia group maintained with the German academic environment dates back a few years earlier, as evidenced by the famous translation into Galician of Heidegger’s book The Essence of Truth, so influential in works such as Ramón Piñeiro’s Filosofía da saudade (1984) and Sete ensaios sobre Rosalía de Castro (1952),6 and whose relations with Franco’s censorship were sufficiently clarified by Xosé Manuel Dasilva (2013).7 In a documented work on Celestino Fernández de la Vega, Ramón López (2007) provides valuable data on the history of the controversial Galician version of the essay. According to López, a doctoral student of the University of Freiburg played a prominent role in the management of the translation rights of the work, “Domingo Carvallo, amigo persoal de Heidegger [que se dirixía a el como] Lieber Herr Professor Heidegger!” [Domingo Carvallo,

3  López Sández, Paisaxe e nación. A creación discursiva do territorio, Vigo: Galaxia, 2007. Ten years later, an essay by Xosé Constenla, winner of the Ramón Piñeiro Essay Award, again testified to the centrality of territorial problems in the Galician cultural field from the perspective of its dismantling: O colapso territorial en Galicia. Vigo: Galaxia, 2017. 4  Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger: Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Denken. Berna: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1962. 5  Heidegger, “¿Por qué permanecemos en la provincia?” (trans. Jorge Rodríguez). Revista Eco VI (1963): 472–76. 6  Piñeiro, Filosofía da saudade. Vigo: Galaxia, 1984 and Sete ensaios sobre Rosalía de Castro, ed. Ramón Piñeiro. Vigo: Galaxia, 1952. 7  Dasilva, “La traducción gallega y la censura franquista.” Quaderns: revista de traducció 20 (2013): 17–29.

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Heidegger’s personal friend (who used to address him as) Lieber Herr Professor Heidegger!] (Otero Pedrayo 1982: 46).8 Heidegger’s influence on Galician cultural thought would become particularly visible again in 1989, when, following the passing of the philosopher, the Grial magazine would dedicate an entire tribute issue to him. For our purposes, the theologian Andrés Torres Queiruga’s approach is attractive.9 Queiruga, who six years after the text “Why do we remain in the provinces” was included in the German edition of Heidegger’s Complete Works, consciously decided to subtitle his approach “Reflexións sobre a provincia,” assuming that this, the provincial, was the scale from which Galicia could be thought of, consciously conceived as a margin: Os que ‘permanecemos na provincia’ podemos tomarnos certa distancia, ollar a discusión desde lonxe, opinar cun chisco de desapego. Ninguén nos vai prestar moita atención; en troques, somos conscientes de que a distancia ten a súa propia lucidez, de que a ollada desde a provincia pode descubrir cousas simples e fundamentais, esas que acaso tendan a escapar á sutil guerra dos matices, á loita implacable da erudición [Those who ‘remain in the province’ can take a certain distance, look at the discussion from afar and reflect with a bit of detachment. No one is going to pay much attention to us; instead, we are aware that distance has its own lucidity, that seeing from the perspective of the province can uncover simple and fundamental things, those that tend to escape the subtle war of the nuances, the relentless struggle of erudition]. (Torres Queiruga 1989: 315)10

Broadly speaking, it is possible to affirm that the influence of Heidegger on Galician cultural thought was based on a notable removal of the most ominous dimension of the intellectual, whose material conditions of writing were, as we know today, literally indebted to Nazi Germany. What is certain is that the “Heidegger case” is explicitly addressed in the Grial magazine tribute issue, an aspect that is widely recognized in the contemporary bibliography and already widely debated since the late 1980s, plus the articles contained in the volume are generally of an exculpatory tone; and Torres Queiruga’s, which contemplates theological problems such as 8  López Vázquez, Celestino Fernández de la Vega, pensador do novo galeguismo. Santiago de Compostela: Centro Ramón Piñeiro para a Investigación en Humanidades, 2007: 46. 9  Torres Queiruga, “Teoloxía e pensamento en Heidegger. Reflexións desde a província.” Grial. Revista galega de cultura 143 (1989): 315–39. 10  Torres Queiruga, “Teoloxía e pensamento en Heidegger”: 315.

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that of evil, does not mention that, at the time of writing “Creative landscape,” Heidegger was serving as rector of the University of Freiburg. Certainly, Heidegger himself had done nothing else in his text; a piece of diction that was not as dark as his first speech under his position as rector,11 but by no means alien to the essentialist dimension that runs through the totality of his thought. We see it very clearly in the device of his argument construction. By means of an operation of subjective totalitarianism, the philosopher employs an exercise of self-interested appropriation of the mountain space. The discursive colonization of the rural environment is based on the establishment of an iron distinction between “man of the field” and “man of the city.” It is a correlative dualism of the opposition between high and low that, in accordance with a secularly grounded cultural imaginary, delineates the dialectic between the mountain and the city in a political economy of salvation and condemnation. Naturally, the place of enunciation in the text aligns with the position that the philosopher defends as legitimate: it is a cabin located in the heights of the Black Forest, which Heidegger is regretfully obligated to leave periodically and what allows him to realize not only that this is his true place of work but also that nature works at the pace of its own thought. It is there, in the identification between intellectual and agricultural work, where subjective colonization becomes more visible, insofar as it has to do with the self-interested interpretation of the natural environment; not only the peasants replicate the rhythm of the work of the philosopher with their tools, but also the trees—specifically the pines—must collaborate in this correlation between the materiality of the earth and the capacity for abstraction: the effort to make words is compared to the resistance of the trees raised in the middle of the trench. Between locus amoenus and locus horridus, Heidegger builds a tailor-made rhetorical space, and for this he must move away from the position of the occasional traveler or the excursionist, in a plot twist that reminds us of our contemporary contradictions as global travelers: we all do tourism, but tourists are always “the others.” Indeed, there are many people who go up to the mountains, but the author must turn away from those who do not understand the mountains as intimately as he does, and for this he generates a catalog of peasant voices called to validate his position in the text, such as the 11  Speech read on May 27, 1933, in the possession of the rector of the University of Fribourg and translated into Spanish by Jorge Rodríguez in 1963.

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eighty-three-­year-old farmer who believes in goblins and retains words and inflections of speech that the local youth will lose,12 and as Heidegger notes ­accurately, half an hour before she died had a memory for “Herr Professor”—the aforementioned anecdote of Domingo Carballo allows us to guess that this is how he liked to be called by his disciples, which incidentally confirms that this was, and not that of teacher, the treatment he gave to the Swabian farmer. In a seemingly humble closing paragraph which introduces the province’s apology on a global scale, the author notes that this message is worth more to him than the report from a globally circulated newspaper (“Weltblatt,” which Garcia Sabell translates as “international”) about his work. But the position of honor is certainly bestowed on the seventy-five-year-old farmer who, aware of the Berlin invitation, refutes the possibility of the philosopher leaving with the resounding final formula: “Definitely not!” Heidegger’s most benevolent commentators emphasize the harmony between the defense of the contemptus mundi, sprinkled with dialectical linguistic inflections, and his decision to publish the piece in a local newspaper at a time when the philosopher’s career would have allowed him to opt for other means of dissemination of his thinking. However, Emmanuel Faye13 opportunely remembers the origin of that text: A radio broadcast— a medium, as is well known, privileged by the third Reich propaganda apparatus—that would later be collected, specifically on March 7, 1934, by the Freiburg-based Nazi newspaper Der Alemanne. Faye himself convincingly explains that the rejection of the Berlin professor chair did not imply a resignation, but a strategic advance with respect to the Heideggerian goal of designing a university policy in accordance with the principles of the National Socialist regime. When read in context, this short piece turns out to be something quite different than it seems. It is not just that its place within a constellation of facts helps us better visualize the strategic position of the article in building a particular intellectual and political trajectory. The fact that there are only two proper toponyms in this supposed defense of the small places opposite the cities is also relevant—specifically, the generic toponyms Black Forest and Berlin, which are strategically located in the starting and 12  Significantly, García Sabell translates in this passage the word “Volk” for “small village.” “Por que nos quedamos na provincia?” (trans. Domingo García Sabell). Grial. Revista galega de cultura 4 (1964): 255. 13  Faye, Heidegger. La introducción del nazismo en la filosofía. Madrid: Akal, 2009: 80.

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closing positions. Neither Freiburg, where he served as rector, nor Marburg, where he also taught in those years, nor of course, and this is the most clamorous, the micro toponym Todtnauberg, the place of the cabin that the author situates as his radial center of thought and was built by his wife in 1922, are mentioned. The philosopher, who compares the act of coining words to the efforts of the pines to not be blown down by the wind, refuses to call the place which he says he thinks and writes from by its proper name. His thinking seems to be better suited to the level of abstraction that makes a common name preferable to the dozens of proper names that the peasants he invokes, and many others, would certainly name those places. The term provinces appears here, in the space that he refused to fill with small and irreplaceable places, a term whose genealogy refers to modalities of territorial articulation of imperial genealogy, later updated in other ways by the modern state and its strict dynamics of resource distribution and of economic and symbolic capitals. The postulation of the advantages of that metaphysical small village in contrast with the purported decline of the modern city is a recurring theme prior to the assimilation of Heidegger’s philosophy by the Galaxia group. It is enough to read Otero Pedrayo’s Ensaio sobre a cultura galega, published some years before that of the German philosopher, and where certain Heideggerian inflections on the small village as guardian of the cultural memory against the dangers of the present seems to echo: “Cando viu [Galicia] na cidade imitadora e sometida, desterrado o seu idioma e esquencidos os seus costumes, seguiu incólume a sosegada vida do campo como reserva de porvir” [When he saw (Galicia) in the imitating and subdued city, its banished language and its customs forgotten, the quiet life of the countryside continued unscathed as a reserve for the future] (Otero Pedrayo 1982: 15).14 And if we go two decades back in time from the “Creative landscape,” we see that in Las tinieblas de Occidente, Vicente Risco also denigrates the machinery of the city in very similar terms to those of the German philosopher. The unequivocal proof that it is a discourse of that period, capable of provoking even the confluence of voices ideologically distant from those of Risco, is found in Castelao, who was granted a scholarship allowing him to travel to the major European cultural capitals. However, as Castelao is well aware, he warns young Manuel Antonio of the danger of cities in a letter dated by Garcia Sabell in 1922:  Otero Pedrayo, Ensaio histórico sobre a cultura galega. Vigo: Galaxia, 1982: 15.

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Temos que andar con moito tino respecto ó ruralismo, pois o noso ruralismo é o que fixo canto temos que o que é o cidadanismo non fixo máis que mal. Iso do ruralismo vén de Francia e penso que nós debemos ser ruralistas dignificando a verba primeiramente. Non sei se coidas que eu son inimigo de todo canto sexa francés; non, eu son o inimigo de París, do París de hoxe [We have to be very careful in respect to ruralism, because our ruralism is what made all that we have, while city life has done nothing but harm. Ruralism comes from France and I think we must be ruralists by first dignifying the word. I do not know if you think I am an enemy of all things French; no, I am the enemy of Paris, of today’s Paris]. (Manuel Antonio 2015: 343–44)15

These all seem to be evidence of the continuity of the cultural discourse of inland Galicia with respect to the pillars established by the Nós generation. But the inheritance, as much as it might seem to be, is not linear. It is certainly true that for all of them, the rural area was the place that had to support the Galician geographical and cultural ought to be. Also, the fact that in his thought the relationship between one’s own place and the other places often took the form of integration, which would be emphasized in the intense dedication of the group to the exercise of translating. However, for the Nós generation, knowledge of places was a very specific and rooted knowledge, as evidenced by just two clues, the historical links with the agrarian movement and the detailed geographical work of Otero. In addition, fundamentally the cultural discourse of Nós was alien to the center-­ periphery polarity, among other things, because of its resistance to understanding Galicia as a margin and because of its ability to postulate reticular models such as those of the small Atlantic homelands. The most suggestive, in any case, is the fact that rigid opposition between the center and the periphery, often leading to urban-rural duality, prevailed in the Galician cultural discourse of the second half of the twentieth century, although we cannot say that it was overcome by all. Duality has become especially noticeable in attempts to construct a literary canon, both poetic and narrative, of urban foundation, very present from the 1980s of the last century. Although the small village was no longer conceived as the natural space of literary representation, the foundations of this rigid polarity remained intact. The implicit assumption was that the modernization and internationalization of the literary repertoire, an 15  Manuel Antonio, Obra Completa. Epistolario, ed. Xosé Luis Axeitos. A Coruña: Real Academia Galega & Fundación Barrié, 2015: 343–44.

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aspirational discourse that was very much present in the cultural planning programs of the time, demanded that the urban imagination be the new metric available to calculate the value of the contributions of storytellers, playwrights and novelists. This discursive aspiration actually turns its back on the way in which, in those same years, a territorial reality linked to rur-­ urban areas was being articulated, very noticeable on the outskirts of A Coruña and in industrial cities such as Vigo, but also in other sectors linked to the services sector like Santiago de Compostela, whose dialogue with the countryside had, by the way, been widely recognized by authors such as Otero Pedrayo. The paradox was that rural spaces were probably the most apt to convey realistic attempts to understand the entry of Galician culture into a global logic. Its borderline and decentralized nature often steals the regulatory purposes that govern the territorial organization of the state and, in its often singular and unpredictable forms, is a reality currently widespread throughout the world. However, the prevalence of formulas such as the famous “Galicia, cell of universality”—taken from the founding document of the Galician Party by García Sabell himself, who in the 1960s translated Heidegger and in the 1970s published the letter from Castelao to Manuel Antonio on the importance of the rural in Galicia—has subjected the debates on the Galician culture to a fundamentally abstract pattern. In fact, the maxim merely settled the tension, rhetorically presented under the Hegelian figure of Aufheben, between a national scale, which is conceived as unique and inescapable, and the aspiration for values of transcendence, defined according to Westernist parameters or, more properly, Europeans. All these discourses prepared the ground for situating Galician culture in the finite-secular debates on the dialectic between the global and the local, understood again, often in a reductionist manner, as a tension between the center and the periphery.

2   Galician Studies in the Face of the Spatial Turn As evidenced by the influence of Heidegger’s text on the Galaxia group, the spatial articulation of Galician studies around the center-periphery axes has logically taken place before the systematic entry into the academic environment of the theories that in different works authors such as Arturo Casas have called empirical-systemic. However, the model would become hegemonic at a time of greater institutional backbone on the study of literature and culture, linked to the introduction of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory

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of literary fields and Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory at the University of Santiago since the late 1980s which, as we know, still determines much of the epistemological orientation of cultural research at Galician Universities. It would be limiting to see a closed framework in these models. Bourdieu’s own sociology now has two legacies largely opposed to and linked to two of the main continuators of the work of the French sociologist. On the one hand, the recently deceased Pascale Casanova (2001),16 with her influential idea of a world republic of letters, where the same Paris that Castelao distrusted, governed the rules of cultural traffic as an indisputable center. Despite its undeniable heuristic potential and ability to renew research perspectives in the field of comparativism, the model was questioned for its somewhat overwhelming dualism between a metropolis, characterized by the power of consecration, and a periphery, rendered to heteronomous value measures. On the other hand, Gisele Sapiro, in a book published in 2014, summarizes her previous contributions on network analysis and explains that their introduction in literary studies allows us to recognize the weight of collective processes over individuals in the articulation of a cultural field with greater finesse than other methodologies. Nevertheless, the weight of quantitative tools typical of standard network analysis confirms that one of the most active links in literary sociology continues to identify materialism with empiricism or, in terms that Jacques Rancière would approve, sociology with sociologism,17 in a way not too unlike what happened to Franco Moretti’s first contributions to the study of the novel as a global literary genre. From the field of Galician cultural studies, some theoretical and methodological alternatives to the empirical-systemic framework have been developed in the last twenty years or, more specifically, to the empiricism of the sociological model and to the formalist and functionalist inheritance of the systemic model. Significantly, many of these proposals were formulated outside of territorial Galicia. In addition, and although not all of them were consciously assigned to the so-called spatial turn of literary studies, they used, in one way or another (often to problematize them), categories of physical and political geography, if such a division is still

16  Casanova, La república mundial de las letras (trans. Jaime Zulaika). Anagrama: Barcelona, 2001. 17  For example in the text En los bordes de lo político. Buenos Aires: Ediciones la Cebra, 2007.

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operational. In this area, a pioneering article by Hooper is memorable.18 In this article, the author carried to her final conclusions the hypotheses of Professor Xoán González-Millán (1994), one of the most active researchers in the Galician diaspora, about the overdetermination exercised by literary nationalism in the cultural field.19 Not by chance, Hooper began by plotting an exercise in simultaneity between Jesus Fraga’s metropolitan alphabet, forged from his experience as a son of emigrants in the city of London (A-Z, 2003), and Otero Pedrayo’s uses of the map of Fontán in the novel Arredor de si (1930). In 2008, Hooper would co-direct a congress with Bangor University Professor Helena Miguélez-Carballeira eloquently titled “Saíndo da nación [Leaving the Nation],” whose proceedings remained not coincidentally unpublished, and in 2011, she would co-publish the volume Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies: Between the Local and the Global and the monograph Writing Galicia into the World. New Cartographies, New Poetics in collaboration with Manuel Puga.20 In convergence with standpoints like those of the researcher José Colmeiro, Hoopper placed her attempts to draw a new critical mapping for Galician studies in the peripheral and global axes. Perhaps aware of the new centrality that starting in 2012 the idea of nation would re-acquire in the territorial debates of the Spanish state and Europe, in her work Hooper would gradually put less emphasis on the category of the postnational and replace it with the term transnational.21 It is in this context that one has to read the second great attempt to re-articulate Galician cultural studies from categories of spatial genesis. I refer to the volume Galicia, a sentimental nation by Helena Miguélez-­ Carballeira (2013),22 a text that again removed the prefix “post-” from the 18  Kirsty Hooper, “Novas cartografías nos estudos galegos. Nacionalismo literario, literatura nacional, lecturas posnacionais.” Anuario de estudos literarios galegos (2005): 64–73. 19  González-Millán, “Do nacionalismo literario a unha literatura nacional. Hipóteses de traballo para un estudio institucional da literatura galega.” Anuario de estudos literarios galegos (1994): 67–81. 20  Hooper and Puga Moruxa, eds. Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies. Between the Local and the Global, New York: Modern Language Association, 2011. 21  Noted thusly by César Domínguez: “‘Eu son fillo dunha Patria descoñecida’: Do Atlántico negro ao Atlántico verde a través da diáspora galega: Castelao (cunhas notas sobre Whitman e Lorca).” Grial: revista galega de cultura 202 (2014): 64–71. 22  Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Gender, Culture, and Politics. Bangor: University of Wales, 2013. The impact of the author’s monograph can be seen in its rapid translation (Galiza, um povo sentimental? Género, política e cultura no imag-

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word nation, to place it instead within the postcolonial condition of Galicia.23 I think that the Bangor University professor’s book had the opportune possibility of globalizing Galician studies by introducing them into the postcolonial studies agenda.24 At the same time, her ongoing project Postcolonial Spain, for which she received a scholarship from the British Academy in 2015, also confirms her willingness to expand the research to the Iberian framework, and to place it in a context sensitive to the criticism of the project of the Spanish Transition to Democracy and of the major economic and political changes in recent years. In the same way that what is happening in Scotland or Catalonia brings the nation back to the center of the current debates, the control of borders in the Schengen space, the crisis of refugees or migrants in the United States, the conversion of more and more territories into open-air prisons and, more recently, restrictions on international mobility due to the COVID-19 pandemic have turned the millenarian ideals of economic and cultural globalization into a kind of frightening dystopia. The current crisis of globalization—and, we might add, the ideology of globalization—is undoubtedly a powerful critical threshold from which to think of all those studies that, especially from the standpoint of comparative literature, have worked on the relationship between the local and the global. This is a relationship that, as we know, lies at the origin of the discipline itself: Comparatism emerges closely linked to the Kantian concept of cosmopolitanism, sometimes controversially confronted with inário nacional galego, 2014), the lively debates it gave rise to and its sales success; very remarkable given its scholarly nature. 23  The operation is reminiscent of the one undertaken a few years earlier by Craig Patterson for Castelao in “Galician Identity and Race: A Postcolonial Reading of Castelao,” a paper presented in the Congress Looking at Iberian from a Comparative European Perspective: Literature, Narration and Identity. University of Lisbon, October 13–14, 2011. 24  Perhaps the main criticism of the use of the term postcolonial is the need to place it in the obsolescence of a prefix that has been undoubtedly abused in postmodernism and that, despite attempts to place it under the shelter of reflexivity, remains attached to connotations of posterity/afterward that are not always effective/relevant/operational for the realities they describe. It is no coincidence that the word decolonial is partly replacing postcolonial in the most recent critical debates. On another topic, let us not forget that colonialism was a condition theorized for Galicia for decades by Xosé Manuel Beiras, who situated his economic theory in the wake of Robert Laffont, leading to a conception of Galicia as an “interior colony,” used in the 1980s by Anxo Tarrío to analyze the authors of Rexurdimento. They are references that do not appear in the text of Miguélez-Carballeira, unequivocal proof of how forgotten these debates were at the time when she publishes her work.

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socialist internationalism, and to the corollary that literature and culture can serve as tools for pacifying the great nation-states. It is true that it is urgent to identify cosmopolitanism, as it has been defended and practiced since the end of the twentieth century, with the venerable ideals of idealist universalism that attends more to the elimination of differences than to the recognition of conflicts. It suffices to think about the fact that, at the turn of the millennium, Homi K. Bhabha had defended the critical potential of the idea of global citizenship, demonstrating, in passing, the fallibility of the net opposition between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism.25 However, it must also be acknowledged that cultural programs based on declared cosmopolitan values often translate, in practice, into an elitist conception of world culture. The return of the anthologies to school and academic curricula then is not surprising, which again echoes the great texts of Western literature, as if the old debates about the canon had never happened. This also explains that at the time of the recast of comparative literature as world literature, Emily Apter had called attention to the need to incorporate analysis models that, like economist Inmanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory, did not turn their backs on the mechanisms of economic distribution of planetary resources (Apter 2013).26 It is no coincidence that Galician comparatists have paid attention to the repercussions that our culture has historically had on the global circulation of literary phenomena. The realization of this fact has led to the emergence of a new interest in the Atlantic, conceived as a third space that would allow the cultural production of both sides of the ocean to be linked. The effect of this spatial expansion toward maritime flows has made more visible, for example, Rosalía de Castro’s contributions to the nineteenth-century global debates on slavery, explored by Joseba Gabilondo (2011) or Catherine Davies (2014).27 And it also explains the 25  Reference taken from León Enrique Bieber’s book: Las relaciones germano-mexicanas: desde el aporte de los hermanos Humboldt. México: UNAM, 2001: 47–48, where an unpublished lecture given on the ten- year-anniversary of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt de Berlín is presented in detail. Not far into the text, the Africanist Kwame Anthony Appiah defends the possibility of a “Cosmopolitan patriotism.” Critical Inquiry 23.3 (1997): 617–39. 26  Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. In her book Apter essentially challenges the model of David Damrosch, who responds in a critical review: “Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability by Emily Apter (review).” Comparative Literature Studies 51.3 (2014): 504–05. 27  Gabilondo, “Toward a Postnational History of Galician Literature: Rereading Rosalía de Castro’s Narrative as Atlantic Modernism.” In Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies. Between the Local and the Global, eds. Kirsty Hooper & Manuel Puga Moruxa. New York:

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interest of comparatists who, like César Domínguez Prieto, have often worked on the connections between postnationalism and European identity or cosmopolitanism and global literature (Domínguez Prieto 2012: 242–52, 2015: 1–9).28 In his work he approaches a Castelao who is sensitive to both the Black Atlantic and the Irish Wild Atlantic Way (Domínguez Prieto 2014: 64–71).29 Given the specific weight of the American diaspora in our culture, it is not necessary to stress the relevance of this approach to Galician studies. But I think that the importance of the Atlantic as a space for literary and linguistic circulation still holds potential and is truly expandable, if we look precisely at the dimensions of a diaspora that today, through, for example, the re-articulation of Galician studies in Italy, is working from cultural spaces as old as those of the Mediterranean. I also think that the possible assignment of Galician studies to the areas of interest defined in the field of transatlantic studies should not be disassociated from some disciplinary debates, many of them still valid in the United States, on the validity of Hispanism: A common program of studies in crisis, once the more or less implicit postulate of the supremacy of the Spanish language and literature, becomes unacceptable in geographical contexts that are highly affected by cultural diversity like the American or the Spanish ones. In the past, Hispanism has been able to act de facto as a kind of expansionist cultural nationalism, through which Spanish culture, understood as a monolingual culture, has globalized its own privileges in academia. Authors like Abril Trigo (2012) or Marcelo Topuzian (2017) have appropriately wondered to what extent the formulation of transatlantic studies in authors such as Julio Ortega (2006) was operating in the background as a state policy called to remove the old Hispanism. In this conception, cultural flows are recognized as the guarantors of a new position in the Modern Language Association, 2011: 74–95; Catherine Davies, “Rosalía de Castro y América.” In Rosalía de Castro no século XXI. Unha nova ollada, eds. Rosario Álvarez, et al. Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura Galega, 2014: 117–36. 28  Domínguez Prieto, “World Literature and Cosmopolitanism Studies.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, eds. Theo D’Haen, et  al. Londres: Routledge, 2012: 242–52; César Domínguez, “Introduction.” In Cosmopolitanism and the Postnational: Literature and the New Europe, eds. César Domínguez and Theo D’Haen. Leinden; Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2015: 1–9. 29  Domínguez Prieto, “‘Eu son fillo dunha Patria descoñecida’: Do Atlántico negro ao Atlántico verde a través da diáspora galega: Castelao (cunhas notas sobre Whitman e Lorca).” Grial: revista galega de cultura 202 (2014): 64–71.

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relations between both sides of the Atlantic, based on the supremacy of the Spanish language.30 This state policy acts, again, to accentuate the tension between the center and the periphery from an implicit presupposition that we, as Galicianists, must question because it is based on a very dangerous gloto-political operation for non-hegemonic cultural forms; that Spanish is superior to other languages in the Iberian and Latin American fields because it has more speakers than any other and because it has produced a literature that, in the global literary market economy, is comparable to Italian, German, English or French. It is here that the relationship between transatlantic studies and comparative literature, understood in the elitist way of a certain cosmopolitanism, becomes clear, as well as the aporias of those Iberian studies that are only defined as the aggregation or juxtaposition of cultural identities conceived as static objects, and that often neglect the flows and connections between the realities they intend to host and describe.

3   Galician Culture From the Perspective of Diaspora Studies The purpose of the third part of this chapter is to begin to think about how diaspora studies, approached with some tools drawn from critical geography, can serve as a stimulus for a disciplinary reformulation of Galician studies. This reformulation is not intended to challenge, but rather to welcome, the main contributions of the mentioned matrices from a new perspective. This is how the national question can take on new nuances in the form of the study of the nation remembered and imagined from exile, just as the colonial key can be expanded by considering not only the relations between the state and the periphery of the state but the circulations in the global space of a migrant community that must be

30  Topuzian presented his hypothesis in the paper “Una perspectiva disciplinar alternativa para las literaturas peninsulares: los estudios ibéricos,” read on November 6, 2017, in the VI Congreso Internacional Celehis de Literatura (Literatura argentina, española y latinoamericana). A similar thesis had been defended by Abril Trigo in “Los estudios transatlánticos y la geopolítica del neo-hispanismo.” Cuadernos de literatura 31 (2012): 16–45. The two undoubtedly think of formulations such as those collected by Julio Ortega in “Los estudios transatlánticos al primer lustro del siglo XXI. A modo de presentación.” Transatlántica: idas y vueltas de la literatura y la cultura hispano-americana en el siglo XX (Dossier coordinated by Francisco Fernández). Iberoamericana 6.21 (2006): 91–98.

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understood in relation to other chains of migratory flows that today reveal the existence of new types of colonial domination. In other words, a diasporic re-articulation of Galician studies allows us to recognize different planes and simultaneous scales in spatial analysis, more in accordance with a topological conception of space rather than a metric one. In this sense, some of the concepts provided by the TAR methodology (acronym of the Network Actor Theory), which are largely supported by the resistance to the polarities we have analyzed from the beginning—namely those that distinguish between “central” and “peripheral,” “high” and “low,” “inside” and “outside,” “large” and “small,” and “local” and “global”—can be illuminating. To put it in Bruno Latour’s words, “ningún lugar domina o suficiente para ser global e ningún lugar é autosuficiente abondo como para ser local” [no place dominates enough to be global and no place is self-sufficient enough to be local] (Latour 2008: 290),31 a sentence that very aptly recalls the resistance of critical geographer Doreen Massey (2005) to identify the categories of “place” and “local.” From Massey’s work we recover her critical conception of the process of globalization from the unveiling of what the author calls “geometries of power,” as well as the challenge of the traditional dialectic between place and space. As is well known, this challenge is based on her conception of space as a result of social interactions and the conditions of the possibility of heterogeneity and multiplicity of worlds inhabiting a world. 32 The powerful networks of the Galician diaspora provide valuable examples to confirm some of the main assumptions of TAR topographies. Among them, the resistance to distinguishing between the micro and macro levels of the analysis, the emphasis on connectivity (once all the points in the network are considered local) or the idea that there is no prior absolute scale from which we can describe the facts. It is the agents themselves, in this case the migrants, who decide in each case on the relative scale from which they act: Those who, located in one space or another, mutually define their positions by transporting specific traces by a series of means strategically chosen for it (Latour 2008: 263).33 We see this very clearly when examining the importance of the magazine Vieiros, the most 31  Latour, Reensamblar lo social. Una introducción a la teoría del actor red. Buenos Aires: Manantial, 2008: 290. 32  Massey, For Space. Londres: Sage, 2005. 33  Latour, Reensamblar lo social: 263.

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outstanding product of the Board of Galician Culture in Mexico, and of what the researcher Ana Acuña Trabazo, comparing it with the program Hora de Galicia, considers to be “na liña das formas de resistencia que os grupos subalternos, neste caso o galego, tanto nas metrópoles como nas periferias, adoptaron ao longo dos tempos” [in line with the forms of resistance that the subaltern groups, in this case the Galician, both in the metropolises and in the peripheries, have adopted throughout the times] (Acuña Trabazo 2009: 94). 34 In her work, Acuña Trabazo was able to see how crucial it was to link the intellectual work of exiles with the strategic use of certain media, namely radio. Argentina demonstrated the successful use of broadcast linked to the publication Galicia emigrante, which remained active until the seventies of the last century. In Mexico, the experience of Vieiros highlights that the Galician exile operated at all times in a network, as evidenced by its connections with Radio Paris or Radio London (Acuña 2009: 104),35 an aspect that invited us to read other media experiences of exile from an international perspective, such as the Galician Programme, the first radio broadcast in the Galician language, conceived of by the announcer and editor of the BBC Plácido Castro, who was born in the village of Corcubion. After his work as Representative of International Relations of the Galician Party and as a translator of literary texts in the prewar period, Castro was forced into exile in the United Kingdom but continued to work closely with agents of the American exile. In fact, one of the most exhilarating results of Galician exile emerged from Castro’s collaboration with Delgado Gurriarán and Luis Tobío: The poetic selection Poesía inglesa e francesa verquida ao galego (1949), which won the translation contest assembled by the Federation of Galician Societies of Buenos Aires. In the aforementioned article, Ana Acuña also mentions the exchanges between Vieiros and enclaves like Buenos Aires and Havana, largely thanks to mediation by agents such as Xosé Neira Vilas (Acuña 2009: 104).36 The exiles used this entire web of relationships to serve as a reactivation of Galician culture in which the youth would participate. The most obvious testimony is the famous epistle “Carta ao Fato Brais Pinto” 34  Acuña Trabazo, “Na encrucillada dos vieiros: a revista Vieiros e os galegos doutras periferias (Madrid, Arxentina, Cuba…).” A Trabe de ouro: publicación galega de pensamento crítico 80 (2009): 94. 35  Acuña Trabazo, “Na encrucillada dos vieiros”: 104. 36  Acuña Trabazo, “Na encrucillada dos vieiros”: 104.

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by Carlos Velo, addressed to a group of Galician boys, based in Madrid, that the Mexican exiles saw as the legitimate “heirs of the Nós group.” In order of appearance on the map, we can recapitulate the points of this network, a constellation which, by virtue of the arduous work of connection, all the places, from the smallest to the largest—Mexico, Buenos Aires, Paris, London, Corcubion, Havana and Madrid—contains Galicia. The network demonstrates that the cultural activity of the diaspora did not develop by virtue of the transfer of goods from one place to another, but by the simultaneous activation of relationships for which the terms central or peripheral, large or small, outer or inner were inoperable. This principle is reaffirmed in another example that eminently illustrates the possibilities of applying network analysis to the diaspora. I am referring to the characteristic associationism of emigration, which in cities such as in Buenos Aires filled with toponyms the names of Galician societies. The careful study of the heterogeneity of these formations would make Latour’s invitation to “localizar o global e redestribuír o local” [locate the global and redistribute the local] (Latour 2008: 249–310)37 real, as few other analyses do. For this it is necessary to recognize the resistance of these formations to vertical articulation and their inherent multiplicity, which the researcher Ruy Farías figures into the development of “todas las posibilidades de asociacionismo étnico, combinando la procedencia geográfica (regional, provincial, local, comarcal o parroquial) con los objetivos específicos que cada institución perseguía (mutualistas médicas, instituciones de beneficencia, centros culturales, recreativos, deportivos, etc.)” [all the possibilities of ethnic associationism, combining the geographical provenance (regional, provincial, local, county or parochial) with the specific objectives that each institution pursued (medical mutualists, charities, cultural, recreational, sporting centers, etc.)] (Farías 2011: 154).38 I think it is very important to preserve in the analysis the diversity of simultaneous scales, the convergence of different purposes in these more or less formal networks of mutual aid, sometimes rearranged in federations, as well as to transcend the centralist logics seen in the characteristic Galician minifundios, a problem that should be fought.

 Latour, Reensamblar lo social: 249–310.  Farías, “El asociacionismo gallego en Buenos Aires y las posibilidades que ofrece para el estudio de la integración de los migrantes: un análisis a partir del archivo de la FAGA-­ MEGA.” Antítesis 4.7 (2011): 154. 37 38

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A yet pending task in tracing these media or associative networks is to examine the giant or minor transformations that Galician culture has undergone when transported to different parts of the world. Again, a conceptual tool by Bruno Latour, who speaks of “immutable moveables” (Latour 2008: 317),39 can help us to refer to those objects or technologies that do not change in their movement from one place to another. If we understand this as a fetish, highly standardized fetish by devices such as grammars or dictionaries, a language could be exactly so. However, as TAR researcher Annmarie Mol (in Martin et  al. 2018)40 acknowledges, when referring to such heterogeneous realities like treating anemia or hydraulic pump technology, there are things that need to change in order to continue operating in different situations, the same way that Pontevedra, Buenos Aires, Fuerteventura or Salvador also had to change some construction materials and solutions to have cruises.41 It is, therefore, proposing a conception of Galician culture more attentive to heterogeneity than to unity, and consequently less dependent on standardizing cultural repertoires that make mutation possible in its route through different spaces. There are many assets, and not just the language, that we could describe as potentially or actually changeable moveables: singing, playing or listening to music, cooking, talking, working in the garden, making a home, writing a poem. What is relevant is not, in Heidegger’s terms, to remain in the provinces in order to dedicate oneself to them while preserving their essence, but to commit to their displacement possibilities, and to examine their simultaneous and complex interactions with facts such as those in host societies, and the importance of these interactions in the processes of linguistic and cultural change. Only then will we be able to really take Galician studies beyond the fields of philology or to bring them to life in a world where almost no one remembers the reasons why this discipline ever found its place in the world. Only by incorporating the implications of this ethical and epistemological choice in practice (Galicia as an archipelago of practices and knowledge spread at different speeds around the world) will we prevent the risk of reducing

 Latour, Reensamblar lo social: 317  Martin and Gomes Pereira, “Corpos múltiplos, ontologias políticas e a lógica do cuidado: uma entrevista com Annemarie Mol.” Interfaze 22.64 (2018): 295–305. 41  I owe these ideas, as well as the recommendation of bibliographic materials on TAR theory, to the geographer Brais Estévez Vilariño. 39 40

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Galician to a single identity, and from that identity, a limited series of essential traits, and ultimately condensed in the language. After all, one of the best legacies of twentieth-century thought in general, and the linguistic turn in particular, is learning how to think of things in terms of their differences. It is not just an ethical and epistemological question, but also a political one: If things simply were as they were, there would be no possible change, and any group affected by domination puts their hope in the fact that what seems identical to what it is could someday change. In this light, the unstable balance between essentialism and strategy that made a feminist and postcolonial cultural practice possible for Gayatri Spivak becomes itself inoperative—a strategic essentialism whose limitations and possibilities have been debated ad infinitum by post-­ identitarian feminism.42 Roots can travel, as languages ​​ and memories travel; there is no relationship of mutual exclusion between displacement and rooting. Similarly, nothing compels us to deduce a whole from the sum of the particulars. On the contrary, it is the particularities, the irreducible differentials, that ask us to understand and listen because, as Deleuze and Guattari have taught us, each singular case asks for its own law.43 Being so closely linked to space, I took the title of the congress where this paper was first delivered as a keynote44 as an impetus to recognize the deficiencies of the models of representation of Galician culture, reluctant to their literally displaced condition. The reality of this condition is not accidental, albeit contingent, but rather constitutive. No one chooses to be born in the place they were born, and we are rarely able to choose our place of death, but between the two points of this journey, even if we never left our birthplace, how many places and how many place names would we be surrounded by? By thinking about the two compulsory points of our uncertain life path, we learn to distrust any model that does not contemplate some kind of loyalty to these or the multiple locations that lie between them and the inoperability of the discourses and practices that, in a more or less conscious way, continue to understand Galicia as an “interior.” An “interior” with respect to which an “exterior” must be 42  A presentation of the debate can be seen in Manuel Asensi’s introduction to the classic study of Gayatri Spivak: Manuel Asensi, “Introduction.” In Gayatri Spivak ¿Pueden hablar los subalternos? Barcelona: MACBA, 2009: 9–39. 43  Deleuze and Guattari, ¿Qué es la filosofía? Barcelona: Anagrama, 1993. 44  “Galician Studies Moving West: Galician Language and Culture at the Crossroads.” III North American Symposium of Galician Studies. Denver, 18–20 October, 2018.

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ordered, described and understood more as a concluded past than as a problematic present-day. We came to the western United States because we know that emigration is not over: it transits through new spaces that need new descriptions, such as those welcomed under the more or less appropriate term “transmigrants.”45 We also need new places from which to continue to think of old Galicia. The only way peripheries can challenge the center is by stating that there is no center that is not radically crossed by peripheries. In the face of the models of tension between two poles that we have analyzed throughout this work, to begin to understand Galician studies as studies of the diaspora allows us to understand that the reality of displacement is probably the most distinctive risk of Galician culture. The operation is not at all alien to the necessary exercise of restitution, with respect to the memory of emigrants and exiles, carried out in Galicia through archives such as that of the Galician Culture Council. But what this is all about, above all, is not to ignore Galicia’s present and future: To how many yet unimaginable places will we Galicians arrive and leave things of our own? It seems crucial to me, at this point, to transcend the ideas of emigration as epic and that of return as myth—it is no coincidence that the myth of return has reached a very prominent place in Heideggerian metaphysics—as he who does not leave, does not even need to return, and he who decides to return, as the poet knew, never returns to the same place nor in the same way. After all, the interculturality inherent in diaspora phenomena can only evoke that powerful idea of José Lambert (1999), perhaps the most memorable legacy of the polysystemic model, that all societies are multilingual.46 The dialectical quality of Doreen Massey’s thought reminds us of this again when she states, as if an axiom, that all places relate to others, but there is no place equal to another. Thinking of Galicia from the vantage of diasporic studies invites us to build a network of connected places that make recognizable all the points on the map to which Galician culture owes something, from the smallest to the most giant, and to do so without assuming that some are more important than others. What is left of the 45  Term coined by María Alonso in Transmigrantes. Fillos da precariedade. Rianxo: Axóuxere, 2017. 46  José Lambert, “Aproximaciones sistémicas y la literatura en las sociedades multilingües.” In Teoría de los polisistemas, ed. Montserrat Iglesias Santos. Madrid: Arco/Libros, 1999: 53–70.

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other places in us when we return and what is there about Galicia in us when we leave? These are the questions capable of introducing the connections between all points in the network into the equation: The dynamism and respect for the differences we must learn to uphold when building models. From that perspective, Galicia is neither our land nor an abstract structure, but the meeting point between displacement and settlement, between the continuous movement that the course of life generates in any person from anywhere in the world and our loyalty to the places that made us—that is why they are irrevocable, although we cannot touch them. From the biggest to the smallest, in their constitutive strength and especially in their relationships, they all call us. It is not in its metaphysical essence, but in the improbable links that these places articulate, where we can perhaps determine the resistance to the devouring force of a world that, like the global space, is increasingly alien to us and needs a new common fraternity from which we Galicians, wherever we were born, must become a part of.

Bibliography Acuña Trabazo, Ana. 2009. Na encrucillada dos vieiros: a revista Vieiros e os galegos doutras periferias (Madrid, Arxentina, Cuba…). A trabe de ouro: revista galega de pensamento crítico 80: 91–107. Alonso, María. 2017. Transmigrantes. Fillos da precariedade. Rianxo: Axóuxere Editora. Antonio, Manuel. 2015. Obra Completa. Epistolario. Edited by Xosé Luis Axeitos. A Coruña: Real Academia Galega & Fundación Barrié. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1997. Cosmopolitan Patriots. Critical Inquiry 23 (3): 617–639. Apter, Emily. 2013. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso. Asensi, Manuel. 2009. Introduction. In ¿Pueden hablar los subalternos? ed. Gayatri Spivak, 9–39. Barcelona: MACBA. Bieber, León Enrique, ed. 2001. Las relaciones germano-mexicanas: desde el aporte de los hermanos Humboldt. UNAM: México. Borgmann, Albert. 1992. Cosmopolitanism and Provincialism: On Heidegger’s Errors and Insights. Philosophy Today 36: 131–145. Casanova, Pascale. 2001. La república mundial de las letras. Translated by Jaime Zulaika. Barcelona: Anagrama. Constantine, David. 1979. The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. Londres: Modern Humanities Research Association.

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Constenla, Xosé. 2017. O colapso territorial en Galicia. Vigo: Galaxia. Damrosch, David. 2014. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability by Emily Apter (review). Comparative Literature Studies 51 (3): 504–505. Dasilva, Xosé Manuel. 2013. La traducción gallega y la censura franquista. Quaderns: revista de traducció 20: 17–29. Davies, Catherine. 2014. Rosalía de Castro y América. In Rosalía de Castro no século XXI. Unha nova ollada, ed. Rosario Álvarez, Anxo Angueira, María do Cebreiro Álvarez, and Dolores Vilavedra, 117–136. Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura Galega. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1993. ¿Qué es la filosofía? Translated by Thomas Kauf. Barcelona: Anagrama. Domínguez Prieto, César. 2012. World Literature and Cosmopolitanism Studies. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 242–252. Londres: Routledge. ———. 2014. ‘Eu son fillo dunha Patria descoñecida’: Do Atlántico negro ao Atlántico verde a través da diáspora galega: Castelao (cunhas notas sobre Whitman e Lorca). Grial: revista galega de cultura 202: 64–71. ———. 2015. Introduction. In Cosmopolitanism and the Postnational: Literature and the New Europe, ed. César Domínguez and Theo D’Haen, 1–9. Leiden; Boston: Brill Rodopi. Farías, Ruy. 2011. El asociacionismo gallego en Buenos Aires y las posibilidades que ofrece para el estudio de la integración de los migrantes: un análisis a partir del archivo de la FAGA-MEGA. Antítesis 4 (7): 151–171. Faye, Emmanuel. 2009. Heidegger. La introducción del nazismo en la filosofía. Madrid: Akal. Gabilondo, Joseba. 2011. Toward a Postnational History of Galician Literature: Rereading Rosalía de Castro’s Narrative as Atlantic Modernism. In Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies. Between the Local and the Global, ed. Kirsty Hooper and Manuel Puga Moruxa, 74–95. New York: Modern Language Association. González-Millán, Xoán. 1994. Do nacionalismo literario a unha literatura nacional. Hipóteses de traballo para un estudio institucional da literatura galega. Anuario de estudos literarios galegos, 67–81. Heidegger, Martin. 1963. ¿Por qué permanecemos en la provincia? (Translated by Jorge Rodríguez). Revista Eco VI (5): 472–476. ———. 1964. Por que nos quedamos na provincia? (Translated by Domingo García Sabell). Grial. Revista galega de cultura 4: 254–256. Hooper, Kirsty. 2005. Novas cartografías nos estudos galegos. Nacionalismo literario, literatura nacional, lecturas posnacionais. Anuario de estudos literarios galegos, 64–73. ———. 2011. Writing Galicia into the World: New Cartographies, New Poetics. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

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Hooper, Kirsty, and Manuel Puga, eds. 2011. Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies: Between the Local and the Global. New  York: Modern Language Association. Lambert, José. 1999. Aproximaciones sistémicas y la literatura en las sociedades multilingües. In Teoría de los polisistemas, ed. Montserrat Iglesias Santos, 53–70. Madrid: Arco/Libros. Latour, Bruno. 2008. Reensamblar lo social. Una introducción a la teoría del actor red. Buenos Aires: Manantial. López Sández, María. 2007. Paisaxe e nación. A creación discursiva do territorio. Vigo: Galaxia. López Vázquez, Ramón. 2007. Celestino Fernández de la Vega: pensador do novo galeguismo. Centro Ramón Piñeiro para a Investigación en Humanidades: Santiago de Compostela. Martin, Denise, Mary Jane Spink, and Pedro Paulo Gomes Pereira. 2018. Corpos múltiplos, ontologías políticas e a lógica do cuidado: uma entrevista com Annemarie Mol. Interfaze 22 (64): 295–305. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. Londres: Sage. Miguélez-Carballeira, Helena. 2013. Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Gender, Culture, and Politics. Bangor: University of Wales. ———. 2014. Galiza, um povo sentimental? Género, política e cultura no imaginário nacional galego. Santiago de Compostela: Através Editora. Ortega, Julio. 2006. Los estudios transatlánticos al primer lustro del siglo XXI. A modo de presentación. Transatlántica: idas y vueltas de la literatura y la cultura hispano-americana en el siglo XX (Dossier coordinated by Francisco Fernández). Iberoamericana 6 (21): 91–98. Otero Pedrayo, Ramón. 1982. Ensaio histórico sobre a cultura galega. Vigo: Galaxia. Patterson, Craig. 2011. Galician Identity and Race: a Postcolonial Reading of Castelao (talk). In Looking at Iberian from a Comparative European Perspective: Literature, Narration and Identity. University of Lisbon, October 13–14. Piñeiro, Ramón, ed. 1952. Sete ensaios sobre Rosalía de Castro. Vigo: Galaxia. ———. 1984. Filosofía da saudade. Vigo: Galaxia. Rancière, Jacques. 2007. En los bordes de lo político. Buenos Aires: Ediciones la Cebra. Schneeberger, Guido. 1962. Nachlese zu Heidegger: Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Denken. Berna: Selbstverlag des Verfassers. Topuzian, Marcelo. 2017. Una perspectiva disciplinar alternativa para las literaturas peninsulares: los estudios ibéricos (talk read on 6 November, 2017). In VI Congreso Internacional Celehis de Literatura (Literatura argentina, española y latinoamericana). Nacional University of Mar del Plata, 6–8 November. Torres Queiruga, Andrés. 1989. Teoloxía e pensamento en Heidegger. Reflexións desde a provincia. Grial. Revista galega de cultura 143: 315–339. Trigo, Abril. 2012. Los estudios transatlánticos y la geopolítica del neo-­hispanismo. Cuadernos de literatura 31: 16–45.

Language as Object of Research Versus Language as Political Object: Old and New Horizons in the Study of Galician Xosé Luís Regueira

1   Introduction In studies relating to Galician linguistics, it is common to refer to the late point at which research began on the Galician language or to the brief history of Galician linguistics. This is an undeniable fact, but one that should be seen in perspective. Although it is true that from the first Spanish grammar (de Nebrija 1492)1 to the first in Galician (the Compendio de gramática gallega-castellana [Compendium of Galician-Castilian Grammar]2 of

1  Nebrija, Arte de la lengua castellana. Salamanca, 1492. Incunabulum, Biblioteca Nacional de España. http://www.bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000174208&page=1. 2  All direct translations are my own.

X. L. Regueira (*) Insituto da Lingua Galega, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Castro et al. (eds.), Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98861-6_2

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Francisco Mirás 1864),3 almost 400 years had passed, the study of linguistics, in the sense that we currently understand it, emerged in the Iberian Peninsula only in the twentieth century, albeit with some notable exceptions, such as the works of Gonçalves Viana on Portuguese phonetics (e.g., Essai de phonétique et de phonologie de la langue portugaise [Essay on Portuguese Phonetics and Phonology]) (Viana 1883).4 The first significant work on Spanish linguistics was the Manual elemental de gramática histórica española, [Basic Manual of Historical Spanish Grammar], by Menéndez Pidal (1904),5 followed shortly afterwards by Elementos de gramática histórica gallega [Aspects of Historical Galician Grammar] by García de Diego (1984).6 Linguistics studies were implemented at quite a late stage in Spanish and Portuguese universities, but in Galicia they did not appear until the mid-1960s. It is from that moment that work on the Galician language began in Galicia. Previously, the only work undertaken in that regard was by foreign and some Spanish linguists, such as the aforementioned work by García de Diego. Studies on Galician linguistics therefore developed significantly from the 1970s with the creation of the Instituto da Lingua Galega [Galician Language Institute, ILG] and the implementation of Galician linguistics studies at the University of Santiago de Compostela. This process occurred in tandem with political change in Spain, with the end of the Franco dictatorship (1975) and with the process of standardizing Galician. At this time, the priorities were the standardization and development of varieties to meet the new requirements. However, at the beginning of the twenty-­ first century, once the most urgent needs of the standardization process had already been met, a significant shift toward research lines and objectives began, enabling the study of Galician linguistics at an international

3  Mirás, Compendio de gramática gallega-castellana. Santiago de Compostela: Imp. M. Mirás, 1864. Facsimile ed.: Madrid: Akal, 1978. 4  Gonçalves Viana, “Essai de phonétique et de phonologie de la langue portugaise d’après le dialecte actuel de Lisbonne.” Romania 45 (1883): 29–98. https://www.persee.fr/doc/ roma_0035-8029_1883_num_12_45_6248. 5  Menéndez Pidal, Manual elemental de gramática histórica española. Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez, 1904. https://archive.org/details/manualelementald00men uoft?view=theater. 6  García de Diego, Elementos de gramática histórica gallega (fonética-morfología). Burgos: Hijos de Santiago Rodríguez, 1909. Facsimile ed.: Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 1984.

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level. As shall be argued in this study, it is in this change of direction that Galician linguistics is currently engaged. Throughout this journey, it should be borne in mind that the emergence of Galician linguistics was conditioned by several well-known factors. Galician was a minoritized language in a community that did not have its own political institutions until 1979: the language of a (until recently) largely rural, unindustrialized society, undergoing intense emigration. It was the majority language, but it was above all the language of the powerless classes and thus had little social prestige. All this, together with the non-existence of higher education and linguistic research centers until the 1960s, explains the later and precarious development of a tradition of linguistic studies in Galicia that was focused on Galician. In this analysis, some preliminary reflections regarding the two facets of the linguistic work on Galician (Sect. 2.2) shall be shared; the background and work undertaken before the 1970s shall be briefly discussed below (Sect. 2.3), in order to focus on the most significant achievements before 2000 (Sect. 2.4) and on new developments in Galician linguistics studies (Sect. 2.5). Section 2.6 contains a brief conclusion. Because of space limitations, reference to specific works shall be greatly reduced, and only a few examples shall be included. Whenever possible, reference shall be made to other bibliographic or historiographical works in which more detailed information may be found. To cite only the most significant works in each discipline would lead to a very large number of bibliographic references that would be impractical in a work of this size. This is an example of the degree of development of the studies of Galician linguistics, but it entails the omission of important references both to studies undertaken in Galicia and beyond. My purpose is to reflect on the lines followed and the lines to be followed in the future, so the omission of references to works or people who have relevant roles in this process should not be construed as a lack of consideration.

2   Language as a Political Object and Language as a Research Object In the public discourse, statements can be found to affirm that languages are “means” or “tools of communication,” and from this position the corollary can be made that speakers should adopt the most appropriate instrument to cover this function, since there are languages that are “more useful” than others. It may be shown that these are fundamentally

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ideological discourses, but this is not the place to do so. It is obvious that languages are part of the core of the cultural and social life of a community, and consequently, the work on a language always has meanings and implications that go beyond pure linguistic research. Languages matter, and people make frequent observations, comments and judgements about language and speakers (e.g., Rymes 2020),7 whether it is their own or someone else’s. Languages are linked to individual and social identities. It can even be argued that languages make us, or allow us, to be who we are (Joseph 2010).8 On a more abstract level, it can be argued that languages are political objects (Regueira 2019)9 in terms of their role in society, and therefore, many states legislate on which languages can be declared “official” (legitimized for uses related to established power) and used in certain social spheres. However, political power not only deals with regulating the status of languages, but also regulates their form. States legislate on the standard form of languages or in some cases delegate that function to other institutions. In the Galician case, the Galician Parliament expressly delegates through the additional provision of the Linguistic Normalization Law (Law 3/1983 of 15 June) to the Real Academia Galega [Royal Galician Academy] (RAG) the power to determine “questions regarding the regulation, updating and correct use of the Galician language.” Therefore, it is clear that the competent institution in this area is the Galician Parliament, and the RAG can only exercise this function by delegation. The spelling reform of German, agreed in 1996, was an international treaty signed by the governments of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The Portuguese Orthographic Agreement was also an international treaty signed by the different Portuguese official language countries following its discussion and approval by the respective national parliaments. It is therefore for parliaments and governments to decide on the spelling and the

7  Rymes, How we talk about language. Exploring citizen sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 8  Joseph, “Identity.” In Language and identities, eds. C. Llamas and D. Watt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010: 9–17. 9  Regueira, “Variación fonética, a lingua da esfera pública e estándar oral: entre a lingüística e a política.” Revista Galega de Filoloxía 20 (2019): 119–147. https://doi.org/10.17979/ rgf.2019.20.0.5922.

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rules of the standard,10 and this is because the standard language is an institution, an important political object. In European nation-states, the language policies of the states aimed at establishing a homogeneous “national language” (cf. del Valle and Gabriel-­ Stheeman 2002, on Spanish linguistic nationalism),11 giving rise to the standard language ideology that has become dominant in these states (Milroy and Milroy 1999).12 The linguistic standards in force in these states are based on the varieties of the courts of the kingdoms of the Modern Age and the upper classes that succeeded them (Regueira 2005: 72–75)13; the pronunciation of the legitimized variety became a prominent social marker (e.g., Mugglestone 1995; Lippi-Green 2012; Silverstein

10  One anonymous reviewer pointed out that “[t]his is not true in countries like the United States or Great Britain (and others) which do not have Language Academies and where language norms are not dictated by the state. There are other institutions that take care of that: school systems, dictionaries, which take action based on the use and prestige of specific forms.” This is true, but only to a certain extent. In Germany, for example, the rules of spelling are stated by the Duden dictionary, but the official status of the Duden spelling had to be confirmed by political and governmental agreements (by the Bundesrat in 1902 and the ministers of culture of the German states in 1955) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden). The spelling reform of 1996 was agreed between governments, as stated in the main text. Ultimately, governments and political institutions have the final say, unless they have no need to do so. This applies even to the United States and the United Kingdom, where different spelling reform proposals have been discussed in their respective parliaments, such as the Spelling Reform Bill (https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1949/ mar/11/spelling-reform-bill), submitted to the UK Parliament in 1949 (and defeated by only three votes), and the Simplified Spelling Bill, which was submitted in 1953 (http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1953/feb/27/simplified-spelling-bill). On the successive attempts to reform the spelling of British English, see Iglesias Rábade (1995). Furthermore, in 1906 the US Congress passed a bill that banned the simplified spellings proposed by the Simplified Spelling Board in anything printed by the US Government Printing Office (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform). Thus, the British and American parliaments also make decisions about spelling. 11  del Valle, José and Luis Gabriel-Stheeman, eds., The battle over Spanish between 1800 and 2000: Language Ideologies and Hispanic Intellectuals. London: Routledge, 2002. 12  Milroy and Milroy, Authority in language. Investigating standard English. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 1999. 13   Regueira, “Estándar oral.” In Norma lingüística e variación, eds. Álvarez and Monteagudo. Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura Galega / Instituto da Lingua Galega, 2005: 69–95.

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2014).14 We should not forget, as Coulmas states, that “language often serves as the stage on which power relations involving inequalities of various kinds are acted out” (Coulmas 2018: 63).15 Therefore, questioning the linguistic hierarchy imposed by the centers of power of the state involves challenging the established order. Consequently, the promotion of minority languages is seen as a problem for homogeneity and even as a threat to national unity (UNESCO 2003). According to information published in the press in 2018,16 the French president, Emmanuel Macron, went so far as to say that the use of the letter “ñ” (foreign to French) in a Breton name meant “breaking the will of our rule of law for maintaining the unity of the country and equality without distinction of origin.” On the other hand, the emergence of minority languages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is inextricably intertwined with processes of the national construction of the communities that speak them, or at least the visibility and constitution of these communities as a political subject (Joseph 2004).17 In the Galician case, the re-emergence of Galician as a written language is linked to the process of building a Galician national identity, based fundamentally on a history, culture and language different from those dominant in the Spanish state (Beramendi 2007).18 The creation of a literature in Galician is part of a larger political project in which the language plays a key role. The well-known and oft-repeated words of Castelao may be recalled: “Se aínda somos galegos é por obra e gracia do idioma” [“If we are still Galicians, it is thanks to the language”].19 Therefore, efforts focused on producing a native historiography, literature and, with the 14  Mugglestone, “Talking proper”: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995; Lippi-Green, English with an accent. Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. 2nd. ed. London/New York: Routledge, 2012; Silverstein, “The race for place: dialect eradication vs. the linguistic “authenticity” of terroir.” In Indexing Authenticity. Sociolinguistic Perspectives, eds. V. Lacoste, J. Leimgruber and T. Breyer. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, 2014: 159–187. 15  Coulmas, Florian. An Introduction to Multilingualism. Language in a Changing World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 16  Rivas, “Macron contra la ‘ñ’.” El Confidencial, 2018. https://www.elconfidencial.com/ mundo/2018-07-08/francia-letra-n-polemica-nombremacron-fanch_1589445/. Accessed 21 July, 2021. 17  Joseph, Language and Identity. National, Ethnic, Religious. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 18  Beramendi, De provincia a nación. Historia do galeguismo político. Vigo: Xerais, 2007. 19  Rodríguez Castelao, Sempre en Galiza. Buenos Aires: Edicións Galiza, 1946.

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emergence of nationalism, works in other cultural forms (music, theater, etc.). With regard to language, the objective was to provide the language with legitimation tools, such as dictionaries and grammars, as well as the search for a standard form for the written language. It follows the model of the state languages, which had those instruments that in the popular mentality were seen as necessary in order “to be a language” (cf. González Seoane 2018: 408).20 From this point of view, this process of constructing the standard is a fundamentally political task undertaken in the language that aspires to be a “national language.” In recent times, Galician has been the subject of intense work in terms of its standardization and development. As Haugen (1966: 26)21 stated, language planning is part of politics, not language science. The choice of the standard variety and all subsequent stages of the elaboration process (Haugen 1987; Ramallo and Rei-Doval 2015)22 are based on political decisions, inevitably marked by the political, social and linguistic ideology of their promoters. This includes linguists participating in the selection and elaboration (and “purification”) of the standard variety, who, as Zimmermann (2003) points out, act as members of the language community, from where the attitudes on which the purism is based arise, and not as linguists, “obschon sie manchmal so tun, als ob es sprachimmanente Gründe für den Purismus gäbe, die sie als Spezialisten herausfunden hätten” [although they sometimes pretend that there are reasons for the purism inherent in the language that they have discovered as specialists] (Zimmermann 2003: 323).23 It can be questioned whether the development and implementation of a standard form is necessary or desirable (Regueira 2005).24 From my point of view, in a society that assumes the standard ideology, in which Galician has low social prestige and is subjected to the prejudice of 20  González Seoane, “Prescrición e descrición na Gramática de Saco.” Boletín da Real Academia Galega 367 (2018): 407–417. https://doi.org/10.32766/brag.379.740. 21  Haugen, Language Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Modern Norwegian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. 22  Haugen, “Language Planning.” In Sociolinguistics. Vol 1, eds. Ammon et al. Berlin / New York: de Gruyter, 1987: 626–637; Ramallo and Rei-Doval, “The Standardization of Galician.” Sociolinguistica 29. 1 (2015): 61–82. https://doi.org/10.1515/soci-2015-0006. 23  Zimmermann, “Fremdeinflüsse, Sprachpurismus und Sprachplanung in amerindischen Sprachen (am Beispiel des Otomí und des Guaraní).” In Purism in minor languages, endangered languages, regional languages, mixed languages, eds. J. Brincat, W. Boeder and T. Stolz. Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer, 2003: 315–347. 24  Regueira, “Estándar oral.”

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“dialectalism” (Piñeiro 1967; Santamarina 1998),25 the standard language enables Galician to advance in society and assume functions that previously were only covered by standard Spanish (cf. Moreno Cabrera 2000: 59).26 From the perspective of the Galicianist and nationalist movements, the attainment of a linguistic standard was regarded as an unavoidable necessity within the process of national construction that has been taking place since the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the study of Galician language has a relatively recent history as well. Modern linguistics began with the historical-comparative method (e.g., Bopp 1816)27 and continued throughout the nineteenth century with Neo-grammarians (Paul 1880).28 The most relevant shift tends to be identified as having occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the publication of Cours de linguistique générale [Course in General Linguistics] by Ferdinand de Saussure (1995 [1916]),29 which laid the foundation for the dominant concepts of linguistics throughout the twentieth century. From this point of view, languages are seen as systems of oppositions between units at different levels (as the famous formulation attributed to Saussure affirms, “un système où tout se tient” [“a system in which everything is interconnected”], (cf. Regueira 2016: 25),30 in the structuralist view, or later as rule grammars (in generative theory). Languages, therefore, are conceived as objects outside speakers, as stated by Saussure (1995 [1916]): “La langue, distincte de la parole, est un objet qu’on peut étudier séparément” [“Language, distinct from speech, is an object that can be studied separately”] (31)31: “as if it were in fact an 25  Piñeiro, A lingoaxe i as língoas. A Coruña: Real Academia Galega, 1967; Santamarina Fernández, A linguaxe e as linguas. Ramón Piñeiro revisitado ós 30 anos do seu ingreso na Real Academia Galega. A Coruña: Real Academia Galega, 1998. 26  Moreno Cabrera, La dignidad e igualdad de las lenguas: crítica de la discriminación lingüística. Madrid: Alianza, 2000. 27  Bopp, Über das Conjugationsystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der grieschischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache. Frankfurt am Main: Adräischen Buchhandlung, 1816. Repr. London: Routledge, 1999. 28  Paul, Pricipien der Sprachgeschichte. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1880. Repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 29  Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, ed. Tullio di Mauro. Paris: Payot, 1995. 30  Regueira, “La lengua de la esfera pública en situación de minorización: español y portugués como lenguas de contacto en el lenguaje político gallego.” In El español en contacto con las otras lenguas peninsulares, ed. D. Poch Olivé. Madrid / Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2016: 39–59. 31  Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale: 31.

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autonomous natural object,” as Lass stated (Lass 1980: 120).32 In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, tendencies emerged that challenged this conception, such as sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics or conversation and discourse analysis, among other branches. Now, the emphasis is on how language is used in communication and social interaction, debunking the idea of a system external to speakers and also the notion of the ideal or representative speaker. It is in this sense, as stated in the introduction, that linguistic studies were late to emerge in the Iberian Peninsula. The perspectives outlined above make it possible to distinguish linguistic studies (i.e., outside of prescriptive interests and aimed at the knowledge of the language, both in terms of linguistic structures and uses as well as in sociolinguistic aspects, such as variation, linguistic change or attitudes to the language, among others) from works intended to develop and maintain the language as political object, such as standardization, with all the instruments associated with this variety (norms, grammars and dictionaries, essentially). In a situation characterized by minoritization and during a process of social normalization (in terms of both the corpus and the status of the language), it is understandable that the efforts of Galician linguists were essentially aimed at meeting requirements concerning language planning. For some time, linguistic studies were even undervalued, as they were seen as a distraction from the priority objectives of defense and “normalization” of the language, and a requirement for ideological commitment was placed on linguists. However, it was gradually accepted that language work was needed not only as a provider of solutions for language planning but also to “normalize” Galician as an object of linguistic study. On the one hand, it is obvious that language policies cannot be implemented without a sound knowledge of the linguistic reality, both in terms of the uses and the linguistic attitudes of the current or potential speakers, and without understanding what the speakers are doing with the language in its social interactions (whether in the private or public sphere). On the other hand, positioning Galician as a legitimate object of study for any linguist is also an objective of “social normalization” (in the sense of making Galician a “normal” language, a language like any other in its field), intended to confer prestige upon the language. In this regard, significant advances have been made in recent decades, as shall be seen below.

 Lass, On explaining language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

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3   Precursors: Linguistic Research Prior to the 1960s As is well known, Galician underwent important development as a written language in the Middle Ages, as a vehicle for the so-called Galician-­ Portuguese lyric as well as literary and documentary prose. However, Galician was replaced by Spanish as a written language in the late Middle Ages, just as the use of printing began to develop. The first known printed texts in Galician date from 1612 (Mariño 1998: 251, 2008: 144)33 and the first complete book is from 1863 (Cantares gallegos by Rosalía de Castro), if we do not count the translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew published by Louis Lucien Bonaparte in 1861. During the Modern Age, there was no relevant cultural production in Galician, with some exceptions: these are what have been called the “dark centuries” (Monteagudo 2016).34 With the advent of the Enlightenment, Galician was part of the concerns of enlightened figures, such as the Benedictines Juan Sobreira,35 who started collecting lexicographic material (Sobreira 1979),36 and Martín Sarmiento,37 who produced works on onomastics and etymology (Sarmiento 1998–1999),38 as well as an outline on the history of the Galician language, in which he expressed ideas that would later be supported by Romance Linguistics (Sarmiento 1974).39 These works remained unpublished and partly unfinished; their impact was therefore very

33  Mariño Paz, Historia da lingua galega. Santiago de Compostela: Sotelo Blanco, 1998; Mariño Paz, Historia de la lengua gallega. München: LINCOM, 2008. 34  Monteagudo, “A invención dos Séculos Escuros.” In Historia das historias de Galicia, ed. I. Dubert. Vigo: Xerais, 2016: 149–179. 35  Juan Sobreira Salgado (1746–1805), a fellow of the Order of Saint Benedict, authored works on Galician geography, botany and language, which remained mostly unpublished until the twentieth century. 36  Sobreira, Papeletas de un diccionario gallego, ed. J. L. Pensado. Ourense: Instituto de Estudios Orensanos Padre Feijoo, 1979. 37  Martín Sarmiento (born Pedro José García Balboa, 1695–1772), also a member of the Order of Saint Benedict, was a scholar and writer. His works in Galician and about Galician remained unpublished until the twentieth century. 38  Sarmiento, Onomástico etimológico de la lengua gallega, ed. J.  L. Pensado. 2 vols. A Coruña: Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza, 1998–1999. 39  Sarmiento, “Sobre el origen de la lengua gallega y sobre la paleografía española.” In Opúsculos lingüísticos gallegos del siglo XVIII, ed. J. L. Pensado. Vigo: Galaxia, 1974: 17–47.

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limited. There was no continuity in studies on Galician until the period of the Rexurdimento or Galician literary revival. During and after the Napoleonic Wars, Galician began to be used as a language of political propaganda and for the composition of some poems, but it was in the second half of the nineteenth century, during the Rexurdimento, when a literature and culture expressed in Galician began to be created. Galician was part of a larger political project: the constitution of a national idea of Galicia (Beramendi 2007).40 The ideologues of the Rexurdimento mostly belonged to the urban middle classes (lawyers, pharmacists, journalists, doctors and civil servants) who no longer spoke Galician (Mariño 1998: 400).41 However, without being a central element, Galician would be an important part of this political project. During this time, the first attempts were made to provide Galician with a grammar and a dictionary. Between 1863 and 1884, three grammars and four dictionaries were published (not to mention another grammar, by Marcial Valladares, from 1892 and which remained unpublished until 1970; see Fernández Salgado 2004).42 Of these works, Gramática gallega [Galician Grammar] by Juan A.  Saco Arce (1868) can he highlighted, “obra de grande mérito e calidade para o seu tempo” [a work of great merit and quality for the time] (Cidrás and Dubert-García 2017),43 and the Dicionario gallego-castellano [Galician-Castilian Dictionary] by Valladares (1884). All these works take Spanish as a reference language and are written in Spanish. At the end of that century, discussions also began on some issues relating to Galician’s orthographical representation, which continued into the first decades of the nineteenth century (Hermida 1987).44 The language as a political object was therefore of crucial interest to Galicianists. The general motivation of all these studies was the desire to contribute to the dignity of the Galician language and, through it, to the

 Beramendi, De provincia a nación.  Mariño Paz, Historia da lingua galega: 400. 42  Fernández Salgado, “A obra gramatical de Marcial Valladares.” Cadernos de Lingua 26 (2004): 47–98. 43  Cidrás and Dubert-García, “A gramática galega, un río de curso curto e sinuoso. Panorama histórico dos estudios gramaticais sobre o galego.” LaborHistórico 3.1 (2017): 11–125. https://doi.org/10.24206/lh.v3i1.17110. 44  Hermida Gulías, “A polémica ortográfica a finais do século XIX (1888).” Grial 97 (1987): 299–316. 40 41

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regeneration of Galicia (González Seoane 2006: 25–26).45 However, a grammar and a dictionary were not a priority in the ideological program of national construction (Cidrás and Dubert-García 2017: 113)46 nor were there figures equipped with the proper training enabling them to carry out these tasks. Therefore, the only precedent of linguistic studies published at this time were the “Observaciones sobre la pronunciación del dialecto gallego” [Observations on the pronunciation of the Galician dialect], three and a half pages of precise phonetic observations written by Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte as an introduction to the Galician translation of the Gospel of Saint Matthew (1861). These also went unnoticed (Kabatek 1992).47 In the first decades of the twentieth century, Galician took huge steps forward in social uses (Monteagudo 1999).48 Not only did literary and essay writing develop in Galician, but also foreign works were translated; Galician was the first language, after French, into which several chapters of Ulysses by Joyce were translated in 1926 (see McKevitt 2003),49 which is evidence of the ambition of Galician nationalism’s political and cultural program at the time. At that point, Galician appeared in the public sphere and would be the language of the cultural and public policy activities of the nationalists and the Galicianists. However, little progress was made in establishing a standard, with the exception of some dictionary- and grammar-­related essays (see Regueira 1996; Fernández Salgado 2000).50 The standard was established on a de facto basis, through the works of the authors of the time; in fact, if we read the works of Castelao,51 for example, 45  González Seoane, “A gramática de Lugrís na tradición lingüística galega.” Boletín da Real Academia Galega 379 (2006): 37–57. 46  Cidrás and Dubert-García, “A gramática galega, un río de curso curto e sinuoso”: 113. 47  Kabatek, “O príncipe Louis Lucien Bonaparte, precursor da lingüística galega.” Cadernos de Lingua 6 (1992): 5–26. 48  Monteagudo, Historia social da lingua galega. Vigo: Galaxia, 1999. 49  McKevitt, “Cuestións pasadas por alto: a tradución para o galego do Ulysses de James Joyce.” In James Joyce, Ramón Otero Pedrayo: Fragmentos de Ulises, 1926. Vigo: Galaxia, 2003: 7–51. 50  Regueira, “Os estudios de lingüística galega.” In Homenaxe á profesora Pilar Álvarez Cuesta, eds. Lorenzo and Álvarez. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade, 1996: 47–67; Fernández Salgado, Os Rudimentos da lingüística galega: un estudio de textos lingüísticos galegos de principios do século XX, (1913–1936). Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2000. 51  Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao (1886–1950) was a leading figure in twentieth-century Galician culture and politics and is considered the father of modern Galician nationalism

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in their original version, we find that standard Galician is already present there in its basic form, some minor issues aside. Regarding this state of affairs, the work of the Soria-born author Vicente García de Diego (1909),52 already mentioned in the introduction and which involves the application of the methods of historical linguistics to Galician, is of interest, and even more so the work of a group of linguists from Hamburg University, led by Fritz Krüger (Regueira 1991, 1996).53 This group, with a strong historical-comparative training, applied in Galicia innovative methodologies at the time for the study of some rural varieties, which were understood as more conservative and less “contaminated” by modern ways of life and which would, therefore, provide access to considerably older cultural forms (Regueira 1991: 157).54 This aim was in line with the search for the Volkgeist of the peoples who spoke romance languages, which was the general objective of the works of Krüger. The title of the journal of the Romance Language Seminar of Hamburg University, of which Krüger was a co-editor and in which they published their works, is revealing: Volkstum und Kultur der Romanen [Ethnicity and Culture of the Romance People] (1928–1944). To achieve this aim, they applied a method called Wörter und Sachen [Words and Things], where linguistic forms (and their etymology) are studied in connection with the material objects they designate (and with their history). This was a genuine research program on the Galician-­ speaking territories and on the boundary between Galician and Leonese, to the east, and Portuguese, to the south. These boundaries, in particular, were the subject of various works by Krüger. Three of his disciples carried out studies on three extreme points of the Galician territory: W. Schröder, on the Fisterra fishing boats in the west; W. Ebeling on farming implements in the Lugo mountains, in the east; and finally Hans-Karl Schneider, who deviated from his colleagues’ methodology for a complete study of the phonetics and morphology of the Lower Limia, on the border with Portugal. They were all members of the German National Socialist Party (NSPD) and were subject to a purge at the end of World War II, leading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_Daniel_Rodr%C3%ADguez_Castelao. 52  García de Diego, Elementos de gramática histórica gallega. 53  Regueira, “A contribución alemana á lingüística galega.” In Homenaxe ó profesor Constantino García. Vol. 2., eds. M.  Brea López and F.  Fernández Rei. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade, 1991: 155–178; Regueira, “Os estudios de lingüística galega,” 1996. 54  Regueira, “A contribución alemana á lingüística galega.”

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to their removal from the university. Their work, published in German in the journal VKR, had little impact because it was not widely distributed in Galicia and at the time there were no linguists who could benefit from it. After the end of the Spanish Civil War, which led to the elimination of Galicianism (even physically, with the murder of some of its most significant figures and the exile of others), Galician was prohibited in the public sphere and studies on Galician were limited to some works on etymology and onomastics, carried out fundamentally, again, by two Germans: Harri Meier and Joseph M. Piel (Regueira 1991).55 From the 1950s, works on dialectology began to appear slowly, authored by Madrilenian Alonso Zamora Vicente and by Dámaso Alonso, with some important contributions, into the 1960s, from Ramón Lorenzo (Regueira 1996).56 In the mid-1960s, there were still no trained teams or linguists (with a few exceptions) and no research program on Galician. As late as 1967 Pilar Vázquez Cuesta stated that “el área ocupada por el gallego resulta una zona casi virgen y de la que es difícil hablar con seguridad” [the area occupied by Galician is an almost virgin field and it is difficult to discuss it confidently] (Vázquez Cuesta 1967: 192).57 The remains of Galicianism gathered around the Galaxia publishing house created in 1950, but they were concerned with recovering Galician literature and in the field of linguistics had only published the Diccionario enciclopédico gallego-castellano [Galician-Castilian Encyclopaedic Dictionary] by Eladio Rodríguez (1958–1961),58 completed before the Spanish Civil War. However, Galician society underwent significant changes in the 1960s. Cultural associations were created and clandestine political parties whose ideology was nationalist and left-wing were founded (Beramendi 2007: 1077–1088).59 In the wake of this movement, a new, although still quite small, public sphere in Galician began to appear in urban areas. It was during this period when studies of Romance Philology began at the University of Santiago de Compostela and the teaching of Galician was introduced in the university. From there, the revolution that took place in subsequent decades began to take shape.  Regueira, “A contribución alemana á lingüística galega.”  Regueira, “Os estudios de lingüística galega.” 57  Vázquez Cuesta, “A propósito de la Gramática Gallega de Carballo Calero.” Grial 16 (1967): 192–196. 58  Rodríguez González, Diccionario enciclopédico gallego-castellano. Vigo: Galaxia, 1958–1961. 59  Beramendi, De provincia a nación. 55 56

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4   Linguistic Studies in Galician Universities: The Role of the Galician Language Institute From the creation of the Romance Philology Section at the University of Santiago de Compostela during the 1962–1963 academic year and the introduction of the option in Galician Language and Literature in the 1965–1966 academic year, academic work on Galician began. Constantino García, the new professor of Romance Philology, began to supervise studies aimed at covering the lack of information on the spoken language, focusing on rural and coastal varieties which were already considered in danger of disappearing due to the socioeconomic and cultural changes that were taking place, such as urbanization and the loss of traditional rural culture (cf. Lorenzo Vázquez 1962: 52; García 1978: 459).60 The center of interest was the lexicon of traditional trades, which was perceived as the most differential and most interesting from a philological point of view, following the lines of classical dialectology. At the same time, the phonetic and morphological description of the different varieties of Galician started. These works led to the completion of a number of undergraduate theses and three doctoral dissertations that began to fill the gaps in the knowledge of the linguistic reality of Galician (Regueira 2008).61 In order to cover new demands to match the new social situation of Galician (discussed in the last paragraph of Sect. 2.3) during this period, there were publications on the Galician grammar of Carballo Calero (1966), another grammar by Carré Alvarellos (1967) and a Galician-­ Castilian dictionary by Franco Grande (1968). In addition, Saco’s grammar was republished (1967, the original being published in 1868). Despite their limitations (Regueira 2007: 11–12),62 Carballo’s grammar and Franco Grande’s dictionary enjoyed broad dissemination until 1980. However, it was from the creation of the Galician Language Institute (ILG) in 1971 when events began to accelerate. In 1971, the ILG 60  Lorenzo Vázquez, “Estudios etnográfico-lingüísticos sobre La Mahia y aledaños.” Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos 17 (1962): 49–67; García, “Os estudios dialectais do galego.” Grial 62 (1978): 458–464. 61  Regueira, “Os estudos de dialectoloxía galega desde 1967 á actualidade.” In A mi dizen quantos amigos ei. Homenaxe ao profesor Xosé Luís Couceiro, eds. E. Corral Díaz, L. Fontoira and E. Moscoso Mato. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2008: 573–584. 62  Regueira, “Galician language studies: between ideology and linguistics.” Galician Review 5/6 (2006/2007): 1–24.

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published the first manuals for learning Galician (1971–1974), launched the journal Verba. Anuario Galego de Filoloxía (1974) and collected the materials for the Atlas Lingüístico Galego [Galician Linguistic Atlas] (1974–1976) (Álvarez and Sousa 2017).63 In 1977, the university degree in Galician Philology was created. In 1981, Galician was recognized as the official language of Galicia, together with Spanish. The following year, Normas Ortográficas e Morfolóxicas do Idioma Galego [Orthographical and Morphological Rules of the Galician Language], produced by the Galician Language Institute and the Royal Galician Academy, were declared official and in 1983 the Galician Linguistic Normalization Law was passed. In 1986, the first complete reference grammar was published and the first monolingual dictionaries appeared. The first ILG activities focused on the study of Galician, especially on its dissemination and related teacher training. In 1974, one of the most ambitious projects was launched: Atlas Lingüístico Galego (ALGa).64 The success of the ILG in the following years placed it at the center of Galician linguistic endeavors. This success was due to several factors: on the one hand, it initiated university research on Galician, a facet that was almost completely neglected at that time; on the other hand, the ILG work team’s structure was hardly pyramidal at all, meaning that researchers enjoyed an important degree of autonomy, decision-making and innovation. This was something new, in an area (and generally throughout the Humanities) in which research was usually conducted individually (cf. Alonso Pintos 2017: 50–51).65 Understandably, the following years focused on tasks of a political nature: the development of the linguistic standard and the promotion of learning Galician. Since the establishment of the Galician Autonomous Government, the ILG has had a central role in the training of primary and secondary school teachers, as well as officials of the local, regional and state administrations. The ILG also played a leading role in the development of the language standard and subsequent discussions, which were 63  Álvarez and Sousa. “A investigación sobre a variación lingüística do galego: desde o ALGa ata a actualidade.” LaborHistórico 3.1 (2017): 63–75. https://doi.org/10.24206/ lh.v3i1.17107. 64  The role and activities of the ILG are discussed in studies by Francisco Fernández Rei (1991) and Serafín Alonso Pintos (2017); on ALGa, see Álvarez and Sousa (2017). 65  Alonso Pintos, “Investigar, elaborar, divulgar. O Instituto da Lingua da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela.” LaborHistórico 3.1 (2017): 49–62. https://doi.org/10.24206/ lh.v3i1.17106.

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especially intense in the 1980s (regarding this process, see Alonso Pintos 2006; Ramallo and Rei-Doval 2015).66 The central role of the ILG in this process was due to this group at the time already having an enormous amount of linguistic data gathered throughout the Galician-speaking territory (and it was the only group that was doing linguistic research on Galician). Furthermore, Ramón Lorenzo, a member of the ILG, was the most relevant figure in the field of Galician historical grammar. The Galician Royal Academy did not have the data or personnel with the proper training to carry out the tasks of standardization which led to it approaching the ILG in order to jointly elaborate the language norms that were made official in 1982. The task of the ILG in the standardization of Galician was not limited to the establishment of orthographical and morphological rules. Two researchers, Antón Santamarina and Manuel González, produced the Vocabulario ortográfico da lingua galega [Orthographical Vocabulary of the Galician Language] (VOLGa), which was first published in 1989 and which served as the basis for almost all subsequent dictionaries. The ILG also developed the legal and administrative lexicon required to cover the new needs of the autonomic and local administration. The people who supervised the production of these dictionaries were also members of the ILG or related to it. The ILG wrote the grammar that served as the main reference source until the end of the twentieth century (Álvarez et  al. 1986),67 and also played a central role in the standardization conflict that dominated the 1980s and, to a lesser extent, the 1990s, until the 2003 standardization agreement (Alonso Pintos 2017: 56).68 In 1990, the universities of A Coruña and Vigo were created, marking the beginning of a diversification of university work on the Galician language. From the point of view of the introduction of new lines of research in linguistics, the most outstanding have been the works of Celso Álvarez Cáccamo, in A Coruña, in the tradition of the interactional sociolinguistics of John Gumperz, but his work had little impact upon subsequent research. No teams of significant stature were formed at any of the new

66  Alonso Pintos, O proceso de codificación do galego moderno (1950–1980). A Coruña: Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza, 2006; Ramallo and Rei-Doval. “The standardization of Galician.” Sociolinguistica 29.1 (2015): 61–82. https://doi.org/10.1515/soci-2015-0006. 67  Álvarez, Monteagudo and Regueira. Gramática galega. Vigo: Galaxia, 1986. 68  Alonso Pintos, “Investigar, elaborar, divulgar”: 56.

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universities; the ILG has therefore continued to be the center of reference for linguistic research to this day. In the course of that decade, significant changes took place that took Galician to a new dimension in the field of dissemination, knowledge and recognition beyond Galicia. The event that symbolized this transformation was the 19th Romance Linguistics and Philology Conference at Santiago de Compostela University in 1989, where Galician was the official language, together with French (the official language of the Romance Linguistics Society). The fact that Galician was the official language and not Spanish led to a boycott by some members of the Spanish Philology establishment, but the conference was a success and recognized Galician as a Romance language on an equal footing with the other major languages. This recognition was consolidated in the Lexikon der romanistischen Linguistik, an encyclopedia of Romance languages in eight volumes (1988–2005), in which Galician and Portuguese shared a volume (Holtus et  al. 1994).69 Furthermore, several German Romance specialists had already examined Galician, especially the sociolinguistic situation, during the second half of the 1980s (see Regueira 2007).70 Beginning in 1988, a summer course on Galician language and culture has been organized for foreign students annually. Organized by the ILG and the RAG, it continues to be taught today and is now called Galego sen fronteiras [Galician Without Borders]. These courses enabled research and teaching on Galician language and culture to develop in numerous universities throughout five continents, although mainly in Europe and in North and Latin America. Many students who attended these courses went on to work on Galician in different fields (research, translation and creative), and were one of the key elements that allowed, years later, a network of Galician study centers to be established in universities in Europe and America. Many of the people in charge of these centers were former students of the courses. During the same period, the International Association of Galician Studies was founded and developed. It organizes regular conferences in which researchers on Galician language and culture from Europe and America gather. In the early years, these activities were highly criticized by certain sectors of nationalism, which considered it a waste of

69  Holtus, Metzeltin and Schmitt. Lexikon der romanistischen Linguistik. Vol. 6.2: Galegisch, Portugiesisch. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1994. 70  Regueira, “Galician language studies: between ideology and linguistics.”

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money for an activity not relevant to the social normalization of the language. Moreover, at the time, some of the first research using modern methodologies on the sociolinguistic situation in Galicia was criticized, in particular those carried out by researchers from outside the world of Galician nationalism, such as Guillermo Rojo or Mauro Fernández (on the development of sociolinguistics and associated controversies, see Rei-Doval 2018).71 These linguists were seen as “technicians” researching Galician in the same manner as an entomologist studies an insect, in a frequently used comparison. Therefore, ideological combat was prioritized in these sectors as part of the defense of language and nation, in a line that could be represented by a figure such as Pilar García Negro (see García Negro 1991).72 Criticisms of this kind were also aimed at downplaying the value of language studies in general and those conducted at ILG in particular, in the framework of debates on the standard form of language during the 1980s and 1990s. Over the years, this type of criticism has become rarer and today few people discuss the value of linguistic research on Galician or its dissemination within international academic fields. Reference works continue to be published in the late 1990s, such as a historical grammar (Ferreiro 1996–1997),73 the history of the language (Mariño 1998, 2008)74 and grammar (Freixeiro 1998–2003; Álvarez and Xove 2002).75 New lines are also being launched within Galician linguistics, such as acoustic phonetics (see González and Regueira 2016),76 prosody (see Fernández Rei and Regueira 2017)77 and also language variation 71  Rei-Doval, “Tres décadas de sociolingüística galega (1967–1997): continuidades e discontinuidades.” In Limba noastra ̆-i o comoară… Estudos de sociolingüística románica en homenaxe a Francisco Fernández Rei, eds. M.C.  Alén Garabato and M.  Brea. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2018: 239–268. 72  García Negro, O galego e as leis: aproximación sociolingüística. Vilaboa: O Cumio, 1991. 73  Ferreiro, Gramática histórica galega. 2 vols. Santiago de Compostela: Laiovento, 1995–1997. 74  Mariño Paz, Historia da lingua galega. Santiago de Compostela: Sotelo Blanco, 1998; Mariño Paz, Historia de la lengua gallega. München: LINCOM, 2008. 75  Freixeiro Mato, Gramática da lingua galega. 4 vols. Vigo: A Nosa Terra, 1998–2003; Álvarez and Xove, Gramática da lingua galega. Vigo: Galaxia, 2002. 76  González and Regueira, “Galicia en los inicios de los estudios de fonética acústica dentro del estado español.” In 53 reflexiones sobre aspectos de la fonética y otros temas de lingüística, ed. A. M. Fernández Planas. Barcelona: Universitat, 2016: 373–382. 77  Fernández Rei and Regueira, “Situando o galego no terreo da investigación lingüística: os traballos de fonética e fonoloxía.” LaborHistórico 3.1 (2017): 93–110. https://doi.

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in society (e.g., Regueira 1994, 1999).78 These lines would be developed further into the twenty-first century. However, the most innovative language research was carried out outside Galicia. As far as language variation and attitudes are concerned, a very relevant contribution came from Johannes Kabatek, who had been a student in the first summer courses of Galician language and culture and published his doctoral thesis in 1996 on variation and linguistic attitudes. He has continued to open up new avenues for the qualitative sociolinguistics of Galician (on the work of Kabatek, see Regueira 2017).79 However, it is in North American universities where linguistic work on Galician has been initiated and intensified in recent years and in most cases by researchers with Galician roots. These studies have focused on phonology and the works of Obdulia Castro (who published a Galician phonology, Castro 1998,80 see Fernández Rei and Regueira 2017: 100),81 Fernando Martínez-­ Gil and Sonia Colina should be highlighted, among others (see Fernández Rei and Regueira 2017: 100–101).82 The impact within Galicia of these publications was limited because, on the one hand, there were few linguists working with phonology in Galicia and their theoretical training was weak (they were fundamentally self-taught in phonology), and also because of the low penetration in Galician universities of the linguistic frameworks within which these works were carried out (Autosegmental Phonology and Optimality Theory) (Regueira 2007: 20).83 In the twenty-­ first century, relevant works on phonology and prosody of the Galician language, among other topics, have continued to be published, and the new situation of linguistic research in Galicia may be more favorable toward a more enriching communication in both directions. This is shown org/10.24206/lh.v3i1.17109. 78  Regueira, “Modelos fonéticos e autenticidade lingüística.” Cadernos de Lingua 10 (1994): 37–60; Regueira, “Estándar oral e variación social da lingua galega.” In Cinguidos por unha arela común: homenaxe ó profesor Xesús Alonso Montero. Vol. 1, eds. R. Álvarez and D. Vilavedra. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade, 1999: 855–875. 79  Regueira, “Alargando os límites: Johannes Kabatek na lingüística galega.” Anadiss, numéro hors-série (Mai 2017): 35–48. 80  Castro, Aproximación a la fonología y morfología gallegas. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1998. 81   Fernández Rei and Regueira, “Situando o galego no terreo da investigación lingüística”: 100. 82  Fernández Rei and Regueira, “Situando o galego no terreo da investigación lingüística”: 100–101. 83  Regueira, “Galician language studies: between ideology and linguistics”: 20.

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by the reception of the most recent works, both in the field of phonetics, which are being used in research carried out in Galicia, and that of syntax (e.g., the work of Timothy Gupton 201484 has been reviewed in the ILG; see Cidrás 2018)85 (see Sect. 2.5).

5   New Century, New Horizons: The Shift for Linguistics At the beginning of the new century, the so-called agreed language norms were approved,86 putting an end to disputes over orthography within the field of Galician. A re-integrationist movement continues, introducing a new ideological discourse, not based on orthographic discussion but aimed at promoting the approach to Portuguese. At this point, the Galician standard has been consolidated and, despite some shortcomings, studies of a “political” nature are no longer a priority; in addition, all the standardization issues are carried out through the RAG (dictionary, grammar and terminology). In meeting these needs, then, it becomes necessary to refocus efforts and set new objectives. The development of these new pathways is conditioned by structural limitations, on the one hand, and by internal and theoretical factors, on the other hand. These two dimensions are related. The crisis of the humanities in Spanish universities has prevented the renewal of research teams and the incorporation of new researchers in Galician universities. This makes it difficult to open new lines of research in which Galician linguistics is deficient, as well as new theoretical orientations, which are usually associated with developments promoted by young researchers. In this context, the ILG not only continues to be the largest and most productive group in the area of Galician linguistics but is also one of the most powerful groups in the area of Humanities in Galician universities. I shall therefore refer in more detail to the developments produced at this center. Considering the scarcity of human and material resources that characterizes linguistic research in Galicia, where it is common for only 84  Gupton, The syntax-information structure interface. Clausal word order and the left periphery in Galician. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2014. 85  Cidrás, “Review of Gupton (2014).” Revue de Linguistique Romane 82 (2018): 327–328, 566–571. 86  See http://consellodacultura.gal/cdsg/paxinaarq.php?id=807. Accessed 21st July 2021.

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two or three people to work in some areas, it does not seem realistic to try to cater effectively to each and every one of the possible lines of interest, from onomastics and lexicography to sociolinguistics (quantitative and qualitative), speech technologies, phonetics, grammar and all other possible areas. Therefore, at the ILG in recent years, there has been an effort to concentrate work on some lines that are deemed a priority or worthy of preferential attention. So far, those lines have been mainly linguistic contact and change, prosody, perceptual studies, corpus linguistics and new developments in dialectology. Due to the aforementioned lack of renewal of research staff, these changes in orientation are slow and difficult, especially considering that they require a major theoretical and methodological renewal. However, the commitment made to collaborate with teams from other areas, in the pursuit of an interdisciplinarity that has proved very fruitful, has been of great importance and is now seen as almost a must. The creation of an interdisciplinary network with teams from the universities of Santiago de Compostela and Vigo, led by the ILG group, has therefore marked a milestone. It has remained active between 2012 and 2018, involving telecommunications, computer and statistics teams, among others.87 Another important aspect is the collaboration with universities in Portugal and Brazil, which has been very intense in terms of activities for ILG researchers in recent years, with joint projects undertaken and a continuous exchange of visiting researchers maintained. It also maintains collaborative relationships with numerous European and North American universities, and, of course, those throughout Spain. Despite the difficulties, some important steps have been taken on this path toward renewal and a change of strategy in Galician linguistics research. In dialectology, research has been conducted with dialectometric techniques (e.g., Sousa 2020).88 In relation to the AMPER pan-Romanic project, prosodic dialectology research has been carried out, with relevant studies undertaken on Galician prosody in relation to that of Portuguese (e.g., Fernández Rei et  al. 2016)89 and perceptual studies of intonation 87  See http://ilg.usc.gal/tecandali/index.php/21-principal/2-inicio. Accessed 21 July 2021. 88  Sousa, “From regional dialects to the standard: measuring linguistic distance in Galician varieties.” Languages 5(1).4 (2020). https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5010004. 89  Fernández Rei, Castro Moutinho and Coimbra, “Contribution to the diachronic study of Galician and Portuguese prosodies.” Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 24.1 (2016): 42–61.

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(e.g., Fernández Rei and Engroba 2014)90; a platform for experimentation in perceptual work was also created (Ferramenta On-Line para ExpeRimentación PerceptivA,  FOLERPA).91 On the other hand, the foundations for the development of corpus linguistics have been laid, and at present there is a corpus of medieval language (Tesouro Medieval Informatizado da Lingua Galega, TMILG),92 written language (Tesouro Informatizado da Lingua Galega,  TILG),93 rural language (Arquivo do Galego Oral, AGO)94 and oral language in all its varieties (Corpus Oral Informatizado da Lingua Galega,  CORILGA).95 A language corpus has also been set up at the Ramón Piñeiro Center (Corpus de Referencia do Galego Actual, CORGA).96 This shift allowed some lines to be addressed regarding social variation, language contact (with Spanish and, partly, with Portuguese), variety contact (especially the influence of the standard), the perception of these varieties, language attitudes and other similar topics. Some work undertaken in recent years also opens up new paths with the incorporation of new theoretical frameworks, such as interactional sociolinguistics and language and identity issues, for example (e.g., Regueira 2016),97 or discourse analysis applied to gender identity (Basanta 2018).98 Some language landscape work has also been done (e.g., Regueira et al. 2013),99 with some more elaborate developments (Zas and Prego 2016).100 Other interesting developments have also taken place at other universities, such as the work of Estefanía Mosquera, in A Coruña, on SMS 90  Fernández Rei and Engroba, “Estudio perceptivo de la entonación de las interrogativas totales del gallego central.” In Fonética experimental, Educación Superior e Investigación, eds. Y. Congosto, M. L. Montero and A. Salvador. Vol. 3. Madrid: Arco Libros, 2014: 227–244. 91  See http://ilg.usc.gal/FOLERPA/. Accessed 21st July 2021. 92  See https://ilg.usc.gal/tmilg/. Accessed 21st July 2021. 93  See https://ilg.usc.gal/TILG/. Accessed 21st July 2021. 94  See http://ilg.usc.gal/ago/. Accessed 21st July 2021. 95  See http://ilg.usc.gal/corilga/. Accessed 21st July 2021. 96  See http://www.cirp.gal/corga. Accessed 21st July 2021. 97  Regueira, “La lengua de la esfera pública en situación de minorización.” 98  Basanta Llanes, “As formas cambiaron porque o mundo cambiou”: construción discursiva e interseccional de identidades de xénero e sexualidade en conversas sobre ligar. PhD diss., Univ. de Santiago de Compostela, 2018. 99  Regueira, Wellings and Pérez Docampo, “El paisaje lingüístico en Galicia.” Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 21 (2013): 39–62. 100  Zas Varela and Prego Vázquez, “Las escalas del paisaje lingüístico en los márgenes de la super-diversidad.” Debates 15 (2016): 6–25.

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language (Mosquera 2017).101 In Vigo, Fernando Ramallo has carried out relevant work on “new-speakers” of Galician (in collaboration with Bernadette O’Rourke, e.g., O’Rourke and Ramallo 2015)102 and work was undertaken that initiated new routes, such as qualitative sociolinguistics (Iglesias Álvarez 2003;103 Pinto 2018).104 Moreover, Xavier Gómez Guinovart has developed language technologies and applications focused on the Galician language. Furthermore, in Vigo, the team led by Carmen García Mateo has developed a speech recognition device and a speech synthesizer for Galician in collaboration with researchers from the ILG and the Ramón Piñeiro Center (e.g., Piñeiro et al. 2018).105 Beyond Galicia, research is still underway on Galician, especially in US universities, where, to name just a few examples, relevant contributions to phonetics have been made (Amengual and Chamorro 2015; de la Fuente and Pérez Castillejo 2019).106 In phonology, several authors have published significant works. Among these, Sonia Colina and Fernando Martínez-Gil have published a number of articles within the framework of the Optimality Theory on, among other topics, the gheada (Colina 2013;

101  Mosquera Castro, “A escrita electrónica galega: tradición, innovación e recepción.” In Estudos sobre o cambio lingüístico no galego actual, eds. X. L. Regueira and E. Fernández Rei. Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura Galega, 2017: 129–156. 102  O’Rourke and Ramallo, “Neofalantes as an active minority: understanding language practices and motivations for change amongst new speakers of Galician.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 231 (2015): 147–165. https://doi.org/10.1515/ ijsl-2014-0036. 103  Iglesias Álvarez, Falar galego: “no veo por qué”: Aproximación cualitativa á situación sociolingüística de Galicia. Vigo: Xerais, 2003. 104  Pinto Pajares, Representaciones ideológicas de las lenguas: análisis comparativo de las ideologías lingüísticas en las clases altas gallega y catalana. PhD diss., Universidade de Vigo, 2018. 105  Piñeiro Martín, García-Mateo, Docío-Fernández and Regueira, “Estudio sobre el impacto del corpus de entrenamiento del modelo de lenguaje en las prestaciones de un reconocedor de habla.” Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural 61 (2018): 75–82. https://doi. org/10.26342/2018-61-8. 106  Amengual and Chamorro, “The effects of language dominance in the perception and production of the Galician mid vowel contrasts.” Phonetica 72 (2015): 207–236. https:// doi.org/10.1159/000439406; de la Fuente Iglesias and Pérez Castillejo, “Phonetic interactions in the bilingual production of Galician and Spanish /e/ and /o/.” International Journal of Bilingualism 24.2 (2919): 305–318. https://doi. org/10.1177/1367006919826868.

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Martínez-Gil 2004)107 or mid-vowel reduction (Martínez-Gil 2019).108 In syntax, in addition to the aforementioned work by Gupton (2014),109 contributions of interest are also taking place, such as Brown and Rivas (2019).110 Work on the Spanish spoken in Galicia is also being carried out at US universities (especially at Minnesota), whereas in the Galician universities work on this variety is scarce. Researchers at Galician universities are therefore now in a better position to establish meaningful dialogue with those at other universities, in particular with those in the United States. The small size of the teams working on Galician renders it essential to collaborate with researchers not only from other places but also from other disciplines and other areas of interest. On the other hand, the gap in theoretical training between researchers working in Galicia and those who do so at German, British or American universities is rapidly narrowing. Following the tradition of studies inherited from previous generations, linguistic training in Galician universities was based on the tradition of historical linguistics (Romance, especially) and on the study of the linguistic code coming from the tradition of European structuralism. However, increasing numbers of people are being trained in sociolinguistics (both quantitative and qualitative), interaction, discourse analysis, pragmatics, grammaticalization, experimental phonetics and perceptual linguistics, among others, researching within the same theoretical framework as their colleagues in the international academic world. This shift places Galician linguistics in Galicia in a position to take the step of entering the international sphere, in the sense that studies on Galician language could appear in journals and books with an international scope. Since the 1990s, above all, Galician is an accepted language in the field of Romance studies and today it is not possible to conceive of 107  Colina, “Galician geada: in Defense of Underspecification in Optimality Theory.” Lingua, 133 (2013): 84–100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2013.04.003; MartínezGil, “Galician geada.” In Contemporary approaches to Romance linguistics, eds. J.  Auger, J. C. Clements and B. Vance. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004: 299–320. 108  Martínez-Gil, “Galician mid-vowel reduction: a stratal OT account.” In Romance phonetics and phonology, eds. M.  Gibson and J.  Gil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019: 299–350. 109  Gupton, The syntax-information structure interface. 110  Brown and Rivas, “Bringing Purported Black Sheep into the Fold: Galician Inflected Infinitives and Puerto Rican Spanish Pre-verbal Infinitival Subject Pronouns.” Languages 4.40 (2019): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages4020040.

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books, atlases, encyclopedias or studies on Romance languages without considering the presence of Galician. However, in the international field, in studies on aspects of general linguistics or of a global scope, the presence of Galician is still very limited. In order to change this, the first step may be to place studies by researchers who have already earned an academic position in publications with a global circulation. Some steps are already underway, and publications on Galician (not only by authors from American universities but also by an increasing number of authors from Galician universities) have been appearing or will appear in mainstream journals and in books published by Oxford University Press, John Benjamins, De Gruyter, Routledge, Niemeyer and Peter Lang, among others. The presence of Galician is increasingly common in specialized international conferences. However, it is not just a question of publishing work carried out in Galicia: Galician must be seen as an object of “legitimate” study by researchers from any European or American university. To advance in this direction, it is necessary to have reference works written in English and for that purpose a Manual of Galician Linguistics shall soon be available from the international publisher, De Gruyter. In this sense, the creation of a Galician studies section within the Modern Language Association is a breakthrough. In recent years, there are frequent meetings where Galician is present in both American universities (such as Lusophone and Hispanic Linguistics Symposia, at the universities of Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or the North American Symposia of Galician Studies, that have been held at different American universities) or English and Irish universities, within the annual conferences of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland, among other events. In this strategy, the International Association of Galician Studies must also play a leading role. The main objective of these strategies is to develop linguistic research on Galician fully, covering areas that remain untouched or scarcely covered but which are crucial for a full understanding of Galicia’s linguistic situation. In these objectives, the research on the Spanish of Galicia should be included, in collaboration with researchers working in this field or interested in doing so, in order to have a more complete picture of Galicia’s linguistic reality. Everyone who lives in Galicia observes in the streets, in their families and in their own classrooms a variety of linguistic behaviors, practices, attitudes and linguistic ideologies. We see that languages work in Galician society in a very complex way, and the net separation between “Galician language” and “Spanish language” is a methodological division

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established by us linguists, but which does not always correspond to the behavior observed in society (cf. Regueira 2019).111 Galicia, in this sense, is an authentic linguistic laboratory which we are unable to use for research, partly because of ideological reasons, partly because of a theoretical training gap and also due to a structural scarcity of resources. In addition, it is obvious that a language policy that seeks to expand the use of Galician among the population, and especially among the younger population, must start from a more complete knowledge of reality. Language policies cannot be formulated on the basis of ideological premises without regard to the reality of the speakers, their practices or their linguistic ideologies. Criticizing the “wrong” uses that appear in the public sphere or indoctrinating on the “quality” of the language without trying to understand these practices and the factors involved in these processes bears no result, as can be seen in Galician society today. In Regueira (2019),112 I attempted to develop the idea that in order to effectively influence the linguistic practices of the different areas of Galician use in the public sphere, it is necessary to investigate all these questions: today, we have the tools to do it. Far from being a “distraction” or an attitude that some might criticize as an “entomological study,” linguistic research in the areas of language variation, contact and change is essential for language planning. On the other hand, the objective of “standardizing” Galician research, of getting Galician into the international academic world as a possible object of study, like any other language in the world, cannot be considered of minor importance among people interested in the situation of Galician. This aim is not a chimera, and today we can find on the Internet a number of academic papers (undergraduate, master’s and doctoral theses) written in Minnesota, Toronto, Oxford, Stockholm, Brno, Münster, Marburg, Kassel, Munich or Turin, among others, on aspects of the Galician language. It is worth going down that path.

6   Conclusion This work has outlined a panorama of Galician linguistics, from its beginnings to the present. It began by highlighting the distinction between works of linguistic research and works of political interest, understood as  Regueira, “Variación fonética, a lingua da esfera pública e estándar oral.”  Regueira, “Variación fonética, a lingua da esfera pública e estándar oral.”

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those intended to establish a standard language, with all the instruments that accompany those linguistic varieties (mainly grammars and dictionaries). It is clear that many concepts used in the field of language as a political object, such as “correction” or “error,” are meaningless in the field of linguistics. It should be kept in mind that for some linguists, even the concept of language is impossible to handle, or to put it in other words, the concept of “a language” does not correspond to any object of analysis that linguistics can handle (e.g., Harris 1990: 45).113 Understood in this sense, Galician linguistics has suffered a certain delay and less development with respect to the studies on state languages within our environment. Nevertheless, when studies of linguistics in Galician universities were established and research on Galician began, the breakthrough was spectacular. It should be recalled that even in the early 1960s, Dámaso Alonso lamented the lack of studies with these words: “debido al increíble atraso de los estudios de lingüística gallega, esta lengua, en su estado moderno, es casi una incógnita; lo es, desde luego, su vocalismo. Falta casi completamente una recogida sistemática de materiales: labor de años” [Due to the incredible delay of the studies of Galician linguistics, this language, in its modern state, is almost an unknown one and of course, so is its vocalism. A systematic collection of materials is almost completely lacking: it will take years of work] (Dámaso Alonso 1962: 16).114 The existing bibliography on Galician was very scarce, but the path taken during the last fifty years makes these statements unrecognizable today, and even in some respects (such as dialectology or quantitative sociolinguistics), the Galician linguistic domain is better studied than neighboring state languages. This is not about falling into triumphalism, as there is still some way to go and weaker areas to strengthen, but the effort made should be duly recognized, considering in addition that most of this period was dedicated to carrying out work aimed at consolidating Galician as a political object. At this point, Galician linguistics is now in the process of asserting its presence in the international sphere and becoming a “normal” language, one more language among the other Romance and Indo-European languages, also with regard to linguistic research. Galician linguistics should 113  Harris, “On redefining linguistics.” In Redefining linguistics, eds. H.  Davis and T. Taylor. London: Routledge, 1990: 18–52. 114  Alonso, La fragmentación fonética peninsular. Supl. of Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica. Madrid: CSIC, 1962.

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have something to say within the field of international linguistics, and in part, it is already beginning to make itself heard within that discourse. It is in the context of this endeavor that we find ourselves, reorienting lines and constantly updating theoretical frameworks. In order to achieve this objective, scientific communication and collaboration between linguists working in Galicia and those outside Galicia, both in the United States and Europe, is essential, not to mention the necessary communication with Portuguese and Brazilian research centers. The first steps on that path have been taken. The objectives are ambitious, but the development experienced in recent years and the increasing collaboration between teams and the researchers allow us to face this challenge with optimism.

Bibliography Alonso, Dámaso. 1962. La fragmentación fonética peninsular. Supl. of Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica. Madrid: CSIC. Alonso Pintos, Serafín. 2006. O proceso de codificación do galego moderno (1950–1980). A Coruña: Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza. ———. 2017. Investigar, elaborar, divulgar. O Instituto da Lingua da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. LaborHistórico 3 (1): 49–62. https://doi. org/10.24206/lh.v3i1.17106. Álvarez, Rosario, and Xulio Sousa. 2017. A investigación sobre a variación lingüística do galego: desde o ALGa ata a actualidade. LaborHistórico 3 (1): 63–75. https://doi.org/10.24206/lh.v3i1.17107. Álvarez, Rosario, and Xosé Xove. 2002. Gramática da lingua galega. Vigo: Galaxia. Álvarez, Rosario, Henrique Monteagudo, and Xosé Luís Regueira. 1986. Gramática galega. Vigo: Galaxia. Amengual, Mark, and Pilar Chamorro. 2015. The Effects of Language Dominance in the Perception and Production of the Galician Mid Vowel Contrasts. Phonetica 72: 207–236. https://doi.org/10.1159/000439406. Basanta Llanes, Noemi. 2018. ‘As formas cambiaron porque o mundo cambiou’: construción discursiva e interseccional de identidades de xénero e sexualidade en conversas sobre ligar. PhD diss., Univ. de Santiago de Compostela. Beramendi, Justo. 2007. De provincia a nación. Historia do galeguismo político. Vigo: Xerais. Bopp, Franz. 1816. Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der grieschischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache. Frankfurt am Main: Adräischen Buchhandlung, 1999. Repr. London: Routledge. Brown, Esther, and Javier Rivas. 2019. Bringing Purported Black Sheep into the Fold: Galician Inflected Infinitives and Puerto Rican Spanish Pre-verbal

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Infinitival Subject Pronouns. Languages 4 (40): 1–17. https://doi. org/10.3390/languages4020040. Carballo Calero, Ricardo. 1966. Gramática elemental del gallego común. Galaxia: Vigo. Carré Alvarellos, Leandro. 1967. Gramática gallega. A Coruña: Imp. Moret. Castro, Obdulia. 1998. Aproximación a la fonología y morfología gallegas. New Orleans: University Press of the South. Cidrás, Francisco. 2018. Review of Gupton (2014). Revue de Linguistique Romane 82: 327–328, 566–571. Cidrás, Francisco, and Francisco Dubert-García. 2017. A gramática galega, un río de curso curto e sinuoso. Panorama histórico dos estudios gramaticais sobre o galego. LaborHistórico 3 (1): 11–125. https://doi.org/10.24206/lh. v3i1.17110. Colina, Sonia. 2013. Galician Geada: In Defense of Under Specification in Optimality Theory. Lingua 133: 84–100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. lingua.2013.04.003. Coulmas, Florian. 2018. An Introduction to Multilingualism. Language in a Changing World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fernández Rei, Francisco. 1991. O Instituto da Lingua Galega (1971–1990). Contribución á investigación e á normalización do galego. In Homenaxe ó profesor Constantino García, ed. M.  Brea López and F.  Fernández Rei, vol. 1, 15–46. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Fernández Rei, Elisa, and Noelia Engroba. 2014. Estudio perceptivo de la entonación de las interrogativas totales del gallego central. In Fonética experimental, Educación Superior e Investigación, ed. Y.  Congosto, M.L.  Montero, and A. Salvador, vol. 3, 227–224. Madrid: Arco Libros. Fernández Rei, Elisa, and Xosé Luís Regueira. 2017. Situando o galego no terreo da investigación lingüística: os traballos de fonética e fonoloxía. LaborHistórico 3 (1): 93–110. https://doi.org/10.24206/lh.v3i1.17109. Fernández Rei, Elisa, Lurdes de Castro Moutinho, and Rosa Lídia Coimbra. 2016. Contribution to the Diachronic Study of Galician and Portuguese Prosodies. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 24 (1): 42–61. Fernández Salgado, Benigno. 2000. Os Rudimentos da lingüística galega: un estudio de textos lingüísticos galegos de principios do século XX (1913–1936). Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Fernández Salgado, Xosé A. 2004. A obra gramatical de Marcial Valladares. Cadernos de Lingua 26: 47–98. Ferreiro, Manuel. 1995–1997. Gramática histórica galega. 2 vols. Santiago de Compostela: Laiovento. Franco Grande, Xosé Luis. 1968. Diccionario galego-castelán e vocabulario castelán-­galego. Vigo: Galaxia.

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Freixeiro Mato, Xosé Ramón. 1998–2003. Gramática da lingua galega. 4 vols. Vigo: A Nosa Terra. de la Fuente Iglesias, Mónica, and Susana Pérez Castillejo. 2019. Phonetic Interactions in the Bilingual Production of Galician and Spanish /e/ and /o/. International Journal of Bilingualism 24 (2): 305–318. https://doi. org/10.1177/1367006919826868. García, Constantino. 1978. Os estudios dialectais do galego. Grial 62: 458–464. García de Diego, Vicente. 1909. Elementos de gramática histórica gallega (fonética-­ morfología). Burgos: Hijos de Santiago Rodríguez. Facsimile ed.: Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 1984. García Negro, Pilar. 1991. O galego e as leis: aproximación sociolingüística. Vilaboa: O Cumio. González, Manuel, and Xosé Luís Regueira. 2016. Galicia en los inicios de los estudios de fonética acústica dentro del estado español. In 53 reflexiones sobre aspectos de la fonética y otros temas de lingüística, ed. A.M. Fernández Planas, 373–382. Barcelona: Universitat. González Seoane, Ernesto. 2006. A gramática de Lugrís na tradición lingüística galega. Boletín da Real Academia Galega 379: 37–57. ———. 2018. Prescrición e descrición na Gramática de Saco. Boletín da Real Academia Galega 367: 407–417. https://doi.org/10.32766/brag.379.740. Gupton, Timothy. 2014. The Syntax-Information Structure Interface. Clausal Word Order and the Left Periphery in Galician. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Harris, Roy. 1990. On Redefining Linguistics. In Redefining linguistics, ed. H. Davis and T. Taylor, 18–52. London: Routledge. Haugen, Einar. 1966. Language Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Modern Norwegian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1987. Language Planning. In Sociolinguistics, ed. U. Ammon et al., vol. 1, 626–637. Berlin / New York: de Gruyter. Hermida Gulías, Carme. 1987. A polémica ortográfica a finais do século XIX (1888). Grial 97: 299–316. Holtus, Günter, Michael Metzeltin, and Christian Schmitt, eds. 1994. Lexikon der romanistischen Linguistik. Vol. 6 (2): Galegisch, Portugiesisch. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Iglesias Álvarez, Ana. 2003. Falar galego: ‘no veo por qué’. Aproximación cualitativa á situación sociolingüística de Galicia. Vigo: Xerais. Iglesias Rábade, Luís. 1995. O uso e o costume no proceso de normativización ortográfica da lingua inglesa. Cadernos de Lingua 11: 39–69. Joseph, John E. 2004. Language and Identity. National, Ethnic, Religious. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010. Identity. In Language and Identities, ed. C. Llamas and D. Watt, 9–17. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Kabatek, Johannes. 1992. O príncipe Louis Lucien Bonaparte, precursor da lingüística galega. Cadernos de Lingua 6: 5–26. Lass, Roger. 1980. On Explaining Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lippi-Green, Rosina. 2012. English with an Accent. In Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States, 2nd ed. London / New York: Routledge. Lorenzo Vázquez, Ramón. 1962. Estudios etnográfico-lingüísticos sobre La Mahia y aledaños. Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos 17: 49–67. Mariño Paz, Ramón. 1998. Historia da lingua galega. Santiago de Compostela: Sotelo Blanco. ———. 2008. Historia de la lengua gallega. München: LINCOM. Martínez-Gil, Fernando. 2004. Galician Geada. In Contemporary Approaches to Romance Linguistics, ed. J.  Auger, J.C.  Clements, and B.  Vance, 299–320. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ———. 2019. Galician Mid-Vowel Reduction: A Stratal OT Account. In Romance Phonetics and Phonology, ed. M. Gibson and J. Gil, 299–350. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McKevitt, Kerry Ann. 2003. Cuestións pasadas por alto: a tradución para o galego do Ulysses de James Joyce. In Fragmentos de Ulises, 1926, ed. James Joyce and Ramón Otero Pedrayo, 7–51. Vigo: Galaxia. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. 1904. Manual elemental de gramática histórica española. Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez. https://archive.org/ details/manualelementald00menuoft?view=theater. Milroy, James, and Lesley Milroy. 1999. Authority in Language. Investigating Standard English. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Mirás, Francisco. 1864. Compendio de gramática gallega-castellana. Santiago de Compostela: Imp. M. Mirás, 1987. Facsimile ed.: Madrid: Akal. Monteagudo, Henrique. 1999. Historia social da lingua galega. Vigo: Galaxia. ———. 2016. A invención dos Séculos Escuros. In Historia das historias de Galicia, ed. I. Dubert, 149–179. Vigo: Xerais. Moreno Cabrera, Juan Carlos. 2000. La dignidad e igualdad de las lenguas: crítica de la discriminación lingüística. Madrid: Alianza. Mosquera Castro, Estefanía. 2017. A escrita electrónica galega: tradición, innovación e recepción. In Estudos sobre o cambio lingüístico no galego actual, ed. X.L.  Regueira and E.  Fernández Rei, 129–156. Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura Galega. Mugglestone, Lynda. 1995. ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. Oxford: Clarendon. de Nebrija, Antonio. 1492. Arte de la lengua castellana. Salamanca. Incunabulum, Biblioteca Nacional de España. http://bdhrd.bne.es/viewer. vm?id=0000174208&page=1.

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O’Rourke, Bernadette, and Fernando Ramallo. 2015. Neofalantes as an Active Minority: Understanding Language Practices and Motivations for Change Amongst New Speakers of Galician. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 231: 147–165. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-­2014-­0036. Paul, Hermann. 1880. Pricipien der Sprachgeschichte. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 2009. Repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piñeiro, Ramón. 1967. A lingoaxe i as língoas. A Coruña: Real Academia Galega. Piñeiro Martín, Andrés, Carmen García-Mateo, Laura Docío-Fernández, and Xosé Luís Regueira. 2018. Estudio sobre el impacto del corpus de entrenamiento del modelo de lenguaje en las prestaciones de un reconocedor de habla. Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural 61: 75–82. https://doi. org/10.26342/2018-­61-­8. Pinto Pajares, Daniel. 2018. Representaciones ideológicas de las lenguas: análisis comparativo de las ideologías lingüísticas en las clases altas gallega y catalana. PhD diss., Universidade de Vigo. Ramallo, Fernando, and Gabriel Rei-Doval. 2015. The Standardization of Galician. Sociolinguistica 29 (1): 61–82. https://doi.org/10.1515/soci-­2015-­0006. Regueira, Xosé Luís. 1991. A contribución alemana á lingüística galega. In Homenaxe ó profesor Constantino García, ed. M. Brea López and F. Fernández Rei, vol. 2, 155–178. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade. ———. 1994. Modelos fonéticos e autenticidade lingüística. Cadernos de Lingua 10: 37–60. ———. 1996. Os estudios de lingüística galega. In Homenaxe á profesora Pilar Álvarez Cuesta, ed. R. Lorenzo and R. Álvarez, 47–67. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade. ———. 1999. Estándar oral e variación social da lingua galega. In Cinguidos por unha arela común: homenaxe ó profesor Xesús Alonso Montero, ed. R. Álvarez and D. Vilavedra, vol. 1, 855–875. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade. ———. 2005. Estándar oral. In Norma lingüística e variación, ed. R. Álvarez and H. Monteagudo, 69–95. Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura Galega / Instituto da Lingua Galega. ———. 2006–2007. Galician Language Studies: Between Ideology and Linguistics. Galician Review 5 (6): 1–24. ———. 2008. Os estudos de dialectoloxía galega desde 1967 á actualidade. In A mi dizen quantos amigos ei. Homenaxe ao profesor Xosé Luís Couceiro, ed. E.  Corral Díaz, L.  Fontoira, and E.  Moscoso Mato, 573–584. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. ———. 2016. La lengua de la esfera pública en situación de minorización: español y portugués como lenguas de contacto en el lenguaje político gallego. In El español en contacto con las otras lenguas peninsulares, ed. D. Poch Olivé, 39–59. Madrid / Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana / Vervuert.

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PART II

Bodies, Sexes and Genders I: Intimate and Political Bodies

Lobos Sucios: Nazis, Meigas and Mouros in the Galician Wolfram Mines During WWII María Elena Soliño

Myths, legends, and fairy tales portray the wolf as a ruthless predator, a shadowy, relentless and remorseless threat tracking its innocent prey through a fearsome, frightful environment. From tales like The Three Little Pigs, to telenovelas like Cuna de Lobos [Den of Wolves],1 popular culture has long associated wolves with the loathsome and terrifying. In fiction, wolves embody the worse elements of human nature. These characteristics become a salient feature in the literary fairy tale tradition, and also in Simón Casal’s 2016 directorial debut Lobos sucios [Dirty Wolves],2 which has Little Red Riding Hood as a key intertext. At the end of the film, the protagonist, Manuela, is presented like Red Riding Hood, while the Big Bad Wolf, in the guise of Franz the Nazi, stalks the protagonist Manuela through the woods, ready to pounce and kill. This association is presented 1 2

 Blanco, González and Morales. directors. 2019. Cuna de Lobos. Televisa.  Casal. director. 2016. Lobos Sucios. Agallas Films.

M. E. Soliño (*) University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Castro et al. (eds.), Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98861-6_3

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as an allegory of the relationship between the Galicians who worked the wolfram mines in the early 1940s, and the Nazis who controlled the mines, behaving as viciously as the wolves of fairy tale lore, or more contemporary cultural products, like cinematic action thrillers. In recent fiction wolves continue to be portrayed as devious animals who hunt people. In Liam Neeson’s 2011 film The Grey (Carnahan 2011)3 which grossed $77,278,331 worldwide, a group of workers on the Alaskan oil pipeline survive a plane crash, only to be relentlessly hunted by a pack of wolves as they struggle to withstand brutal weather. The wolves incarnate the menace posed by nature, both to industry, when at the beginning of the film marksmen must protect the oil company from wolves, and to individuals, as five members of the group are attacked. The struggle is cast as good versus evil, with the wolves acting out their traditional role. The enormous wolves, created for this film mainly as computer-generated images, are clearly not dealing with hunger; instead, they hunt in the role of the monster in a horror movie.4 If the size of the animals were not enough, the dialogue makes clear that the wolves were not hunting for food. As the first victim is killed, they explain: “They weren’t eating him. They were killing him.” Yet, as has recently been highlighted in nature films, and in the attention given to projects like the reintroduction of wolves into the wild in places such as Yellowstone, wolves do not kill for sport or out of malice, but for survival’s sake.5 The Grey was given the Scat Award by the International Wolf Center in their newly created category of “Scare Tactics and Silly Information” for its absurd degree of misinformation. Their Board Chair Nancy Jo Tubbs’s description of wolf portrayals in The Grey is applicable to a large number of cultural productions for  Carnahan. director. 2011. The Grey. Open Road Films.  They also used puppets, trained animals, and actors in wolf costumes. But the greatest controversy arose when the filmmakers hired a trapper to deliver the corpses of actual wolves to use at the end of the battle scenes. Neeson also boasted of preparing for the film by enjoying a wolf stew, whereas other members of the cast reacted violently when informed of the contents of their meal. Animals were harmed in the making of this film. 5  The Trouble with Wolves (Monda. director. 2019. Gravitas Ventures), Medicine of the Wolf (Huffman. director. 2015. Gravitas Ventures), and Living with Wolves: Return of the European Wolf (Landin and Zimen. directors. 2001. MagellanTV) are just three examples. There are a number of fiction films that celebrate a bond between humans and wolves. Entrelobos [Among Wolves] (Olivares. director. 2010. Wanda Vision), Druid Peak (Zelnick. director. 2014. Indie Rights), and Friends for Life (Spence. director. 2008. C3 Entertainment) are examples. However, none of these achieved the success of The Grey with its more traditional portrayal of the wolf as a menace. 3 4

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giving, “as accurate a portrayal of wolf behavior as King Kong was about gorillas.”6 Nevertheless, the image of the wolf as a fear-provoking, predatory and menacing killing machine that preys on the weak pervades popular culture. The vicious wolf of the Brothers Grimm and action movies is a dirty wolf, one who kills spurred on by the will to dominate. The symbol of the dirty wolf sets the tone for Galician director Simón Casal’s Lobos sucios, a WWII drama set in Galicia, which like most Nazi films portrays a struggle between good and evil. The Nazis who were mining wolfram (also known as “tungsten”) and hunting down Jews in Galicia during WWII are the dirty wolves of the title, as are the Spanish officials of the Franco regime who invited the Germans in to exploit both the Galician mines and the Galician people. The Nazi-operated mines are also run like prison camps, with political prisoners performing the most dangerous jobs, without consideration for their safety. Wolfram, the name of the mineral that was crucial to German arms manufacturing, references society’s preconceived notions of Nazis and wolves as killing machines. Wolfram comes from German—“wolf” referencing the animal, and “rahm” from the Middle High German for soot/ dirt.7 English speakers will connect the name to the image of a wolf eating a ram. It was rumored among miners that the devil, in the form of a wolf, contaminates the mineral with his slime (García del Amo and López 2018).8 In fact, wolfram is commonly intermixed with arsenic, coating workers’ hands with a sticky substance that is almost impossible to wash off. As seen in Lobos sucios, as well as the homonymous 2006 documentary on which it is based, the workers who processed the mineral were often

6  Tubbs is quoted in the UPI review of the film. “Wolf expert no fan of ‘The Grey.’” h t t p s : / / w w w. u p i . c o m / E n t e r t a i n m e n t _ N e w s / M o v i e s / 2 0 1 2 / 0 2 / 1 2 / Wolf-expert-no-fan-of-The-Grey/75291329101437/. 7  wolfram (n.) 1757, from German Wolfram, wolform “iron tungstate” (1562), of obscure etymology. It looks like “wolf-cream” (from rahm “cream”), but the second element might be Middle High German ram (German Rahm) “dirty mark, soot;” if so, perhaps “so called in sign of contempt because it was regarded of lesser value than tin and caused a considerable loss of tin during the smelting process in the furnace” [Klein]. Or perhaps the word is originally a personal name, “wolf-raven.” (“Wolfram/Etymology, Origen and Meaning of Wolfram.” Etymoline [Online Etymology Dictionary]. Accessed 12 April 2018. https:// www.etymonline.com/word/wolfram). 8  García del Amo and López, “Lobos sucios y La Batalla desconocida.” 100cias@uned #11, 2018. Accessed 6 August 2019. http://e-spacio.uned.es/fez/eserv/ bibliuned:revista100cias-­2018-­11-7500/n53_-_Lobos_sucios_.pdf.

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women, who would then contaminate their young children, ignorant of the dangers of this poison they were passing on through touch. Much more than a stereotypical anti-Nazi WWII film, Lobos sucios offers a multilayered look into how Spanish filmmakers are reconsidering and refashioning the history of the Francoist regime. As part of the movement to recuperate historical memory, the film engages with new historical practices that recover the voices of the Republicans, whose experiences had been silenced by the regime. Lobos sucios offers a powerful reexamination of Spain’s complex role in WWII, a subject made popular internationally by series like El tiempo entre costuras [The Time in Between] (López Amado et  al. 2013–2014),9 and the film Silencio en la nieve [Frozen Silence] (Herrero 2011).10 Like El tiempo entre costuras, Casal’s film reinserts women into war stories through its focus on the predicaments of two sisters, Manuela and Candela. Lobos sucios does not treat women simply as victims or bystanders but as active agents and explores the ways their lives were disrupted and fundamentally altered by WWII, a war that many believe did not affect Spain. Nominally neutral, Franco’s Spain in fact aided the Nazi causes, even as it sought to sustain ties with the Allies. By aiding both warring factions, Franco ensured the acceptance of his regime, regardless of who won WWII. Lobos sucios also provides an example of how Galician directors and screenwriters are recovering regional identities and traditions. Much of what makes this film very different from other melodramatic anti-Nazi polemics is its attempt to wrestle and recover Galicia’s cultural and historical heritage. Like other films set in Galicia, such as José Luis Cuerda’s 1999 hit La lengua de las mariposas [Butterfly]11 and Oliver Laxe’s 2019 O que arde [Fire Will Come],12 stunning aerial shots of the Galician landscape perform more than just an ethnographic function. The landscape itself becomes a character in Lobos sucios. Sergi Gallardo’s cinematography for Lobos sucios won praise for the film, nominated for the Maestre Mateo prize, as well as a Goya. The most unforgettable scenes in the film are framed by shots of the area surrounding the mines of Casaio, especially the portrayal of the yew forest, O Teixedal. 9  López Amado, Mercero and Peñafiel. directors. 2013–2014. El tiempo entre costuras. Antena 3. 10  Herrero. director. 2012. Silencio en la nieve. Castafiorie Films. 11  Cuerda. director. 1999. La lengua de las mariposas. Miramax. 12  Laxe. director. 2019. O que arde. Tarantula.

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The Teixedal is represented through words and images as a magical space of the sort found in fairy tales. In one of the film’s subplots, the protagonist Manuela resembles Little Red Riding Hood, being chased through the forest by a dirty wolf. Through the interactions between Manuela and her Nazi tormentor, the film provides a sophisticated analysis of the uses of the fairy tale metaphor. Lobos sucios shows how fairy tales play into the German Romantic, anti-French Enlightenment tradition. Far from being innocent entertainment, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm were part of a nationalistic project, aimed at helping in the construction of a unified Germany. Like most nationalisms, the nineteenth-century German movement was built on excluding and/or silencing those who were different, and often also women. In these tales, those who did not conform and comply were hunted down by dirty wolves. In Lobos sucios, Franz, the director of the mine, attempts a mission similar to that of the Brothers Grimm, but now in the twentieth century it is the Nazi party that is attempting to shape a new German nationalism, legitimized through the discovery of ties to ancient civilizations. The literary fairy tales stand in contrast to tales from the oral tradition, often referred to as old wives’ tales, that present women not as weak and vulnerable, but as figures whose connection with nature can be a source of power. Lobos sucios garnered its first accolades at the Mill Valley Film Festival. Internationally, Jewish groups in particular appreciated Lobos sucios since one of the intertwined plots of the film is a tribute to the Galicians, who, like the historical Touza sisters, helped hundreds of Jews escape Nazi persecution by guiding them into Portugal, from where they could sail to America. In Lobos sucios the victims were not just the local Galician miners and the political prisoners brought in to boost production in the wolfram mines, but also the Jews who were hunted by the Germans whose actions defy the laws of nature, since they kill out of malicious ideology, and not just to survive. This subplot serves to highlight the film’s main theme: in spite of its official posture of non-belligerence, the Franco regime was deeply implicated alongside the Nazis in WWII.  Non-belligerence does not equal neutrality as it holds out the promise not to take arms, while still allowing for ideological bonds. Lobos sucios is an intricate film with a number of intertwined subplots. In this analysis of the film, we shall highlight four of the main elements pertinent to understanding the film. Although Casal was not the first to bring the subject of Galicia’s wolfram mines to the big screen, he transformed a subject previously treated in documentaries into the stuff of art,

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literature, and regional myth. There were two earlier documentaries, Antonio Caeiro’s 2003 A Memoria nos tempos do wolfram [Memories from the Wolfram Era]13 and Felipe Rodríguez Lameiro’s documentary, also titled Lobos sucios,14 which premiered a decade before the feature film. Paula Cons, one of the scriptwriters for the fiction film, directed the documentary La Batalla desconocida [The Hidden Battle]15 for RTVE in 2017. Con’s documentary foregrounds the importance of the history of Spanish participation in WWII. In addition to recuperating the history of the wolfram mines in Galicia, Lobos sucios recovers the voices of the defeated whose stories were stifled not only by Francoist historians but also by the postwar film industry. The film engages with Francoist cinema to question its intent. The 1949 El santuario no se rinde [The Sanctuary Will Not Surrender]16 is another of the intertexts that enriches Lobos sucios. This is a very different type of war story. Finally, one of the least understood elements of the film is its engagement with both the literary fairy tale tradition of the Brothers Grimm and the female-centered old wives’ tales, a genre strongly linked in Lobos sucios to Manuela, and through her, to Galician legends and myths.

1   Resistance and Rebellion in the Galician Countryside The film is set in Casaio, home to one of the largest wolfram mines run by Germans in the early 1940s, using both an impoverished local workforce and political prisoners to perform the dangerous tasks of extracting and processing the mineral. As a fiction film, with a strong basis in historical realities, Lobos sucios draws the audience into the plot through the insertion of love stories, political intrigue, and an allegorical and poetic view of the plight of Galicians in times of supposed peace, that instead brought WWII to their front door. The protagonist, Manuela, is a poor single mother who works in the wolfram mine in Casaio. At the beginning of the film, Manuela is portrayed as illiterate and apolitical, struggling simply to survive. In contrast, her younger sister, Candela, is much more rebellious, refusing to work in  Caeiro. director. 2003. A Memoria nos tempos do wólfram. Olympus Comunicación.  Rodríguez Lameiro. director. 2006. Lobos sucios. Agallas Films. 15  Cons. director. 2017. La Batalla desconocida. Agallas Films. 16  Ruiz Castillo. director. 1949. El santuario no se rinde. Valencia Films. 13 14

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the mine for wages so low, that no matter how hard and dangerous the work, they will forever be trapped in grinding poverty. Candela can earn much more gathering wolfram in the mountains around the mine and then selling it on the black market to Mr. Bryan, a British spy who is in Galicia as part of Britain’s program of pre-emptive buying of wolfram in order to keep it out of German hands. But he and Edgar, a resistance fighter whose family previously owned the mine, have more ambitious plans. They work to destroy the wolfram mine at Casaio. To do so they need help from within, and thus Manuela is drawn into a battle that initially she considers foreign. To convince Manuela to help them, the British hold out the promise of providing Manuela’s ill daughter with penicillin, which can save her life. Still in pure survival mode, Manuela grudgingly agrees to carry messages to one of the prisoners, Miguel Peña. In turn, Edgar, who is a doctor, will treat Manuela’s daughter. Manuela becomes further implicated when she unwittingly captures the attention of Franz, the director of the mine, whom she will eventually be asked to seduce in order to retrieve up-to-date maps of the mine. With these maps, the rebellious prisoners inside the mine connect with the maquis, the resistance fighters who live in the woods, refusing to abandon their fight against the fascist regime. Together, they steal the sacks of wolfram that are about to be sent to Germany. In a secondary plot, Candela finds a starving man trying to drink milk directly from the family’s cow. Once again, this serves to highlight one of the unknown stories of Galician intervention in WWII. There was a network that led Jews who were fleeing from the Nazis across Galicia and into Portugal. Candela and Edgar become part of the effort, eventually leading to Candela’s torture and death when she is captured during one of the missions. Candela loses her life, but after the destruction of the mine, Manuela and Miguel, who have fallen in love, escape together into the woods to join the maquis. In addition to debunking the myth of the Spanish government’s neutrality in WWII, through the character development of the two sisters, Lobos Sucios questions the possibility of individuals remaining neutral. Both Candela and Manuela not only live in grinding poverty but are also deprived of education and information. This is made clear in Manuela’s first encounter with the British who seek her help. The mine workers often did not know why wolfram was important. Once told that it is used to build weapons that are killing thousands, Manuela responds that it is none of their concern—“no es asunto nuestro.” Candela eventually becomes

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deeply involved, both emotionally and ideologically in rescuing the Jews that flee across their land. Yet initially she says that all she knows about the Jews is that they are the people who killed Christ. Their transformation into active agents of anti-fascist resistance movements highlights another key theme in the film: that ignorance offers no excuse for condoning genocide. For those involved in fascist regimes, turning a blind eye to violence was a deliberate act. Reviewing the film for Variety, Dennis Harvey writes, “The pic is attractively packaged, its most notable aspect being d.p. Sergi Gallardo’s striking aerial shots of the gorgeous, mountainous countryside.”17 The wolfram mine is not the only notable feature of the countryside in Lobos sucios, the area also hosts one of the few yew forests in the world, the Teixedal. Yews are solitary trees, typically found scattered among other species in forests, but not clustered. This forest becomes a character in its own right in the film, symbolizing the power of unity. It also becomes a battlefield where Manuela defeats Franz, her Nazi tormentor. Drawing on Galician folklore, the film emphasizes Manuela’s connection to the magical landscape. At the same time, the film draws on the German fairy tale tradition of the Brothers Grimm in the way it presents Franz, who seeks more than just wolfram. For Franz, his post as director of the mine is just a pretense to continue his search for the mystical Cova do Mouro, thought to contain the soul of the earth. The conflicts between the Galician woman and her German tormentor can be read as an allegory of the differences between two contrasting systems of beliefs.

2   Documenting the Wolfram Mines of Galicia A feature film, Lobos sucios takes up the story told previously in two documentaries about the German-run wolfram mines in Galicia during WWII.  In 2004 Antonio Caeiro directed A memoria nos tempos do wolfram (Memories from the Times of Wolfram). Felipe Rodríguez Lameiro, who later co-wrote the script for the fictional feature film alongside Carmen Abarca, Paula Cons and Noelia del Río, had already directed a 2006 documentary of the same title, Lobos sucios. Both documentaries contain dialogue mainly in Galician, with a series of interviews with former miners and other eyewitnesses to history. 17  Harvey. “Film Review: Dirty Wolves.” Variety. Accessed 23 September 2018. https:// variety.com/2015/film/reviews/dirty-wolves-review-1201626252/#article-comments.

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Although A memoria begins with the oft-quoted complaint by British Ambassador to Spain, Samuel Hoare,18 that preventing Germany from buying wolfram in Spain so consumed his tenure that the word “wolfram” would probably appear on his tombstone, the overall tone of the film is nostalgic, focusing on the point of view of the Galician participants in mining wolfram. In contrast to the triumphant broadcast announcing the end of the war on April 1, 1939, that is reproduced before the title sequence, in establishing shots of old photographs, women from the remote rural areas of Galicia that housed the mines recall the extreme poverty they suffered at the end of the civil war. Well into the film, these same women delight in describing the prosperity the German mines brought to the region. This same tone of nostalgia also permeates the interviews with old miners from Fontao, Pontevedra, who describe the period in terms comparable to the California gold rush. Suddenly there were sixty-six bars in a previously desolate location, and locals sold their livestock so that the barns could be converted into makeshift dormitories for the influx of workers. There is a special level of joy in descriptions of how they stole wolfram to sell on the black market. The phrase “acórdome ben” [I remember well] is often repeated by the old-timers reminiscing about a youth that, far from being dull, propelled them into a temporary whirlwind of activity and prosperity. While there is a brief description of the torture the prisoners had suffered during the war and the abuses of the Guardia Civil, the two old miners who receive the most screen time joke about the fate of the political prisoners brought in to work in the mines: “vivían ben e cobraban” [they lived well and had a paycheck] and “aquí pasárono ben” [they had a good time here]. Without any previous exposure to education, the miners also express admiration and gratitude toward the well-educated prisoners for exposing them to a level of culture previously foreign to them. The tone changes when the scene shifts to Casaio, where due to the proximity to mountains that hid guerilla groups still fighting against the Franco regime, there was more a feeling of a penal colony from which some escaped. 18  “After six months of continuous controversy, the word ‘wolfram’ will probably be written on my tombstone—a word that before the war was practically unknown, a mineral that was as worthless as dust in 1939, and was selling at £7000 a ton in 1943.” From Public Record Office (PRO) FO371/39654/6240, Letter, Hoare to Eden, 1 May 1944 (in Leitz, “Nazi Germany’s Struggle for Spanish Wolfram during the Second World War.” European History Quarterly 25.1 (1995): 71–92).

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A memoria nos tempos do wolfram follows traditional documentary format, accompanying interviews with images of newspaper clippings and historical footage. Lacking certain documentary conventions, such as voice-over commentary, there is a pretense of neutrality in its uniform presentation of all the testimonials. It is easy for the audience not to know the politics or status of the speakers until they are defined in the closing credits. Only then do we discover that the widow who lost her husband in the mines was the wife of a political prisoner. Her interview is presented in the same tone as that of the retired Civil Guard who would have been one of his jailers. Without a hint of reproach, the film presents the points of views of those who tortured and killed anyone who opposed the regime. The Franco regime’s pretense of neutrality is mirrored in A memoria, as is the Transition’s Pact of Silence, as it attempts to avoid politics, or assign blame, while presenting a highly political and emotionally charged retelling of a shameful period of Spanish history. The mine at Casaio is the focus of Felipe Rodríguez’s documentary Lobos sucios. The difference in the two titles highlights the difference in tone. The intent is entirely different in Lobos sucios, a documentary that lacks any pretense of offering a neutral representation of the events. As Bill Nichols points out, many documentaries rely on a spoken commentary to guide the viewer to the ‘correct’ interpretation of the images that embody what’s said. The commentary, as spoken language, can name and define poverty, affluence, or fear directly. Documentaries offer the sensuous experience of sounds and images organized to move us: they activate feelings and emotions and they tap into values and beliefs. (Nichols 2017, unpaginated)19

In this case the voice-over is particularly poetic, through the use of poet/novelist Manuel Rivas as narrator. He was no stranger to the topic of wolfram mining in Galicia. Rivas published his 2006 novel Os libros arden mal [Books Burn Badly]20 the same year the documentary premiered. This novel incorporates the wolfram trade into the plot, in an ingenious way that simultaneously condemns the practice, and pays tribute to rebellious Galicians from past eras by resurrecting one of Emilia Pardo Bazán’s best-­ known characters. In Os libros, Rivas’s character, Medias Vermellas, who 19  Nichols, Introduction to Documentary. Champaign: Indiana University Press, 2017. Kindle Edition Loc 1646. 20  Rivas, Os libros arden mal. Vigo: Xerais, 2006.

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resembles Pardo Bazán’s Ildara from “Las medias rojas” [The Red Stockings], roams the port as a Medusa-like figure, looked upon by passers-­by as an insane homeless person. This pose conceals the fact that she is a covert operative, part of an anti-fascist network that carried messages that helped sink the ships bound for the German armament factories, loaded with wolfram. Given his well-known work on the topic of Francoist abuses during the civil war and its aftermath, Rivas’s participation in the documentary further stresses that Lobos sucios engages with the movement to recuperate historical memory.21 He is strongly linked to the movement to bring closure to the families who never learned the fate of their loved ones who had disappeared in the war and postwar. True to the mission of literally unearthing the past, in the documentary Lobos sucios, the grandchildren of two men who had worked in the wolfram mine at Casaio return to the scene to share their family histories with each other, and with the audience. One is Eva Abal, the granddaughter of a schoolteacher who had left his poorly paid profession to help direct the mine. The other is Miguel Cardeñas, an Andalusian who had been tracked down by members of the Commission for the Recuperation of Historical Memory when his grandfather’s remains were found buried in Soutadoiro. A third documentary on wolfram mining in Galicia premiered on January 25, 2018, as part of RTVE’s series Otros documentales [Other Documentaries]. La Batalla Desconocida [Hidden Battles] written and directed by Paula Cons, one of the scriptwriters for the fictional Lobos sucios. This is a more academic study of the role of wolfram in Franco-era 21  “For more than a decade, Manuel Rivas’s work has been inextricably linked to the project of the recuperation of historical memory. No discussion of the engagement of the artist in this project would be complete without acknowledging his 1998 novel El lápiz del carpintero [The Carpenter’s Pencil] and his short stories from ¿Qué me quieres, amor? [What do you want, my love?] that in 1999 served as the basis for the film La lengua de las mariposas [Butterfly]. Yet in comparison to other authors from this movement, Rivas’s works sustain the added mission of recuperating the historical memory of a land that carried an additional blemish in the history of franquismo. As Franco himself was from Galicia, the region was one of the first to be subjected. In Rivas’s works on the civil war, there is a clear statement that in Galicia instead of a war, there was a swift and especially brutal massacre, followed by a tighter than usual rescripting, or erasing, of Galician history, and even of its language” (Soliño, “Emigration, War, and a Case of Collective Madness in the Forging of a Galician National Consciousness: Manuel Rivas Rewrites Emilia Pardo Bazán’s ‘Las medias rojas’.” Monographic Review/Revista Monográfica: Hysteria, Hallucination and Madness in Hispanic Literature 26 (2010): 119).

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politics. Here a group of experts, mainly historians, but also mining engineers, describe the mining of wolfram in Spain as the greatest economic battle of WWII. Wolfram was crucial to the manufacture of weapons. Its qualities—exceptionally hard, but lightweight and able to withstand extremely high temperatures without warping—initially made the German Panzer tanks impenetrable against the much weaker Allied Sherman tanks.22 Wolfram was also critical for the manufacture of armor-piercing shells. In La Batalla desconocida historian Emilio Grandío explains that in Spain it is almost impossible to research Franco’s involvement in WWII through his sale of wolfram to the Germans. Historians must look to German, British, and American archives to retrieve the pertinent records that document what in Spain was a secret war. Even the local villagers, for whom wolfram was the black gold that temporarily saved them from famine, were ignorant of the political maneuvering that had brought WWII to their front door. Not only were the Germans managing the mines, but British spies were also actively engaged in buying as much wolfram as possible in order to keep it out of German hands.

3   Galicia as a Battlefield in WWII As early as 1937, Hitler sent his envoy Hermann Göring, along with a team of experts, to Spain in search of raw materials that would aid the Reich’s war effort. In 1938, Göring established SOFINDUS (Sociedad Financiera e Industrial, S.A.), a company secretly owned by the German government, but that could conduct business in autocratic Spain by posing as a Spanish company.23 SOFINDUS eventually operated the wolfram 22  “The Americans began developing tungsten-cored shells after some of the German antitank guns using this shell were captured in North Africa. Development was not pushed as rapidly as in retrospect it should have been because of the scarcity of tungsten and the belief that conventional guns and ammunition were sufficient. After D-Day, however, the army discovered that the Sherman Tank armed with its standard 75 mm gun, and firing conventional ammunition, was no match for the German Panther and Tiger tanks. Only shots fired at extremely close range, and hitting the more vulnerable tracking, could do any damage; the German tanks could destroy the Shermans at a distance” (Caruana and Rockoff, “A Wolfram in Sheep’s Clothing: Economic Warfare in Spain, 1940–1944.” The Journal of Economic History 63.1 (2003): 118. 23  The Spanish businessmen who posed as SOFINDUS’s directors and board profited greatly from their sinecure. José María Martínez Ortega, Count of Arguillo, was one of these. His son, Cristóbal Martínez Bordiú, would become Franco’s son-in-law. (Juárez Camacho, “El espionaje alemán en España a través del consorcio empresarial SOFINDUS.”

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mine at Casaio. Nazi assistance had been crucial for Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War, but it came at a price. Once the war ended, the Germans expected repayment of the enormous debt that the Nationalists had accrued. In 1940 Heinrich Himmler traveled to Spain to sign agreements with Franco that firmly established German presence in Galicia for military purposes. The German navy used the ports of Vigo and El Ferrol for refueling, maintenance, and repairs. At night, after regular programming had concluded, the Germans used radio signals from A Coruña to guide attacks against British convoys in the Atlantic. They also installed powerful antennas that provided coverage for a thousand miles, as well as a German naval meteorological station. But supplying German arms factories with wolfram seemed to offer the greatest solution both to repaying the debt and for profiting from the war, as eventually the price of wolfram, as well as the needed export licenses, skyrocketed. Early in WWII, Germany had been cut off from its original Chinese and Indian suppliers of wolfram by a British blockade of the region. Before the war Germany had imported 8037 tons from China, but only 141 from Spain (Thomàs 2017: 80).24 This changed in 1941 when the Iberian Peninsula became its only source. The Spanish government used wolfram as leverage to gain concessions, mainly by using the permissions to export to Germany as payment of the debt incurred during the civil war. Franco claimed that by providing wolfram, his participation in WWII was more valuable to Germany than if he had sent regular troops—“of greater value than a Spain which would be drawn into the war” (Leitz 1995: 87).25 There are estimates that the Allied program of pre-emptive buying reduced the amount of wolfram that the Germans could export by a third, but at a cost of roughly $170 million that fortified Franco’s regime (Caruana and Rockoff: 117–118).26 In La Batalla Desconocida Eduardo Rolland, the author of Galicia en Guerra [Galicia at War],27 affirms that the Ría de Vigo might hold one of the largest reserves of wolfram, since that was the place where much of it was dumped from both the Diacronie: Studi di Storia Contemporanea 28.4 (2016). http://journals.openedition.org/ diacronie/4795). 24  Thomàs, “Tungsten in the Second World War: China, Japan, Germany, the Allies and Iberia.” Comillas Journal of International Relations 10 (2017): 65–90. 25  Leitz, “Nazi Germany’s Struggle for Spanish Wolfram.” 26  Caruana and Rockford, “A Wolfram in Sheep’s Clothing: Economic Warfare in Spain, 1940–1944.” The Journal of Economic History 63.1 (2003): 100–126. 27  Rolland, Galicia en guerra. Vigo: Edicións Xerais, 2006.

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pre-­emptive buys by the British and the wolfram that came from the mines, but was hijacked in route to Germany. By selling to Britain and the United States Franco could also appease the Allies, thus playing both sides of the war to enable continued support once WWII concluded, regardless of who won. The Franco government used the economic warfare that was raging between Germany and Britain, and then later the United States, to improve the pitiful state of affairs in the Spanish treasury. In addition to a sharp increase in the price of wolfram—between 60 and 80 pesetas per kilogram at the end of 1941, to 172 by the end of 1942, to 285 in May 1943—in January 1943 the Franco government added a 100 pesetas per kilogram production tax in addition to the existing 50 per kilogram export tax (Leitz 1995, 80).28 Franco’s plans to exploit the needs of both sides met with more serious opposition once the United States entered the war. Loath to be exploited, in January 1944 the United States imposed an oil embargo. The Allies had already used an oil embargo to sway Spain into a more neutral position in 1940. Spain lacked oil reserves. Faced with the prospect of not even having a functioning fishing fleet in times of famine, at the start of WWII the Franco regime had appealed to the Germans for supplies of oil, as well as coal, wheat and other raw materials. Germany’s failure to provide Spain with the needed supplies forced Spain to negotiate with the Allies and thus pushed the regime closer to non-belligerence. For the British, continued control over Gibraltar was key to controlling the region and that would become more complicated if Spain joined the war (Caruana and Rockoff 2003: 102).29 Whereas the earlier embargo had been key to determining Spain’s level of involvement in WWII, the 1944 embargo was not entirely successful due to lack of support from the British.30 For the United States price was not the only issue, they wanted to cut off supplies to Germany as part of  Leitz, “Nazi Germany’s Struggle for Spanish Wolfram”: 80.  Caruana and Rockford, “A Wolfram in Sheep’s Clothing”: 102. 30  Although wolfram was one of the key issues in discussions leading up to the 1944 embargo, there were other serious complaints from the Allies—cancellation of Spain’s war debt to Germany, the unanswered requests to expel German spies from Spain, the use of Spanish airfields and ports for Axis war planes and naval operations, the lingering presence of Spaniards on the Eastern Front, even after the Blue Division had pulled out, and the strong pro-Nazi stance in Spanish media. (Caruana and Rockoff, “A Wolfram in Sheep’s Clothing”: 120). 28 29

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the buildup to the Normandy invasion, which began in June 1944. The British were wary of harming their lasting financial interests in Spain and depended on Spain for 42% of its iron ore supplies. The British threatened to provide oil to Spain if the United States persisted with the embargo (Caruana and Rockoff 2003: 121).31 The Franco regime continued to export Galician wolfram to Germany throughout the first half of 1944, both openly, although in lesser amounts, and through smuggling (Leitz 1995: 84).32 The production of wolfram in the mines operated by Germans eventually came to a halt in October 1944. By this date Germany already had enough reserves of wolfram to last them to the end of the war. Also, with Germany bankrupt, the price had collapsed, thus ending Spanish interest in continued mining. These last months of the wolfram boom are the background to the personal stories of love, loss and heroism portrayed in the feature film Lobos sucios. This end stage is portrayed in Lobos sucios when the Civil Guards arrive to inform the Germans that they no longer have the Caudillo’s permission to operate the mines and must exit the region. The film delivers a happy ending when the maquis and the political prisoners together succeed in their plan to steal the last shipment of wolfram, thus keeping it out of German hands and humiliating Franz who must now account for the loss. In the film the maquis are credited for expelling and defeating the Germans, more so than the government. In the end, Franz’s thwarted attempt to kill the prisoners by blowing up their quarters provides visual satisfaction as a metaphor for the collapse of Nazi powers. The explosion also makes it possible for Miguel and Manuela to begin a true relationship since in the chaos Miguel escapes the prison camp, and Franz is killed in his attempt to hunt down Manuela.

4   Rescripting Francoist Cinema As one would expect by the repetition of the title, there is a certain amount of fluidity between the documentary Lobos sucios and the homonymous fiction film. The real-life Miguel Cardeñas Lozano, whose grandson is featured in the documentary, had been among the 461 political prisoners who arrived in Casaio in 1942. He is the inspiration for the fictional Miguel in the 2016 Lobos sucios. Both the heroic and romantic lead, Miguel  Caruana and Rockford, “A Wolfram in Sheep’s Clothing”: 121.  Leitz, “Nazi Germany’s Struggle for Spanish Wolfram”: 84.

31 32

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was serving a thirty-year sentence of hard labor for his participation in the siege of the Sanctuary of the Santísima Virgen de la Cabeza in Jaén during the war. His heroism must have been well known, for when he arrives at the penal camp in Casaio, his reputation precedes him. In this detail, Lobos sucios engages in the recuperation of historical memory in another way, by questioning the portrayal of the civil war in Franco-era films. Through references to Miguel’s war exploits in this particular siege, Lobos sucios challenges the portrayal of this famous incident in the Spanish Civil War in one of the Franco regime’s classic wartime epic films, El Santuario no se rinde (1949), directed by Arturo Ruiz Castillo and starring Alfredo Mayo. The Republicans may have won the battle in Jaén, but they lost both the military war and the propaganda war. In its representation of this Republican victory, Román Gubern considers El santuario as a film that forms a bridge between the fascist cinema of the early forties, the cine de cruzada that glorified and justified the brutality of the civil war, exemplified by films such as Sin novedad en el Alcázar [All Clear in the Alcázar] (1940)33 and Raza [The Superior Race] (1942),34 and a cinema that could be seen as attempting a reconciliation between the warring parties.35 While this may be the case, eighty years after the end of the civil war, those on the losing side are still trying to uncover the secret battles that continued to be fought in the postwar. Released in 1949, El santuario belongs to a set of films that hid Franco’s strong fascist alliances throughout WWII. To be accepted into the new world order after the Allied victory, Franco needed to create new images of Spain’s fascist past and erase the old. The attempts to erase the history of the wolfram mines are part of this same effort to soften the image of Franco’s fascist allegiances. The most representative film of Francoist cinema, Raza, was re-released with all the fascist salutes edited, as was Sin novedad en el Alcázar. Lobos sucios recovers those stories erased both by Franco-era historians and filmmakers by rescripting events in films such as El santuario. The Republican protagonist of El santuario brings about the reconciliation discussed by Gubern by recognizing the supposed error of his ways and joining the Nationalists. Through the character Miguel, Lobos sucios  Genina. director. 1940. Sin novedad en el Alcázar. Film Bassoli.  Sáenz de Heredia. director. 1942. Raza. Concillería del Consejo de la Hispanidad. 35  “La película se ofrecía como un puente ente la exaltación épica del viejo ‘cine de Cruzada’ y la nueva consigna de apaciguamiento y de reconciliación entre vencedores y vencidos, que será el leit-motiv propagandístico de los años cincuenta.” (Gubern, 1936–1939: La guerra de España en la pantalla: de la propaganda a la historia. Madrid: Filmoteca Española: 112). 33 34

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continues the story of El santuario and exposes the fate of those men who may have won the battle in Jaén but lost their place in history. Miguel’s firm convictions highlight the unlikelihood of a Republican embracing Nationalist ideals during the battles in Jaén. In Lobos sucios, instead of the female lead inspiring a Republican to convert, as happens in El santuario, there is an opposite influence as Manuela develops an anti-fascist political consciousness through her contact with Miguel, to the extent that she becomes a combatant herself.

5   History on Screen Both the documentary and the fiction version of Lobos sucios reveal that in the 1940s there was a strong presence of clandestine fighters in the mountainous regions near Casaio, comparable only to the widely studied Andalusian maquis. Historically, they did receive support from the British agents operating in the area to thwart the German enterprises in Galicia. In the documentary, the representative from the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory reveals that Miguel did escape, and they believe that he loved a woman from the village, with whom he may have had a child. Rather than dying at the hands of the fascists, he was ultimately killed by his own fellow resistance fighters. As an Andalusian, he would have stood out in Galicia. The real-life Miguel’s visits to his new family in the village exposed the entire group, who then decided to shoot him and bury him in the grave that was found decades later. As a documentary filmmaker, Fernández Lameiro exposes the complex realities of the postwar era, without the pressure to provide a happy ending, which is much preferred by the audiences of fictional dramas. The 2016 Lobos sucios ends with the Nazi firmly defeated and the lovers, Manuela and Miguel, running into the woods together. Their future belongs to the imagination of the audience. Yet, the obvious fictional elements of the feature Lobos sucios should not eclipse the historicity of its portrayal of an era, just as the eyewitness accounts in the documentaries should not be taken as neutral testimonies. The repressive atmosphere captured in the fiction film corresponds more closely to the descriptions provided by historians than what is transmitted through Caeiro’s nostalgia-tinged interviews in Memorias no tempo de wolfram:

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Al inicio de la Segunda Guerra Mundial la sociedad gallega se encontraba destrozada. Desgarrada en jirones por los efectos de una política represiva, de opresión asfixiante. Y no sólo para aquellos considerados ‘derrotados’. Aquella era una sociedad vigilada, en la que los servicios de información encontraban un caldo de cultivo excelente para extender redes de delación, tras tres años de clima bélico civil. Una sociedad que oía a través de las paredes, plena de murmullos y silencios, de autocontención y disciplina. Y este clima de autocensura continúa durante el conflicto bélico mundial [At the start of WWII Galician society was in shambles. It had been torn apart by repressive politics, and a crushing level of oppression. And not only for those considered ‘defeated.’ It was a society subject to constant surveillance, in which government information services found fertile ground in which to grow its networks of accusations, after three years of civil war. It was a society in which the walls had ears, full of murmurs and the silences imposed by self-control and discipline. And this climate of self-censorship continued during the World War]. (Grandío Seoane 2015: 102–103)36

The sense of continued oppression is transmitted in the film through a plot in which the native population must continuously fight for basic survival. There is no access to medicine or education, but no one dared complain or share their plight with others for fear of betrayal. The film begins with Manuela gathering herbs in an attempt to cure her chronically ill daughter. Not only is she ignorant of the existence of penicillin, the drug that could save her daughter’s life, but she would not have had access to it without the assistance of the British spies. She must compromise both her physical and psychological safety by accepting the sexual advances of the director of the mine, Franz, in order to steal the plans the maquis need to sabotage the mine. Here again, the details of the plot are fictional, but the film’s atmosphere is not. Lobos sucios reminds us that wars are not fought only by men; women and children often cannot escape involvement in the conflicts. Since sexual violence is a common weapon in times of war, it is likely that Manuela would not have been able to reject Franz’s advances. Even in the postwar, Manuela faces as much danger as any active combatant in times of war. Manuela survives, but one of the young women who scavenge wolfram on the mountainside to sell on the black market is killed by the Civil Guards, and Candela is tortured to death 36  Grandío Seoane, “No solo wolframio. Galicia, campo de juego de las redes de inteligencia durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial.” Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar 4.8 (2015): 101–117.

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by Franz for helping Jews escape to Portugal. A sense of oppression is also expressed through the film’s lighting. It is almost always dark. In the scenes shot inside Manuela’s house, it is impossible to distinguish if it is night or day. The women of this household are as engulfed in a darkness as stifling as that of the mines.

6   Ancient Battles in Mythical Lands The violently political nature of the sexual encounter between Manuela and Franz is highlighted by the revelation that under his elegant clothing, Franz has a large tattoo linking him to the Nazi Das Ahnenerbe movement. Originally charged with enhancing the value of German traditions, this mystical branch of the SS attempted to create a new German religion to replace Catholicism and Protestantism. Its members were devoted to pseudo-scientific research and as of 1939 worked with Spanish archeologists to uncover the remains of ancient civilizations. Das Ahnenerbe was established by Heinrich Himmler, second only to Hitler within the Nazi party and considered the architect of the Holocaust. Himmler visited Spain in 1940, not only to solidify the political alliances between the two regimes but also to visit archeological sites and the museums and archives in Madrid in their effort to create an archeological narrative that would support Hitler’s propaganda (Alonso 2008: 5–7).37 As part of this organization, the fictional character Franz arrives in Galicia more interested in finding evidence that an ancient Aryan race had been present in Galicia, than in running the mine. From the onset, he is obsessed with finding “A Cova do Mouro,” where he believes that he will find the soul of the earth. Franz maintains that the mountain area near the Teixedal yew forest is a mystical space. He explains that yews are solitary trees, that only grow together as forests in magical locations. These are also ancient trees. As Manuela explains in the film, the mouros were the ancient peoples of Galicia. They were a superior race of strong individuals with magical powers. The water jugs left behind by mouros who flee when approached by humans are believed to contain waters that heal livestock. In some places in Galicia, the family of a newborn will deposit a few drops of its blood 37  Alonso, “Relations between Spanish Archaeologists and Nazi Germany (1939–1945): A preliminary examination of the influence of Das Ahnenerbe in Spain.” Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 18.4 (2008): 4–24.

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into the rock formations believed to be inhabited by mouros so that their baby will grow healthy and strong (Llinares 1990: 78–79).38 They live in spaces uninhabitable by mere humans—underground, under rivers, inside boulders, and in caves. Unique natural formations, usually at a certain distance from local villages, in the case of Lobos sucios the Teixedal provides magical spaces for the mouros to occupy. At times they, especially the mouros, the females, guard treasures. The opening sequences of the film reveal the links between Manuela and the mouros. After an aerial view of the Teixedal, in a voice-over Manuela tells her daughter Alba a story about the magical powers of the mouros. Manuela is cast as a meiga, a type of Galician witch with magical powers, among them the ability to enter the world of the mouros. The meigas share certain spaces with the mouros given their connection to a spiritual world, but with the crucial difference that meigas operate in the world of normal humans. Thus, the mouros live in caves, which are just the entry into an elaborate subterranean world, whereas Manuela works in the parallel human environment of a mine, which is also an elaborate subterranean world with many passages. The meigas and the mouros are in harmony with nature and allow it to blossom. Humans destroy it for profit, just as Franz wants to violate the sanctity of the Teixedal to turn it into a pilgrimage site. For him, the mouros are guardians of a treasure that he must also mine. Manuela’s mystical powers are what first attract Franz’s attention. While working in the mine, she spots a white owl that warns her of an impending explosion. Initially thinking that she is a collaborator with the maquis, Franz interrogates her in his office, but is soon convinced that she has mystical powers. Afterwards, Franz insists that Manuela become his guide through the Teixedal. As they enter the forest, Franz asks her what the villagers say about the area. She responds, “historias para asustar a los niños,” which is translated in the subtitles as “old wives’ tales.” Manuela refuses to guide Franz to the Cova do Mouro under the pretense that only her grandmother knew where it was. What follows in this plotline is a struggle in which Franz fights to have his nationalistic discourse dominate and appropriate Galician national myths. Franz longs to be a modern-day version of the Brothers Grimm. Their 1812 Nursery and Household Tales have important ties to German 38  Llinares, Mouros, Ánimas, Demonios. El Imaginario Popular Gallego. Madrid: Akal Universitaria, 1990.

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nationalism and the stabilization of a more homogenous German bourgeois culture. Jakob and Wilhem Grimm falsely claimed that their fairy tales were compiled by roaming through the countryside to collect the true expressions of the “folk.” In the preface to the first edition, they claimed that their tales were exact transcriptions of oral tales being told by peasant women. They viewed their work not so much as a collection of children’s stories, but as a scholarly and nationalistic quest.39 The study of the “folk” first became fashionable through German Romantics, for whom Germany was not the underdog of Europe, but rather the cradle of the most brilliant European culture. The popularity of the “folk” in nineteenth-century Germany was part of a movement to promote a sense of pride in being German, in a century that had begun with the humiliation of the Napoleonic occupation. By the end of that century, the separate principalities and dukedoms had grown into the Prussian Empire, which like all empires required a canon to help establish its cultural legitimacy. The Grimms’s Fairy Tales became part of this German canon and required reading in the new centralized secular elementary school system. The tales were meant to teach German children to appreciate the soul of their nature, but “also that the book serve as a manual of manners” (Tatar 2019: 217).40 However, a number of the tales are brutal and grisly, and have often been declared unsuitable for children by educators. Accordingly, after WWII, as part of the explanations for the atrocities committed by the Nazis, the Grimms’s Nursery and Household Tales was believed to have passed on these “manners so well that all the editions of the tales were banned as nourishers and reflectors of a cruel, perverse national mentality” (Dégh 1979: 96).41 The British military authorities believed that the brutality found in many tales prepared the German people to accept the monstrosities of the Nazis. The Nazis had encouraged xenophobic readings of some tales. For example, they considered Cinderella worthy of her good fortune because she was of pure Aryan blood, while her evil stepsisters deserved to have their eyes pecked out by 39  “We have tried to collect these tales in as pure a form as possible … No details have been added or embellished or changed, for we would have been reluctant to expand stories already so rich by adding this kind of analogies and allusions; they cannot be invented” (Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019: 210). 40  Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales: 217. 41  Dégh, “Grimm’s Household Tales and Its Place in the Household: The Social Relevance of a Controversial Classic.” Western Folklore 38 (1979): 83–103.

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birds at her wedding because they belonged to an inferior race (Bottigheimer 1988: 194).42 Any female character who defied conservative notions of femininity was punished with grisly torture. The main source of entertainment at Snow White’s wedding is the Queen’s torture when forced to dance to death in red-hot shoes. In the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the color red symbolizes a deviant female sexuality that must be punished. In Lobos Sucios, it is no coincidence that Manuela, who throughout the film wears the somber black of mourning, like a modern-day Little Red Riding Hood is wearing a red sweater as she runs through the woods, hunted down by the dirty wolf, Franz. If Franz resembles the Brothers Grimm, Manuela is like one of the peasant women, steeped in a tradition of oral tales, whose voices were appropriated by the Grimms. In Lobos sucios we are reminded that the fairy tale was once an outlet for female creativity. In contrast to literary fairy tales, the folktales of oral tradition celebrated women with magical powers. The fairies in the literary tradition are relegated to the role of helper, which is the role Franz assigns Manuela. In the female-centered oral folktale tradition, female magic celebrates the power of women. The Galician mouros and meigas belong to this female oral tradition that totalitarian regimes seek to silence in the name of building a patriarchal state. In the version of Little Red Riding Hood published by the Grimms, the wayward girl and her grandmother are eaten by the wolf, but later are saved by a woodsman: “Only a strong male figure can rescue a girl from herself and her lustful desires” (Zipes 1983: 81).43 Manuela’s presentation in the film as Little Red Riding Hood coincides with what researchers such as Jack Zipes have found in ancient folktales in which the girl outsmarts and sometimes kills the wolf: “It is obvious from this oral tale that the narrative perspective is sympathetic to a young peasant girl (age uncertain) who learns to cope with the world around her” (80).44 Manuela is transformed by the end of the film, becoming socially and politically engaged with those who seek to build a better world. Like in the “old wives’ tales,” more than the men who surround her, another woman, in this case her sister Candela through her commitment to saving 42  Bottigheimer, “From Gold to Guilt: The Forces That Reshaped the Grimms’ Tales.” In The Brothers Grimm and Folktale, ed. James M McGlathery. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988: 192–204. 43  Zipes, “A Second Gaze at Little Red Riding Hood’s Trials and Tribulations.” The Lion and the Unicorn 7/8.1 (1983): 78–109. 44  Zipes, “A Second Gaze at Little Red Riding Hood’s”: 80.

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Jews, motivates Manuela to act in defense of the victims of fascist regimes. She is so moved to discover that one of the Jews Candela hides in their house is still producing breast milk for the baby the Nazis have murdered, that she decides to risk her own life to steal the blueprints of the mine from Franz. If in the tales of the Brothers Grimm, the forest is a menacing place for females, like the protagonists of the old wives’ tales, Manuela is in communion with nature. Nature is one of the main characters in Lobos sucios. The link is established in the documentary on which the film is based. The narrator of the documentary, Manuel Rivas, provides a poetic voice-over that accompanies aerial shots of the region. According to Rivas, “O mellor libro da humanidade, o mellor libro de Galicia é a propia terra. Na terra está escrito todo. Están todas as pedadas. A terra fala. Fala con todos os sentidos, ademáis. O que pasa é que é necesario escoitar a terra” [The greatest book of humanity, also the greatest book of Galicia is the land itself. Everything is written on the land; all the traces are there. The land speaks, and it speaks with all the sense, the trouble is that it’s necessary to listen to it].45 The Manuela scripted for the fiction film listens to the land. Films that feature wolves hunting humans are not created in a cultural vacuum. They carry the weight of centuries of traditions that demonize wolves. Lobos sucios brings those traditions center-screen to question them and reestablish the productive bond between humans and nature. Like the Red Riding Hood of the female oral tradition, Manuela is protected from her dirty wolf by a pack of white wolves who behave according to their natural instincts. After the mine explosion, Franz spots Manuela in her red sweater running through the woods. He hunts her down. As he is about to execute her, Manuela lures him further into the Teixedal, stating that it is not fair for him to return to Germany before finding the mystical Cova do Mouro. As he enters the cave, Franz assures Manuela that he is not afraid of wolves. She responds that neither is she. As if taking their cue from her, the wolves kill Franz. As she departs the cave, a white wolf comes out, as if to assure her that she is now safe. Lobos sucios offers a vivid example of how talented filmmakers can transform the genre of the anti-Nazi war film into something far more profound. In the hands of its director and screenwriters, the film becomes a meditation on Galician and German identity and a vehicle for reimagining and reconceptualizing the history of Spanish involvement in WWII. Films,  Translation from subtitles.

45

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even fictional films, are educators and, in the age of democracy, often serve as the instrument for recovering Spanish and Galician identity, history and traditions.

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Harvey, Dennis. n.d. Film Review: Dirty Wolves. Variety. Accessed September 23, 2018. https://variety.com/2015/film/reviews/dirty-­wolves-­review-­120162 6252/#article-­comments. Herrero, Gerardo. director. 2011. Silencio en la nieve. Castafiorie Films. Huffman, Julia. director. 2015. Medicine of the Wolf. Gravitas Ventures Juárez Camacho, Francisco Javier. 2016. El espionaje alemán en España a través del consorcio empresarial SOFINDUS. Diacronie: Studi di Storia. Contemporanea 28 (4) http://journals.openedition.org/diacronie/4795. Landin, Bo, and Erik Zimen. directors. 2001. Living with Wolves: Return of the European Wolf. MagellanTV. Laxe, Oliver. director. 2019. O que arde. Tarantula. Leitz, Christian. 1995. Nazi Germany’s Struggle for Spanish Wolfram during the Second World War. European History Quarterly 25 (1): 71–92. https://doi. org/10.1177/026569149502500103. ———. 2000. Nazi Germany and Neutral Europe During the Second World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Llinares, María del Mar. 1990. Mouros, Ánimas, Demonios. El Imaginario Popular Gallego. Madrid: Akal Universitaria. Lobos sucios—Guión postmontaje (13 febrero, 2015). n.d. Accessed 28 November 2019. https://www.academiagalegadoaudiovisual.gal/wp-­content/ uploads/2016/04/LobosSucios.pdf. López Amado, Norberto, Iñaki Mercero, and Iñaki Peñafiel. directors. 2013–2014. El tiempo entre costuras. Antena 3. Monda, Collin. director. 2019. The Trouble with Wolves. Gravitas Ventures Nichols, Bill. 2017. Introduction to Documentary. Champaign: Indiana University Press. Olivares, Gerardo. director. 2010. Entrelobos. Wanda Vision Rivas, Manuel. 1988. O lapis do carpinteiro. Vigo: Xerais. ———. 1996. ¿Que me queres, amor? Vigo: Galaxia. ———. 2006. Os libros arden mal. Vigo: Xerais. Rodríguez Lameiro, Felipe. director. 2006. Lobos Sucios. Agallas Films. Rolland, Eduardo. 2006. Galicia en guerra. Vigo: Edicións Xerais. Ruiz Castillo, Arturo. director. 1949. El Santuario no se rinde. Valencia Films. Sáenz de Heredia, José Luis. director. 1942. Raza. Cancillería del Consejo de la Hispanidad. Soliño, María Elena. 2002. Women and Children First: Spanish Women Writers and the Fairy Tale Tradition. Potomac: Scripta Humanistica. ———. 2010. Emigration, War, and a Case of Collective Madness in the Forging of a Galician National Consciousness: Manuel Rivas Rewrites Emilia Pardo Bazán’s ‘Las medias rojas’. Monographic Review/Revista Monográfica: Hysteria, Hallucination and Madness in Hispanic Literature 26: 116–131. Spence, Michael. director. 2008. Friends for Life C3 Entertainment.

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Alma e o mar: About Love, Myths and Landscapes in Galicia Dosinda G. Alvite

Alma e o mar (2017),1 by Francisco “Chisco” Fernández Naval, is the remarkable story of Alma, born in Ourense and educated in Santiago de Compostela, who ends up working as a screenwriter in Los Angeles and as an Spanish instructor in New York, where she experiences an abusive relationship with her boyfriend Jonathan. Once she escapes from him, she seeks refuge in Agrovello, a small village at the foot of Mount Pindo on the Costa da Morte (Galicia), in order to work through her trauma and reflect on her personal goals. In her daily interactions there, she develops close friendships with other women who inspire her to seek new ways to relate to the world. However, the disappearance and death of another young woman in the area puts the community at risk and accentuates differences in behavior between women and men. The novel explores topics 1

 Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar. Santiago de Compostela: Editorial Galaxia, 2017.

D. G. Alvite (*) Denison University, Granville, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Castro et al. (eds.), Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98861-6_4

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related to women’s identity, examining several levels of definition for Galician women: sexual practices, the social and historical assessment of women and a possible resignification of femininity. Alma e o mar is a powerful rendering of Galician traditions and myths connected with matriarchy and presented within the context of the larger history of women’s achievements that have been hidden by androcentric cultures. Over 404 pages, readers engage with Alma, Nora, Ophelia, Silvia, Brenda, Áurea, Anida, Madinson and Catherine, who talk about jobs, food, history, literature, traditions, herbs, mountaineering, sea, beaches and music. In the author’s opinion, the narrative is a thriller, based on the real life event of the disappearance of a woman in the region of Carnota and Corrubedo, that aims to criticize the socially destructive rise of machista violence in Spain (for further discussion on his perspective, see Inma Doval-Porto’s article, 2017).2 He has described the novel as the biggest challenge of his literary career, one marked by many achievements: seven youth novels, ten books of poetry, six textbooks, multiple travel guides, more than twenty literary essays and eight novels, of which Alma e o Mar is his latest (Fernández Naval 2017a).3 This chapter analyzes Alma e o mar from a relational feminist perspective, examining the criticism it presents of masculine dominance through the play with Galician myths and traditions that allow women’s agency to be socially relevant. In this chapter, relational feminism is linked to a feminist ethics of care, which is founded upon the connections subjects establish among themselves both consciously and by chance. In the judgement of  forerunner Carol Gilligan, it is very problematic to conceive of a separate self, such as the traditional “rational man” because it has resulted in unproductive dualisms and dichotomies like private and public life, inner and outer self. In her view, “such autonomy, rather than being the bedrock for solving psychological and moral problems, itself becomes the problem, signifying a disconnection from emotions and a blindness to relationships which set the stage for psychological and political trouble” (Gilligan 2003: 157).4 2  Doval-Porto, “Revisión da novela Alma e o mar, de Francisco X. Fernández Naval, desde unha perspectiva de xénero.” Madrygal. Revista de Estudios Gallegos 21 (2018): 71–91. 3  In his interview in Radio Galega the writer speaks at length on this. See Fernández Naval, “‘Alma e o mar’, unha novela de Francisco Fernández Naval.” Diario Cultural, 27 December, 2017. http://www.crtvg.es/rg/destacados/diario-cultural-diario-cultural-dodia-27-12-2017-3593811. Accessed 10 October, 2018. 4  Gilligan, “Hearing the difference: Theorizing connection.” Anuario de Psicología 34.2 (2003): 157.

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Modern society, which is characterized as capitalist and liberal, has been built upon an individualist social ontology that extends its effects to the productive, reproductive, social and political levels. As a consequence, women have been excluded, oppressed and made invisible, all experiences that have been analyzed and criticized by feminists in several fronts. Both feminist theoreticians and activists have pointed out those asymmetrical power relations between men and women that have been naturalized while subjugating people. A critical perspective of such individualist ontology that reproduces and accentuates the inequalities sustained by patriarchy has turned its focus toward a social ontology of precariousness (Sales Gelabert 2017: 182–83).5 As Galician philosopher M. Xosé Agra explains, we are fragile subjects who live precarious lives and need support networks to transform our precarious existence into sustainable, long-term ways of living. A relational ontology considers care of oneself and care of others a social value and a necessary principle to achieve a worthy and inhabitable life, that of an autonomous being (2013: 52).6 More specifically, the analysis of Alma e o mar presented here is supported by the field of feminist economics which has turned its attention to recovering a relational and affective dimension in its understanding of well-being, very connected to the concept of care, but forgotten by traditional economics (Pérez Orozco 2014: 76).7 Further on, when examining the protagonist’s recovery near Mount Pindo, many of the spiritual and medical practices of women characters show intersections with what Olaya Fernández Guerrero indicates is one of most interesting contributions of ecofeminist theory, “this perspective on human being which goes beyond anthropocentrism and places each individual in a relational, interactive context, connected with other individuals and other natural environments” (2010).8 A close reading of the narrative reveals a deconstruction of the gender and sexuality structures that shape the protagonist’s personal suffering and the social assumptions that oppress women from a feminist relational perspective. 5  Sales Gelabert, “Crítica y teoría feminista; por una nueva agenda feminista.” Astrolabio. Revista internacional de filosofía 20 (2017): 182–83. 6  Agra Romero, “Vulnerabilidad; injusticias y cuidados.” In Bioética: justicia y vulnerabilidad, ed. M. Boladeras. Barcelona: Proteus, 2013: 52. 7  Pérez Orozco, Subversión feminista de la economía. Aportes para un debate sobre el conflicto capital-vida. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños, 2014: 76. 8  Fernández Guerrero, “Cuerpo, espacio y libertad en el ecofeminismo.” Nómadas. Critical Journal of Social and Juridical Sciences 27.3 (2010). http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=18113757014. Accessed 7 August, 2021.

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1   Questioning a Neoliberal Self: Work and Sex Galician women’s participation in the workforce has a long history. Feminist studies have shown the lack of social recognition of women’s work in rural and seaside areas for decades, which fails to acknowledge the strong contributions of women to Galicia’s social and economic standing.9 Currently, the dire economic situation has forced new waves of migrants abroad. In the novel, the protagonist, Alma, and several of her friends seek employment abroad to find work in their fields of specialization. However, advancing up the economic ladder and achieving career success does not provide the necessary acknowledgment for women, even in the United States, where feminist struggles have gained more visibility than in Galicia. For example, Alma’s work in the film industry in Hollywood is presented as a consequence of the numerical and intangible limitations that Galician women face in audiovisual fields such as television. In the end, she and her friend Madinson are fired for developing a close friendship not permitted in their American company, a case that shows the precarious conditions women experience even in the wake of their notable advancements in professional fields. The aggressive gesture of being merely given a cardboard box to pack their personal belongings upon leaving the office, instead of receiving an official notification, is symbolic of the violence of the neoliberal marketplace that particularly affects women. This commentary is offered through Madinson, a single mother of a toddler, who represents the challenges professional migrant mothers face nowadays. Her participation in the workforce provides her satisfaction and much-needed income, but her move to an expensive city—Los Angeles—means she lacks a social network that can offer quality childcare at difficult times or respite from demanding personal situations. The pressures of being a good mother while handling a competitive job outside the home prove excruciating for contemporary professional women like her. While Alma responds empathetically to Madinson’s plight, her protest at the company where they work makes clear that, in the neoliberal market, women like them are simply regarded as producers of economic profitability, so other aspects of their identities are to be blurred or even hidden in the workplace. These “prácticas capitalistas” [capitalist practices]10 that “escribiu Alma no 9  For an anthropological analysis, see, for example, García-Ramón et al., “Farm Women, Gender Relations and Household Strategies on the Coast of Galicia.” Geoforum 24.1 (1993): 5–17. 10  All direct translations are my own.

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Facebook” [Alma wrote in Facebook] make both friends aware of the vulnerability of their positions as migrant women and their own replaceability in the savagely competitive world of Hollywood, which further diminishes the sense of ownership of their life paths (Fernández Naval 2017a: 31).11 Furthermore, the neoliberal creed that makes workers disposable is so pervasive and internalized that when Madinson and Alma leave their jobs, their coworkers bury their faces in their desks and do not say goodbye, a gesture that confirms the women’s exclusion and shows their colleagues’ own subjugation under the label of “worker’s productivity” (Fernández Naval 2017a: 35).12 This is a manifestation of what Lynne Layton has termed “the perverse social norm of non-caretaking and self-­ sufficient omnipotence to which so many of us have submitted ourselves,” which sadly turns into the alienation and atomization of the individual (Layton 2010: 316).13 Neoliberalism is a mindset that has become so powerful and integrated into our psyche that it affects the way we organize our daily activities and how we conceptualize interpersonal relations. Promoting competition and the belittling and dehumanization of “the other” as a rule of the game, it has a pernicious impact on relationships, even intimate partner arrangements. For the neoliberal subject, the regular disavowal of vulnerability, dependency and interdependence has the effect of intensifying individuality and narcissism (Layton 2010: 313).14 Moreover, as a manifestation of the neoliberal ethics, male dominance continues to be promoted in heterosexual relationships. That is the case presented by Alma’s traumatic romantic engagement. When the protagonist moves to New York, she meets Jonathan, the son of Galician immigrants, with whom she starts a relationship. Their attachment has a strong sexual component that allows her to explore the Bondage, Discipline, Submission and Masochism (BDSM) world, revealing to her that she likes a masochistic position. The narrative adopts a feminine perspective, gently and respectfully revealing Alma’s consciousness of testing her body’s limits, and her absolute confidence that the power roles inherent to this type of relationship, and the rules that  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 31.  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 35. 13  Layton, “Irrational exuberance: Neoliberal subjectivity and the perversion of truth.” Subjectivity 3.3 (2010): 316. 14  Layton, “Irrational exuberance”: 313. 11 12

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organize the games to ensure safety, will be faithfully respected. Far from a voyeuristic approach that would pander to a traditional heterosexual male gaze, the novel emphasizes the protagonist’s perspective that vindicates a woman’s right to use her body and explore different forms of pleasure. However, it is in this realm, in the most intimate encounter allowed by sex, where two opposing conceptions of the world clash, showing how the concepts and experiences of choice, freedom and agency that inspire Alma’s actions are transgressed by a patriarchal heterosexuality and commodity culture, when Jonathan rapes Alma and gives her body to others to use without her consent. While from the beginning he is presented as a dark character, and his brooding attitude makes him attractive to her (à la Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire) (Fernández Naval 2017a: 67), his dominant attitude and his transformation of women into sexual objects is made explicit through his alteration of the Sinatra lyrics he whispers to Alma: “something in my heart told me I must possess you” (my emphasis, Fernández Naval 2017a: 75).15 As she reflects, “el non dicía have you, terte, coma Sinatra. Dicía possess” [he did not say have you like Sinatra. He said possess] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 73).16 His verbalization of the act of “possessing” when they are intimate expresses his desire for control, his dehumanizing of her and his invalidation of the possibility of communication between them both. Other aspects of Jonathan’s life— such as the years he spent as an American soldier in the Desert Storm campaign in Kuwait, his current job as a Jiu-Jitsu instructor, his discipleship of Wabi-sabi and his obsession with having a regimented, muscular body (Fernández Naval 2017a: 71–72)17—can be considered examples of performative masculinity. His way of relating to his own physical body coincides with what Gill et al. describe as contemporary behavioral models for men, who are “actively engaged in constructing and policing appropriate masculine behaviors and identities,” or as it is called, “regulating normative masculinity” (Gill et al. 2005: 37).18 Jonathan’s masculinity is one based upon the paradigm of individuality and controlling social power, which in his case expands to female abuse and violence (he ends up making a snuff film of another woman at the end of the novel).  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 67 and 75.  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 73. 17  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 71–72. 18   Gill, Henwood and McLean, “Body Projects and the Regulation of Normative Masculinity.” Body and Society 11.1 (2005): 37. 15 16

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Although the behavior of this character is extreme, and he is presented as a terrible villain, his attitudes and actions are not uncommon. In fact, Alma will see similar displays in Agrovello, the Galician village where she seeks refuge. Many of the masculine clientele that frequent the main bar in town are compared in the narrative to “centauros e sátiros, todos cazadores, algún narcotraficante. Violentos, arrogantes e insolentes” [centaurs and satyrs, all hunters, some drug dealer. Violent, arrogant and insolent] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 106).19 These behaviors are common among men and have been normalized through a long history of gender inequalities, which the critic Pierre Bourdieu has explained in the following terms: The principle of the inferiority and exclusion of women, which the mythic-­ ritual system ratifies and amplifies, to the point of making it the principle of division of the whole universe, is nothing other than the fundamental dissymmetry, that of subject and object, agent and instrument, which is set up between men and women in the domain of symbolic exchanges, the relations of production and reproduction of symbolic capital, the central device of which is the matrimonial market, and which are the foundation of the whole social order women can only appear there as objects, or, more precisely, as symbols whose meaning is constituted outside of them and whose function is to contribute to the perpetuation or expansion of the symbolic capital held by men. (my emphasis, Bourdieu 2001: 42–43)20

In Alma and Jonathan’s relationship, sex becomes the field for cultivation of his ego instead of benefiting both members of the couple; he transgresses her trust when he invites other people to use Alma’s body without her prior consent (Fernández Naval 2017a: 149).21 His violence is a result of his understanding of her body as an object he can use and abuse. This aggressive behavior has sadly become commonplace in a capitalist context that, as Beatriz Suárez Briones affirms, has imposed “goce, cosa que finalmente ha empujado más a las mujeres a la posición de objeto de goce del otro (violencia, prostitución, maltratos…)” [pleasure, something that, in the end, has pushed women to the position of pleasurable objects for

 Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 106.  Bourdieu, Masculine Domination (trans. Richard Nice). Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001: 42–43. 21  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 149. 19 20

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others (violence, prostitution, abuse …)] (Suárez Briones 2006:146).22 However, the extended criticism and call for attention presented here is that the practice of masochism should not leave the woman vulnerable and exposed to social judgment. When Alma thinks of denouncing his aggression to the police, she feels that because of her position on the sexual spectrum, revealing her choices in public would be problematic for her. Instead, she decides to leave the United States and return to Galicia, where a period of introspection and redefinition begins. Social shame over certain sexual preferences is not presented in the novel as an aspect that creates personal conflict for having them. In fact, here I would like to argue that the treatment of a masochistic position is respectful and opens a path of personal and social exploration rarely considered in contemporary Galician and Peninsular literature. In fact, because of the limited and partial treatment of the topic in general, there is a lack of knowledge about how this type of sexual preference may affect the power relations within the couple. For example, in her recent book about the BDSM circuits of San Francisco, Margot Weiss states that “although sexuality is imagined as a break from material social relations, sexuality is, instead, the raw material of these circuits” (Weiss 2011: 270), thus replicating normative assumptions about gender, heterosexuality and race, the same systems of oppression dominant in society at large.23 In Alma and Jonathan’s encounters, it becomes clear that the explicit contract of respect that should rule their BDSM interactions soon gives way to the type of non-consensual violence that is conflated in heterosexual relationships as well. In fact, his view of her enjoyment shows his masculine desire for control and traditionally restrictive expectations that patriarchal norms mark for women: “Nunca atopara muller tan inmoral e tan obscena (…) Ela era a culpable do desprezo e do noxo que el sentía. Dela a perversión. Gozara, dexenerada e sucia coma un animal. De ser súa, xa estaría morta” [He had never found such an immoral and obscene woman (…) She was responsible for the contempt and anger he was feeling. She was wicked. She had enjoyed herself, degenerate and dirty like an animal. If she were his, she would have been long dead] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 83).24 His 22  Suárez Briones, “Feminismos del siglo XXI.” Lectora: revista de dones i textualitat 12 (2006): 146. 23  Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011: 270. 24  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 83.

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male-centered view erases the possibility of her enjoying sexual pleasure and demands, at the very least, her subordination. This attitude certainly betrays the respect he should have afforded her in the BDSM sessions; instead, on the contrary, he utilizes them to aggrandize himself by degrading and abusing her. In fact, it appears that he feels threatened by her assertive sexuality. The immediate application of the Madonna-whore binary paradigm alludes to the sexist attitudes that have oppressed women for centuries. As Alma later reflects, “Dobre moral, exhibición e comercio, non só do segredo, tamén do íntimo. Beneficio e escándalo. Sempre ese xogo cínico e hipócrita. Así era a moral” [Double morals, exhibition and commerce, not only of what was secret but also of the intimate realm. Profit and scandal. Always that cynical and hypocritical game. Those were the morals] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 149).25 After realizing that the dominant sexual objectification of women and sexual double standards imply a type of submission she will not tolerate, she decides to leave the space where her abuser lives. The question, however, is how does Alma enter the BDSM world and accept it? After the initial exploration, what does she seek? Few reasons are provided, but when the protagonist reflects on her masochistic position, the narrative of her stream of consciousness says: “En cada encontro descobría algo de sí descoñecido, algo que se desvelaba e revelaba a un tempo. Sí, aquela deriva supoñía momentos de entrega e de perda nunca antes vividos, a procura do confín do gozo” [During each meeting she discovered something unknown of herself, something that was unveiled and revealed at the same time. Yes, that abandonment meant moments of giving and losing herself that she had never experienced, seeking to be on the brink of pleasure] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 73).26 Her testing of new limits does not come without hesitation, but most of all, similar to other women she later befriends in Agrovello, she is presented as consciously choosing her steps. She does decide to test the limits of her freedom and the roleplaying that the BDSM scene allows, and it is in this aspect of her identity where I propose that Fernández Naval offers a reading of sexuality that has tinges of utopia, preparing the reader for the relational understanding of the subject that he later advances in the novel. The protagonist envisions her sexual experiences as a path for self-understanding and communication. Beyond physical pleasure or indulgence, sex is a venue for  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 149.  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 73.

25 26

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expansion of the self by connecting with the partner. What does this mean? As aforementioned, the character of Jonathan represents a traditional masculine ideology that includes toughness, dominance and a conception of sex as an arena where he exerts and maintains control, a perspective that expects low sexual agency from women and therefore imagines them as submissive, just like in the sessions he acts out with Alma. She, on the other hand, although remembering several occasions where she was victimized by men like Jonathan, is described as independent, in command, ambitious and seeking an understanding of herself through sex because of the connection it should provide with her partners. In her memories of how she feels and thinks of the BDSM sessions, there is an expectation of ulterior reach, a view that coincides, in my opinion, with George Bataille’s understanding of masochism, which is antithetical to current popular views of these practices (cf. Fifty Shades of Grey).27 According to Bataille, power structures and our inclination to build systems hold us, as subjects, in the realm of utility and objectification. Our everyday tasks keep us so busy calculating, accumulating and producing that we separate ourselves from others, and in the processes of othering, we become objectified things as well. This systematic experience of objectification is at the core of all moral and political conflict at a general level and, for the individual, results in her alienation from the rest of the human community. He says, “We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity,” which consists of a form of fusion or unification achieved through erotism (Bataille 1986: 15).28 For him, erotism, conceived as a process of ritual sacrifice, provides the communion we need because it “elevates [its] victim above the humdrum world where men live out their calculated lives” (Bataille 1986: 85).29 In correlation with that idea, masochism would refer to the desire for, the love of, the pleasure, or ecstasy in pain, punishment, anguish and humiliation, an inner experience that has value and authority. The loss of the self that masochism provides is dramatic, yet it also makes the subject “sovereign” of herself and prepares her for communication. Communication is the first step, a

27  Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality (trans. Mary Dalwood). San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. 28  Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality: 15. 29  Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality: 85.

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fundamental principle, toward achieving community, which is a priori to, and constitutes, all knowledge, individuals and morality (Bataille 1986: 7).30 Alma e o mar does not present many obvious connections with the masochistic mechanism that is central to Bataille’s ethics, so the latter could easily be discounted as irrelevant in explaining Alma’s experiences with Jonathan; yet, as the narrative develops, the reader can see that her increasing self-assurance in Agrovello is directly connected to her acts of doing service with others, a way of seeking out how to work in community by counterbalancing her discontinuities. Even when she is starting to recover, she still has nightmares about his abuse but is able to imagine turning it around, taking a more reciprocal approach, one that fulfills expectations of love: “non habería dominación, nin humillación, nin dano, só a proposta de transitar xuntos polos camiños do enigma, polas rúas da fin do mundo, cara ao brillo dun astro ignorado e apenas intuído, como só intúe a alma que se desvela na madrugada” [there would be nor domination, nor humiliation, nor hurt, only the goal of walking together the roads of mistery, through the streets of the end of the world, looking towards the light of a forgotten star, maybe barely intuited, like only the soul that is revealed at dawn intuits] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 120).31 What she seeks in BDSM is something further or deeper than kinky experiences, as she is very cautious about not objectifying herself. The desire for reciprocal support and inspiration toward unknown paths is a core drive for love and fulfillment, both personal and social. Alma’s subconscious ability to imagine partnership and transcendence after suffering indicates that she feels closer to gaining ownership of herself than to revictimization. Role playing in sex, and having strong sensorial experiences through it, means new ways of knowing: “Para ela, non había perversión en facer realidade as fantasías e combinar a sexualidade ardente co caos onírico dos corpos entregados a compartir, e a se exhibir” [In her opinion, to make fantasies a reality and to combine a burning sexual urge with the oneiric chaos of bodies entwined in sharing and showing was not perverted] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 150).32 This attitude shows how important fantasy is in sustaining a sexual relationship and the fragile balance between fantasy and reality in our relationships. When Alma’s fantasy  Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality: 7.  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 120. 32  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 150. 30 31

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disintegrates, she enters into a nightmare. Her sexual dreams are hijacked when the power dynamics modeled after a patriarchal canon penetrate her body and thwart her desires. Alma’s expectations and letdowns stand for those of many women whose sexuality is oppressed by dominant discourses that manipulate their desires and objectify their bodies.

2   Alma: Of Matriarchy and Galician Mythologies Women are materially and symbolically annihilated through restrictive labor stipulations and by having their sexuality become an area of masculine domination. Historically, androcentric social regulation has made women’s contributions invisible. The erasure and concealment of women’s history and their perspectives is one of the main themes of Alma e o mar, which contemplates the multiple forms this process takes. Starting with the genealogy of the protagonist, the narrator reveals that her name is a creative reference to Alma Reville, a brilliant screenwriter and film editor whose successful career was dimmed when she married Alfred Hitchcock, for whom she wrote many scripts for the films he made afterwards but rarely received the credit she deserved. Obscuring women’s achievements facilitates hegemonic male dominance and hinders women’s advancement. As historian Trouillot pointed out in Silencing the Past (1995), where he analyzed the relationship between power and silence in Haitian history, the process of telling history always involves an unequal contribution by groups and individuals that compete with each other to participate in constructing the official history, and often subordinates the ones who lose the most.33 A strong ally of history made by women, writer Fernández Naval presents in this novel a tour de force historical excavation of Galician and world-renowned female figures that have been hidden away from popular culture: “Lupa, Medea, Antígona, Penélope, Eurídice, Ariadna, Iocasta, Pasifae, Casandra, Andrómaca. Todas mulleres que sofren contadas por homes. Non hai ningunha muller cantada por muller. Non hai ningunha muller, contada por home, que sexa feliz” [Lupa, Medea, Antigone, Penelope, Eurydice, Ariadne, Iocaste, Pasiphaë, Cassandra, Andromache. All of them suffering women narrated by men. There is no woman sung by another woman. There is no woman narrated

33  Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past. Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

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by a man who is happy] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 238).34 The disappearance of these women from history, or the partial view presented of them, damaged the legacy they left for contemporary generations and, furthermore, has accentuated androcentric discourses that through time have conditioned social and cultural spaces, assuring that “masculine domination is embodied in language, texts, knowledge, policies, human practices and in notions of that which constitutes the legitimate political subject” (Dillabough 2004: 495).35 In this sense, a successful meta-­narrative construction of Fernández Naval’s novel is the inclusion at the end of each chapter of a section entitled “Do caderno de Alma” [Alma’s notebook], a kind of diary in which the protagonist takes notes of readings, experiences and learnings that inspire her and where she writes drafts of possible film scripts and series. In this book of reflections, Alma establishes emotional links with other female artists, painters and writers, especially drawing the reader’s attention to the richness of the feminine and feminist creative background in Galicia. This section includes texts on women’s participation in wars in Spain, Africa and Latin America. Other entries reproduce excerpts from contemporary Galician writers such as Marta Dacosta, Eva Veiga, Ana Romaní, Marilar Aleixandre and María Solar. Finally, other quotations connect the worlds of film, music, literature, painting, theater and poetry, showing a palimpsest of female voices forgotten by the official history written by men. Among these vanished figures, an interesting case is that of Queen Lupa, a legendary character who acquires great import in both the diary of the protagonist and the novelistic diegesis. The narrator describes her as follows: Lupa, sacerdotisa e raíña, representante dun país vencido. Ela e as súas irmás sometidas a violencia extrema. Non a unha violencia, si ás violencias todas. Posuídas pola tropa diante dos pais, esposos e irmáns. Forzadas a presenciar a crucifixión das guerreiras e guerreiros. Lupa obrigada a consultar as súas decisions ao gobernador romano de Duium (…) Lupa, privada de todo poder (…) O corpo de Lupa, das súas irmás e o das outras mulleres dos pobos derrotados, configurados como campo de batalla. A Lupa só lle restaría o amor da xente. Quizais por iso aínda a lembramos hoxe [Lupa,  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 238.   Dillabough, “Class, Culture and the ‘Predicaments of Masculine Domination’: Encountering Pierre Bourdieu.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 25.4 (2004): 495. http://www.jstor.org.denison.idm.oclc.org/stable/4128673 34 35

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priestess and queen, representative of a defeated country. She and her sisters subjected to extreme violence. Not to one violent episode, yes to all types of violence. Raped by troops in front of her parents, husbands and brothers. Forced to witness the crucifixion of female and male warriors. Lupa forced to check her decisions with the Roman governor of Duium (…) Lupa, deprived of all power (…) Lupa’s body, those of her sisters and of other women of defeated peoples who were configured as battlefields]. (Fernández Naval 2017a: 172)36

As shown in this quote, the novel seeks to reconstruct the semi-­mythical figure of Queen Lupa, who in the novel becomes a symbol of the hidden history of women in Galicia.37 Yet, who remembers Queen Lupa nowadays? Those who are acquainted with the Jacobean tradition of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela probably know something about her. The first direct references to Lupa appear in the Codex Calixtinus (twelfth century), where she is named in Latin, as “Luparia.” Other references appear in the oldest texts of the Epistle of Pope Leo (ninth century) without using her name, in French manuscripts of Fleury-sur-Loire (France) and Saint-Pierre-de-Gembloux (Belgium) and in The Great History of James by the French theologian Jean Béleth (twelfth century). All these stories offer a vision of Lupa that agrees in the essential aspects: she was a powerful pagan queen from the area now comprising Santiago de Compostela, who tried to deceive the disciples of Santiago who brought his body to be buried in this region of Galicia by sending them to the Finisterre area, to Pico Sacro (Fernández Naval 2017a: 127).38 After being defeated in her efforts to control her territory in the area we now know as Compostela, she ended up ceding land to bury the bones of Santiago, an event that, as we know, initiated the conversion of inhabitants of this part of the Roman Empire to Christianity. There are sources that indicate that, supposedly, the place where Santiago’s tomb is located was the place Lupa had reserved for her own burial. Despite details such as this, given the sparse and fragmented data to be found on Queen Lupa, it is difficult to accurately reconstruct her figure. The lack of well-catalogued information demonstrates that she has disappeared almost entirely from official history, and any that does  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 172.  The representation of Queen Lupa in the novel presents characteristics in common with those pointed out in the anthropological study by Alonso Romero in “La leyenda de la Reina Lupa en los montes del Pindo (Galicia).” Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos 99 (1983): 227–67. 38  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 127. 36 37

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appear does so in a fragmentary way, frequently loaded with a tone of ominous harshness that has lasted for many centuries. From a feminist point of view, it is noteworthy to mention that in ancient Hispania, and particularly in Galicia, the term “lupa” or wolf was applied to a human being, usually a woman of strong temperament and will, who imposes upon man or his activities and especially upon the tasks of authority and government, seeking with protective zeal the fate of her people.39 In the novel, the frequent intertextual dialogue with the myth of Lupa as a bad woman indicates a clear attempt at historical rereading, deconstructing the meaning that men have imparted on her for centuries in order to reevaluate the power dynamics between men and women. In this regard, it is important to observe how the birth of Christianity in Galicia implies the disappearance of a powerful pagan queen, now forgotten in the national psyche. As Joseph Campbell indicated, Western civilization (Greek and Roman traditions) is built upon the victory of the patriarchal deities over the earlier matriarchal ones (Campbell 1964: 28–29).40 When Alma resurrects Queen Lupa, as she plans to do in her film script, and she creates “un posible diálogo entre Lupa e Xacobe” [a possible dialogue between Lupa and James], she would be using one myth to combat another. She would replace the current androcentric model with a previous figure, one usually associated with matrifocal traditions. The protagonist’s voice insists on highlighting that Galicia is “un país de tradicións e deidades antigas, ocupado por un exército estranxeiro, pero que conserva o seu carácter, os seus ritos e crenzas. A Gallaecia, en que reina Lupa, logo da derrota militar” [a country of old traditions and deities, occupied by a foreign army, that preserves however its character, its rites and beliefs. It is the Gallaecia, where queen Lupa reigns after her military defeat] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 158).41 “O proxecto de Lupa” [The project “Lupa”] is relevant because her connection with an almost animistic conception of nature, later turned into a singular, abstract entity, is necessary to question the dualistic system of thought that prevailed in Galicia with the biblical stories of creation and the human condition that still dominates contemporary gender relations. The re-examination of this pre-­ Christian icon also serves to reflect on a mythical matriarchal model in 39   See Alonso Romero’s “La leyenda de la Reina Lupa en los montes del Pindo (Galicia)”: 227–67. 40  Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. New York: Viking Press, 1964: 28–29. 41  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 158.

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Galician culture that is offered as an alternative to the conflicting construction of relationships between men and women. However, gender relations in Galicia have not always followed current heteronormative models. In 1999, in the introduction to a special issue of the scientific journal Anthropologica, New  York University researcher Susan Carol Rogers made an assessment of the transformation of the discipline of anthropology, indicating that a big step forward had been taken in the field when they incorporated the concept of gender in their analyses.42 She highlighted the decisive role the study of women in Galician society played in advancing a gendered approach to research, explaining: “It requires a considerable stretch of the imagination to remember that twenty-five years ago, the anthropology of gender was barely emergent as a legitimate domain of inquiry (…) Since then, of course, things have changed” (Rogers 1999: 158). She continued: The ethnography of Galicia and northern Portugal played an important role at least through the 1980s in the development of anthropological thinking about the gendered division of power. Partly because this region is one where women seemed to have access to more power than elsewhere (notably in comparison to Mediterranean societies), it drew considerable attention from anthropologists interested in this domain, yielding a body of literature that stretched our imaginations and provided considerable insights about the dynamics of gender and of power distribution. (Rogers 1999: 158)43

As reported by  Rogers, anthropological studies produced until then were divided into several groups: some continued to find “evidence” of the universality of man’s dominance; others emphasized the domestic sphere, which was as an important locus of economic and symbolic power; and still others, such as Brøgger and Gilmore in 1997, spoke of the absolute power of women in the area of Galicia looking for social patterns of a possible matriarchy.44 Professor Rogers’ final assessment indicates that today it is very difficult to sustain block expressions such as patriarchy or matriarchy, but that the study of women’s experiences in northern Portugal and Galicia undoubtedly offers multiple examples of how, in practice, 42  Rogers, “Once upon a Time…: Comments on the Myth of Female Dominance.” Anthropologica 41.2 (1999): 158. 43  Rogers, “Once upon a Time…”: 158. 44  Brøgger and Gilmore, “The Matrifocal Family in Iberia: Spain and Portugal Compared.” Ethnology 36.1 (1997): 13–30.

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women there subvert and manipulate dominant norms of gender relations more frequently and assertively than in other parts of the peninsula and Europe.45 It is in this way that, in parallel with the historical revisionism presented by the novel, the relational ties between the female characters seem to feed on a possible forgotten historical substratum wherein Galician culture focused on the female figure. As reflected in the novel, popular culture, which is unofficial, supports practices of social interdependence and material knowledge not sanctioned by official perspectives. In the story, excursions of women through Mount Pindo to search for herbs and stones with healing properties, to pray to Mother Gaia and to offer help in the face of crisis, show immediate and subconscious connections between women, who redirect the center of social power toward themselves (Fernández Naval 2017a: 125–30).46 Some traditions that Alma and her friend Brenda engage with are, for example, the rituals and curative treatments women herbalists have passed from generation to generation. In their trip to the “Marías’ house” in the mountains, the protagonist gives credence to those women’s knowledge: “Mentres observaba como ascendía o fume da ramada, Alma pensou que nesa mesma cociña, durante moitos anos, xeracións de Marías terían repetido a mesma liturxia, e sentiu que as paredes negras conservaban o eco das escuras voces que entoaran ladaínas e salmodias” [While she was looking at the ascending smoke from burning the branches, Alma thought that in that same kitchen, for many years, generations of Marias would have repeated the same prayer, and thought that the black walls preserved the echo of those dark voices that sung litanies and religious chants] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 228).47 Yet, those spiritual and medicinal practices have been discredited by official doctors, especially 45  According to M. Xosé Agra, it is important to pay attention to the multivalency of the term “gender,” which in fields like anthropology, psychology, sociology and history is a tool for analysis of men and women’s relations, and its use in feminist philosophy, where the concepts of sex and sexual difference would be preferred instead of gender difference (Agra, “Del sexo y del género: Epistemología y política.” 1616: Anuario de Literatura Comparada 7 (2017): 104). Agra cautions the critic about the risk of slippage when discussing “women,” “gender” and “feminism,” so they are not used interchangeably. I am attentive to that. Because the above quotes are from anthropological studies, the term “gender” is taken to recognize the social constructs of “female and male characteristics” and their corresponding semantic fields. 46  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 125–30. 47  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 228.

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since medicine became a male-dominated field. And the rites associated with them have been forgotten or emptied of meaning. At the social level, the microcosm of female relationships that are revealed to Alma while living in Agrovello is notable. After befriending Brenda, a free-spirited woman, affirmative in her love for herself and her place in society, Alma is introduced to Anida, Isidora, Ofelia and her mother Herminia—both prisoners of restrictive social and sexual regulations—the fisher Áurea, Silvia, who works in the police department, and others, all of whom weave a rich picture of Galician femininity. Their interactions turn into models of sorority that strengthen individual goals at the same time as they become a force of communal transformation. Brenda, who becomes Alma’s confidant, provides much commentary about gender roles and sexual expectations in the community. She is also harassed by Arnaldo, “dono da vida e señor da morte, coma Jonathan” [owner of life and master of death, like Jonathan] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 224),48 yet her attitude is assertive and protective of her rights and desires. Unfazed by men teasing her, she unabashedly bathes naked on the beach, enters male-dominated spaces like the town’s bar or verbally challenges them, even her tormentor. As she tells Alma, “Se te achicas ou te escondes é peor. No fondo sonche moi covardes” [If you get scared or hide away it is worse. At the end of the day, they are big cowards] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 106).49 This type of attitude and behavior, which has a positive influence in Alma’s emotional recovery, is an example of the independence attributed to the women of this region, which correlates with somewhat passive men in the family realm. Brenda also explains how those power positions can affect sexual relationships: “As mulleres eran quen de levar para a casa un home de fóra, pero non sucedía o mesmo con eles. Se os homes casaban cunha de fóra, marchaban (…) Moitos quedan solteiros por coidaren das nais” [Women are the ones that marry men from different locations, not the men. If a man married someone from a different town they would move (…) Many men remained single in order to take care of their mothers] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 234).50 Brenda represents the self-sufficient women of Costa da Morte that anthropologist Heidi Kelley had interviewed for her research on matriarchy in Galicia. According to her observations, women in this region inherit land and maintain  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 224.  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 106. 50  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 234. 48 49

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independent control over their inherited property, and their prestige or positive reputation is based on their hard work and initiative. It may be that their power is not acquired without resistance or directly, most likely by default (because it comes weighted down by responsibilities others did not want or were not able to engage with), yet women obtain it, and is socially recognized as valuable. In keeping with Kelley, in this region, “the fact of being Galician is a highly relevant part of a woman’s identity and is used to stand for certain characteristics such as forthrightness, diligence, and productivity” (1994: 77).51 While these qualities do not describe all the women Alma meets—her mentee Ofelia deserves a whole article to analyze her oppressive state—the circle of female friends Alma makes in Agrovello is characterized by attributes that have been identified as very desirable for a woman of the coast of Finisterre already centuries ago. In dialogue with it, it is possible that even negative stereotypes and degrading legends such as that of Orcavella52 and examples of meigas and witchcraft revisited in the novel (Fernández Naval 2017a: 192–93), were created to counteract the import of such strong women. The incorporation of a certain conception of the feminine into the national imagination is a historical process common to the conceptualization of modern nation states from the Romantic period onward. Feminine symbols have been used in the construction of Galician identity, sometimes in problematic ways. Leaders of Galician nationalism have used the concept of female power in their definition of regional identity, advancing the metaphor of matriarchy as a distinctive element (Kelley 1994: 74).53 In the novel, a critical reader may argue that there is a case for mythicizing an idyllic rural world in the pursuit of an ongoing redefinition of women’s roles.54 It is true that from the pragmatic point of view, the idea of a 51  Kelley, “The Myth of Matriarchy: Symbols of Womanhood in Galician Regional Identity.” Anthropological Quarterly 67.2 (1994): 77. 52  Orcavella is reported to be “an ancestral witch who sustained her unnatural life with the help of diabolical arts and the flesh and blood of innocent children” (Castillo, Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010: 73). 53  Kelley, “The Myth of Matriarchy”: 74. 54  The same anthropologist Heidi Kelley studied the relative social acceptance of unwed mothers in the village of Ézaro, not far from Mount Pindo, as the probable combination of two main factors: a historical pattern of male emigration, which resulted in a skewed sex ratio, and its consequence of placing more importance on female agricultural labor and female inheritance of property. The visibility of women in the region did not however accord them more power, as in a possible traditional matriarchy; rather, there were many tensions in

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­ atriarchy was manipulated to celebrate strong Galician women that took m care of the family, the house and the manual labor in the countryside without recognizing their unequal power share at the social level.55 Yet, even if the representation of the relational identities of the female characters is so positive that it can be termed idealist, it can also be valued as supporting a process of decentering hegemonic gender structures by pointing at differential elements. Within an androcentric context, women are repressed and deauthorized. The novel’s narrative deconstructs those power relationships and does so not by using an oppositional logic; rather, it shows that gender categories are themselves fundamentally malleable and contestable. While matriarchy in Galicia may be a myth, revisiting it has the beneficial effect of demystifying and decentering current politics. As Heidi Kelley expressed, “Empirically, anthropological evidence does not support the existence of a Galician matriarchy, in the sense of female domination over men, either in the past or the present. Rural Galician women, both in the past and the present, have however commanded a significant amount of power and these attributes of female strength have been drawn upon in the process of Galician ethnogenesis” (Kelley 1994: 72–73).56 Recovering real and imagined female figures who held power in a variety of settings represents a process of decolonizing the patriarchal canon and of re-writing Galician culture by pointing out forgotten times, political actions and different equations of power that are being silenced today. Shedding light into strong female role models does not amount to building a myth but revising that of Queen Lupa strengthens the process. Because, as Roland Barthes explains, myths are systems of communication, modes of signification that are quite stable, but their repetition in a different context has the effect of changing their message: “Myth is speech stolen and restored. Only, speech which is restored is no longer quite that which was stolen: when it was brought back, it was not put exactly in its place” (Barthes 1972: 252).57 Alma’s re-examination and reevaluation of the ways in which villagers conceived of the household, gender roles and social reputation (Kelley, “Unwed Mothers and Household Reputation in a Spanish Galician Community.” American Ethnologist 18.3 (1991): 565–80: 578 http://www.jstor.org.denison.idm.oclc. org/stable/645594). 55  For a detailed analysis of the problematic use of the myth of matriarchy in Galicia, see María Xosé Agra’s work included in Elvira Fente’s book Parir a libertade. O movemento feminista en Galicia. Santiago de Compostela: Alvarellos, 2010. 56  Kelley, “The Myth of Matriarchy”: 72–73. 57  Barthes, Mythologies (trans. Jonathan Cape). The Noonday Press, 1972: 252.

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Galician myths has an impetus different from their previous uses. Because it is done by a woman questioning androcentric history, it provides an exercise deserving of the reader’s attention. In connection with the novel’s goal to highlight women’s voices in Galician history, it should be pointed out that Fernández Naval’s novel digs into the past through another aspect that is foundational to Galicia’s culture: that is, the reader can recognize traces of the cantigas de amigo’s tone and voices in those of the novel’s characters, a process which highlights feminine perspectives in the literary canon. Alma’s ventures into eroticism and the worlds she opens up in her dalliance with Jonathan show connections with the deep emotional intensity expressed in those lyrical poems. As analyzed by  Louzada Fonseca and Araújo, “Nas cantigas de amigo, o erotismo aparece como tema da possibilidade de satisfação, da promesa, do desejo ou da sua negação, e da proximidade da felicidade” [In the cantigas de amigo, erotism shows up as a theme expressing the possibility of satisfaction, of promise, of desire or its denial, and of impending happiness] (2013: 418).58 It should be remembered that the cantigas constitute some of the first literary works in the Iberian Peninsula that represent a female voice, they have an erotic basis manifested in an ambiguous enunciation and they use symbols that can be connected with both masculine and feminine interpretations of love (Louzada Fonseca and Araújo 2013: 419).59 Usually, the cantigas de amigo have a feminine voice that speaks with her mother, holding a dialogue about desire for her lover and the possible sexual encounters with that person, a conversation that typically happens in a setting near water. Similar scenes take place between Alma and her childhood friend Mercedes in New York, with whom she speaks in confidence about her sexual encounters, and later on with Brenda in Agrovello, from whom she learns about the strength of the region’s women and Galician myths that give positive symbolic value to them. These conversations and friendly female relationships stress a sense of sorority, of networks of mutual support among women that have a long history, now erased by neoliberal conceptualizations of a subject’s identity. Most of all, they emphasize a relational dimension of life, an approach promoted by feminists indicating that, in contrast with an individualistic 58  Louzada Fonseca and Melo Araújo, “Mulher e erotismo na lírica trovadoresca galegoportuguesa [Woman and eroticism in the Galician-Portuguese troubadour lyric].” Mirabilia 17 (2013): 418. 59  Louzada Fonseca and Melo Araújo, “Mulher e erotismo”: 419

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understanding of the person, it requires that “se reconozca que las personas dependemos unas de otras, que nos organizamos colectivamente para vivir y tenermos responsabilidades sobre el bien-estar de otrxs” [we recognize that as people we depend on each other, that we organize ourselves collectively to live and we are responsible for the well-being of others] (Pérez Orozco 2014: 128).60 In the novel, contemporary Galician women are presented as questioning the conditions imposed by patriarchal codes while seeking the support and understanding of other women as they revisit myths and traditions that may empower them.

3   Mar e Rochas [Sea and Rocks]: Galician Landscapes The title of the book, Alma e o mar, refers to the protagonist’s relationship with the sea. It also introduces the reader to a culture that places a high value on interdependence with nature, as it symbolizes certain ways of knowing and feeling, whose power resonates through all realms of life. The novel focuses on two elements, water and stone, which are especially symbiotic in Mount Pindo, in the area of Carnota. Fernández Naval’s descriptions of certain water and lithic spaces that have physical and spiritual curative properties seep through a Celtic cosmovision and speak of popular Galician sentiments toward landscapes. Yi-Fu Tuan  defines topophilia as,“the affective bond between people and place or setting,” manifested in a variety of ways such as “the sensual delight of physical contact, the fondness for familiar places, or happiness for the health they provide” (1974: 247).61 In a similar vein, expanding the scope, Edward Relph (1976) explores how people experience space and identifies three main approaches: pragmatic space (immediate, instinctively felt through the body), perceptual space (mapping and organizing, abstract space) and existential space (our everyday environment or setting).62 As a primordial aspect of human living, place influences our identity, culture and social structure to the point that we can talk about place identity. This is defined by the intensity and meaning given to the 60  Pérez Orozco, Subversión feminista de la economía. Aportes para un debate sobre el conflict capital-vida. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños, 2014: 128. 61  Tuan, Topophilia. A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1974: 247. 62  Relph, Place and Placelessness. London: Pion Ltd., 1976.

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relationship between: one, the place’s physical setting; two, its meanings for individuals and groups depending on their experiences there; and three, the activities and events that happen there. In the world of the novel, some of the physical and emotional needs that Alma and her female friends have are symbolically expressed in the Agrovello landscape, especially through their relationships with the sea and Mount Pindo. These places turn to be a “repository of meaning” that reflect these women’s experience and aspirations, as they are given expression in their relationship with this specific landscape of the region.63 When Alma moves to Agrovello, she develops the habit of bathing every day in the sea because “O contacto diario con el significaba unha fráxil e efémera vitoria sobre o desacougo. Alma e o mar, pensou. Alma de mar. Necesitaba somerxerse nas ondas (…) Sentíase ceiba. Limpa e ceiba” [The daily contact with it (the sea) meant a fragile and ephemeral victory over her sorrows. Alma and the sea, she thought. A soul of the sea. She needed to be covered by the waves (…) She felt free. Clean and free] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 182–83).64 Many pages in the novel describe “o areal,” “as ondas,” “a praia” and “as augas,” [the sandy beach, the waves, the beach, the waters] and the curative effect they have on Alma. The narrative attention paid to the sea is presented through frequent descriptions of the protagonist’s house “na Beirada” [seaside] on the coastline of Agrovello; of her friend Brenda bathing naked every morning like a “serea” [mermaid]; scenes about the sea’s importance as a food provider, especially for Alma’s neighbors Hilario and Áurea, who practice sustainable fishing; and in the multiple sketches of its biodiversity, with notes about the life of “golfiñas,” “marsopas,” “tartarugas,” “cetáceos,” [dolphins, porpoises, turtles, cetaceans] and the vegetation that grows on the coastline. Beyond its therapeutic properties and the life it provides, the sea is also the element the protagonist has to cross to leave a disconnected life behind and start a new one. The prominence of the sea in the novel can also be explained as a metaliterary reference to the cantigas de amigo, a literary pinnacle of a distinctive Galician-Portuguese culture. In the Medieval cantigas, centered on 63  A “repository of meaning” is the expression selected by R.  Lawton to emphasize the importance of human geography, which looks at the many subjective ways we look at and express ourselves through landscape and place, rather than considering places as wholly objective. In R. Lawton, “Space, Place and Time.” Geography 68.3 (1983): 196. 64  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 182–83.

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female voices sharing their disquietude, the setting for expressing their emotional pain and their search for love (“desejo insatisfeito” [unsatisfied desire], in the words of Louzada Fonseca and Araújo 2013: 422) was close to a water source.65 In the novel, the natural environment of the sea where the protagonist lives becomes a context where she can delve into her feelings and explore other ways of loving. If, in the cantigas, the water element had the figurative meaning of feminine sensuality and provided the “associação arquetípica do princípio líquido com a natureza feminina tradicionalmente aceitada” [archetypal association of the liquid principle with feminine nature, which has been traditionally accepted] (Fonseca and Araújo 2013: 423),66 in Fernández Naval’s work it is also a medium for transcendence. Uneasiness and vulnerability bring the characters closer to nature. In moments of doubt, Alma seeks the protection and powers of the sea and the stars, finding peace by contemplating them: “Bañarse enteira no mar e, tamén, nos raios lunares. O corpo límpido, como aquela tenue luz concentrada no seu ventre (…) Estou núa na madrugada na procura da luz, pensou. O firmamento era un sorprendente escintilar de estrelas” [Immerse herself completely in the sea and, also under the moonlight. The body limpid like that faint light coalescing on her belly (…) I am naked at dawn in search of light, she thought. The firmament was a dazzling sparkle of stars] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 118).67 Against the common division between subject and environment, the contact with nature makes the protagonist feel a symbiotic relationship with it. Nature is not to use or abuse; rather, it is all-powerful and expects a contemplative, collaborative attitude to benefit from it. In the quote, water is a symbol of femininity, just as the stars, the breeze in the air and the dew at dawn are. A synergistic approach to the sea facilitates that the protagonist achieves a deep reflective experiencing of her inner self. In the novel, nature is more than a mirror of humans’ feelings, because it is understood as having a preeminent, generous role in the life of Alma and her friends. Furthermore, the narrative shows that landmarks like Pedregal are perceived and recognized as sacred spaces with telluric energy. Nowadays, the inhabitants of the area still call it Olympus, an old metaphor that emphatically indicates the importance attributed to it. This type of topophilia promotes landscape symbols as shared symbolic structures that validate social  Louzada Fonseca and Melo Araújo, “Mulher e erotismo”: 422.  Louzada Fonseca and Melo Araújo, “Mulher e erotismo”: 423. 67  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 118. 65 66

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claims to space and time, and here they are connected again with the myth of Galician matriarchy. In the novel, Brenda and Alma’s explorations of the Mount Pindo area uncover legends of female figures and values, as well as petroglyphs, that point to a pre-Christian civilization where natural elements were praised for their fecundity and their connection with female power. Fernández Naval and Galician anthropologist Fernando Alonso Romero have researched and published several volumes on the Pindo analyzing rock art in the area: spirals, concentric circles and cups carved into granite rock.68 Pre-Christian religious beliefs survive in the region through a series of imaginary characters such as “mouras” [Moors] and other feminine beings that, apparently, “suelen estar en los acuíferos a la espera del ser humano que las desencante, como diosas célticas de la soberanía,” [they are usually in the aquifers waiting for a human to break the spell, like Celtic goddesses of sovereignty] frequently imagined as a labyrinth carved on a rock, which is a powerful “producto de la Madre-Tierra” [product of Mother Earth] (Alonso Romero 2007: 29).69 In the novel, Pedregal is described as large and constituted by several distinctive points such as Outeiro do nariz, Chan de Lamas, Pedrullo, Chan de Lourenzo, Casa de Xohana, Campo da Moa and, far above everything, Pico Sacro. This is also the location of Queen Lupa’s kingdom, that is, the symbol of women as dominas of their own lives, even if that means being associated with the misnomer “memoria das lobas,” [memory of She-wolves] or to be considered “cóbrega e muller, memoria de Eva” [snake and woman, Eve’s memory] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 141–42).70 For example, the round symbols found in Laxe das Rodas represent both a snake and the moon, the phases of which gave way to the lunar calendar in prehistoric times, drawn using spirals or “Rodas.”71 Following Alonso Romero,

68  See Alonso Romero’s “Animas y brujas de Finisterre, Cornualles e Irlanda.” Anuario Brigantino 22 (1999): 91–104 and Fernández Naval’s Muros-Carnota: pedra, mar e luz. A Coruña: Deputación da Coruña, 2016. 69  Alonso Romero, “Análisis etnográfico y arqueológico de una Diosa Madre en el petroglifo del Outeiro de Filladuiro en Mallou (Carnota, A Coruña): ‘Coviñas’ y círculos.” Anuario Brigantino 30 (2007): 21–56. 70  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 141–42. 71  For a visual exploration of these images, see the photographic documentation of this area by the novelist and Maribel Longueira. See Francisco X.  Fernández Naval and Maribel Longueira, Muros: Ronsel de Piedra, espiral de mar. A Coruña: Deputación da Coruña, 2003.

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Existía ya en esa época la creencia en una divinidad femenina, en una mujer majestuosa con poderes propios de su feminidad: receptáculo de la vida, seno fecundo del ser humano y, por extensión también, de la fecundidad de la Tierra. Los hombres que le rendían culto lo hacían por medio de ritos mágicos con el fin de conectarse con ella, de conjurar sus poderes para satisfacer las necesidades individuales o colectivas del pueblo que la veneraba. Ella era el vínculo entre la vida del ser humano en la Tierra y las fuerzas de la naturaleza que le afectaban no sólo a él, sino también a su entorno y a todos los seres que vivían en el mismo espacio geográfico [There was already at that time the belief in a feminine divinity, in a majestic woman with powers corresponding to her femininity: receptacle of life, fertile womb of the human being and, by extension, also of the fertility of the Earth. The men who worshiped her did so through magical rites to connect with her, to conjure up her powers to satisfy the individual or collective needs of the people who venerated her. She was the link between human life on Earth and the forces of nature that affected not only humans, but also their environment and all beings that lived in the same geographical space]. (Alonso Romero 2007: 23)72

The novel presents these beliefs as an important underlying influence in the lives of the inhabitants of the area. The characters comment on the curative properties of Campo da Moa as well as those of Pedregal, indicating how humans enhance their relationship with their natural surroundings by believing in its curative powers: “Din que dende ese outeiro ofrecíanlle ao Pedregal os mortos e os enfermos” [They say that from that lookout they used to offer the dead and sick people to the Pedregal (mountain)] (Fernández Naval 2017a: 141–43).73 The thaumaturgic power of healing is so influential in this region of Galicia that there are pilgrimage shrines that have translated those beliefs into Christian sites. A celebration that recognizes such a connection is that of the romería of Virxe da Barca in nearby Muxía, which requires that the believers have a close relationship with the rocks near the chapel. Three big stones—A Pedra de Abalar (the shaking rock), A Pedra dos Cadrís (the kidney stone) and A Pedra dos Namorados (the lover’s rock)—are supposed to help with specific ailments and needs (Valentine and Bervig Valentine 2005: 477).74 This is a case in which spiritual symbolism transcends physical reality,  Alonso Romero, “Análisis etnográfico y arqueológico”: 23.  Fernández Naval, Alma e o mar: 141–43. 74  Valentine and Valentine, “Healing at the Coast of Death in Spanish Galicia: The Romería of Our Lady’s Boat.” The Journal of American Folklore 188.470 (2005): 474–84. 72 73

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transforming it into a dialogue with the divine. These lithic spaces are also cultural landscapes that have celebrated feminine energy and power. The author’s decision to situate Agrovello in this area of Galicia, where pre-Christian values and beliefs still survive, is a strategic choice to promote contemporary feminism. The protagonist’s trip to Agrovello is necessary for her to acquire the proper distance to engage with reality. In a way, it provides a magical suspension from temporal and spatial neoliberal limitations, which allows her to engage with reality in a different and meaningful way. What she discovers in this region is that landscape perceptions have embedded meanings that transcend material culture and provide symbolisms necessary for the inhabitants’ survival. Some of those meanings connect landscape features and characteristics, especially those of water and rocks, to conceptions of the world that stress close readings of nature to signify its role in the histories and understandings of those people’s place in the universe. However, landscape symbols that were associated with femininity and women’s power were renegotiated through the imposition of the patriarchal and androcentric myth of Saint James, one extended through much of Europe by the pilgrims. The legend of Santiago, described as one of the first missionaries to bring Christianity to Spain and who later miraculously aided Christian troops against the Moors in the Reconquest, is one that stands upon, erases and substitutes the also-­ legendary Queen Lupa, a representative of women’s achievements. Agrovello, meaning old countryside, turns out to be a landscape where a silenced past of women’s power can still speak to contemporary women through the signs left by their ancestors. In conclusion, contemporary society has been constructed based on an androcentric view, expelling women to the margins and forcing them into invisibility and silence, at least in the public spheres. Writing as an ally of women’s causes, “Chisco” Fernández Naval shows in Alma e o mar his determination to challenge and weaken dominant patriarchal codes. His approach is one that dialogues with Pierre Bourdieu’s statement that “To change the world, one has to change the ways of world-making, that is, the vision of the world and the practical operations by which groups are produced and reproduced” (Bourdieu 1989: 23).75 His protagonist’s voice verbalizes women’s sense of dispossession and deconstructs the many ways in which they are still objectified. Her trip to Agrovello, a locus 75  Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory 7.1 (1989): 23. https://doi.org/10.2307/202060

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of women’s strength, represents her process of self-definition and of decentering dominant codes. Women are repressed and deauthorized because female power and voice are perceived as threatening by men. The time has come for women to be rewritten and to (re)write themselves into the culture and canon from which they have been excluded. While writing her “caderno” [notebook], Alma digs out myths that can be empowering role models, at the same time that she revisits historically silenced times and reinstates forgotten figures and their political actions. Alma’s return to her origins, to the beginnings of her life in Galicia, is an invention, a utopic effort that nevertheless allows her the creation of a primal community of sorts, of a “we” that advances new myths. Francisco Fernández Naval’s Alma shows that the active construction of female identities requires the recovery of mythical, historical and fictional figures that have been displaced from history but can be significant references for the future. This effort represents a process of decolonizing the patriarchal canon and of re-writing Galician culture.

Bibliography Agra Romero, María Xosé. 2013. Vulnerabilidad; injusticias y cuidados. In Bioética: justicia y vulnerabilidad, ed. M. Boladeras, 49–82. Barcelona: Proteus. ———. 2017. Del sexo y del género: Epistemología y política. 1616: Anuario de Literatura Comparada 7: 87–106. Alonso Romero, Fernando. 1983. La leyenda de la Reina Lupa en los montes del Pindo (Galicia). Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos 99: 227–267. ———. 1999. Animas y brujas de Finisterre, Cornualles e Irlanda. Anuario Brigantino 22: 91–104. ———. 2007. Análisis etnográfico y arqueológico de una Diosa Madre en el petroglifo del Outeiro de Filladuiro en Mallou (Carnota, A Coruña): ‘Coviñas’ y círculos. Anuario Brigantino 30: 21–56. Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. Translated by Jonathan Cape. New York: The Noonday Press. Bataille, George. 1986. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. Translated by Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1989. Social Space and Symbolic Power. Sociological Theory 7 (1): 14–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/202060. ———. 2001. Masculine Domination. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Brøgger, Jan, and David D. Gilmore. 1997. The Matrifocal Family in Iberia: Spain and Portugal Compared. Ethnology 36 (1): 13–30. https://doi. org/10.2307/3773933. Campbell, Joseph. 1964. The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. New  York: Viking Press. Castillo, David R. 2010. Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Dillabough, Jo-Anne. 2004. Class, Culture and the ‘Predicaments of Masculine Domination: Encountering Pierre Bourdieu. British Journal of Sociology of Education 25 (4): 489–506. http://www.jstor.org.denison.idm.oclc.org/ stable/4128673. Doval-Porto, Inma. 2018. Revisión da novela Alma e o mar, de Francisco X. Fernández Naval, desde unha perspectiva de xénero. Madrygal. Revista de Estudios Gallegos 21: 71–91. https://doi.org/10.5209/MADR.62594. Fente, Elvira. 2010. Parir a liberdade. O movemento feminista en Galicia. Santiago de Compostela: Alvarellos. Fernández Guerrero, Olaya. 2010. Cuerpo, espacio y libertad en el ecofeminismo. Nómadas. Critical Journal of Social and Juridical Sciences 27 (3). Accessed August 7, 2021, from http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=18113757014. Fernández Naval, Francisco X. 2016. Muros-Carnota: pedra, mar e luz. A Coruña: Deputación da Coruña. ———. 2017a. Alma e o mar. Santiago de Compostela: Editorial Galaxia. ———. 2017b. ‘Alma e o mar’, unha novela de Francisco Fernández Naval. Diario Cultural, December 27. Accessed October 10, 2018, from http://www.crtvg. e s / rg / d e s t a c a d o s / d i a r i o -­c u l t u r a l -­d i a r i o -­c u l t u r a l -­d o -­d i a -­2 7 -­1 2 2017-3593811. Fernández Naval, Francisco X., and Maribel Longueira. 2003. Muros: Ronsel de piedra, espiral de mar. A Coruña: Deputación da Coruña. García-Ramón, M.  Dolores, et  al. 1993. Farm Women, Gender Relations and Household Strategies on the Coast of Galicia. Geoforum 24 (1): 5–17. Gill, Rosalind, Karen Henwood, and Carl McLean. 2005. Body Projects and the Regulation of Normative Masculinity. Body and Society 11 (1): 37–62. https:// doi-­org.denison.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/1357034X05049849. Gilligan, Carol. 2003. Hearing the Difference: Theorizing Connection. Anuario de Psicología 34 (2): 155–161. Kelley, Heidi. 1991. Unwed Mothers and Household Reputation in a Spanish Galician Community. American Ethnologist 18 (3): 565–580. http://www. jstor.org.denison.idm.oclc.org/stable/645594. ———. 1994. The Myth of Matriarchy: Symbols of Womanhood in Galician Regional Identity. Anthropological Quarterly 67 (2): 71–80. https://doi. org/10.2307/3317362.

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Lawton, R. 1983. Space, Place and Time. Geography 68 (3): 193–207. http:// www.jstor.org.denison.idm.oclc.org/stable/40570691. Layton, Lynne. 2010. Irrational Exuberance: Neoliberal Subjectivity and the Perversion of Truth. Subjectivity 3 (3): 303–322. http://dx.doi.org.denison. idm.oclc.org/10.1057/sub.2010.14. Louzada Fonseca, Pedro Carlos, and Márcia María de Melo Araújo. 2013. Mulher e erotismo na lírica trovadoresca galego-portuguesa [Woman and eroticism in the Galician-Portuguese troubadour lyric]. Mirabilia: Electronic Journal of Antiquity & Middle Ages 17 (2013): 418–429. Pérez Orozco, Amaia. 2014. Subversión feminista de la economía. Aportes para un debate sobre el conflicto capital-vida. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños. Relph, Edward. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion Ltd. Rogers, Susan Carol. 1999. Once upon a Time…: Comments on the Myth of Female Dominance. Anthropologica 41 (2): 155–160. http://www.jstor.org. denison.idm.oclc.org/stable/25605937. Sales Gelabert, Tomeu. 2017. Crítica y teoría feminista; por una nueva agenda feminista. Astrolabio. Revista internacional de filosofía 20: 179–191. Suárez Briones, Beatriz. 2006. Feminismos del siglo XXI. Lectora: revista de dones i textualitat 12: 145–152. Trouillot, Michel Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past. Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1974. Topophilia. A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Valentine, Eugene, and Kristin Bervig Valentine. 2005. Healing at the Coast of Death in Spanish Galicia: The Romería to Our Lady’s Boat. The Journal of American Folklore 118 (470): 475–484. http://www.jstor.org.denison.idm. oclc.org/stable/4137667. Weiss, Margot. 2011. Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Semellantes as feridas? Feminist De-colonial Readings of Galician Fiction María Reimóndez

1   Irmaus Galician poet Celso Emilio Ferreiro (1912–1979) penned “Irmaus” [Brothers] in 1962 as a hymn to the solidarity of the oppressed and, since then, it has been the object of multiple song adaptations (Ferreiro 1997).1 The poem equates the suffering of a Galician (masculine) political subject with his (male) abstract racialized equal across borders. Ferreiro claims: “Anque as nosas palabras sexan distintas,/ e ti negro i eu branco,/ si temos semellantes as feridas,/ como un irmau che falo” [Although our words are different,/ and you are black and I am white,/ as our wounds are similar,/ I speak to you like a brother] (167).2 Ferreiro neatly summarizes a common trope developed in left-wing Galician nationalism in the 1960s with the line “temos semellantes as 1 2

 Ferreiro, Longa noite de pedra. Vigo: Asociación Socio-Pedagóxica Galega, 1997: 167.  All direct translations are my own.

M. Reimóndez (*) Lugo, Spain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Castro et al. (eds.), Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98861-6_5

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feridas.” According to theoretician Pablo García Martínez (2017),3 Marxism and the trope of solidarity across oppressed nations were central not just for the political milieu of the period in Galicia, but also for the literary voices associated with it. Ferreiro’s poem was written at a time when the decolonization process was still on-going in many parts of the world, and when Marxism was used as a tool to understand colonization. However, postcolonial critics, both during the decolonization struggles and up until the present, have criticized the blind spots and inherently racist and colonial messages present in much Marxist writing from the West (see Dhawan 2018).4 Precisely, one contentious element for these critics has always been the idea of a unity of the oppressed that is blind to patriarchal-­colonial power dynamics, often expressed as a sort of “fraternity based on an idea of a natural unity of brothers” (Chakrabarty 2009: 228).5 In Galicia, the trope, however, did not end with the original political context that produced it. Texts as diverse in style, time, and political position as Otero Pedrayo’s O señorito da Reboraina (1960),6 Manuel Rivas’ Mohicana (1986),7 or the recent O Fim do Apartheid (The Apartheid Manifesto) of the lusista movement (2016) have returned to it. 8 While Galicia has been and still is subjected to exploitation (see Hooper and Puga 2011; Miguelez-Carballeira 2013),9 it is also an exploiter due to its

3  García Martínez, “Literatura Heterónoma a La Salida Del Franquismo: El Caso Del Primer Nacionalismo Marxista Gallego.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.18.2 (2017): 153–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2017.1308629. 4   Dhawan, “Post-Colonial Critique of Marxism.” Krisis. Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 2 (2018). https://krisis.eu/post-colonial-critique-of-marxism/ 5  Chakrabarty, Provinzialising Europe. Princetown: Princetown University Press, 2009: 228. 6  Otero Pedrayo, O señorito da Reboirana. Vigo: Galaxia, 1960. 7  Rivas, Mohicana. A Coruña: Edicions do Rueiro, 1986. 8  The Manifesto tries to create awareness about the lack of spaces in the Galician literary establishment for writers using the Portuguese standard. While their claims might be relevant, the fact that they equate their situation to that of people who were systematically murdered and deprived of any rights is astounding, to say the least. For a colonial criticism of the concept of “Lusofonía” see Baltrusch, “Galiza e a Lusofonía- Unha tradución entre a miraxe e a utopía.” Galicia 21 A (2009): 4–19. 9  Hooper and Puga Moruxa, Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies: Between the Local and the Global. New  York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011; Miguelez-­ Carballeira, Galicia, A Sentimental Nation: Gender, Culture and Politics. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013.

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mere geographical-political location in the West/North. “Levelling” its situation to that of a colonial Other is, to say the least, problematic. Indeed, for European cultures located in the hegemonic periphery, it is sometimes difficult to acknowledge their role in global networks of symbolic and material exploitation (see McIvor 200910 for the case of Ireland). Thus, going back to the trope of the “irmandade” (brotherhood), not only are women absent as its supposed subjects, but the fact that these writers present the situation of Galicians as somewhat similar to their Other masks their own privilege and the power relationships that are actually folded into such comparisons. This process is easier to understand when compared to the criticism that the term “sisterhood” as developed by white feminists has been received by black and postcolonial feminist theoreticians (Mohanty 2007; hooks 2015; Moraga and Anzalduá 2015).11 Cultures and communities such as the Galician-speaking one occupy what I call a “hinge position,” simultaneously being non[and]hegemonic. They thus offer a very fertile ground to develop alliances and complex understandings of resistance to the “modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system” (Grosfoguel 2011).12 It is time we look past the “irmaus” and into the wounds to understand ourselves in a more complex web of power relationships, a task of extreme urgency, as authors such as Mohanty (2007)13 and Segato (2013)14 have clearly underlined. I will be writing here as a critical member of this community, as a Galician decolonial feminist, writer, and translator engaged in creating polyphonic alliances of non-hegemonic women.

10  McIvor, “‘I’m Black an’ I’m Proud’: Ruth Negga, Breakfast on Pluto, and Invisible Irelands.” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 13 (2009). https:// www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_13_/mcivor/index.html. 11  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Longueuil, Québec: Point Par Point, 2007; hooks, Feminist Theory: from Margin to Center. New York; London: Routledge, 2015; Moraga and AnzalduÁ, This Bridge Called My Back Writings by Radical Women of Color. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015. 12  Grosfoguel, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1.1 (2011). https://escholarship. org/uc/item/21k6t3fq. 13  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders. 14  Segato, La escritura en el cuerpo de las mujeres asesinadas en Ciudad JuÁrez: Territorio, soberanía y crímenes de segundo estado. Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina: Tinta Limón Ediciones, 2013.

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This chapter is my initial contribution to exploring the complexities and complicities of the Galician cultural system with colonial/racist discourses. I will briefly outline Galicia’s historical contribution to (neo)colonization in different periods, and then focus on how the Galician literary establishment has been instrumental in disseminating key elements of the general Western colonial/racist discourse. As postcolonial theoreticians have rightly argued, from Bhabha (1994)15 and Spivak (1999)16 to Mignolo (2012),17 there is no material exploitation without an underlying discourse to support it. The colonial enterprises, both past and present, would not exist if “one local history, that of Western civilization,” had not “built itself as the point of arrival and owner of human history” (Mignolo 2012: x).18 In this budding contribution to the process, I will be referring to the Galician (patriarchal) nationalist system and the literary system by sometimes using the terms “male” and “patriarchal” in parenthesis to show how these discourses present themselves as the only approaches to nationalism in Galicia, while feminist nationalism often differs from their views. I will also be presenting a series of selected examples of different literary works, in the hope that a more systematic study of colonial discourse/racism in Galician literature is undertaken in the future.

2   The Wound The participation of Galicians in colonization has been generally conceptualized as negligible. For example, Maximino Cacheiro claims: “Apenas foron galegos ó Novo Continente nos séculos XVI e XVII (houbo, si, membros da nobreza e do alto clero galegos entre os descubridores e administradores da primeira época)” [There were hardly any Galicians going to the New Continent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (there were, however, Galician noblemen or high-rank clergymen amongst the descubridores and administrators of that first period)] (1992: 13).19  Bhabha, The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.  Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 17  Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. 18  Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: x. 19  Cacheiro Varela, América na poesía galega. A Coruña, Spain: Deputación Provincial de A Coruña, 1992:13. 15 16

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Indeed, there was a prohibition against Galicians taking part in the first Spanish looting expeditions, but there is proof of their participation in Portuguese incursions.20 Luis Alonso Álvarez (1986)21 linked the political developments in Galicia to the presence of Galician traders and slave owners in Cuba in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, while many of the riches on which our cities, namely A Coruña and Vigo, are built are known to come from the slave trade (see Calvo 200722 and Bugallal 201623). Scholars such as Cacheiro Varela (1992)24 and David Miranda (2016)25 have also explored the role of Galicians in the slave trade and the opposition of Galician (patriarchal) nationalist leaders to the independence movements in the Spanish colonies, respectively. Under the new guise of migration, the exploitative relationship established through colonization found a seamless continuation when the newly formed states in Latin America became independent. Galicians did not cease to cross the Atlantic searching for riches. Migration, as I will explore later in relationship to literature, became the defining element of the Galician nation (see Romero 2011).26 Generally, migration was understood as the heroic enterprise of poor people for the benefit of the American countries, an idea summarized in Cacheiro: “continxentes de galegos puxeron o seu traballo e o seu sangue ó servicio destes pobos e axudáronlles a impulsa-las súas economías nacentes” [large contingents of Galicians put their labor and blood at the service of those peoples and 20  See for example Dizon and Rodríguez Cruceiro: Spanish Galicia at Some Crossroads in Philippine History and Culture, 1521–1898 (Angeles City, Philippines: Center for Kapampangan Studies, Centro Gallego de Filipinas, 2011) for a discussion of the participation of Galicians in the colonization of the Philippines from Magellan’s first colonial expedition onwards. 21  Alonso Álvarez, Comercio colonial y crisis del Antiguo Régimen en Galicia, 1778–1818. Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia. Consellería da Presidencia, 1986. 22  Calvo, “Vigo releva a Sevilla como principal centro de esclavitud entre 1660 y 1668.” Faro De Vigo, 2 May, 2007. 23  Bugallal, “Próceres y Negreros.” La Opinión, 24 October, 2016. 24  Cacheiro Varela, América na poesía galega. 25  Miranda, Barreiro “Galician Slaves in Cuba.” Research Journal. David Miranda Barreiro (blog), 20 October, 2016. https://davidmirandabarreiro.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/ galician-slaves-in-cuba/. 26  Romero, “The Other Galicia: Constructions of National Identity through Absence.” In Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies: Between the Local and the Global, eds. Kirsty Hooper and Manuel Puga Moruxa, 104–24. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011.

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helped them develop their budding economies] (1992: 13).27 From a decolonial perspective, this framework loses sight of the immense power that some Galicians acquired as “migrants” in countries such as Argentina, Venezuela, or Mexico, where they became large entrepreneurs. The link between these extremely wealthy migrants and Galicia expands until the present (see Ruiz 2017).28 In spite of all these facts, a decolonial analysis of migration has not been undertaken yet, with some exceptions, such as the work of Naranjo Orovio (1999),29 on the impact of Galician migration on indigenous and Afro-­ American communities in Cuba. These aspects also need to be considered in view of other more contemporary forms of (neo)colonization such as the exploitation of women and children in developing countries for the production of consumer goods (see, e.g., “Zara, Next, Mango Slammed for Leaving Workers Without Wages in Turkish Factory” 2017),30 the focus of policies regarding the fisheries (see the section on Fisheries in “Construír Galiza Con Ilusión Contigo” 2016)31 or development aid,32 and the perpetuation of the colonial imaginary that actually supports such exploitation.

 Cacheiro Varela, América na poesía galega: 13.  Ruiz, “El pueblo de Galicia donde veranean las mayores fortunas del mundo.” El Mundo, 3 August, 2017. https://www.elmundo.es/viajes/espana/2017/08/03/588b4a242260 1d5f148b458c.html. 29  Naranjo Orovio, “Los trabajos y los días: colonos gallegos en Cuba en el siglo XIX.” SÉMATA 11 (1999): 191–215. 30  “Zara, Next, Mango Slammed for Leaving Workers Without Wages in Turkish Factory.” Clean Clothes Campaign, 25 September, 2017. https://cleanclothes.org/ news/2017/09/25/zara-next-mango-slammed-for-leaving-workers-without-wages 31  “Construír Galiza Con Ilusión Contigo.” BNG, 2016. https://www.bng.gal/media/ bnggaliza/files/2016/09/12/programa_electoral_galegas_2016.pdf. 32  As a general note I could mention that “priority countries” in the Galician Development Aid Strategy are those with whom Galicia’s civil society is supposed to have had a history of long-term cooperation (see all details here: https://cooperacion.xunta.gal/gl/presentacion). While countries such as Kurdistan, the Sahara, and India have been excluded, Mozambique and others are in because of business interests. The inclusion of companies as cooperation agents in the mentioned strategy was and still is rejected by the NGO sector (see, e.g., the position of the Galician NGO Federation here https://galiciasolidaria.org/ wp-content/uploads/docs/Consenso-Empresa-CGONGD.pdf), though this reasoned opposition has not yielded any change in the government’s policies. 27 28

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3   The Wound: A Result of Trauma/Injury Indeed, while it is reasonable to argue that Galicians have contributed to colonization as part of the powers of Spain and Portugal and not on behalf of a Galician nation, my main goal here is to review how the Galician literary system, while presenting itself as the voice of an oppressed people, has also supported the colonial discourse in its representation of its Others. I will therefore focus on how the work of different Galician writers from different periods illustrates this tension between belonging to an oppressed nation and being complicit with colonial discourses. I need to start this analysis by referring to the work of Anxo Tarrío Varela (1986),33 who has used the body of work developed by scholars in the Global South to understand Galician literature. In his 1986 article, he examines some postcolonial literary theories, but he delinks them from their political context and shows no interest in understanding these literatures per se, nor in using the theories to question how the Galician cultural system has been party to colonization. His approach is similar to Ferreiro’s in “Irmaus,” as shown here: A literatura galega amosa xestos semellantes ós dos países situados naquelas latitudes. E, non obstante, tamén subsisten en Galicia condicións terceiro-­ mundistas (…). E, nembargantes, en fin, existe na historia moderna e contemporánea de Galicia un sentimento de país colonizado que, esporádica e intuitivamente manifestado dende o século XVIII, cando menos, pasou a ser argumento político principalísimo nos movementos nacionais modernos [Galician literature shows similar traits to that of countries in those parts. However, Third-World-like conditions also continue to exist in Galicia (…). And, however, there is in Galician modern contemporary history a feeling of being a colonized country that, sporadically and intuitively expressed since the 18th century at least, became the most relevant political principle of modern nationalist movements]. (Tarrío Varela 1986: 396)34

My objective here is quite the opposite of Tarrío’s. Instead of equating the conditions of Galician literature to those of postcolonial countries, I aim to explore to what extent this idea of a similar position actually masks alliances with colonial discourse in the Galician language context. I will 33  Tarrío Varela, “Rosalía, Curros, Pondal: Literatura e Colonización.” In Actas do Congreso Internacional de Estudios sobre Rosalía de Castro e o seu tempo 3. Santiago de Compostela: Univ. de Santiago de Compostela, 1986: 395–401. 34  Tarrío Varela, “Rosalía, Curros, Pondal: Literatura e Colonización”: 396.

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touch on three different aspects: Orientalism, the migration narrative, and exoticization/sexualization.

4   Orientalism One of the earliest manifestations of colonial discourse in contemporary Galician literature is Orientalism. The most important voice in producing the Oriental was Vicente Risco, who devoted a large part of his initial literary efforts to the Orient without ever leaving Europe. As Edward Said explained, whenever a “European consciousness” is interested in the Orient, we must ask ourselves about its underlying reasons (2003: 157).35 Risco, the “father” of Galician (patriarchal) nationalism in the twentieth century, did not explore the Orient to find references or alliances for his nationalist project in the revolutionary movements that were taking place all over the “Orient,” from India to Egypt. Quite the opposite, Risco just followed the same trend as other hegemonic European white male writers. For him, the Orient was mysterious, it did not change, it was a place that did not evolve: Las sociedades asiáticas han mostrado hasta hoy una estabilidad multisecular que las hace parecer a nuestros ojos inmutables, como si para ellas no pasase el tiempo. En la China, en la India, en Indonesia, en Persia, en los demás países musulmanes, las creencias, las instituciones y las costumbres parecen haber sido esencialmente las mismas desde hace decenas de siglos [Asian societies have shown a centuries-old stability that makes them look unchangeable in our eyes, as if time did not pass through them. In China, in India, in Indonesia, in Persia, in the other Muslim countries, beliefs, institutions and habits seem to have been essentially the same for centuries on end]. (Risco 1955: 10)36

For Risco, the Orient is only a relevant space in its relationship to the West. For example, because it is the place of “el nacimiento, predicación, pasión y muerte de Nuestro Señor Jesucristo” [the birth, preaching, Passion and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ] (12).37 Therefore, in line with Said’s definitions of Orientalism, Risco uses the Orient to help “define Europe (or the West), as its contrasting image, idea, personality,  Said, Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 2003: 157.  Risco, La historia de Oriente contada con sencillez. CÁdiz: Escelicer, 1955: 10. 37  Risco, La historia de Oriente contada con sencillez: 12. 35 36

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e­ xperience” (Said 2003: 1–2).38 In that comparison, the West comes out as civilized presented under an ambiguous light because, despite its presumed superiority, in Risco it produces “cobiza do lonxe” [a greed for the distant], as a repository of the space where the white male Western subject still feels completely powerful and safe (see Fundación Vicente Risco 2013).39 The contradictions between his role as nationalist ideologue and his colonial position as an Orientalist are soon revealed. While Galician nationalism had to be developed by Galicians (Risco 1920: 3),40 “Orientals” did not have the same prerogative: En Oriente no hay naciones (…) Los orientales se diferencian por la raza, por la religión, por la lengua, por las costumbres. (…) Es cierto que los partidos que defienden la independencia de aquellos países frente a la dominación o influencia europea se llaman nacionalistas, pero esta palabra, lo mismo que la idea que representa, son cosas importadas de Occidente, que sólo comprenden unos pocos “intelectuales” europeizados [There are no nations in the Orient (…) Orientals can be differentiated by race, by religion, by language, by habits. (…) It is true that the parties who advocate for independence in those countries against European domination or influence call themselves nationalist, but this word, even the idea it represents, is something imported from the West that only a few Europeanized “intellectuals” understand]. (Risco 1955: 11)41

Cesáreo Sánchez Iglesias harks back to this trope in his 2013 volume Caderno do Nilo [Nile Diary].42 This is a poetry collection rooted in the most classical Orientalist tradition described by Said. Everything in this work contributes to bring us to a space lost in time, where the present and the actual history of Egypt as a country have been erased. Only the European imagination about it remains. The collection itself starts with these words: “Este poema nace de camiñar o atemporal, o sen tempo da historia e da natureza, nas miñas viaxes a Exipto en setembro do 1989, setembro do 2003 e xaneiro do 2007” [This poem stems from walking along timelessness, along the time without time of history and nature, in  Said, Orientalism: 1–2.  Fundación Vicente Risco. Quen é Risco? Allariz: Fundación Vicente Risco, 2013. 40  Risco, Teoría do nacionalismo galego. Ourense: La Región, 1920: 3. 41  Risco, La historia de Oriente contada con sencillez: 11. 42  Sánchez Iglesias, Caderno do Nilo. Vigo: Xerais, 2013. 38 39

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my travels through Egypt in September 1989, September 2003 and January 2007] (Sánchez Iglesias 2013: 7).43 Said echoes once again in these words: The Orient has no present, it is lost in time. Sánchez Iglesias’ collection also begins with a clear list of its forefathers: Borges, Herodotous, Flaubert. The list increases as the poems unfold, summarized by the verse: “Gardo en min lecturas de viaxeiros./ Os seres que eles fixeron vivir,/ viven en min, o seu sentir en min camiña” [I keep in me the books of travellers I have read./ The beings they infused life into,/ live in me, their feelings walk with me] (9).44 This fictional characterization in itself is a marker of Orientalism: “each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions with the Orient itself” (Said 2003: 20).45 As a strategy, “the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for the West. He is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says” (20–21).46 The end-result of this strategy is depriving the people the poet speaks about of the capacity for self-­ representation, “in a sense obliterating him [sic] as a human being” (27)47 and thus contributing to structural colonial violence against the Other. Sánchez Iglesias neatly falls into the category Said described as: “the writer for whom a real or metaphorical trip to the Orient is the fulfilment of some deeply felt and urgent project” (158).48 Once again, the chance to forge alliances, both in the twentieth and twenty-first century, with the decolonial movements of the time (pre-Independence struggles and the Arab Revolution) is missed whenever these Oriental texts are produced. In the end, they reinforce the structures Said so clearly describes: “There are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The former dominate: the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another Western power” (36).49 Disguised under a particular aesthetics and the recreation of a particular (Western, male) genealogy, Sánchez Iglesias’s writing finally supports the very structures of colonial

 Sánchez Iglesias, Caderno do Nilo: 7.  Sánchez Iglesias, Caderno do Nilo: 9. 45  Said, Orientalism: 20. 46  Said, Orientalism: 20–21. 47  Said, Orientalism: 27. 48  Said, Orientalism: 158. 49  Said, Orientalism: 36. 43 44

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discourse, the same discourse Galician nationalism is supposed to work against. The colonial discourse in Galicia, however, does not only reside in this Orientalist gaze, but also in the way local communities have been described in the migration and exile writings of the Galician diaspora, as we will see next.

5   Migration and Exile As already mentioned, migration and exile are an important part of the Galician cultural and literary history. Poor economic conditions, greed, and the Civil War led many Galicians to the Americas, including many authors. Migration and/or exile literature gradually became a sort of genre included in literary histories such as that of Gómez Sánchez and Queixas Zas (2001, see in particular pages 238–248).50 In order to analyze the position of some of these authors toward the Other, I will be dwelling on Cacheiro Varela’s collection of essays Os escritores galegos e Iberoamérica [Galician Writers and Latin America] (2000)51 as it provides insights about the views that a number of Galician authors in exile had about their host countries. The collection presents a brief biography of each author and then a text produced by the writers themselves reflecting on their experiences in the Americas. The work includes both men and women writers and there is a striking difference between the perspective of both groups. While the men in the collection focus on aspects related to the Galician diaspora and some show a clear sense of superiority over the locals, the women tend to offer positive views of the host country. For example, Pura Vázquez highlights the dignity of the indigenous peoples she finds in Caracas, dressed “coas súas galas auténticas, propias da dignidade que debían ter dentro do seu pobo autóctono, aborixe e indíxena” [with their authentic regalia, a sign of the dignity they must have had within their autochthonous, aboriginal and indigenous communities] (Cacheiro Varela 2000: 48).52 She also tells the story of her friendship with 50  Gómez SÁnchez and Queixas Zas, Historia xeral da literatura galega. Vigo: Edicións a Nosa Terra, 2001: 238–248. 51  Cacheiro Varela, Os escritores galegos e Iberoamérica. Vigo: Departamento de Filoloxía Española, 2000. 52  Cacheiro Varela, Os escritores galegos e Iberoamérica: 48.

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an indigenous child: “Aquel neno e aquela muller metéronseme ata o meu corazón” [That child and that woman went straight to my heart] (Cacheiro Varela 2000: 49).53 One could think that there is some sort of condescending colonial compassion in this encounter, but quite the opposite. Vázquez asks the boy why he does not go to school and he replies that he has to work; the writer finds in his answer a link to her own experience as a teacher in Galicia, where she also taught many children who had to work. Interpreting his experience in this way is in line with Mohanty’s description of feminist solidarity (2007: 243)54 as being aware of local histories and of our own location. Vázquez’s relationship to Venezuelans of all sorts is consistently affectionate and she shows interest in understanding social inequality in their particular context. The case of Luz Pozo is equally interesting. In her contribution to the volume, she chooses the topic of how women poets from Latin America influenced her writing and became her role models. Likewise, Maria do Carme Kruckenberg claims in her essay: “Non foi a terra en si a que envolveu o meu espírito, como puido suceder, foron os homes e as mulleres, foron as súas actitudes, as súas obras” [It was not the land itself that engulfed my spirit, as it might have happened, it was the men and women, their attitudes, their works] (Cacheiro Varela 2000: 83).55 A gendered understanding of migration/exile can help explain these feelings of affection and bonding. The Galician women writers mentioned above seem to have experienced migration as a space for freedom and to look for their peers/role models. By contrast, male literary voices in the collection seemed to have a totally different understanding of their presence in the Americas, in line with the ideas discussed by Íker González-­ Allende (2018)56 in his study about masculinity in Spanish migration and exile: “el exilio y la emigración causan un sentido de crisis, impotencia e inestabilidad en la masculinidad de los hombres que los padecen. La masculinidad, como parte fundamental de la identidad personal y cultural-­ social de un hombre, influye decisivamente en cómo éste se enfrenta y vive su desplazamiento territorial” [exile and migration produce a feeling of crisis, helplessness and instability in the masculinity of men who go  Cacheiro Varela, Os escritores galegos e Iberoamérica: 49.  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: 243. 55  Cacheiro Varela, Os escritores galegos e Iberoamérica: 83. 56  González-Allende, Hombres en movimiento: masculinidades españolas en los exilios y emigraciones, 1939–1999. Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2018. 53 54

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through them. Masculinity, as integral part of the personal and socio-­ cultural identity of a man, decisively influences how he faces and lives his territorial displacement] (González-Allende 2018: 4).57 Xabier Alcalá deserves special attention in this regard. In his piece in Cacheiro’s volume, he focuses on the situation of Cuba, stereotyping black people in his descriptions of “negros lentísimos, en bicicleta, a pé e sentados” [extremely slow blacks, by bike, standing and sitting] (Cacheiro Varela 2000:101).58 He constantly draws a line between what is “European” and what is “African”; for example, when he explains how the investment that the Xunta de Galicia made in the building of a Centro de galegos takes one “moi lonxe: a Europa, territorio onde se pode ver renovación, coidado das cousas” [very far: back to Europe, a territory where one can see renewal and care for things] (Cacheiro Varela 2000: 104)59 against the generalized carelessness of black Cubans. Furthermore, Alcalá goes back to the view of Galician migration as a failed enterprise to “enaltecer” [uplift] the colonies, thus obscuring the material gains obtained by Galicians in this process. Besides, Alcalá exploits the racist trope of the (un)grateful slave (Boulukos 2011),60 who can of course not manage their country without the support, in this case, of Galician migrants. As a consequence, in his view, they fall prey to other powers: “Un detrás de outro, os países nos que se desangrou Galicia (…) sucumbiron á súa desorde administrativa e á codicia estadounidense” [“One after the other, the countries where Galicia bled her people (…) succumbed to their own administrative disorder and US greed” (Cacheiro Varela 2000: 104).61 Another author in Cacheiro’s anthology is Victor Freixanes, who is fascinated by the Spanish “conquest.” He is the author of A cidade dos Césares [Caesars’ City] (2002),62 a novel of colonial exaltation. Furthermore, he sees migration as the outmost Galician epic still to be written: “Hai tempo que defendo a teoría de que a verdadeira épica dos galegos é esta: a gran aventura da emigración. Está por escribir (…) a novela da emigración galega a América, que empeza precisamente nestas datas, a finais do s. XVIII e chega practicamente á década dos anos 50  González-Allende, Hombres en movimiento: 4.  Cacheiro Varela, Os escritores galegos e Iberoamérica: 101. 59  Cacheiro Varela, Os escritores galegos e Iberoamérica: 104. 60  Boulukos, George. The Grateful Slave: the Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 61  Cacheiro Varela, Os escritores galegos e Iberoamérica: 104. 62  Freixanes, A Cidade dos Césares. Vigo: Edicións Xerais de Galicia, 1993. 57 58

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deste século” [For some time now, I have been advocating for the great adventure of migration as the true Galician epic. The novel on the Galician migration to the Americas is still to be written; about the migration that starts precisely at that time, at the turn of the nineteenth century and continues up until the 1950s] (Freixanes 1993: 137).63 These statements are interesting in light of the generalized feminine construction of the nation that was developed around the figure of Rosalía de Castro, among other tropes (see Miguelez-Carballeira 2014).64 It seems that those male authors are trying to find a more patriarchal approach to the nation, and in order to do so, they resort to colonization or the epic of migration indistinctly to support the existence of a Galician nation glorifying those who participated in the oppression of Others. Only from this perspective can one understand that a recent novel, Nova Nursia (2018) by Héctor Cajaraville,65 was ever penned. The novel tells the story of missionary Frei Rosendo Salvado, a priest from Tui who moves to Australia to complete his evangelizing mission. The novel lacks any critical presentation of the historical facts narrated. For example, nowhere is the opposition to colonization expressed and the images of the local indigenous population all fall under tropes of the (good) savage, even with colonial pictures of Australian “specimens” attached. The novel amplifies the same kind of narrative elements glorifying the colonization of the Americas: the taming of the ever grateful/treacherous natives, a fully white and masculine view of the colonization process where women are either the excuse to take the vows or exotic objects to be possessed. The choice of outlook and main character is all the more surprising if we consider that Frei Rosendo Salvado is the person who first introduced the cultivation of eucalyptus in Galicia, now seen by all environmental organizations in the country as one of the most important environmental disasters we are still facing.66 That a novel about Frei Rosendo Salvado, written in the terms I have described, seemed appropriate in the late 2010s is another indicator of a generalized lack of deep reflections about colonization from the perspective of those who were/are colonized.  Freixanes, A Cidade dos Césares: 137.  Miguelez-Carballeira, A Companion to Galician Culture. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2014. 65  Cajaraville Héctor. Nova Nursia. Edicións Xerais de Galicia, 2018. 66  See for example, http://www.fruga-galiza.org/2017/03/21/eucalipto-cero-como-eneuropa/, http://www.verdegaia.org/wp/o-eucalipto-eucalyptus-globulus-e-unha-especieexotica-invasora-en-galicia/, https://www.elsaltodiario.com/biodiversidad/galicia-destinegestion-forestal-eucalipto 63 64

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The exotic and sexualized depiction of women in Cajaraville’s novel is not the only example of these two forms of colonial/racist discourse in Galician literature. The way racialized women have been objectified in the writing of Galician authors is quite remarkable, as we will see in the next section. However, we can also find some disturbing examples of white women rendering the male Other an object of abject colonial desire.

6   Exoticization/Sexualization As Will Jackson (2018)67 explains, the sexual and intimate space is now a full-fledged arena where to study colonization and racism. Works such as the ones by Ann Stoler (2006)68 have helped understand that colonization did not only work through its “official” public structures, but through the intimate. This section shall focus on a gendered analysis of how the European racist gaze has constructed its Others in Galician literature along exotic/sexual lines. The exoticization of the indigenous/black female body is a common trope of the colonial male imaginary (see Bringas López 2010)69 and is also found in the narratives I referred to in the previous section, both the ones in Cacheiro’s anthology and in Cajaraville’s novel. For example, Florencio Delgado Gurriarán writes the poem “Preta” [Black woman], to construct the black female body as a site for the abject pleasure of the white man: “Preta de arrecendo bravo/ preta/ ouh preta!,/ teu corpo é todo/ berro a chamar polo macho” [Black woman of wild scent/ black woman/ oh black woman!/ your body is in itself/ a loud grunt to mate with your male] (Cacheiro Varela 1992: 54).70 This description p ­ resents 67  Jackson, “The Private Lives of Empire: Emotion, Intimacy, and Colonial Rule.” Itinerario 42.1 (2018): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0165115318000049. 68  Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Duke: Duke Univ. Press, 2006. 69  Bringas, “Oscuros objetos de deseo: Construcciones culturales del cuerpo femenino negro en el discurso publicitario.” In Violencias (in)Visibles: Intervenciones Feministas Frente a La Violencia Patriarcal, ed. Belén Martín Lucas. Barcelona: Icaria, 2010: 115–38. 70  The poem, included in Cacheiro’s 1992 anthology América na poesía galega, is part of Delgado Gurriarán’s “Noiturno da noiva jaracha,” a section in his collection Galicia infinda (1963). The whole section can be found here http://www.adelal.com/nOproblemO/ adelal/florencio/mexicanos.html. In 2021, the Real Academia da Lingua Galega [Royal Academy of the Galician Language] decided to dedicate their Día das Letras Galegas [Day of Galician Literature] to this author, quoting the fact that he was in exile in Mexico as one of the reasons to choose him, regardless of the way he has depicted the local population of the

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the black woman as some sort of female in rut (“femia” and “macho” in Galician are terms only used for animals), animalizing her further with: “Femia/ brindas o froito do sexo” [Female/ you offer the fruit of sex] (55).71 Avilés de Taramancos makes an interesting case: his alliances with the indigenous peoples of Colombia (see Capelán 2003 for a detailed study),72 also present in his novel Nova crónica das Indias (1989),73 do not prevent him from exoticizing the female body of the indigenous woman María: “Vén na doce cantiga da torcaza/ todo o amor a me subir na illarga:/ e bico os dous petiños de María/ como poidera un temporal, acaso,/ bicar a flor” [Come in the sweet cooing of the dove/ all my love going up my loins:/ I kiss María’s little breasts/ as a storm could by chance/ kiss a flower) (Cacheiro Varela 1992: 95).74 Likewise, Celso Emilio Ferreiro uses the “mulata [sic] Coromoto” as a sexual sensual object in his poem of the same name: “A mulata Coromoto/ é un remuíño musical/ arpas de vento na fala,/ ritmo de bongo no andar,/ maracas de grau centeo/ baixo da brusa a tremar” [Coromoto the mulatta/ is a whirlwind of music/ wind harps in her speech,/ the rhythm of the bongo in her walk,/ maracas of rye grains/ under her waging blouse] (Cacheiro Varela 1992: 74).75 In a homoerotic turn, Luís González Tosar expresses his fascination toward the “corpos acibeches” [jet bodies] of black men and the “mulato” child who, according to Cacheiro, can be “de sangue de galego e lume de Negra” [of male Galician blood and black female fire] (Cacheiro Varela 1992: 38. Italics mine).76 Postcolonial feminist theoretician and activist Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso (2009) offers a sharp analysis of the implications of the exoticization of the male gaze these authors display:

country (https://academia.gal/-/as-letras-galegas-2022-homenaxear-c3-a1n-a-florenciodelgado-gurriar-c3-a1n). 71  Cacheiro Varela, América na poesía galega: 55. 72  Capelán, “Da saudade revertida: a realidade americana na obra de Avilés de Taramancos.” Novos boletíns da Real Academia Galega 364 (2003): 41–137. 73  Avilés de Taramancos, Nova crónica das Indias. Vigo: Ir Indo, 1989. 74  Cacheiro Varela, América na poesía galega: 95. Avilés de Taramanco’s poem was originally published in 1985 in Contos caucanos. 75  Cacheiro Varela, América na poesía galega: 74. Ferreiro’s poem was originally written in 68 and published in Terra de ningures (1969). 76  Cacheiro Varela, América na poesía galega: 38.

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el relato del hombre blanco “enamorado” de la esclava indígena o africana, oculta la verdad del encuentro sexual obligatorio, de la producción de un cuerpo femenino al servicio de la empresa colonial y patriarcal. La naturalización de la mujer nativa o esclava como parte del paisaje conquistado es un efecto no sólo de la razón colonizadora sino de la razón patriarcal y heteronormativa. Es pues que ambas razones más que articuladas han sido parte de lo mismo, son parte de la misma trama de dominio. No es posible pensar la una sin la otra: la historia de la invasión europea a estas tierras también ha sido la historia de la invasión del cuerpo violable de las mujeres originarias [the narrative of the white man “in love” with the indigenous or African slave woman hides the truth of forced sexual encounters, of the production of a female body at the service of the colonial and patriarchal enterprise. The naturalization of the native or slave woman as part of the conquered landscape is an effect not only of colonizing reason, but of patriarchal and heteronormative reason. It is thus that both reasons in their articulation have been part of the same, are part of the same domination fabric. It is not possible to think of one without the other: the history of the European invasion of these lands has been the history of the invasion of a rapable body of native women]. (Espinosa Miñoso 2009, unpaginated)77

However, the exoticization/sexualization of the Other is not just a matter of the male gaze. Indeed, there are several contemporary women writers, two of them active in the feminist movement, who also display the same kind of racist representation in their writing. I will be focusing first on the specific case of Inma López Silva, as I think her position helps illuminate further contradictions not only from a national point of view, but from a feminist point of view. López Silva is not only active in nationalist politics but has recently started writing texts that try to contribute to the Galician feminist debate (López Silva 2018).78 Through the following examples, I will try to show how her understanding of feminism falls into the category of the white Western feminism rightfully criticized by postcolonial and black feminists. Indeed, López Silva seems to have constructed her identity as a European white feminist using the racialized female Other as the repository of the animal and barbaric.

77  Espinosa Miñoso, “12 de octubre: Conmemorar la violación originaria.” Pan y Rosas (suplemento), September, 2009. 78  López Silva, ChÁmame señora, pero trÁtame coma a nn señor: Memoria persoal do machismo na cultura. Vigo: Editorial Galaxia, 2018.

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In López Silva’s novel Non quero ser Doris Day [I Don’t Want To Be Doris Day] (2006)79 the main character, a woman who has fled the altar in Santiago and moves to Paris, starts a series of relationships with different men. They are all white and European except for one, Mahmud, who is first described as “un marroquí de ar mafioso” [Moroccan with a mafioso air] (41).80 Mahmud, the owner of an affiche store near the Centre Pompidou, refuses to hire “nin magrebís, nin practicantes islámicos ou islamistas, nin moito menos turcos” [neither people from the Maghreb, nor practicing Muslims or Islamists, and least of all, Turks] due to “cuestións étnicas” [ethnic issues] (44)81 and hires the protagonist instead. The description of this North African Other continues with a passage in which he invites the protagonist for coffee (although, in line with Said’s description of the deceitful Oriental, he discounts the amount from her salary) because “por fin conseguira casar a filla de 15 anos” [he had at last managed to marry her 15 year-old daughter off] (60).82 During this encounter, the female protagonist reflects on how he is married to several women because “o islamismo os promove, deixándoos casar con todas as mulleres das que se namoran e enriba garántelles que elas non se ofendan” [Islamism (sic) supports them, allowing them to marry all women they fall for and, on top of that, it guarantees that the said women do not feel offended] (61).83 Mahmud shows all the stereotypical traces of the “Arab” (treacherous, impossible to understand, alluring, jealous, and degrading toward women) as described by Macfie: “That orientals, unlike occidentals, are by nature mysterious, menacing, irrational, demonic, and sexually corrupt” (2002: 87).84 However, Mahmud is also exotic in his sexual allure, thus matching Kamala Kempadoo’s description of this “romanticization of the racial, ethnic or cultural Other, yet the simultaneous oppression and exploitation that occurs with it (…) Other cultures, other creeds, were not merely different, not even merely lower, but positively—even objectively—strange ”

 López Silva, Non quero ser Doris Day. A Coruña: Biblos, 2006.  López Silva, Non quero ser Doris Day: 41. 81  López Silva, Non quero ser Doris Day: 44. 82  López Silva, Non quero ser Doris Day: 60. 83  López Silva, Non quero ser Doris Day: 61. 84  Macfie, Alexander L. Orientalism: Seminar Studies in History. London: Longman, 2002: 87. 79 80

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(2004 Kindle).85 In the sexual arena, Mahmud is also a walking racial stereotype: he stalks the protagonist, saves her from the man she left at the altar, who comes to take her back, and ends up having an affair with her and getting her pregnant. The white woman, in the end, in another Orientalist twist, falls for the exotic, uncivilized, and eroticized Other (see Shepard 2012).86 She concludes: “Se Mahmud vai ser polígamo ou monógamo a partir de agora, queridas, dáme francamente igual” [Whether Mahmud is going to be polygamous or monogamous from now on, my dears, I do not actually care] (López Silva 2006: 108).87 Brigitte Vasallo (2019: 147–150)88 has written extensively about how these racist tropes construct the monogamous (now polyamorous) West versus the alien, backward, and oppressive (toward women) Other. Da Silva’s novel is, beyond doubt, reinforcing all these racist stereotypes. In spite of this example, however, López Silva racist depictions tend to focus on women. In her novel Memoria de cidades sen luz [Memory of Lightless Cities] (2009),89 the male narrator shares the following about black women in Paris: A min gustábame velas chegar pola mañá cedo cos seus propios bebés atados ao lombo nun pano, apoiados en cus inmensos. Foi daquela cando pensei que algún día querería ter unha muller negra e vela levar os nosos fillos ao lombo envoltos nunha manta, coma canguros do revés. E oíla cantarlles as cancións das Negras que nunca se parecen aos arrolos de berce e que fan que os nenos durman rindo [I liked seeing them arrive early in the morning with their own babies tied at the back with a cloth, resting on their immense bottoms. It was then that I thought that one day I would like to have a black woman and see her carry our children on her back wrapped in a blanket, like front to back kangaroos. And hear them sing the songs of Black women that are so unlike lullabies and that make babies sleep with a smile on their face]. (López Silva 2009: 105)90 85  Kempadoo, Kamala. Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race, and Sexual Labor. Routledge, 2004. 86  Shepard, “‘Something Notably Erotic’: Politics, ‘Arab Men,’ and Sexual Revolution in Post-Decolonization France, 1962–1974.” The Journal of Modern History 84.1 (2012): 80–115. https://doi.org/10.1086/663172. 87  López Silva, Non quero ser Doris Day: 108. 88  Vasallo, Pensamiento monógamo, terror poliamoroso. Madrid: La Oveja Roja, 2019: 147–150. 89  López Silva, Memoria de cidades sen luz. Vigo: Galaxia, 2009. 90  López Silva, Memoria da cidade sen luz: 105.

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The obsession of the white male gaze with black women’s bottoms is a topic that has received much attention in decolonial critical writings (Bringas López 2010 summarizes an important list of contributions).91 This type of representation could make sense from a decolonial perspective if used to criticize this tradition, and/or to mark a character as racist (see, e.g., Eli Ríos’ strategies in Luns 2017).92 However, the way it is introduced in the novel does not indicate any further reflection about the character’s perception of women as being racist. In fact, it seems to be conceived as a somehow poetic depiction of what he sees, as this is part of a longer description of Paris. Finally, López Silva’s essay Maternosofía [Maternosophia] (2014),93 as Susana Sánchez Aríns (2014)94 already discussed in her review for the literary platform A Sega, again animalizes women in “underdeveloped countries” and uses them, in the best colonial tradition, to construct her identity as a European white bourgeois woman. Another feminist writer who has also repeatedly expressed exoticizing and racist views of the bodies of the Other in her writings is María Xosé Queizán. Her latest contribution to this trope is actually included in her Memoir Vivir a galope (2018):95 Estimo (…) a beleza da raza negra, as súas cabezas ben formadas, a elegancia, a postura lanzal. (…) E aquí radica o meu aprecio estético: a súa andadura. Considero que as persoas de raza negra, en sendo guapas, son as máis fermosas. (…) Quero dicir con isto que teño motivos obxectivos para ser adepta á raza negra, sen recorrer á solidariedade que me une coas persoas e pobos perseguidos [I am fond of (…) the beauty of the black race, their nicely shaped heads, their elegance, their straight posture. (…). It is here where my aesthetic appreciation lies: in their gait. I think that people of the black race, when beautiful, they are the most beautiful in the world. (…) I want to say with all this that I have objective reasons to be adept to the black

91  Bringas López, “Oscuros objetos de deseo: Construcciones culturales del cuerpo femenino negro en el discurso publicitario.” In Violencias (in)Visibles: Intervenciones Feministas Frente a La Violencia Patriarcal, ed. Belén Martín Lucas. Barcelona: Icaria, 2010: 115–38. 92  Ríos, Luns. Vigo: Edicións Xerais de Galicia, 2017. 93  López Silva, Maternosofía ou o embarazo da escritora primípara. Vigo: Galaxia, 2014. 94  Sánchez Aríns, A Sega (blog), April 2014. http://www.asega-critica.net/2014/04/ maternosofia-suficiencia-racional-vs.html. 95  QueizÁn, Vivir a galope. Vigo: Edicións Xerais de Galicia, S.A., 2018.

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race without appealing to the solidarity that binds me to oppressed people and peoples]. (Queizán 2018: 226)96

The passage could not be clearer in the way black male bodies are seen as objects to be appreciated in their physical qualities as in some updated recreation of a slave market. The violence implicit in these words is self-explanatory. However, not only are “Arab” and black bodies treated in this way. Yolanda Castaño attempts a poem inspired by Marguerite Duras’s “The Lover” and instead of politically rewriting it, she just mimics the colonial body politics inscribed in it: “Percorro ese exotismo. Acaricio a cor dourada./ O amante da China do Sur/ trouxo un cálido e húmido monzón ás miñas ideas./ Cómo se foron achegar/ o teu oriente coa miña fin do mundo” [I run through that exoticism. I caress his golden color/ The lover of South China/ brought a warm and humid Monsoon to my ideas./ How your Orient approached / my land’s end) (2003: 53).97 Xiumei Pu (2013) has already analyzed the way Duras subjects the male Chinese lover to her colonial gaze. Her criticism applies to Castaño’s poem here too. The use of “dourada” to describe the skin of the lover brings back the colonial fiction of Chinese and Japanese people being “yellow.” Tseng (2019)98 describes not only how this process came about, but also how damaging it is still for the racialized depiction of people from these and other countries in Asia. Even examples by women writers as recent as Ramonas (2018)99 by Ana Cabaleiro contribute to racial stereotyping. Cabaleiro’s novel follows a woman photographer in precarious working conditions trying to rebuild her life and her art. She is planning an artistic intervention, for which she needs some cypress trees. When she stumbles upon different obstacles to obtain them, her grandmother gives her sound advice telling her that she needs to resort to the “xitanos” (Gypsis). This is the description of the aforementioned “xitano”: [C]un señor traballador e sacrificado que se mataba a nomadear de mercado en mercado, estritamente dentro da legalidade, que mantiña a súa familia ben alimentada e a furgoneta en perfecto estado, e cun corazón bonachón  Queizán, Vivir a galope: 226.  Castaño, O libro da egoísta. Galaxia, 2003: 53. 98  Tseng, Arroz tres delicias: sexo, raza y género. Barcelona: Plan B (Ediciones B), 2019. 99  Cabaleiro, As Ramonas. Editorial Galaxia, 2018. 96 97

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que se lle entrevía nun sorriso de dentes fortes. Mais o xitano quería o mesmo que podería querer calquera, un golpe de sorte. E o golpe de sorte resultou chamarse seis mil euros, cincocentos euros por ciprés conseguido, desenterrado do seu hábitat, transportado e colocado na estación do tren do Castro [A hard-working and self-sacrificing man who struggled to nomadically go from open market to open market, everything within the strict limits of legality; who kept his family well fed and his van in perfect condition and with a kind heart one could see through his smile of strong teeth. However, the gypsy wanted the same as anybody else, a lucky strike. And the lucky strike happened to be called six thousand Euros, five-hundred Euros for each cypress obtained, uprooted from its habitat, transported and placed at O Castro’s railway station]. (Cabaleiro 2018: 122)100

This example shows to what extent the stereotypes surrounding “xitanos” in Galicia and in Spain as a whole are rooted in the most stereotypical of ways: nomadic, patriarchal and, even in the case of the “good kind,” always interested in fast and illegal money (see Agüero 2020).101 This depiction might help the reader forget that the only reason why this nameless “xitano” decides to illegally uproot several cypresses is to help a middle-­class now precarious white woman artist create her great “piece.” The racist tropes help dilute the responsibility for the illegal affair that is taking place. All these examples come to show how an analysis of this kind is relevant to understand how Galician literature, albeit its non-hegemonic position within Spain and Europe, has indeed exercised colonial forms of discursive violence in line with the hegemonic literatures of the continent. I will now conclude with some thoughts about the implications of this trend.

7   The Wound Still Bleeds It is an incontestable fact that literature originally written in Galician has had little contribution from people who are not white, with works being limited to Calella sen saída [Blind Alley] (2005)102 by Victor Omgbá and

 Cabaleiro, As Ramonas: 122.  Agüero, “Informe sobre la situación del Pueblo Gitano en España.” Pretendemos gitanizar el mundo/Plataforma Ciudadana Rosa Cortés por la Memoria Gitana/ Camelamos, 2020. 102  OmgbÁ, Calella sen saída: o dilema dun inmigrante. Vigo: Galaxia, 2005. 100 101

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Ser Moudou [Being Moudou] (2017)103 by Cheikh Fayé, both African men, together with Contos a carón da lareira [Stories by the Fireplace] (2007)104 and Fundación libélula [Dragonfly Foundation] (2011)105 by Yashmina Shawki, a woman author of Galician and Kurdish origin who also writes in Spanish. While it is not the purpose of this chapter to explore these works, it might be interesting to briefly discuss how they fit into the white Galician literary system. On the one hand, Shawki’s stories have been written from a mainstream white Galician perspective, with white characters and places (with the exception of a migrant prostitute from Colombia in Fundación libélula that unfortunately reproduces the existing stereotypes around women in these situations and from similar backgrounds). On the other, Omgbá’s novel revolves around the situation of several African migrants, mainly in Madrid (over half of the novel is set there) and in A Coruña. While racism is mentioned (mainly linked to the violence of the Neo-Nazi groups in Madrid and labor exploitation by greedy businessmen in Galicia), most of the time the book discusses “Africans” as a somehow homogeneous group and the responsibility of the “Africans” themselves for the generalized poverty and corruption that force them, according to the omniscient narrator and the main character, to migrate. Fayé’s approach is more interesting in this sense, even though it is not a fictional text but rather a collection of blog posts from his blog Senegaliza, put together by the AS-PG (Asociación Socio-Pedagóxica Galega) [Galician Socio-­ Pedagogic Society].106 He shares his views on local A Coruña/Galician politics and society and Senegalese culture, history, and politics. In this sense, this is a very interesting text of antiracist pedagogy, representing the complex realities, cultures, and political projects of Senegal for a Galician audience, but also going into the difficulties that white societies present for black migrants in particular. However, it is interesting to note that, in the true spirit of Ferreiro’s “Irmaus,” mentioned by the author of the foreword María Xosé Bravo (Fayé 2017: 9–11),107 Fayé tends to represent Galicians in a highly benevolent light, even the police is seen as: “xente  Fayé, Ser Modou. A Coruña: ASPG, 2017.  Shawki Aziz, Contos ao carón da lareira. Vigo: Nova Galicia, 2007. 105  Shawki Aziz, Fundación Libélula. Vigo: Edicions Xerais de Galicia, 2011. 106  Fayé was one of two Senegalese migrants living in A Coruña who were chosen in the Bloque Nacionalista Galego’s [Galician Nationalist Block] open assemblies to run in the municipal elections of A Coruña. The Spanish electoral law did not allow them to run as they were not Spanish citizens. 107  Bravo, “Limiar.” In Cheikh Fayé Ser Modou, 9–12. A Coruña: ASPG, 2017. 103 104

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moi boa a pesar de que ás veces as normas obríganos a facer o seu traballo” [very good people, despite the fact that the law sometimes forces them to do their work] (2017: 96).108 This very brief analysis shows that this limited presence of racialized authors is even more telling if we look at the type of narratives that the white Galician literary system has allowed to circulate. Furthermore, even if there were no original writers in Galician of different “racial” backgrounds, and even no racialized people living in Galicia, an analysis of the violence of colonial and racist discourse would still be relevant, in the sense that this discourse is key in creating images of the self and other that justify military invasions, economic exploitation, and the general way we relate to others in the world. Considering that there are indeed plenty of Galicians subjected to racism, the analysis is therefore more urgent (see “Racismo e Xenofobia en Galicia” 2018109 and Santiago 2018110). We have seen how the idea of a “brotherhood” proposed by Ferreiro only abets the persistence of a colonial racist discourse in the nationalist project, at least in its literary form. The discourse of white superiority is not the only one present in Galician literature, though. There are counterexamples for this trend that are beyond the scope of this chapter, although I think they need specific attention. However, the examples presented here show that colonial/racist tropes in Galician literature have been normalized and that they need to be discussed as these texts foreground ideas of the Other not as an equal belonging to a similarly oppressed nation, but as an object to be colonized. Thus, the reason why I think analyzing the colonial/racist discourse is of key importance for Galician literature and the Galician nationalist project is not to discard the project altogether, but to emphasize how, in a world where non-hegemonic identities are more and more at the expense of capital and neo-imperialist exploitation, it is now more urgent than ever to explore the colonial wound before we can begin healing it and using the scar productively.

 Fayé, Ser Modou: 96.  “Racismo e xenofobia en Galicia.” SOS Racismo, 2018. https://sosracismo.eu/wp-­ content/uploads/2018/03/RESUMO-INFORME-OID-2018-GALICIA.pdf. 110  Santiago, “Afrogalegas: ‘Estamos Orgullosas De Ser Negras.’” El Salto, 30 May, 2018. https://www.elsaltodiario.com/racismo/afrogalegas-estamos-orgullosas-ser-negras. 108 109

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If we really want the wound to heal, we need to start by understanding that we are causing it. That is the only way we can work together with our partners in the Global South toward a new world order in which the capitalist/patriarchal structures can be dismantled. Our position as a non[and]hegemonic culture could open the door to this process, but we need to have a critical understanding of how we also contribute to colonial and racist structures. This is relevant to forge alliances with other non-­ hegemonic peoples, leaving the empty concept of “irmaus” behind and exploring that of feminist solidarity. This task is now more urgent than ever in the face of rising racism in Galicia, Spain, Europe, the US, and the West in general.

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PART III

Bodies, Sexes and Genders II: Seductions, Motherhoods and Rebellions

“Seducible” Souls, “Bastard” Republics: Fear of a Literate Demos in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La Tribuna (1883) Diego Baena

The many studies that have, over the last decades, stressed the relevance of Pardo Bazán’s La Tribuna for the study of labor history and women’s rights—including those of Daniel S. Whitaker (1988),1 Geraldine Scanlon (1990),2 Cristina Patiño Eirín (2005),3 Akiko Tsuchiya (2008),4 Araceli 1  Whitaker, “Power of Persuasion in Pardo Bazán’s La tribuna.” Hispanic Journal 9.2 (Spring 1998): 71–80. 2  Scanlon, “Class and Gender in Pardo Bazán’s La Tribuna.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies LXVII (1990): 137–150. 3  Patiño Eirín, “Lectoras en la obra de Pardo Bazán.” In Lectora, Heroína, Autora (La mujer en la literatura española del siglo XIX). III Coloquio de la Sociedad de Literatura Española del Siglo XIX (Barcelona, 23–25 de octubre de 2002), eds. Luis F. Díaz Larios et al. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2005: 293–306. 4  Tsuchiya, “Deseo y desviación sexual en la nueva sociedad de consumo: la lectura femenina en La Tribuna de Emilia Pardo Bazán.” In La mujer de letras o la letraherida: textos

D. Baena (*) Department of Language and Culture Studies, Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Castro et al. (eds.), Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98861-6_6

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Tinajero (2010),5 Pardo Amado (2012), María Pilar García Negro (2016),6 Pedro García Suárez (2017),7 and Narciso de Gabriel (2018)8— have all come to highlight the ways in which the author, perhaps ahead of her time, came to ask rather serious questions on the nature of both classand gender-based inequalities. It is important to remember that Pardo Bazán wrote La Tribuna (1883)9 in a context of both unprecedented urban migration and industrial proletarianization, and, as Akiko Tsuchiya reminds us, at a time in which Spanish women (particularly in urban settings) were beginning to read more and more, coming to represent between 40 and 50 percent of the reading public in larger cities; though with a considerable disadvantage relative to males in rural settings.10 In this sense, there has been a certain tendency to read the protagonist of Pardo Bazán’s novel (worker, woman, reader, and democratic and socialist activist) as a figure that seems to transgress and transcend the classist and fundamentally patriarchal ­society of nineteenth-century Spain; that is, as a kind of “new woman,”11 both working-class and self-educated, which would appear to receive both the praise and compassion of our author as a “strong,” “independent” individual who is at the same time the victim of systemic poverty and patriarchal privilege. Very few contemporary critics would openly question the explicit feminism of Pardo Bazán’s novel, or of her literary corpus at large. On y representaciones del discurso médico-social y cultural sobre la mujer escritora en el siglo XIX, eds. Pura Fernández and Marie Linda Ortega. Madrid: CSIC, 2008: 137–150. 5  Tinajero, Araceli. El lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. 6  García Negro, “Pardo Bazán: feminismo, espírito de clase, moralismo.” La Tribuna: Cadernos de estudo da Casa Museo Emilia Pardo Bazán 2 (2016): 201–218 (pub. original 1989, Festa da Palabra Silenciada). 7  García Suárez, “Mujer, lectura y educación en la obra de Emilia Pardo Bazán.” Hispanic Research Journal 18.6 (2017): 466–478. 8  de Gabriel, “Emilia Pardo Bazán, las mujeres y la educación. El Congreso Pedagógico (1892) y la Cátedra de Literatura (1916).” Historia y Memoria de la Educación 8 (2018): 489–525. 9  Pardo Bazán, La tribuna. Madrid: Cátedra, 2016. 10  Tsuchiya, “Desvío y desviación”: 137. See also: Botrel, “La novela por entregas: unidad de creación y de consumo.” In Creación y público en la literatura española, eds. Jean-François Botrel and Serge Salaün. Madrid: Castalia, 1974: 111–155; Martínez Martín, Lectura y lectores en el Madrid del siglo XIX. Madrid: CSIC, 1991: 58; Simón Palmer, “La mujer lectora”. In Historia de la edición y de la lectura en España, eds. Víctor Infantes, François López et al. Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, 2003: 745. 11  García Negro, “Pardo Bazán”: 201–218.

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the other hand, all or nearly all of the papers cited so far identify the real tension that seems to exist between Pardo Bazán’s purportedly “egalitarian” feminist project, on the one hand, and her generally conservative and elitist worldview as a member of the nineteenth-century high aristocracy sympathetic to catholic traditionalism and carlismo. Or, as María Pilar García Negro would put it: “é Pardo Bazán o caso paradigmático da contradicíon que supón encaixar un pensamento e actitude pretensamente feministas no recipiente dunha ideoloxía conservadora, católica e fondamente clasista como a que a autora exibe na súa vida pública e na súa amplia obra” [Pardo Bazán is the paradigmatic case of the contradiction that is implied when one fits a supposedly feminist attitude and a form of thinking in the vessel of an unequivocally conservative, catholic, and classist ideology, such as the author exhibits both in her public life and in her vast work] (García Negro 2016: 201).12 Akiko Tsuchiya likewise recalls the works of Sánchez Reboredo (1979),13 Bieder (1998),14 and Mary S. Vásquez (1990),15 who collectively stressed the ways in which La Tribuna should be seen as a fundamentally duplicitous work of art, serving, on the one hand, as feminist manifesto, and, on the other, as a rather denigrating satire of the democratic, socialist, or generally “left-wing” political projects of the 1860s and 1870s. But if the two sides of the equation (“feminism,” on the one hand, “conservatism-elitism,” on the other) have tended to be seen as discursive-­ideological demarcations that are in theory “opposed” to one another (as if our sole role as readers and cultural scholars were reduced to that of “deciding,” referendum-style, whether or not we “like” Pardo Bazán’s novel, whether or not we can “forgive” her for her evident elitism or for her perhaps outmoded understanding of feminism), my intention here is to explore the ways in which these two  García Negro, “Pardo Bazán”: 201.  Sánchez Reboredo, “Emilia Pardo Bazán y la realidad obrera. Notas sobre La Tribuna.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 351 (1979): 567–580. 14  Bieder, “Emilia Pardo Bazán y la emergencia del discurso feminista”. In Breve historia feminista de la literatura española (en lengua castellana). V. La literatura escrita por mujeres, desde el siglo XIX hasta la actualidad, eds. Díaz-Diocaretze and Iris Zavala. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1998: 75–110. 15  Vásquez, “Class, Gender, and Parody in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La Tribuna.” In Estudios en homenaje a Enrique Ruiz-Fornells, eds. Fernández Jiménez and Eric Labrador. Pennsylvania: ALDEEUU, 1990: 679–687. 12 13

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in-theory “opposed” ideological forces seem to complement one another within a single, perfectly coherent bio-political and pedagogical project, not only a case of what various socialists and socialist feminists at the end of the nineteenth century already began to call “bourgeois” feminism (Zetkin 1896),16 or, more broadly, a feminism of, by, and for the economic and political elite, but that, in the case of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Spain, we can situate squarely within the purview of a unique conservative ideology called National Catholicism. We will see, over the course of this chapter, that Pardo Bazán’s feminism, while unquestionably modern, progressive, and rooted in the most purportedly “advanced” scientific discourse of the day (and indeed, quite “liberal” in its own right),17 is at the same time inseparable from an almost cosmically anti-egalitarian, hygienist, and xenophobic ideology, a kind of naturalist and catholic-nationalist mysticism that, in the name of protecting Spanish women and the Spanish population at large from the “seduction” or “disease” of revolutionary populism (seen simultaneously as both libidinal “excess” and foreign threat), offers its own peculiar set of political and biopolitical “remedies.”18

16  Zetkin, “Sólo con la mujer proletaria triunfará el socialism.” Speech given at the Gotha Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, 16 October, 1896. In Zetkin, La cuestión femenina y la lucha contra el reformismo. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1976. https://www. marxists.org/espanol/zetkin/1896/0001.htm 17  For more on the status of Pardo Bazán as an indisputably progressive and modern thinker, one can consult the work of her most recent biographer, Isabel Burdiel. See, for example, a recent interview with Burdiel in the Newspaper ABC: Burdiel, “Isabel Burdiel: ‘Un rasgo fundamental de Emilia Pardo Bazán fue su sentido del humor.’” ABC 26 March, 2019. Accessed 1 September, 2019. https://www.abc.es/cultura/cultural/abci-isabel-­ burdiel-­r asgo-fundamental-emilia-pardo-bazan-sentido-humor-201903260210_ noticia.html 18  As Giorgio Agamben has long reminded us, the etymological root of “nationhood” is linked quintessentially to the concept of birth/nascere. See: Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016: 128.

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1   Intentions Matter: The “Moral Geographies” (and Economies)19 of La Tribuna Pardo Bazán’s intention (as stated explicitly in the prologue to La Tribuna) was not, as some scholars have suggested, to create a work of mere satire. It was, rather, and as has been pointed out by Geraldine Scanlon (1990)20 and María Pilar García Negro (2016),21 intended as a fundamentally “pedagogical” text (docente). Neither was the novel meant to inhabit the so-­ called picturesque idealism of costumbrista authors and folklorists such as Fernán Caballero, or for that matter, the so-called humanist socialism of Eugène Sue. It was, on the contrary, meant to arise from “[el] espectáculo mismo de las cosas” [the very spectacle of things], and from the desire to render “un señalado servicio a la patria” [a necessary political service to the fatherland].22 It was meant, in short, to paint a scientific and realistic portrait of the “Spanish people” to whom in part she addresses herself, not according to the “crude naturalism” of which she was often accused as a writer (and of which she herself accuses authors like Zola and Goncourt), but with the same frank honesty she sees as the natural attribute and virtue of all Spaniards. Indeed, to Pardo Bazán, the Spanish people were quite “fortunate” to not yet resemble Zola’s own supposedly barbarous or disheveled countrymen.23 Pardo Bazán’s self-described “patriotic” duty is not therefore to write a mere satire, or paint as dirty, “miserable,” barbarous, or obscene those she pretends to represent (in the style of the jacobin or so-called socialist and social-hygienist authors). On the contrary: she needs to convince her readers, through the careful observation of so-­ called positive facts, of the ways in which the Spanish people are effectively being “duped” by foreign political propaganda and seduced by specifically 19  I use the term “moral economy” slightly differently from how it would be first employed by E.P Thompson in his famous analysis of eighteenth-century bread riots and commoners’ ethical demands as “crowd” in times of scarcity (1971). Here, by contrast, I seek to identify and critique the view on political economy conditioned by the affective and moral concerns of a nineteenth-century catholic aristocrat, that is, her personal moral views of working people’s economic and political concerns. See Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past and Present 50 (February, 1971): 76–136. 20  Scanlon, “Class and Gender”: 137. 21  García Negro, “Pardo Bazán”: 201. 22  Pardo Bazán, “Prologue.” In Pardo Bazán, La tribuna: 58. 23  “(…) afortunadamente (el pueblo español) no se parece todavía, en buena hora lo digamos, al del lado de allá” [fortunately, (the Spanish people) do not yet resemble, thankfully, that which lives on that side (of the Pyrynees)]. Pardo Bazán, La tribuna: 57.

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French political customs, to the point that Spaniards themselves begin to forget their own undeniable virtues: “Porque no necesitaré agrupar sucesos, ni violentar consecuencias, ni desviarme de la realidad concreta y positiva, para tropezar con pruebas de que es absurdo que un pueblo cifre sus esperanzas de redención y ventura en formas de gobierno que desconoce, y a las cuales por lo mismo atribuye prodigiosas virtudes y maravillosos efectos” [For I need not pile on the evidence, nor dispute what would seem to follow, nor need I drift from the concrete and positive reality around me to determine that it is absurd to assume that a people should peg their hopes for redemption to modes of government of which they are wholly ignorant, and to which they nevertheless attribute prodigious virtues and marvelous effects] (Pardo Bazán 2016: 58).24 It is not too difficult to guess to which “forms of government” our author is here referring (well-known by the French but not by Spaniards). This is the crux of what Pardo herself terms a project of anti-republican “moral geography” (similar, she hopes, to that of the catholic traditionalist author José María de Pereda), which is in itself a cartographic partition of the world into what she perceives to be “moral” and “immoral” zones, a nineteenth-century pre-figuration, under the well-known binary “civilization”/“barbarism,” of the conservative myth of “clash of civilizations.” Before beginning our analysis, we will summarize the novel for those who may not know it or may not remember. Amparo is a young working-­ class woman, daughter of a sweet-peddling street vendor (barquillero), who as a child receives rudimentary lessons in reading and writing, and who at a given moment stops collaborating in the family business to earn her own wage in the cigar-factory of Marineda (fictional industrial city on the Bay of Biscay, evidently modeled on A Coruña). Given her command of the written word, Amparo is soon enough appointed as the factory’s official public press-reader.25 From her dais in the cigar factory, Amparo  Pardo Bazán, La tribuna: 58.  As we know, reading press out-loud, whether in factory settings or in any number of public places, was quite habitual in Pardo Bazán’s time, and throughout much of the Spanish-­ speaking world, among many different social classes. Those who wish to know more may consult the work of Araceli Tinajero (El lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), who aptly demonstrates that this kind of public reading was often seen as an opportunity for political proselytism both in Spain and in revolutionary Cuba, and among both Spanish and Cuban immigrants; it was an activity that was sometimes encouraged by factory owners and local authorities, but also quite often censored, depending on the political inflection of the reading material. For more information on proletarian liter24 25

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shall become a veritable “tribune” of the people, a charismatic orator who shares with her co-workers the apostolic dictates of various republican and socialist propagandists (namely, political devotees of Proudhon and of his principal Spanish translator, the future president of the First Spanish Republic, Francisco Pi y Margall). At the same time, Amparo becomes enamored of a young bourgeois lieutenant, Baltasar, who veritably sweeps her off her feet, taking her, among other places, to the theater: a cultural space which, for someone on her salary, would have been almost impossible to go to regularly on her own. In the theater, Amparo is likewise swept up by melodramatic plays of the romantic tradition,26 whom the proper young ladies of Baltasar’s middle-­class entourage can only consider “cursis y populacheras” [corny and vulgar].27 During such excursions, Amparo seemingly lets herself be seduced by the young irresponsible dandy, who, almost predictably, leaves her with child and soon thereafter abandons her in pursuit of a more economically convenient marriage. The birth of Amparo and Baltasar’s illegitimate child coincides with the proclamation of the First Republic, an event which the politically minded Amparo once looked forward to with glee, but which instead finds her pregnant, unemployed, and without recourse. “Amparo” (whose name in Spanish quite literally means shelter, protection, care) has now quite literally become a des-Amparada, that is, poor and almost utterly helpless, but for the care of her family. Whereas before we saw a fiercely independent young woman in pursuit of both her ary and pedagogical cultures in Spain, one should consult the works of Jean-Louis Guereña: Guereña, “Associations culturelles pour ouvriers et artisans à Madrid (1847–1872).” In Culture et Société en Espagne et en Amérique latine au XIXe siècle. Lille: Université de Lille III, Centre d’études ibériques et ibéro-americains de XIXe siècle, 1980: 77–91; Guereña, “Analfabetismo y alfabetización en España 1835–1860.” Revista de educación 288 (1989) (a): 185–236; Guereña, “Demande populaire déducation et réforme sociale.” Clases populares, cultura, educación: Siglos XIX y XX. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1989 (b): 111–141; Guereña, “L’éducation populaire en Espagne (deuxième moitié de XIXe siècle—premier tiers du XXe).” In Histoire de l’Éducation Populaire, 1815–1945: Perspectives françaises et internationales, eds. Christen y Besse. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2017: 63–77. 26  Quite possibly themselves works of republican propaganda. See Sales de Bohigas, “Sociedades de seguros contra las quintas (1865–1868).” In La Revolución de 1868: Historia, pensamiento, literatura, eds. Clara E. Lida and Iris M. Zavala. New York, 1970: 109–125; Salgues, “Las quintas y el teatro: una farsa macabra.” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 40.1 (2010): 191–210; de la Fuente Monge, “El teatro republicano de La Gloriosa.” Ayer 72 (2008): 83–119. 27  Pardo Bazán, La tribuna: 257.

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political ambitions and her personal economic emancipation, she has now lost her salary, and is almost exclusively devoted to the rearing of her new child. Outside the home of the young mother, joyous cries of “Long live the Federal Republic!” serve as too bittersweet a reminder of her own interrupted life, contrasting sharply and almost grotesquely with the somber interior of the protagonist’s home. Inside, the fragile lives of the newborn and the unprotected mother; outside, the voices of any number of supposedly “naïve” women too much like Amparo herself, who flock, as if “enchanted,” to the revolutionary flame. Like so many nineteenth-century novels and feuilletons that wrap up social polemic in the guise of sentimental tales of family strife, La Tribuna can be read as a novela de desclasamiento (García Negro 2016: 212)28 or, if one prefers, as a kind of inverted bildungsroman, in the sense that the final outcome of Amparo’s sentimental education is neither redemptive nor optimistic, but rather, unequivocally tragic. It is the story of a perspicacious and talented young “waif” (pícara), who gradually becomes an independent and responsible wage-earner, but whose life is irremediably interrupted by her seduction. On the one hand, as has already been noted by Sánchez Reboredo, we note the caricaturesque gaze of the author with respect to male working-class characters such as Chinto or Amparo’s father: personifications of a working-class masculinity, sometimes stereotyped as ignorant, servile, or naïvely well-intentioned, but which, quite differently from Amparo and the rest of the female working-class characters, does not yet willingly inscribe itself in the disciplinarian space of the factory (Pardo Bazán thus rightfully points out the uniquely feminine makeup of much of the nineteenth-century industrial proletariat). On the other hand, one can read the factory as a properly disciplinarian space which, according to the particular feminist view of the author, also has the potential of both “emancipating” women workers from the “patria potestad” [male tutelage] and imbuing them with a moral and social education of their own (Pardo Bazán 2016: 95).29 Pardo Bazán seems to maintain, both in this novel and in later feminist essays such as “El trabajo de la mujer” (1915), an understanding of salaried labor as a kind of “emancipatory machine” for those woman laborers who would otherwise have to “depend” on the wages of male family members. Somewhat distant, in this sense, from the explicitly socialist  García Negro, “Pardo Bazán”: 212.  Pardo Bazán, La tribuna: 95.

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feminisms of her day—outlined, for example, by the likes of Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxembourg, in Germany, or utopian socialists of the Fourierist tradition such as María Josefa Zapata and Margarita Pérez de Celis in Spain (more than twenty years prior to the publication of La Tribuna)— and very distant from both Simone de Beauvoir and the militantly anti-­ capitalist feminism of contemporary gender theorists such as Silvia Federicci or Angela Davis, Pardo Bazán would seem to “put her money” on salaried labor as that which in itself should be able to free women from their oiko-nomic dependence on men. Which is to say, liberate them from their oppressive role as (re)producers confined to the domestic space, in order to transmute them into producers and consumers all their own (Tsuchiya 2008).30 This potential economic/oiko-nomic emancipation of the individual through her work is precisely that which becomes “interrupted” by the seductive advances of the dandy (who becomes a metonymic substitute for an entire social class, the Galician petty-bourgeoisie, whom Pardo Bazán, an aristocrat, considered to be both idle and stupid). But this “interruption” of the consummation of Amparo’s “free” productive life both is and is not a catastrophe of her own making; it is just as much her own fault as a consequence of the mad ideas and passions she “contracts” from both the newspapers she reads and from the “pop” melodramas she attends with her lover. Tales from the now almost passé romantic dramaturgical tradition, more than a few about forbidden or otherwise improbable love affairs between members of different social classes (first exemplified, in nineteenth-century Spain, through the popular melodramatic episodic novels of the republican statesman, Ayguals de Izco), become the “B-side” of the joint promises of social ascension, federalist republicanism, and proudhonian iconoclastic socialism which began to take root among the growing urban proletariat during the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1868 and throughout the Democratic Sexennium of 1868–1874 (Checa Godoy 2006). It is through this cultural and political lens that we must read and closely analyze the following passage: Durante la deshecha borrasca de ideas políticas que se alzó de pronto [all emphases are my own], observose que el campo y las ciudades situadas tierra adentro se inclinaron a la tradición monárquica, mientras las poblaciones fabriles y comerciales, y los puertos de mar, aclamaron la república. En la 30  Tsuchiya, “Deseo y desviación sexual en la nueva sociedad de consumo: la lectura femenina en La Tribuna de Emilia Pardo Bazán,” 2008.

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costa cantábrica, el Malecón y Marineda se distinguieron por la abundancia de comités, juntas, clubs, proclamas, periódicos y manifestaciones. Y es de notar que desde el primer instante la forma republicana invocada fue la federal. Nada, la unitaria no servía: tan sólo la federal brindaba al pueblo la beatitud perfecta. ¿Y por qué así? ¡Vaya a saber! Un escritor ingenioso dijo más adelante que la república federal no se le hubiera ocurrido a nadie para España si Proudhon no escribe un libro sobre el principio federativo y si Pi [Francisco Pi y Margall] no le traduce y le comenta. Sea como sea, y valga la explicación lo que valiere, es evidente que el federalismo se improvisó allí y doquiera en menos que canta un gallo. La Fábrica de Tabacos de Marineda fue centro simpatizador (como ahora se dice) para la federal. De la colectividad fabril nació la confraternidad política; a las cigarreras se les abrió el horizonte republicano de varias maneras: por medio de la propaganda oral, a la sazón tan activa, y también, muy principalmente, de los periódicos que pululaban. Hubo en cada taller una o dos lectoras; les abonaban sus compañeras el tiempo perdido, y adelante. Amparo fue de las más apreciadas, por el sentido que daba a la lectura; tenía ya adquirido hábito de leer, habiéndolo practicado en la barbería tantas veces. Su lengua era suelta, incansable su laringe, robusto su acento. Declamaba, más bien que leía, con fuego y expresión, subrayando los pasajes que merecían subrayarse, realzando las palabras de letra bastardilla [!!], añadiendo la mímica necesaria cuando lo requería el caso (…) [During the relentless tempest of political ideas that soon made itself manifest in those days (all emphases are my own), one soon observed that the countryside and the in-­land cities became inclined toward the monarchist tradition, while the factory towns and commercial centers, together with the seaports, came to hail the republic. On the Cantabrian coast, El Malecón and Marineda distinguished themselves for the abundance of committees, juntas, proclamations, newspapers, and demonstrations. And it is notable that from the very first instant, the form of republicanism that was invoked was the federalist variety. No sir, the unitary kind didn’t get the job done: only la federal offered to the people their perfect beatitude. And why, one could ask? How should I know! A clever author would say, years later, that the federal republic wouldn’t have occurred to anyone as a solution for Spain if it wasn’t for Proudhon having written a certain book about federative principle, and if Francisco Pi y Margall hadn’t deigned to translate and comment on it. Whatever the case, and whichever explanation you deem correct, it is evident that federalism soon improvised itself into being hither and thither in no-time at all. The Tobacco Factory of Marineda was a center of sympathy (as one would say nowadays) for la federal. From the workers’ collectivity was born the political confraternity; the republican horizon opened itself before the working women in several ways: by way of oral propaganda, then

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very much in vogue, and also by way of the newspapers that buzzed about everywhere. There were in every factory and workshop, one or two readers; their comrades would compensate them for the lost time, and there you have it. Amparo was one of the most revered, for the sensibility with which she imbued her readings; she had already acquired the habit of reading, having practiced at the barber’s time and time again. Her tongue was loose, her larynx untiring, her accent, robust. She declaimed, more than she read, with fire and expressiveness, underlining those passages that deserved to be underlined, highlighting the phrases in italics, and adding the necessary mimicry, when the case required it (…)]. (Pardo Bazán 2016: 104–106)31

In the original Spanish, Pardo Bazán employs the term “letra bastardilla,” literally, italics, but, given the plot and themes of the book, and the existence of an equally correct alternative, cursiva, it is more than likely that Pardo Bazán picked the term with an explicit and bitingly sarcastic double meaning in mind: in a word, “bastard” letters. Let us, now, resume our reading: (…) y comenzando con lentitud y misterio, y en voz contenida, los párrafos importantes, para subir la ansiedad al grado eminente y arrancar involuntarios estremecimientos de entusiasmo al auditorio, cuando adoptaba entonación más rápida y vibrante a cada paso. Su alma impresionable, combustible, móvil y superficial, se teñía fácilmente del color del periódico que andaba en sus manos, y lo reflejaba con viveza y fidelidad extraordinarias. Nadie más a propósito para un oficio que requiere gran fogosidad, pero externa; caudal de energía incesantemente renovado y disponible para gastarlo en exclamaciones, en escenas de indignación y de fanática esperanza. La figura de la muchacha, el brillo de sus ojos, las inflexiones cálidas y pastosas de su timbrada voz de contralto, contribuían al sorprendente efecto de la lectura. Al comunicar la chispa eléctrica, Amparo se electrizaba también. Era a la vez sujeto agente y paciente (…) [She would begin slowly and with an air of mystery, and in a subdued voice, reading the important paragraphs, all the better to raise the level of expectation to its climax and extract involuntary raptures of enthusiasm from the auditorium, adopting a more vibrant and rapid intonation with every passing step. Her impressionable soul, combustible, moveable and superficial, became dyed with the color of whatever newspaper happened to be in her reach, mirroring it vividly and with extraordinary fidelity. There was no one better suited for a profession that requires such fire, but nevertheless, external; a source of energy incessantly renewed and  Pardo Bazán, La tribuna: Chapter IX, “La Gloriosa”: 104–106.

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made available in order to waste it in exclamations, scenes of the utmost indignation and fanatical hope. The figure of the young lady, the brightness of her eyes, the warm and at the same time tacky inflexions of her tempered contralto, all contributed to the astonishing effect of the reading. Sharing her electric spark with her comrades, Amparo became electrified as well. She was, at the same time, both subject and agent, as well as patient (…)]. (Pardo Bazán 2016: 104–106)32

The projects of collective emancipation proposed by the democratic and labor movements of the 1860s and 1870s are here described by our author according to the typically naturalist symbolism of the nineteenth century, here, in a clearly conservative appropriation: sometimes, appearing as electrical “storm” or dangerous “tempest,” they are also described as a kind of fever, will-dulling passion, stupefying agent, or near-orgasmic electro-chemical transfiguration of Amparo’s body, processes of which Amparo shall be, fulfilling the vicious drug-like cycle, both “agent” and “patient,” that is, willing “agent” as well as unwitting “victim” of an illness. As a kind of vaccine, lightning rod, or prophylactic measure against such storms, passions, alterations of the body, and spontaneous combustions of the soul, Pardo Bazán proposes her own remedy and understanding of working-class female economic emancipation: a feminist remedy, to be sure, but a fundamentally anti-democratic and almost unrepentantly moralistic one (surprising given the author’s explicit intention not to moralize or denigrate, and to represent the “natural” facts of women laborers’ reality in the most allegedly objective and dispassionate way). Pardo Bazán would seem to practice here a kind of anti-costumbrismo, positing a radical separation between, on the one hand, what she considers to be the traditions, customs, and habits of “the Spanish people” in general (taken as an abstract and “imagined” whole),33 and, on the other, the abandonment of such customs by the Spanish people themselves in times of revolution (read as a kind of tempestuous “state of exception” and interruption of the “proper” political, religious, and sentimental life of the nation).34 In effect, Pardo Bazán’s condemnation of the democratic and socialist imaginaries of her day, articulated in terms sympathetic to the struggle against  Pardo Bazán, La tribuna: Chapter IX, “La Gloriosa:” 104–106.  Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 2006. 34  “Spain,” according to Pardo Bazán’s own moral compass, is and should remain the locus amoenus to Zola’s French locus horribilis. 32 33

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atheism and populist “seduction” (Vialette 2018),35 becomes inextricably linked to the simultaneously aristocratic, feminist, and catholic struggle against extramarital sexual relationships between people of different social classes out of wedlock. The critique of what we today would call Baltasar’s male and class privilege as seducer becomes inseparable from a quasi-­ racialist and segregationist social imaginary in which not only Baltasar’s and Amparo’s illicit affair but demo-socialism itself become emblematic of an unwanted “confusión de clases,” that is, erosion of the sacred social distinctions of the idealized ancien régime (a quasi-racial form of classism already present in naturalist novels such as Los pazos de Ulloa and La madre naturaleza). The end result is a kind of moral prescription directed at that part of the female proletariat which through militant reading and radically egalitarian imaginaries could come to desire the occupation of cultural and political spaces that would have appeared at the time to be the monopoly of the propertied classes. The story of romantic love between Amparo and Baltasar is thus read in terms of a double transgression: on the one hand, the obvious transgression of the dandy against the working-class woman whom he seduces and abandons (feminist denunciation of male, and to some extent, class-­ privilege, that a modern-day sympathizer of the #MeToo movement could very rightly feel at home with, and which is given its own particular catholic-­biopolitical remedy in the 1896 sequel to La tribuna, Memorias de un solterón, by way of Baltasar’s reluctant but ultimately moral decision to marry Amparo at the behest of their now-grown son); on the other hand, the supposed transgressions of Amparo herself, in effect, letting herself be led-on, as it were, by fantasies of social ascension, democracy, and collective emancipation through workers’ association. Her search for affective and romantic partnerships, both with Baltasar himself and the bearded bourgeois dandies of the republican committees she begins to attend, leads, very much against her will, to her virtual ruin: the “bastard” little letters that express the foundational ideals of socialism and the republican nation are only capable of producing, in the eye of the narrator, children who are bastards, frustrating the creation of Pardo Bazán’s own utopian vision of the fatherland and of women who “free” themselves through wage-work (in other words, a relative economic freedom that entails a good deal of exploitation and enslavement by other means). 35  Vialette, Intellectual Philanthropy and the Seduction of the Masses. West Lafayette, IA: Purdue University Press, 2018.

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In this sense, the moral imperative Pardo Bazán seems to prescribe to a potential working-class woman reader becomes clear: “don’t aspire to an ideal of political and social equality that simply isn’t your own, concentrate on your work, on your individual emancipation as a woman and as a worker, and don’t ask for trouble by falling for indolent dandies (unless you plan to get married). Read, by all means, be a reader. Emancipate yourself through your work and through your reading. But be careful with what you read: don’t let yourself be carried away.” Amparo’s tragic error becomes, thus, no more and no less than falling in love: with her free time, with Baltasar, with the newspapers she reads, and, finally, with the Federalist Republic itself.

2   Fear of the Illiterate Workers or Fear of What the Workers Could Be Reading? In a recent study, Narciso de Gabriel has commented on the ways in which Pardo Bazán would come to be a staunch advocate for women’s rights in the realm of education, in particular, through her counterarguments to liberals of the so-called krausista school.36 Professor de Gabriel cites, thus, the contributions of Pardo Bazán at the Congreso Pedagógico Hispano-­ Portugués-­Americano of 1892, conference in which the novelist would argue against the widely held belief among purportedly “liberal” and even “republican” men that education was something to be seen as having fundamentally different functions between the sexes, namely, as something that naturally contributed to man’s “perfection” but to women’s supposed “ruin”: El error de afirmar que el papel que a la mujer corresponde en las funciones reproductivas de la especie, determina y limita las restantes funciones de su actividad humana, quitando a su destino toda significación individual, y no dejándole sino la que puede tener relativamente al destino del varón. Es decir, que el eje de la vida femenina para los que así piensan (y son innumerables, cumple a mi lealtad reconocerlo), no es la dignidad y felicidad propia, sino la ajena, la del esposo e hijos, y si no hay hijos ni esposo, la del 36  For a more detailed discussion of Pardo Bazán’s amicable personal and professional relationships with prominent intellectuals of the krausista school, including Laureano Calderón, Augusto González Linares, and later, Francisco Giner de los Ríos, one may consult the work of Darío Villanueva, editor of Pardo Bazáns’ collected works, and who recently gave an interview in El Cultural (2021).

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padre o del hermano, y cuando estos faltaren, la de la entidad abstracta género masculino [The error of affirming that women are obliged to fulfill the reproductive functions of the species determines and limits the remaining functions of her human activity, precluding any significance as an individual from her destiny and, moreover, leaving her a destiny that is only significant relative to his own. This is to say that the key of feminine life, for those who think in this manner (and they are, I must accede, without number), is not her own dignity or happiness, but rather that of others, that of her husband and children, and, in their absence, of the abstract entity of masculine gender]. (de Gabriel 2018: 494)37

But if in this instance women’s education comes to signify a corollary to economic and moral emancipation through wage-work, that is, a weapon with which to combat their constant subjection to the domestic space and to reproductive work (or in modern parlance, a weapon for their personal “empowerment”), we would do well to compare this rather “redemptive” view of a woman’s right to an education with the “lessons” of her novel from ten years prior. In other words, juxtapose this rather celebratory treatment of women’s education as inalienable right to what would appear to be her prejudice against the real pedagogical practices of demo-socialist proletarian culture, and to her own narrow view of what women’s education should fundamentally be. Amparo’s problem, in effect, wasn’t that she was a self-educated reader, but rather what she was reading, and both with whom and in what way she happened to be reading it. Amparo is someone who comes to take charge of her own education and, at the same time, presume of her abilities to use the literary register of the upper classes (all the more problematic given of course that the fictional city of Marineda was based on A Coruña, a Galician city whose upper classes have always maintained a very special relationship with the vernacular of the state bureaucracy: Spanish). This “Tribune of the People,” organic intellectual of the democratic labor movement in the Gramscian sense of the word (Gramsci 2000), is indeed sometimes the very image of both the modern and specifically socialist “new woman.” She is, at the same time, a kind of prototype of the “charismatic orator”

37  “Relaciones y diferencias entre la educación de la mujer y la del hombre.” Nuevo Teatro Crítico 22 (1892): 20–21, cited in de Gabriel, “Emilia Pardo Bazán, las mujeres y la educación”: 494.

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and of the political representative38; a tribune as someone which, similarly to the ancient representatives of the Roman republic who bore this title, could speak both as a member of the body politic and at the same time “to” and “for” the people, who projects to them the words of fellow revolutionaries whom she reads aloud, but (according to the narrator) scarcely understands, thus performing a kind of “code-switching” between government vernacular and local spoken form, and deploying the former as a tool for the creation of symbolic capital and prestige.39 Amparo, who reads the words of these republican and socialist propagandists in standardized Spanish (i.e., the language of the state and of dominant metropolitan cultural markets, and not necessarily that of the locality), and whose character was based upon real A Coruña factory workers whom Pardo Bazán had the pleasure to meet during her anthropological studies prior to the publication of the novel (Varela Jácome 2016: 49),40 is thus able to employ the print vernacular in an altogether contradictory fashion. If on the one hand, she uses this prestigious knowledge as a political tool for collective egalitarian political struggle, on the other hand, she uses it as a means to present herself as “worthy of admiration” and even “superior” to her largely illiterate and Galician-speaking coworkers, distinguishing herself from them and at the same time becoming “able to impress” Baltasar and his middle-­class entourage with her eloquence and command of the written word (Fig. 1). This perceived vanity and air of superiority with regard to her comrades (who, Pardo Bazán wisely points out, may or may not have shared her political views) reveal a brilliant reflection on the part of the author on the ways in which reading and writing themselves would seem to be becoming marks of sociocultural and at the same time hierarchical “meritocratic” distinction at the heart of otherwise explicitly egalitarian movements. These were liberal and republican political cultures which, according to Martínez Martín (2005), were beginning to conceive of literacy as either the right and/or obligation of all citizens, often regardless of their social 38  This caricaturesque or exaggerated image of the “demagogue” or “grand orator” is quite common among both the left-wing satirical imaginaries and the anti-republican and anti-socialist conservative satirical imaginaries of the 1870s. It is of particular relevance when the image in question is that of a woman. See Fig. 1, as well as Gay L. Gullickson’s lucid book: Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune. Cornell University, 1996: 115. 39  Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. G. Richardson. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986: 241–258. 40  Varela Jácome, Introduction to La tribuna. Madrid: Cátedra, 2016: 49.

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Fig. 1  Anonymous French political cartoon, circa 1871, of a female communarde “amazon” orator (Anonymous, “La Grrrrande Orateuse du Grrrrande Club d’Amazones de la Commune.” Paris Sous la Commune. Dépôt central de l’imagerie Populaire. Paris, Moronval Impremeur, 1871. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris. https://www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/musee-­carnavalet/oeuvres/la-­grrrrande-­orateuse-­du-­grrrrand-­club-­des-­amazones-­de-­la-­commune)

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class or gender (a “right” which the liberal governments of the nineteenth century recognized, by the way, long before the right to vote, both in the case of men and women).41 If it is true, then, that within the political cultures of liberalism, republicanism, and socialism, literacy was being seen more and more as a civil right or obligation, this did not stop literacy itself from being seen by “egalitarian” democrats and socialists as something that could positively distinguish one person from another in both a socioeconomic and moral-intellectual sense. Pardo Bazán, in spite of her own prejudices as a conservative aristocrat, rightly though perhaps unwittingly reveals the tension that underpins any and all political projects, regardless of how democratic and egalitarian they purport to be, when the destiny of the imagined republic of the future becomes pegged to the fulfillment of a unitary cultural and linguistic program. This becomes even more alarming when prestige and cultural capital tend to be monopolized by those who use the literary or otherwise prestigious standardized variant of the national vernacular: a distinct linguistic ideology that gives preference to the language of the technocracy, and to so-called oratory “eloquence.”42 The egalitarian dreams of emancipation and social mobility through education thus become stranded on the shores of the liberal nation-state’s official cultural program; they are, in effect, “orphaned,” rendered fatherless and motherless (des-­Amparados) before the coming of the new technocracies, and before the individual desire for social ascension (in other words, the desire to become, oneself, like a technocrat, using prestigious knowledge to “rise” above the throng). The myth-making machine that joins the idea of “emancipation” to the idea of “merit,” in other words, to the goal of specifically individual emancipation, empowerment, and distinction, is also a dream-making machine43 of almost mickey-mousian proportions, which at the end of the nineteenth century is already beginning to churn out something close to what today we may recognize as the myth of “The American Dream” (and 41  See my own doctoral thesis: La literatura y sus pueblos: demopoéticas de la España Liberal (1834–1854). 42  The term “linguistic” ideology is developed at length by Del Valle and Streetham. See del Valle and Streetham, La batalla del idioma. La intelectualidad hispánica ante la lengua. Madrid, Frankfurt: Iberoamericana and Vervuert, 2004. 43  The notion that there are different “myths” and “mythologies” that guide our interpretation of literacy’s role in society belongs to the critical sociolinguist, James Paul Gee. See Gee, “The literacy myth and the history of literacy.” Social Linguistics and Literacies. New York: Routledge, 2008: 50–67.

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which is simultaneously taking form at the other side of the Atlantic through the pseudo-Dickensian dime-store novels and rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger). Pardo Bazán’s novel, a contratempo of the myths which we tend to maintain from a rather naïve optimistic and whiggish liberalism, serves as a critical reflection on how both literacy and certain kinds of literature can become modes by which to discriminate against people who aren’t familiar with prestigious cultural codes. But even as she would seem to condemn some forms of symbolic violence (purported superiority of women workers who could read over those who could not, of those who believed in the republican “dream” over those who did not, etc.), Pardo Bazán perpetuates a different and the same time more perverse kind of symbolic violence which unquestionably reveals the relative privileges and prejudices from which she herself writes. If she condemns Amparo for her self-proclaimed sense of superiority (whether because of her political ideals, her ability to read, or because she is going out with a middle-class lieutenant), our novelist would also seem to deny any possibility for emancipation which could be envisioned collectively through a sharing of a political program to which she, as an author, is so fundamentally opposed.

3   “Seduced” by Democracy: Catholic Paternalism and the Imagination of the Activist as Dis-emancipated Subject In this regard, it can be said that we largely disagree with those critics who have tended to idealize and/or decontextualize Pardo Bazán’s particular brand of feminism, saying, for example, that it is quite “advanced” for the time, or that her implicit calls for a kind of “inter-class” alliance of women set her apart from the generally male gaze of some of her equally privileged contemporaries.44 We consider ourselves profoundly indebted, in this regard, to scholars such as María Pilar García Negro, who have insisted in the ways in which Pardo Bazán’s feminism is, in many ways, inseparable from her fundamentally conservative and catholic political ideology and theology. We would also disagree with the notion that it would be somehow “unjust” to judge the Countess of Pardo Bazán for her explicitly classist politics given purely the relatively “early” or inopportune time at  See Scanlon, “Class and Gender.”

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which she happened to be writing: it has been suggested, for example, that there simply were “no alternatives” to Pardo Bazán’s political vision within the fledgling Spanish feminist “movement,” and that Pardo Bazán represents a kind of “singular” and/or “singularly progressive” voice in the otherwise uncritical machista “wasteland” of Restoration Spain: “There seems, however, to be little point in rapping [Pardo Bazán] over the knuckles for her failure to conform to what is regarded as ‘correct’ political analysis: her treatment of class issues and radical politics must be understood in relation to the ideological and political possibilities of the early 1880s rather than the 1980s” (Scanlon 1990: 137).45 Regardless of whether the political “possibilities” of an era of unprecedented conservative and anti-egalitarian reaction like the 1980s were necessarily greater than those of one hundred years earlier, it is important to recognize what gets lost in the mix upon making such generalizations, of implying, namely, that there were simply no “alternative feminisms” to the kind put forward by our author in her time. In a word, one would have to almost willingly invisibilize an entire set of cultural practices and political cultures that begin to proliferate in the Spanish state precisely in the decades leading up to the proclamation of the First Republic in 1873, and an entire array of explicitly class-oriented or politically egalitarian feminisms that were contemporaneous or even antecedent to Pardo Bazán’s literary career. Of which we can mention the following. In the first place, the feminist publications of Margarita Pérez de Celis and María Josefa Zapata (herself an impoverished aristocrat who, renouncing her social standing and suffering economic need, actually worked in a tobacco factory), both devotees of the utopian socialist tradition of Charles Fourier,46 and who would collaborate actively with an array of liberal, republican, and utopian socialist thinkers both in favor of and opposed to  Scanlon, “Class and Gender”: 137.  See the works of Gloria Espigado Tocino: Espigado Tocino, “Precursoras de la prensa feminista en España: María Josefa Zapata y Margarita Pérez de Celis.” In Mujer, cultura y comunicación. Entra la historia y la sociedad contemporánea, eds. Vera and Ramos. Málaga: Digital, 1998: 171–175; Espigado Tocino, “La mujer en la utopía de Charles Fourier.” In La construcción del sujeto femenino en los siglos XVIII y XIX, coord. Ramos and Vera, Barcelona: Anthropos, 2002: 321–372; Espigado Tocino, “Editoras de prensa en España a mediados del siglo XIX: el caso de las fourieristas.” In Redes y Espacios de Opinión Pública. XII Encuentros de la Ilustración al Romanticismo. España, Europa y América. Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, 2005(a); Espigado Tocino, “La mujer-profeta: el pensamiento de las socialistas utópicas españolas.” In Isabel II y las identidades femeninas en el liberalismo. Cursos de Verano de la Universidad de Málaga. Ronda; Espigado Tocino, “Mujeres radicales: utópicas, republicanas 45 46

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the resolution of the “woman’s question” through their “equal” treatment as wage-earners.47 Several decades after these two pioneering utopian-­socialist feminists, we find writers and women’s rights advocates contemporary to Pardo Bazán’s life, like the “red marquise” María Vinyals—also studied in this volume by M.ª Ángela Comesaña Martínez— or her working-class Valencian contemporary María Cambrils, who, much like Simone de Beauvoir, was to problematize the notion that salaried work “in itself” would lead to the emancipation of women without a corresponding reorganization of the basic relations of both productive and reproductive work, and who militantly insisted in the idea that the great “dames” of the aristocracy could not be feminists in the “true” sense of the word.48 These various nineteenth and early twentieth century feminisms, regardless of whether or not they were truly “minor” phenomena when compared to the struggles of the so-called second and third waves of more recent history, were explicitly utopian and egalitarian philosophies that understood the palpable inequalities between men and women in terms which, at the risk of sounding anachronistic, we could truly term intersectional. As such, they did not distinguish so easily between their criticisms of patriarchy and their criticisms of other forms of political and socioeconomic distinction and domination. In short, idealizing Pardo Bazán’s feminism, or marking it as “singularly” progressive for its time, runs the risk of underestimating the power of both the women of the time and of entire political movements that Pardo Bazán and other upper-class authors of the Restoration either took for granted or despised. Giving Scanlon’s argument its due, but flipping it, for a moment, on its head, we could ask if it is not well within our right to “rap” Pardo Bazán and the other classist authors of her generation over the knuckles, given especially that they e internacionalistas en España (1848–1874).” In República y republicanas en España, ed. M.D. Ramos. Ayer 60.4 (2005b): 15–43. 47  It must be recognized that one of their long-term collaborators, and himself one of the principal philosophers read by Amparo and her comrades (the future republican statesman, Francisco Pi y Margall, translator of the notoriously anti-feminist Proudhon), was actually radically opposed to the idea of allowing women to earn their own wages as workers on “moral” and “economic” grounds. See his polemical treatise: Pi y Margall, Conferencia decimocuarta sobre la misión de la mujer en la sociedad. Universidad de Madrid, 1869. 48  Montagut, “Feminismo socialista versus feminismo aristocrático en María Cambrils.” nuevatribuna.es, 28 October, 2019. https://www.nuevatribuna.es/articulo/ cultura%2D%2D-ocio/feminismo-socialista-versus-feminismo-aristocratico-maria-cambrils/20191028172900167593.html

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often did naught but the same to their working class and activist protagonists. Already at the level of her lucid critique of contemporary gender roles, Pardo Bazán would seem to be maneuvering within a very specifically patriarchal conception of amorous relationships that is, while not unique to modern Spanish Catholicism, very much emblematic of it. If, on the one hand, the ubiquitous and problematic figure of the ángel del hogar— present in innumerable nineteenth-century melodramas and feuilletons written (mostly) by men—presents nineteenth-century Spanish readers and theater-goers with the quintessential image (sometimes painted as false) of a woman who “fulfills” her domestic duties with resignation and (seemingly) without question (thus “seducing” and “tying down” her man), the equally ubiquitous trope of the “fallen,” “adulterous,” or “seductive/seduced” woman simultaneously “produces” woman as a subject for whom one may have compassion, but who remains simultaneously guilty and, nevertheless, predominantly passive (perhaps best exemplified in the Christian “pity” and “forgiveness” that Tolstoy shows the otherwise doomed Anna Karenina).49 From this second way of conceiving heterosexual romance within a largely patriarchal frame (which we will call the pathetic or piteous stance), the prototype of the “seduced” woman almost never comes across as one who is capable of engaging actively or genuinely in a relationship or in a process of mutual seduction/“falling” in love. Even the descriptors readily available to us seem to betray the almost innate sexism of our language: a woman is indeed all-too-often imagined as someone capable of maliciously seducing someone else, but also often-enough, conceived as someone who is or must be seduced, as someone who is or must be “conquered,” as someone to whom someone makes love, but without the power to positively desire or make love to someone in turn. At one extreme, her active and participatory role in the relationship is conceived as being limited to one who lets oneself become enamored, who lets herself (or no) be seduced, 49  Both dominant tropes are present and, to some extent, critiqued, in what is, together with Clarín’s La Regenta, possibly the most recognized work of Spanish nineteenth-century long-form fiction: Galdós’ novel Fortunata y Jacinta. For a discussion of these feminine tropes in nineteenth-century Spanish literature at large, see Labanyi, Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; Fernández and Ortega, eds., La mujer de letras o la letraherida: textos y representaciones del discurso médico-social y cultural sobre la mujer escritora en el siglo XIX. Madrid: CSIC, 2008.

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looked at, looked for, contemplated, possessed, or, as Pardo Bazán herself would wisely criticize, to think of her own destiny as contingent upon the destinies and expectations of the men around her, to make herself desirable to the foreign gaze as a kind of attractive object, to be loved or to accept (or no) someone’s love, but not to actively seek it out. She is conceived of, unsurprisingly, as an object, at the same time that her subjectivity is imagined as something that must take a “second place” to that of men. The “piteous” patriarchal conception contrasts with a perhaps more overt form of misogyny, in which the predominantly passive ideal subjectivity is iconized in turn as a kind of natural weakness or even active maliciousness: the woman imagined as “capable of being seduced” (and for whom one can still have pity) is transfigured into a different kind of desire-­ inducing object, a coqueta, a puta, a débil, in other words, a loose woman, who is either “too weak” to control herself or willingly refuses to control herself, of a woman who must therefore in some way “have it coming.” Though very much aware and critical of the violence of overtly misogynistic and patriarchal discourse and practice (see her brilliant and brutal short story “Las medias rojas”), Pardo Bazán’s catholic and equal parts maternalistic and patronizing moralism (indeed, a product of its own time) cannot help but navigate between these two poles: on the one hand, a condescending judgement of Amparo’s taste in men and politics, and of her too-easily-seducible “superficial” character, downplaying the extent to which she herself truly could know or mobilize her own intellect or desires; on the other, a paternalistic, piteous, and almost jealous protectionism of her body. If Amparo is decidedly not the prototypical image of the ángel del hogar, and if Pardo Bazán does end up celebrating some aspects of her protagonist’s emancipated individual spirit (at least in so far as she is a wage-earner, rather than a “rabble-rouser”), the author remains wholly incapable of validating her libidinal life, whether in a sexual or political sense. If, accusing the “weak” and “effeminate” masculinity of Baltasar, Pardo Bazán succeeds in recognizing the validity of Amparo’s grief as someone “not given what she’s owed” (in so far as she is a woman and Baltasar a man), in another way, the author would seem to maintain a rather reactionary hetero-patriarchal framing of words such as “love” or “seduction.” If it is true that the harm done by her politics and by the enamoring dandy couldn’t have been done without Amparo’s initial willing consent as “subject” (clearly unwarranted, in the eyes of the narrator), it is argued to us that this “consent” is both of and not of her own making. It is as if she were a desiring machine (in deleuzian terms) that is both

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aware and unaware of the doom she’s only half-wittingly signing up for: she is both agent and patient of the passions that will lead to her downfall. The “mad” “foreign” passions, diseases of both her political and sentimental life, triumph over the weak flesh and her “superficial” character. The words of the narrator to her readers can only serve, in this fashion, as a potential “inoculation” against such fevers and storms (love out of wedlock, comingling of social classes, and ultimately, democracy). The “electric” nature of these passions, seen as an import from “barbarous,” “atheist,” revolutionary France (which is to say, from the imagined “outside” and “opposite” of the immunological catholic community), triumphs over the weak flesh of the “native” political body, over the customary religious spirit that should belong to Amparo in so far as she is, supposedly, a “Spaniard.” The overarching narrative of seduction intersects with a very peculiar conceptualization or rather, mythology of education (bildung),50 whether civic or sentimental, that conceives of learning as a fundamentally passive, mimetic, and reproductive activity; the education that Amparo receives through her reading of militant texts is presented by the narrator more as a passive internalization of ideology than as a properly “productive” or “creative” enterprise (an exercise in the active production and appropriation of knowledge, to borrow a term from Roger Chartier). The role of the student is characterized here as fundamentally infantile, and Amparo much more as a kind of naïve receiver and consumer of dangerous foreign ideas than as a willing producer of a knowledge and set of political ideals she “makes” her own.51 This criticism toward the “student become tribune” is simultaneously a criticism directed at the republican and socialist propagandists and teachers themselves, whose words would seem to be “lapped” up and parroted by Amparo in a rather uncritical way, or at least in such a way that lacks any kind of intellectual substance beyond the merely decorative:

 See Gee, “The Literacy Myth”: 50–67.  We would do well to remember that in the nineteenth century, the word “propaganda” was not understood as it is often understood today, that is, as a kind of hegemonic state ideology, but rather as something able to propagate itself, rather like an illness, against that very hegemony. This is the way in which the socialist and republican “propagandists” of the day understood this word, and Pardo Bazán herself seems to maintain a similar perception in order to present a state-sanctioned immunological defense to this revolutionary “fever.” 50 51

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Lo que en el periódico faltaba de sinceridad sobraba en Amparo de crédulo asentimiento. Acostumbrábase a pensar en estilo de artículo de fondo y a hablar lo mismo. Acudían a sus labios los grillos trillados, los lugares comunes de la prensa diaria, y con ellos aderezaba [énfasis mío] y componía su lenguaje [What was lacking by way of sincerity in these newspapers Amparo made up for with credulous assent. She became habituated to thinking in the style of a newspaper article and speaking in like fashion. The hackneyed clichés of the daily press came to her lips, and with them, she garnished her language]. (Pardo Bazán 2016: 106)52

Once again, we see how Amparo’s particular use of the republican vernacular is used to “garnish” and “adorn” herself as an object attractive to foreign eyes and ears (aderezar). The way in which she “dresses” her language to let herself be admired by her coworkers, comrades, and loved ones, the way in which she lets this language enter and “electrify” her becomes analogous to the way in which she uses language as a means of being courted by someone of a higher social class, to the way in which she lets herself be admired, electrified, and ultimately penetrated and possessed by Baltasar. The body of the self-educated proletarian militant, in this case a woman, is read by the narrator as a body that is dangerously “dressed,” a “political prostitute,” of sorts, that is, as a body that is both dangerously attractive and “open” to impregnation by ideas that for Pardo Bazán ought to have been considered foreign to catholic morality and to the foundational mythologies of the conservative nation; in other words, ideas that may properly belong to the barbarous, bestial, and sinful people (prostitutes, ruffians, revolutionary conspirators) represented in the novels of Zola, but not to the good and proper, clean, prim, moral, and catholic “Spanish” people. Amparo, qua “political prostitute,” is swept away by the electric inertia of the text, thus “forgetting” what to the narrator ought to be her true condition as a woman and as a Spanish laborer, ignoring those desires incumbent on her “true” being. In other words, “authentic” desires and courtship rituals previously approved by a confessor, to borrow the conceptual model of catholic ideology employed by Slavoj Zizek in his analysis of The Sound of Music (Fiennes 2012). Against the new “social contract” offered by the republican and social-democrat propagandists, Pardo Bazán offers her protagonist an “alternate” contract, as it were, and a way out of sexual exploitation/“perdition”: a contract that  Pardo Bazán, La tribuna: Chapter IX, “La Gloriosa”: 106.

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passes both through the institution of matrimony and through salaried labor offered by the invisible “Big Other,” in this case, the factory manager, and, ultimately, the state. Amparo lets herself be swept up by this sinful energy, and much like the “bastard” Federal Republic itself, is said to pay the cost of this original sin through her own economic “fall,” that is, through the birth of her own bastard child. She has been seduced and brought to potential moral and economic ruin both by the dandy and by the demagogic demon, but in this sense, she cannot be “her own” demon: it is not, strictly speaking, Amparo’s fault that she becomes attractive to, seduced by, or enchanted with this foreign political imaginary, but rather the result of a seductive imagination which is already “airborne,” so to speak. The fault, in a strict sense, cannot belong to the victim or “patient” of a foreign illness, to one who “falls” into disrepute, to one who so naïvely opens and dresses herself up to and for foreign desires, thereby letting others write upon her otherwise supposedly empty and “superficial” conscience. The true fault lies with those who propagate the seductive words, the little “bastard” letters that penetrate in her in order to “dye” or “stain” her conscience a certain color (normally, her conscience would be read as that of a pure, innocent, virginal youth, or as the proverbial blank slate, but in this case, it is read as a page which should have already been tinted, so to speak, with the red-­ and-­gold of the national flag, and which, in the exceptional circumstance of revolution, runs the risk of being tinted, either with the pure blood-red of the communists or the tri-colors of the republic). The fault cannot lie exclusively with the victim of the electrical storm (revolution, economic need), nor with the partially willing subject who is also a passive “patient” or victim of demagogic “fever” or “seduction,” but rather with those who would allow people to move about freely in a time of such storms and passionate “excess.” One must calm the tides, as it were, work upon the weak flesh of so pure and good but at the same time so easily seducible and corruptible a populace. One must protect the mother and the newborn, the Holy Spanish Family, the virgin and the lamb, from the passions that cry storming against the window. Such passions can only mean the perdition of the very women Pardo Bazán seeks out as new working-class feminine ideal (nineteenth-century prefiguration of the francoist Sección Femenina): in other words, the biopolitical transfiguration of the imagined Spanish Virgin Mother into Zola-esque Magdalene. La Tribuna could be read, in this regard, not only as very clear catholic-­ nationalist political allegory, but as an analogy of the processes of state

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censorship that characterize the first years of the Restoration regime: of the cordons sanitaires and government prophylactic measures seen by conservative social hygienists as a way to nip the revolutionary “illness” in the bud. It is not by chance that those revolutionary newspapers alluded to in the 1883 novel are the very same texts that would by and large be censored in the years between General Martínez Campos’ 1874 military coup (the coup that effectively puts an end to the First Republic) and the eventual relaxing of state censorship around 1881–1883 (years in which the Liberal Party of Práxedes Mateo Sagasta opens up, to some extent, the public sphere, allowing for the publication of such radical “free-thinking” outlets as the republican and at times anarchist-leaning Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento). The novel’s appearance around 1882–1883 is in itself quite revealing, as it seems to be a kind of catholic-nationalist warning against returning to such supposed “excesses” of press and political freedom as were seen during the Democratic Sexennium of a decade prior. The novel announces itself thus as a kind of battle cry for “abstinence” against the revolutionary “germ,” against all of that which could sabotage or interrupt the sentimental life of the nation and the flow of the emancipatory capitalist machine (whether unwanted biological or political “pregnancy”), and against all that which could empty the factory of potentially productive “emancipated” bodies. Once again, it is not so much about criticizing what exists in La Tribuna of a critical, ethical, or even compassionate feminist sensibility, but of being able to see how its own pathetic argument53 serves a worldview that is quintessentially patriarchal and hegemonic.

4   Conclusion: Pardo Bazán and the “Democracy” to Come Already in 1998, the literary critic Daniel S. Whitaker had written about Pardo Bazán’s consistent opposition to the concept of universal suffrage: Her view was that common people, both men and women, would be manipulated by those of the upper middle class or the aristocracy. Local caciques also had the power to shape the opinions of rural voters, as was the case in the electoral ploys of Barbacana and Trampeta in the closing pages of Los 53  Loureiro, “Argumentos patéticos: historia y memoria de la Guerra Civil.” Claves de Razón Práctica 186 (2008): 18–25.

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Pazos de Ulloa. Doña Emilia’s conservative political outlook, shaped by her admiration for the Spanish nobility, led her to urge her fellow countrymen to postpone granting the vote to all Spaniards until they were better educated and understood democratic principles. (Whitaker 1998: 71)54

Whitaker goes on to cite the words of our author in a largely unknown satirical essay (“Con una alemana”), in which she would lay out her self-­ declared “moderation” and “pragmatism,” as well as her profound skepticism of the “universal” suffrage laws that many European states began experimenting with at the turn of the twentieth century (which she refers to, collectively, as “universal farse”). On the one hand, when asked by the eponymous “German Lady” if Spaniards in general approve of their monarchy, she goes to great lengths to remind us of her particular understanding of “moral geography,” declaring, for example, that “Cada nación tiene el gobierno que puede tener. Renegar del Gobierno, vale tanto como renegar de nosotros mismos, en cuanto parte integrante de la nación.” [“Every nation has the Government it can have,” and that “To Deny the Government (i.e., ‘ours’) would be to deny ourselves, insofar as we remain part of what constitutes the nation”] (Pardo Bazán 1891: 64).55 Her skepticism of democracy is likewise rooted in a fundamentally Hegelian-teleological conception of aristocratically or meritocratically guided human progress, with airs of Millian utilitarianism and Leibnizian optimism. In the first place, her faith in the idea that extant historical institutions and nations—whose respective governments were already as “good” or “progressive” or “right for the nation” as could possibly be demanded—would, in and of themselves, and in spite of their many evident faults, lead to the creation of a kind of democracy of the future, not guided by a supposed popular demand seen a priori as absurd and as a sign of common people’s ignorance and “sheepish” conformity with corrupt officials and caciques (she refers to Galician peasants in particular as “flocks” and as “greyhounds on a short leash,” Pardo Bazán 1891: 64),56 but by the hand of pragmatic, utilitarian, enlightened aristocrats (hypothetical “New Men” of both world-historical and national significance whom she calls quite simply hombres útiles and who, in this regard, would  Whitaker, “Power and Persuasion”: 71.  Pardo Bazán, “Con una alemana”. Nuevo Teatro Crítico I.2 (February 1898). Madrid: La España Editorial, 1891: 64. 56  Pardo Bazán, “Con una alemana”: 61. 54 55

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no longer need to go through the absurd ritual of rounding up “sheepish” voters or telling them for what party they had to cast their ballot). In the second, her warnings against those who pretended that such a democracy could or should be brought about “tomorrow”: “El caso es huir del radicalismo, dar tiempo al tiempo, no precipitarnos, y dejar para dentro de un siglo lo que podría hacerse en el mes entrante.” [The point is to flee from radicalism, to give time to time [the emphasis is mine], not to rush into things, and to leave for within a century that which could be done next month] (Pardo Bazán 1891: 61).57 Let us not kid ourselves, nor hope for hope where there is none to be had. Nor must we lose our rightful sense of irony toward the teleological and tautological logic of the good Countess: women in Spain, in effect, would take decades to take for themselves the right to vote. One could say that the Countess of Pardo Bazán not only predicted the length of time it would eventually take for suffrage to become truly (if fleetingly) “universal” in Spain, but also gave a perfectly logical and even moral justification for this delay. She was a progressive feminist who wouldn’t have been the least bit put back by knowing that women at large would only get the vote in 1931, or that the right to vote would be abrogated both for men and women during almost forty years of a fascist dictatorship. Maybe a minute or two too soon for our novelist, given that the article in question is from 1891, and that, to her, it wouldn’t have been so bad for ordinary Spaniards to have finally “earned” their right to vote during the same year that the author of this essay was born. But to what other supposedly “democratic” principles could Pardo possibly be referring, besides suffrage itself? If the problem with “democracy” in her own time was, as she says, a problem of manipulation and caciquism, of the ways in which the dominant classes could persuade or pressure ignorant voters via propaganda, bribery, or clientelism, in what way is this situation any different from her own hypothetical “democracy to come”58 of 1991, imagined from one hundred years earlier? The difference, according to our author, was that the voters of that hypothetical pardo-bazanian democracy of the future would no longer be naïve, ignorant and vulnerable, “seducible” waifs and dreamers, but rather, have the moral and civic education necessary not to succumb to seduction or manipulation. Meaning, that what was needed, in her  Pardo Bazán, “Con una alemana”: 61.  Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge, 1994. 57 58

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mind, was no more and no less than proper schooling: only this could guarantee that people would stop being i-logical, zoological beings driven by their passions (zoë) in order to become “qualified” political subjects outright (bios politikon), to borrow, once again, a useful conceptual framework from Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2015).59 Pardo Bazán never stipulates, for that matter, what kind or quantity of civic education would be required in order for people to have finally earned their right to have political rights in that indefinitely delayed always-future democracy of the future, but she does give us a sense of what it very clearly shouldn’t be: (i.e., the “demagogic” education of the Sexennium). Which is to say, the idea of “democracy to come” expounded by the Countess and her ilk was about as “democratic” as that of the so-called English utilitarian “liberals” who wanted to apply literacy and arithmetic tests to the working classes, or of the North American racial segregationists during the Jim Crowe years (yes, sometimes racist and classist discourses migrate across time and across apparently different geographies and epistemological moments). I would like to propose one further reflection regarding this perhaps surprising conceptualization of “future democracy” expounded by our author. Today, both in the Spanish state and in any number of so-called modern democracies, we appear to be confronting processes which indeed seem like direct and often starling threats to our democratic values and institutions: monopolization of the means of communication (i.e., media) by global capital and its “influencers”; conflicts of interest in the realm of the production and socialization of knowledge (i.e., sciences/science communication); the growing influence of the private sector over parliaments and electoral processes through a systemic kind of legally accepted corruption (i.e., campaign finance and lobbying); the political disenfranchisement of the poor, of immigrants, ethnic minorities, and so on; the so-called revolving doors between economic and political power; the monopolization and almost guaranteed inheritance of political, cultural, and economic privileges; forms of non-representative representation that make the votes of some people worth “X” percent, or in some cases, infinite percent more than the votes of others; decrees capable of excluding entire nations from having a say in what gets decided by more powerful states and institutions; and a long list of etceteras. My question would be, in effect, if some of these forms of manipulation weren’t already 59  Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as Political paradigm (trad. Nicholas Heron). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

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something on the mind of Pardo Bazán and the other demo-skeptic authors and philosophers of her day. Could these various forms of explicitly antidemocratic “manipulation” already have been prescribed by those who pretended to save the imaginary “democracy of the future” from the “weak and seducible” demos of the present? I will conclude with another excerpt from the above-mentioned 1891 essay, though I am so far uncertain as to whether or not Pardo Bazán meant for it to be taken ironically (my best guess is no). It reads: ¡Señora! (Exaltándome). El ejercicio del derecho electoral pide cultura, sentido político, patriotismo, pide mil circunstancias… ¿Qué significa ese derecho para la inmensa mayoría de los mortales? ¿Ha visto usted cosa más injusta que la igualdad? Goëthe… su divo Goëthe de ustedes… no creía que el alma de Wieland pudiese disolverse ó absorberse en el Todo como el alma de un cualquiera. Ya se ve que hay clases, hasta en las almas. Yo desearía que el sufragio universal se entendiese así: Fulano (insigne por su saber, sus estudios, sus trabajos), vale diez mil votos. Zutano (ilustre por su integridad, su honrada gestión de los negocios públicos, su elocuencia, sus servicios a la patria), veinte mil. Equis (artista eximio), cinco mil. Zeta (dama opulenta e inteligente, fomentadora de la agricultura, de la industria, del arte), quince mil [My good lady! (Making my tone one of exaltation). The exercise of electoral rights demands culture, education, a sense of the political, patriotism, it demands a thousand different circumstances… What does that right mean to the great majority of mortals? Have you ever seen something so unjust as equality? Goethe… your compatriots’ own divo Goethe… he did not believe that the soul of Wieland could so easily be dissolved or absorbed in the Totality as can the soul of a mere nobody. It is plain enough for all to see, that there are indeed classes, even in the case of souls. My hope is that universal suffrage be understood in the following way: So-and-so (revered for his wisdom, his studies, his good works) is worth ten thousand votes. John Doe (illustrious because of his management of public affairs, his eloquence, his services to the fatherland), twenty thousand. Mr. X (prestigious artist), five thousand. Mrs. Z (opulent and intelligent lady, benefactor of agriculture, industry, and the arts), fifteen thousand]. (Pardo Bazán 1891: 61–62)60

And so it goes.

 Pardo Bazán, “Con una alemana:” 61–62. Cited in Whitaker, “Power of Persuasion”: 78.

60

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Motherhood and Social Progress in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Los Pazos de Ulloa (1886) Susan Walter

Writing during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, the Galician writer Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921) stands out as one of Spain’s most talented and prolific authors, and one of few female writers who reached canonical status during this period. Actively participating in the intellectual circles of her time, she published in various genres over the course of her fifty plus year career. Initially she made a name for herself with her narratives—both novels and short stories—while she also contributed regularly to the periodical press with essays on a myriad of topics and then added cookbooks and plays to her repertoire later in her career. She was an outspoken critic of the patriarchal culture of her social milieu, often exploring the plight of Spanish women who are not given full legal rights, have little economic security, are not permitted to educate themselves or pursue professional opportunities and at times are victims of domestic violence. The varied and unique

S. Walter (*) University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Castro et al. (eds.), Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98861-6_7

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approach to gender in many of her works has drawn many critics to this aspect of her ouevre in recent decades. This analysis continues with this same line of inquiry by exploring how gender dynamics, social progress and the prominence of the upper classes are inexorably linked in her seminal novel of 1886, Los Pazos de Ulloa. As part of my study, I will examine one aspect of the novel that largely has been overlooked until now: namely, the differing value systems that are imposed on the working-class and aristocratic female characters. Specifically, I aim to show how the contrasts established between these various characters’ treatment underscores the contradictory nature of social norms that are imposed on women, especially bourgeois and aristocratic women. In the novel the aristocratic women are trained to be domestic angels whose value is determined by their ability to fulfill the maternal role, yet this model—I argue—does not recognize the physical requirements of motherhood. Finally, I will tie my analysis into the larger discussion of the burgeoning modernity of Spain’s late nineteenth century and how the value systems that aim to control bourgeois and aristocratic women’s activities ultimately diminish the prominence of these classes in the society of the time. When addressing the issue of social progress in this study, I am referencing the social, economic and political changes of the mid- to late nineteenth century that were fundamental to Spain becoming a modern nation-state with a strong economy. Some of the changes that were central to this enterprise were the creation of a national currency, a free-market capitalist economy, universal male suffrage and representative forms of government, industrialization, a State education system, a national press, and so on (Labanyi 2000: 24–27).1 Nevertheless, there were then as there are now diverging opinions as to which of these elements were most central to Spain’s future prosperity, and contemporary critics such as Jo Labanyi note that Spain’s modernity existed more on paper than in reality (24).2 For her part Pardo Bazán often emphasized the deleterious effects of the middle class’s adversity to hard work, the country’s lack of industrialization and the poor educational system, especially that of girls and young women, as keys to understanding Spain’s slow and uneven march toward modernity. 1  Labanyi, Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel. London: Oxford UP, 2000: 24–27. 2  Labanyi, Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel: 24.

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Much has been said about the representation of gender in Los Pazos de Ulloa, including many studies by the leading critics of Spain’s nineteenth century who have highlighted how the novel problematizes normative gender standards in various ways. Maryellen Bieder highlights the synthesis of different literary genre conventions in the novel and the representation of gender, ultimately concluding, “By openly challenging normative definitions Pardo Bazán foregrounds traditional gender stereotypes and lays bare the cruel isolation and destructive silencing inherent in them. Los Pazos de Ulloa thus raises radical questions about the stiflingly rigid definitions of gender identity inscribed in the generic modes that Pardo Bazán reworked” (1990: 143).3 Feal Deibe analyzes the narrative voice employed, asserting that all of the key social and ideological voices are present in the text making it an example of heteroglosia (1987: 217).4 Robin Ragan examines the representation of Nucha’s hysteria in the novel, concluding that Pardo Bazán squarely places the blame for her illness on social causes rather than any deficiencies or flaws in the female body, thus breaking with the norms of the medical community during the previous centuries (2004: 141).5 Along similar lines Joan Hoffman shows how Nucha is defined as the perfect domestic angel in Los Pazos de Ulloa, noting that “Pardo Bazán intentionally and methodically sets Nucha up for failure so that her death may herald the death of the angel” (2016: 111).6 Finally, Jo Labanyi suggests that a key concept underlying both Los Pazos de Ulloa and its sequel La madre naturaleza is that “the ‘natural’ has no stable, inherent meaning. In turning reality into representation modernity turns sexuality into gender (that is, a social construct), subjecting women to a proliferation of contradictory norms whose very arbitrariness allows the possibility of alternative mappings” (2000: 382).7 My study dialogues with these previous analyses, while also looking more closely at how the environment and social class of the female characters ultimately determine their fate. 3  Bieder, “Between Genre and Gender: Emilia Pardo Bazán and Los Pazos de Ulloa.” In In the Feminine Mode: Essay on Hispanic Women Writers, eds. Noel Valis and Carol Meier. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1990: 143. 4  Feal Deibe, “La voz femenina en Los Pazos de Ulloa.” Hispania 70.2 (1987): 217. 5  Ragan, “Another Look at Nucha’s Hysteria: Pardo Bazán’s Response to the Medical Field of Late Nineteenth-Century Spain.” Letras femeninas 30.1 (June, 2004): 141. 6  Hoffman, “The Death of an Angel: A Mother’s ‘Failure’ in Los Pazos de Ulloa and a Daughter’s ‘Success’ in La madre naturaleza.” Hispanic Journal 37.1 (2016): 111. 7  Labanyi, Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel: 382.

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The novel opens as a young and inexperienced priest Julián is sent to an aristocratic country estate in Galicia to serve as the chaplain for the marquis Pedro Moscoso. Shortly after his arrival he becomes aware of the decadence into which the estate has fallen—both physically and economically—and that Pedro’s morality is also in jeopardy as he is engaging in a sexual relationship with his housekeeper, Sabel, which has produced an illegitimate son. In order to remediate this immoral situation, Julián convinces the marquis to take a trip to Santiago to find a suitable wife with whom he can create a family, specifically a male heir who can continue the family name. After Pedro marries his younger cousin Nucha, the second half of the novel focuses on the young couple’s return to the country estate where their daughter is born shortly thereafter, and a sequence of events leads to Nucha’s premature death. Much has been said about the civilization versus barbarity dichotomy that lies at the heart of the novel’s two contrasting landscapes—the los Pazos manor in the Galician countryside where the marquis Pedro and his servants live versus the city of Santiago de Compostela, where Pedro spends some months while he visits his uncle and cousins to choose his future wife Nucha and later marry her.8 Some critics have linked the decadence and immorality that seem to reign free on the country estate that is administered primarily by the marquis’ servants as a sign of the decaying aristocracy and the rise of the popular classes, while Julián, the young priest who is sent to be the chaplain for the marquis, is civilization’s representative at the Moscoso estate. Nevertheless, the novel does not allow for a simplistic reading of these two environments because while the natural surroundings of the country estate are often described as imposing and dangerous, there are also moments in which this landscape is imbued with peace and tranquility. Jo Labanyi proposes that the contrasting representations of these spaces can be tied to the economic shift to a free market, capitalist economy in this same timeframe: “the fall of the house of Ulloa is due not to the invasion of nature (that is the result), nor even entirely to Pedro’s uncle’s mismanagement, but to the transition from an economic system based on inherent value (represented by the aristocratic equation of worth with birth) to one based on nominal value (where status derives 8  See Germán Gullón’s essay “La densidad genérica y la novela del ochocientos: Los Pazos de Ulloa de Emilia Pardo Bazán.” Anales de la Literatura Española V (1986–1987): 174–188, and chapter two of Maurice Hemingway’s Emilia Pardo Bazán: The Making of a Novelist. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.

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from money and what it can buy)” (Labanyi 2000: 346).9 Indeed, an essential part of my reading of the text is also linked to the idea of value and how the environment is associated with it. I suggest that a woman’s traits are valued in varying ways depending on her social class and also the environment in which she lives. Thus, a key to deepening our understanding of the novel is recognizing how these two different landscapes—the city versus the countryside—are linked to the women who are raised in them. The countryside is associated primarily with strong, successful biological mothers, such as Sabel and the wet nurse, perhaps because these women are surrounded by animals and plants, and the reproduction that is an integral part of this natural world. On the other hand, Nucha and her sisters have been raised in the urban environment of Santiago, where they are confined primarily to their home, and are valued for their pleasant appearance and their adherence to a strict moral code. Nucha’s sister Rita is judged by the bourgeois codes of the city; however, her physiology indicates that she would be a successful biological mother. Nevertheless, the upper classes’ conception of women as angels who should guard their chastity and innocence above all else does not value the physiological attributes of these women that could actually prepare them for the very real difficulties of childbirth and motherhood that existed during the nineteenth century in Spain. Rita and her sister Nucha are representatives of bourgeois or aristocratic women who were born and raised in a population center, in their case the provincial capital of Santiago. The vigilance that their father has dedicated to their upbringing was very common for women of their social class: “le imponía suma rigidez y escrúpulo en la elección de sus relaciones y en la manera de educar a sus hijas, a quienes traía como encastilladas y aisladas” (Pardo Bazán 1994: 85)10 [was very strict in his daughters’ upbringing and the choice of their friends. He kept them locked up and isolated as in a castle] (Pardo Bazán 1992: 74).11 This aspect of their upbringing is viewed as essential by most members of their social circle, but yet, as we shall see, one that is highlighted by Pedro as having negatively affected Nucha’s ability to fulfill her motherly duties.  Labanyi, Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel: 346.  Pardo Bazán, Los Pazos de Ulloa. Madrid: Alianza, 1994. This and all subsequent references to the novel are from this edition. 11  All translations of the novel are from The House of Ulloa (trans. Rose Caminals-Heath). Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 1992. 9

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As Pedro arrives to his uncle’s home in Santiago to meet his four female cousins in order to find a wife, he judges his potential mates based on their physiology, health and beauty, traits that seem appropriate given that he is hoping to find his partner and the mother of his future heirs. When he meets Nucha, one of the younger cousins, he judges the health and vigor of her body, finding primarily deficiencies, noting that Nucha is cross-­ eyed, has “pocos encantos físicos” (Pardo Bazán 1994: 88) [few physical charms] (Pardo Bazán 1992: 76) and rather plain features. In general terms he is not attracted to her nor does he distinguish any positive physical attributes as he evaluates her. Indeed, the only aspect of Nucha that seems to please Pedro is the inheritance from a wealthy godmother that she should receive in the near future. Given her beauty and alluring nature, the eldest cousin Rita stands in stark contrast to Nucha’s meek and slender appearance, and not surprisingly, Rita catches Pedro’s eye immediately. As he evaluates her body for its ability to have and raise children, the narration is focalized from his perspective: Lo que más cautivaba a su primo en Rita no era tanto la belleza del rostro como la cumplida proporción del tronco y miembros, la amplitud y redondez de la cadera, el desarrollo del seno, todo cuanto en las valientes y armónicas curvas de su briosa persona prometía la madre fecunda y la nodriza inexhausta. ¡Soberbio vaso, en verdad, para encerrar un Moscoso legítimo, magnífico patrón donde injertar el heredero, el continuador del nombre! El marqués presentía en tan arrogante hembra no el placer de los sentidos, sino la numerosa y masculina prole que debía rendir … (Pardo Bazán 1994: 88)12 [What Don Pedro found fascinating in Rita was not so much the beauty of her face as the generous proportions of her body and limbs, the roundness and broadness of her hips, her fully developed bosom, everything in the aggressive and harmonious curves of her vigorous figure that promised a fertile mother and an inexhaustible nurse. A superb vase, indeed, to contain a legitimate Moscoso, a splendid tree onto which to graft the heir of the Ulloas! What the marquis foresaw in such a glorious female was not sensual pleasure, but the numerous male offspring that she would bring into the world …]. (Pardo Bazán 1992: 76–77)13

 Parzo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa: 88.  Parzo Bazán, The House of Ulloa: 77.

12 13

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While this description is notable for various reasons, perhaps what is most striking is the link it establishes between the health of Rita’s body and its reproductive capacity—in particular within the context of creating an heir for the Moscoso name. Specifically, the “the roundness and broadness of her hips” and “her fully developed bosom” initially may seem like fairly obvious sexual references but the quote makes clear that it is Rita’s ability to have and nourish his future male heirs that is of most concern to Pedro. This description is also notable because it contrasts sharply with the socially prescribed role of angel in which a bourgeois wife’s innocence and chastity are her most highly valued assets. Nevertheless, Pedro’s upbringing in the countryside surrounded by animals and plentiful nature has trained him to see good health and abundant proportions to be the most reliable indicators of a mother’s future success. Since Pedro arrives to Santiago as the outsider, the cousin raised in the country who has been to the city only a couple of times before, his distinct worldview also stands apart from that of his urban relatives. Yet, as Pedro spends time in Santiago with his uncle, cousins and Julián, we see that the value system that he uses to judge his cousins is based less and less on their physiological attributes that would indicate their future success as mothers, and more and more on the social standards of behavior that are applied to women of their social class in Santiago. In short, women of Pedro’s social standing are expected to be angels, guarding their chastity and innocence as their most prized possessions and always putting others’ needs and happiness before their own by caring for their husbands’ and children’s souls, maintaining the home as the sacred space where they are able to protect their family from the competition and self-interest inherent in the new free-market economy (Jagoe 1994: 25).14 While Pedro has admitted to his cousin Rita that he is attracted to her, and also has been quite flirtatious with her, the narrator notes a few weeks into his visit that he has also started to be concerned with her reputation as he observes her interacting with other men while promenading around the city, and also through comments that other men make about her at the casino. Rita’s error is that she does not uphold this social standard that values women’s submissiveness and innocence, and instead she seems very aware of her sexual agency as a young and attractive woman—a grave error for a woman of her social class with hopes of getting married. In her compelling 14  Jagoe, Ambiguous Angels: Gender in the Novels of Galdós. Berkeley, CA: UC Berkeley Press, 1994: 25.

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study, Maryellen Bieder has elucidated this character’s transgression: “Rita is trapped by the duplicity of men who freely express their admiration while condemning her for responding to it. The men of the Casino openly approve of her allure, beauty, and shapely body but silently disapprove of her as a potential partner in marriage” (1990: 136).15 After several weeks in Santiago, Pedro decides to ask the priest Julián for his opinion of the four cousins, inquiring to see if any of them have a bad reputation or a mischievous personality since Julián has known them for many years. After much insistence on Pedro’s part, the priest finally responds that he believes Nucha would make the best choice, given that she is chaste, selfless and pure as well as already having proven herself as a successful mother by essentially raising her younger brother Gabriel. In short, Julián chooses Nucha because she incarnates the essential qualities of the ideal Christian mother, the normative model of femininity that is promoted by the Catholic Church and by social standards in bourgeois and aristocratic society in more general terms. In regard to his choice of Nucha, Mary Lee Bretz proposes that the priest Julián sees Nucha as the instrument of the marquis’ salvation (1977: 204),16 thus highlighting the essential role of the angel as potential savior of her husband and family. In this particular context this is especially true since Julián is hopeful that their marriage will save Pedro’s soul from eternal damnation by putting an end to his immoral relationship with his housekeeper Sabel. Notably, Nucha’s ability to procreate is never considered by the pair, given that the ideal of the chaste Christian mother is based on the Virgin Mary, and not on the very real difficulties and challenges of giving birth that existed in this timeframe.17 Nevertheless, Pedro follows Julián’s recommendation and asks his uncle for Nucha’s hand in marriage, causing much upheaval and discord in their home for the ensuing weeks.18 The sinister imagery  Bieder, “Between Genre and Gender”: 136.  Bretz, “Naturalismo y feminismo en Emilia Pardo Bazán.” Papeles de Son Armadans 87 (1977): 204. 17  On this point my analysis concurs with Labanyi’s; she suggests that Julián’s attempt “to implant a model ‘Christian marriage’ in the Pazos is doomed, regardless of his personal inefficacy, because it denies the fact that human beings have bodies” (Labanyi, Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel: 366). 18  Robin Ragan suggests that it is the three patriarchal forces in Nucha’s life that ultimately decide her fate: “the priest who convinces Pedro, the suitor who asks the father, and the father who concedes. Nucha is absent from these dealings (…)” (Ragan, “Another Look at Nucha’s Hysteria”: 148). 15 16

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used to describe the couple’s wedding reception suggests that Pedro has made an error by choosing Nucha as his bride: “parecía aquello la comida postrera de los reos de muerte” (Pardo Bazán 1994: 112)19 [it was like the last supper of a condemned criminal] (Pardo Bazán 1992: 99).20 Likewise, Julián begins to feel a strange weight on his heart just as the pair is wed (Pardo Bazán 1994: 112).21 Since much of the narration is focalized through the character of Julián, the reader often perceives the world of the novel from his perspective. One way in which this narrative perspective plays a significant role is the many occasions, especially after she is married, in which Julián’s perception of Nucha as an ideal, pure and chaste young woman is highlighted. For example, when Julián is cognizant of what Nucha’s recent marriage means for her sexuality, he begins to see her as even more pure and chaste than she was prior to marriage: “La veneración que por Nucha sentía, y que iba acrecentándose con el trato, cerraba el paso a la idea de que pudieran ocurrirle los mismos percances fisiológicos que a las demás hembras del mundo” (Pardo Bazán 1994: 132)22 [His veneration for Nucha, greater every day, led him to think that she was invulnerable to the physiological accidents that befall the rest of the females of the world] (Pardo Bazán 1992: 116).23 Since Julián appreciates Nucha’s chastity and innocence while always defining her by these qualities, he can’t imagine her as a sexual being during this new phase in her life. His need to continue to view Nucha as the perfect angel serves to foreground the absurdity and contradictory nature of the “angel of the house” model of Christian motherhood that insists on a woman’s chastity and innocence while overlooking the many material aspects essential to motherhood. Since this study aims to link the restrictive nature of gender norms to social progress for the upper classes in more general terms, it is important to note how the novel frames marriage. A thought that Julián has shortly after he learns Nucha is pregnant underscores his vision of this social institution: “Con desinteresada satisfacción se decía a sí mismo que había logrado contribuir al establecimiento de una cosa gratísima a Dios e indispensable en la concertada marcha de la sociedad: el matrimonio  Pardo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa: 112.  Pardo Bazán, The House of Ulloa: 99. 21  Pardo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa: 112. 22  Pardo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa: 132. 23  Pardo Bazán, The House of Ulloa: 116. 19 20

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cristiano, lazo bendito por medio del cual la Iglesia atiende juntamente con admirable sabiduría a fines espirituales y materiales, santificando los segundos por medio de los primeros” (my emphasis, Pardo Bazán 1994: 133)24 [With unselfish satisfaction, he told himself that he had contributed to the creation of a situation that was pleasing to God and necessary for the orderly progress of society: Christian marriage, the blessed bond whereby with admirable inspiration the church serves both spiritual and material needs, sanctifying the later by means of the former] (Pardo Bazán 1992: 117).25 This citation shows the primary role that marriage plays in contemporary society, highlighting how it ties into progress—Julián describes it as part of the “orderly progress of society”—while it also underscores that there are both spiritual and material aspects to the union, alluding albeit in a very veiled way to the inherent sexual needs of the couple and the subsequent creation of offspring as an essential aspect of the union. As we shall see, Pedro and Nucha’s pairing turns out to be less than ideal in this regard. Shortly after Nucha and Pedro move back to the countryside some months after their marriage, Nucha gives birth to a baby girl. As Nucha is suffering through a very difficult labor, Pedro underscores the connection he views between the environment in which a woman is raised and her ability to successfully give birth through a comment made to the local doctor Juncal: “Estoy convencido de que ciertas cosas solo les pasan a las señoritas educadas en el pueblo y con ciertas impertinencias y repulgos … Que les vengan a las mozas de por aquí con síncopes y desmayos … Se atizan al cuerpo media olla de vino y despachan esta faena cantando” (Pardo Bazán 1994: 162)26 [I am convinced … that these things only happen to young women brought up in the city with a lot of nonsense and scruples. Girls around here don’t give a damn about fainting spells. They put down half a gallon of wine and get the job over with in a jiffy] (Pardo Bazán 1992: 144).27 Pedro clearly views the “mozas” (i.e., lower-class women of the countryside) as more handily equipped to successfully give birth than city girls like Nucha, and by extension, one can surmise, other women of her social status and upbringing. The doctor Juncal proves to have a similar opinion of city and countrywomen:  Pardo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa: 133.  Pardo Bazán, The House of Ulloa: 117. 26  Pardo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa: 162. 27  Pardo Bazán, The House of Ulloa: 144. 24 25

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A las mujeres se les da en las ciudades la educación más antihigiénica: corsé para volver angosto lo que debe ser vasto; encierro para producir la clorosis y la anemia; vida sedentaria para ingurgitarlas y criar linfa a expensas de la sangre …. Mil veces mejor preparadas están las aldeanas para el gran combate de la gestación y alumbramiento, que al cabo es la verdadera función femenina (Pardo Bazán 1994: 154)28 [In the city women received the most antihygienic education: girdles to make narrow what must be broad; confinement indoors to produce chlorosis and anemia; sedentary life to fabricate lymph at the expense of blood. Countrywomen are infinitely better prepared for the great battle of pregnancy and childbirth, which is, after all, woman’s real function]. (Pardo Bazán 1992: 136)29

Here Juncal lays bare the obvious contradictions in the angel paradigm: women who are raised in the city, whose social role is entirely determined by their biological ability to give birth and care for their young, in fact are being raised in ways that are detrimental to their fulfillment of this role. As proof of Nucha’s deficient upbringing in the city, even before Nucha gives birth Juncal tells Pedro that his wife won’t be able to nurse her baby because she is too weak. The devastating consequences of this decision, which Juncal and Pedro impose on Nucha, are made clear shortly after the baby’s birth: “la fiebre devoradora que trastornó su cerebro al invadir su pecho la ola de la leche inútil, el desconsuelo de no poder ofrecer a su niña aquel licor que la ahogaba … la vida huía gota a gota” (my emphasis) (Pardo Bazán 1994: 167)30 [the fever that consumed her brain when the wave of useless milk invaded her breasts; her distress at not being able to offer her baby this liquor that was drowning her … Life slipped away drop by drop] (Pardo Bazán 1992: 149).31 Indeed, Nucha’s inability to provide sustenance to her child, one of the essential functions of a mother, has the opposite effect of what the doctor had expected. Instead of allowing her to regain strength after the birth, the milk that floods into her organism figuratively drowns her, slowly taking her vitality away. Nucha’s adverse physiological reaction to this choice imposed on her shows how unnatural it was—implying that had she been given agency to make this important decision for herself, her recovery would likely have been much quicker and the bout of hysteria from which she suffers shortly thereafter  Pardo Bazán, La casa de Ulloa: 154.  Pardo Bazán, The House of Ulloa: 136. 30  Pardo Bazán, La casa de Ulloa: 167. 31  Pardo Bazán, The House of Ulloa: 149. 28 29

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also would not have occurred. Indeed, this decision by the patriarchal forces in Nucha’s life also highlights the inherent contradictions in the angel model imposed on women of Nucha’s social class and upbringing. That is, if a woman’s role in society is determined entirely by her biological function as mother that allows her to carry a child, give birth and also nurse her, then it is only logical that she be allowed to fulfill these essential functions when she has a child. Nevertheless, Juncal makes his decision based on his view of Nucha’s body as a weak and deficient system since she fits the mold of frail and pure angel so well.32 The disconnect between Juncal’s assessment of the situation and Nucha’s lived experience foregrounds the contradictory nature of this idealized model of virtuous motherhood and highlights the patriarchal oppression inherent in it. Charnon-Deutsch’s analysis views the novel’s engagement with the angel figure along similar lines, although she comes to somewhat different conclusions: Los pazos also challenges the idealized mother, the serene virgin so idolized in Spanish religious rite, art and Romantic literature, by juxtaposing to it a physical reality of a cruder kind. Julian’s framing of Nucha as the Virgin Mary parodies the usual way that 19th century writing accommodates the ideology of motherhood by linking biblical or hagiographic figures to women’s ideal roles. While Julian exalts motherhood as women’s perfect vocation, the novel makes amply clear how dangerous this sublimation is for women’s physical well-being. (…) in this way the repeated allusions to the Virgin could be said to subvert the femininity they seem to promote. The idealization of Nucha as mother does not block out the physiological deterioration and abuse to which she is subjected, nor the fact that she clearly has no vocation for bearing children, only for mothering children born to others such as her brother or Perucho. (1994: 79)33

32  Labanyi asserts, “Pardo Bazán noted the illogicality of medical experts’ simultaneous insistence that women were determined by physiology and that they were superior spiritual creatures: an illogicality which doctors resolved by constructing the female body as ‘naturally sick’ for it was difficult to argue that a woman determined by a healthy physiology needed containing (hence the threat posed by Rita)” (Labanyi, Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel: 360). 33  Charnon-Deutsch, “Bearing Motherhood: Representations of the Maternal in Los Pazos de Ulloa.” In New Hispanisms: Literature, Culture, Theory, eds. Mark Millington and Paul Julian Smith. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1994: 79.

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Here Charnon-Deutsch suggests a potentially subversive nature of the comparisons made between Nucha and the Virgen Mary by highlighting how the novel idealizes her motherhood, on the one hand, and creates a sharp contrast to these religious representations through detailing the difficulties of her physical experience of motherhood, on the other hand. In this next part of the analysis, I will look more closely at the peasant women that are presented in the novel, and how the social roles assigned to them are in part a consequence of the need for bourgeois and aristocratic women to adhere to the “angel in the house” model, guarding their purity and innocence above all else. One of the central characters of the country estate is the marquis’ housekeeper and mistress, an attractive and robust countrywoman named Sabel. In addition to being Pedro’s sexual partner, she is also the mother to his illegitimate son, Perucho. The novel makes clear that Sabel’s sexual relationship with the marquis allows both her and her father, Primitivo, to manipulate the running of the estate to their advantage, which seems to be largely responsible for the disastrous financial situation in which Pedro finds himself. It is implied that the decreasing economic and social capital of the aristocracy is due at least in part to this type of scheming by the lower classes. Moreover, the novel implies that Pedro may never have married had it not been for the priest Julián’s threat to leave the estate after he becomes aware of the improper nature of Pedro and Sabel’s relationship. Catherine Jagoe foregrounds the class dynamics related to female sexuality that arise from the “angel in the house” paradigm in general terms during this period: The same discourse which desexualized the women of the middle class hypersexualized working-class women, marking them as “naturally” promiscuous, unrestrainedly passionate, and therefore sinful (…). Prostitution of women of the lower classes was considered a necessary evil because it ensured the continued purity of well-to-do women, who might otherwise become the targets of male lust. (1994: 40)34

With this in mind, the novel suggests that the sexual purity inherent in the angel paradigm endangers the stability of marriage in the upper classes because if men’s sexual needs are fulfilled by lower-class women as was the case for the marquis, they may be inclined to delay marriage or even avoid  Jagoe, Ambiguous Angels: Gender in the Novels of Galdós: 40.

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it all together. Moreover, if there are fewer marriages in these classes, a natural consequence will be fewer legitimate offspring as well, ultimately contributing to the decreasing prominence of these classes in Spanish society as a whole. The marked physical differences between Nucha and Sabel are foregrounded when a description of Sabel is focalized through Pedro’s perspective just as Nucha is in the throes of childbirth: “estaba Sabel fresca y apetecible como nunca, y las floridas carnes de su arremangado brazo, el brillo cobrizo de su pelo (…), la sensualidad de sus ojos azules, parecían contrastar con la situación, con la mujer que sufría atroces tormentos, medio agonizando, a corta distancia de allí” (Pardo Bazán 1994: 161–162)35 [Sabel was fresher and more desirable than ever. The luscious flesh of her bare arms, the coppery brilliancy of her hair … the sensuality of her blue eyes, contrasted sharply with the situation of the woman who was enduring cruel torments and almost dying not far away] (Pardo Bazán 1992: 143).36 The juxtaposition that the novel establishes between Sabel’s attractive and robust physiology and Nucha’s frailty is especially striking given that Pedro is so fixated on her just as his wife is on her deathbed while giving birth to his child in the next room. Moreover, the long-­ standing sexual liaison that Pedro has with Sabel—and that continues after he is married to Nucha—stands in stark contrast to the high value he places on his future wife’s chastity and purity. As Pedro is considering which one of his cousins he will marry, he thinks to himself: “La hembra destinada a llevar el nombre esclarecido de Moscoso y a perpetuarlo legítimamente había de ser limpia como un espejo” (Pardo Bazán 1994: 100)37 [The woman destined to perpetuate the imminent name of Moscoso should be as clean as a mirror] (Pardo Bazán 1992: 88).38 The hypocrisy of this situation may not seem immediately obvious because of how commonplace this scenario was in the nineteenth century; nevertheless, it is worthy of note that the double moral standard to which men and women are held is patently unjust. In Rita’s case there is no evidence of impropriety, it is simply her more flirtatious nature that persuades Pedro to choose pure and innocent Nucha over the cousin to whom he was attracted and who better suited him, and undoubtedly would have produced more  Pardo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa: 161–162.  Pardo Bazán, The House of Ulloa: 143. 37  Pardo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa: 100. 38  Pardo Bazán, The House of Ulloa: 88. 35 36

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numerous and stronger offspring. In Pedro’s case, we know that he and Sabel have been sexual partners for some time, and Sabel has even given birth to an illegitimate child as a result of their sexual liaison. An important point of contrast between the experiences of female characters of different social classes is their freedom of movement, which ties into their ability to express their sexuality more openly. As was true for most working-class women of both the city and the country, Sabel is able to freely move around the estate and the surrounding villages unaccompanied. Jo Labanyi interprets this difference in the context of modernity: “This class distinction is also a distinction between the pre-modern and bourgeois orders: the de la Lage family, though arrogant about its aristocratic status, has assimilated bourgeois norms of domesticity based on the confinement of women to the house” (Labanyi 2000: 350).39 If we contrast this aspect of Sabel’s life with the lives of Nucha and her sisters in Santiago, there is a significant difference. Pardo Bazán comments on these marked disparities in the lifestyles of Spanish women of different social classes in her wide-ranging essay “La mujer española,” which she first published in English for the British press in 1889 and later in a Spanish periodical in 1890. There she notes that working-class women of Galicia often have children prior to marriage and that this was socially acceptable in their class (Pardo Bazán 1999b: 115).40 This is precisely what Sabel does in La madre naturaleza, the sequel to Los Pazos de Ulloa, when she marries her lover el Gallo, underscoring the increased sexual agency of women of these classes in comparison to the angels of the middle and upper classes. Thus, women of lower social standing are often denied agency in many contexts as are their bourgeois and aristocratic sisters (here we see that Sabel is controlled largely by the patriarchal forces in her life—namely her father and Pedro), but in terms of sexual agency, she is granted more freedom. There is a marked difference between this lenient stance for lower-­ class women and the need to guard a woman’s chastity and the appearance of propriety at all costs for Nucha and her sisters (a relevant case in point would be Rita’s tarnished reputation simply because she has a flirtatious personality with no reference to any actual impropriety on her part). Another working-class woman who is juxtaposed to Nucha in the novel is the wet nurse that provides sustenance for Manuela after her birth.  Labanyi, Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel: 350.  Pardo Bazán, “La mujer española.” In La mujer española y otros escritos, ed. Guadalupe Gómez-Ferrer. Madrid: Cátedra, 1999: 115. 39 40

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While this character is never given a name in the narration, the physical descriptions of her are very vivid: “el ama (…) era un tonel lleno de leche que estaba allí para aplicarle la espita cuando fuese necesario, y soltar el chorro: ni más ni menos. (…) Poseía también, como los toneles, un vientre magno” (Pardo Bazán 1994: 172)41 [The nurse … was a barrel full of milk that was there so she could turn on the tap and let the stream flow when necessary: no more and no less than that (…) she also had a capable belly] (Pardo Bazán 1992: 153).42 Clearly the descriptions of her physiology highlight her hearty and robust proportions, and the abundance of milk that she was capable of producing. While her physicality is impressive, the narration focalized through Nucha’s perspective often highlights how uncivilized she is as she doesn’t know how to use utensils while eating, nor does she like to wear shoes (Pardo Bazán 1994: 173).43 In this way the narration highlights her role as human feeding machine, granting her no agency in the process. Moreover, because of her complete lack of refinement, Nucha insists on caring for the baby at all times and allowing the wet nurse to only provide material sustenance for her. A curious aspect of the wet nurse’s background is the unique characteristics of her home province. The narrator informs us that the Castrodorna valley is located in the Western most area of Galicia, very close to Portugal and that it is known for having exceptionally strong women—“las mujeres se distinguen por sus condiciones físicas y modo de vivir: son una especie de amazonas, resto de las guerreras galaicas de que hablan los geógrafos latinos” (Pardo Bazán 1994: 173)44 [women possess a distinct physical condition and mode of life: they are a type of Amazons, remnants of the Galician wars chronicled by Latin geographers] (Pardo Bazán 1992: 154).45 The unmistakable reference to these women’s heredity in this statement can be linked to a Naturalist reading: since pre-Roman times the women of this region have been exceptionally strong and this characteristic clearly continues to live on in the robust wet nurse’s genes. The text also highlights the importance of the women’s current circumstances in fomenting their autonomous nature—noting that they must be independent and strong because most of their husbands go off to find work in  Pardo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa: 172.  Pardo Bazán, The House of Ulloa: 153. 43  Pardo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa: 173. 44  Pardo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa: 173. 45  Pardo Bazán, The House of Ulloa: 154. 41 42

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Lisbon, returning home only a couple times per year. Thus, in the case of the wet nurse, both the unique environment in which she was raised and her genetic makeup have contributed to her exceptional physicality. The novel implies that when it comes to birthing and nursing children, the wet nurse will be capable of producing many more offspring than a woman like Nucha, given that the environment where she was raised was vastly different—and one in which she wasn’t allowed to leave her home without an escort. As Charnon-Deutsch (1994)46 has also asserted in her analysis, the novel problematizes the simple identification of women with motherhood since those who seem to be successful at fulfilling this biological function of giving birth—such as Sabel and the wet nurse (who leaves a two-month-­ old baby at home in order to care for Manuela)—have shown themselves to be poor caregivers to the offspring in their charge. While the extreme physical toll that childbirth has taken on Nucha marks her as an unsuccessful biological mother, she is shown to be an exemplary caregiver to at least three different children—her brother, Perucho and Manuela. What does this commentary on motherhood in the novel say from a scientific or Naturalist perspective? Since the genes that are passed on from generation to generation are those of the biological mothers, not those of the affectionate caregivers, the successful mothers of the narration are Sabel and the wet nurse, and it is the genetic makeup of these working-class and somewhat barbaric women that is being passed onto their offspring. Another question worthy of considering is: what does this suggest in regard to the prominence of certain traits and also social classes in future generations? Clearly the favored group is the working class, including their barbaric and uncouth traits. As the narration makes clear, Pedro could have chosen Rita as his wife and she likely would have been more successful as a biological mother and a better mate for him than her sister was, but the social model of the angelic Christian mother in which a woman’s reputation and impeccable morality is more important than anything else kept Pedro from choosing her. She was the one member of his social class that seemed to be a good match, but he passed her up for her cross-eyed and skinny younger sister. Therefore, the novel proposes that this contradictory and flawed model is also inhibiting the creation of strong, healthy offspring, and thus, by extension, the prosperity of the upper classes as a 46  Charnon-Deutsch, “Bearing Motherhood: Representations of the Maternal in Los Pazos de Ulloa.”

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whole. When working-class countrywomen are more successful biological mothers than their upper-class counterparts, there are serious implications for the future prosperity of this sector of the Spanish population as a whole. In an insightful study of five of Pardo Bazán’s short stories that explore the topic of infertility, Margot Versteeg has come to similar conclusions: “Si recurrimos al conocido símil familia-Estado, Pardo Bazán parece sugerir que de los enlaces de clase media, basados en la desigualdad y la sumisión femenina, nunca saldrá nada bueno. Mientras no se solucione la llamada ‘cuestión de la mujer,’ las clases medias serán estériles y no podrán engendrar la modernización del país que tan necesaria se juzga en la España finisecular” [If we draw on the well-known simile of family-­ State, Pardo Bazán seems to suggest that from middle class marriages, based on inequality and female submission, nothing good will ever come. While the so-called woman question goes unsolved, the middle classes will be sterile and will not be able to engender the modernization of the country that is deemed so necessary at the end of the century]47 (2008: 49).48 As this citation makes clear, Versteeg sees very similar dynamics in the stories she studies as the ones that I am analyzing here, albeit while focusing on the middle class. Likewise, she also ties her analysis into the larger conversation regarding Spain’s ability to fully embrace modernity. In this analysis I suggest that the societal ill that Pardo Bazán places at the center of this novel is the faulty value system used by the upper classes that believes a woman’s only role is that of mother, and then evaluates a woman’s potential success as a wife and mother on her chastity and innocence rather than her physiological characteristics, including her sexuality and her physical strength. The novel makes clear that these young women and girls’ upbringing within the social circles of their same class does not prepare them well for their lives as mothers. Pedro’s initial assessment of Rita’s physiology shows her to be a robust specimen, but her social class does not appreciate her for these characteristics; instead, it devalues her because she does not have a submissive and innocent personality. The novel proposes, in my view, that Spain’s upper classes must abandon this model of female virtue if they have any hopes of creating prolific and strong bourgeois and aristocratic families that will then be able to contribute to the social progress that is necessary for the country to fully embrace  Unless otherwise stated, all translations into English are my own.  Versteeg, “‘Una mujer como las demás’: el deseo de maternidad en cincocuentos de Emilia Pardo Bazán.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 14.1 (April, 2008): 49. 47 48

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modernity. Moreover, the countess has made clear in many of her writings that a society cannot progress if only half of the population is given the ability to contribute in meaningful ways to its success. In her 1890 essay “Galantería y el culto a la mujer” [“Galantry and The Cult of Woman”] she notes the deleterious effects of basing social progress only on men’s roles: “Error profundo, imaginar que adelantará la raza mientras la mujer se estacione. Al pararse la mujer, párase todo; el hogar detiene la evolución y como no es posible estancarse enteramente, vendrá el retroceso. En muchos sentidos ha sido regresivo el movimiento de España” [A profound error, to imagine that the race will progress while woman’s position stays the same. If women are static, so is everything else; the home holds back progress and since it isn’t possible to stay entirely static, backwards movement will come. In many ways Spain has moved backward] (Pardo Bazán 1999a: 309).49 Thus, the angel model is shown to hinder the production of large middle- and upper-class Spanish families because of its contradictory nature, and, in addition, Spain will not be able to fully engage in the progress of modernity if fifty percent of its population is not given a meaningful role to participate in it. The novel does not address directly what the fate of the lower classes will be, but given the representations of Sabel and the wet nurse as strong and fertile, traits that are valued by their social class, it does seem to suggest that the women of the lower class are the ones who will engender robust and abundant offspring. While all of the women in the novel are given very little agency, including the women of the lower classes, Sabel’s ability to openly express her sexuality stands in contrast to the model of the angel to which bourgeois and aristocratic women are to aspire. In the final scene of Los pazos de Ulloa, Julián returns to the country estate ten years after Nucha’s death only to find Pedro’s young daughter Manuelita barefoot and dressed in rags, while his illegitimate son, Perucho, is wearing nice, well-tailored clothing. Critics have interpreted this final scene of the novel in various ways. Feal Deibe proposes that it is a sign of the rising proletariat and the decaying aristocracy. Moreover, he asserts that Manuelita’s appearance serves to demonstrate that she will have a similar fate to that of her mother (Feal Deibe 1987: 220).50 On the other hand, Maurice Hemingway reads this scene through a Naturalist lens, 49  Pardo Bazán, “La galantería y el culto a la mujer.” In La mujer española yotros escritos, ed. Guadalupe Gómez-Ferrer. Madrid: Cátedra, 1999: 309. 50  Feal Deibe, “La voz femenina en Los Pazos de Ulloa”: 220.

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positing “neither civilization nor religion is powerful enough to counteract the degrading effect of a barbaric environment on human beings. The point is conveyed at the end of the novel. The illegitimate child of nature is dressed almost like a señorito, while the legitimate child of civilization is dressed almost in rags” (Hemingway 1983: 28).51 While Hemingway’s assertion ties into a Naturalist reading of the novel it does not take into account the gender dynamics in this scene. The novel makes clear that Pedro has neglected Manuela precisely because she is not the male heir for which he had hoped. Thus, in my view, the marked difference in the physical appearance of the marquis’ two children alludes to the gendered value system of this time period where Perucho, despite his illegitimate status, is clearly the privileged child. However, in typical Pardo Bazanian style this scene contains ambiguity that does not allow for a simple reading of it. As Julián first lays his eyes on the young pair in this scene, he notes how much Manuela looks like her mother: “idénticas largas trenzas negras, idéntico rostro pálido” (Pardo Bazán 1994: 292)52 [identical long black braids, identical pale face] (Pardo Bazán 1992: 259)53 but he quickly goes on to observe some essential and notable differences between the mother and daughter. He describes her face as “más mate, más moreno, de óvalo más correcto, de ojos más luminosos y mirada más firme” (Pardo Bazán 1994: 292)54 [although less transparent, darker, more perfectly oval, with brighter eyes and a firmer gaze] (Pardo Bazán 1992: 259).55 If we contrast Manuela’s upbringing with that of her mother—roaming free in the natural landscape of her family’s country manor, without the watchful gaze of her family controlling her every move—then it seems logical that Manuela’s appearance differs in significant ways from that of Nucha. Put simply, Manuela is the product of her environment. Unlike most other girls of her social class, she is given the same freedom of movement as the working-­ class women that serve in her family’s manor house while she also has been raised in this rural landscape, surrounded by nature’s beauty and exuberance. Moreover, what is remarkable about her circumstances is that the “neglect” that she has suffered under the tutelage of her father, rather than causing her harm, has actually benefitted her. Had she been raised  Hemingway, Emilia Pardo Bazán: The Making of a Novelist: 28.  Pardo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa: 292. 53  Pardo Bazán, The House of Ulloa: 259. 54  Pardo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa: 292. 55  Pardo Bazán, The House of Ulloa: 259. 51 52

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like her mother and aunts were—to be an angel—the novel implies that she might not be so healthy and strong. Thus, in my view, the natural environment of the country estate can’t be seen as a simple representation of barbarie, with Nucha and Julián acting as agents of civilización sent to improve this environment through marriage to a woman of the same class, and Christian morality, respectively. But rather, the natural countryside of the estate is presented in a more ambiguous light, especially since the female characters with closer ties to it are healthy and robust biological mothers, even if they are uncultured and crude to some degree. Through an exploration of how social class and also rural versus urban environments influence gender norms in the novel, we come to a fuller understanding of the dynamics at play, and thus elucidate our understanding of what we know to be one of Pardo Bazán’s principal concerns in the 1880s and 1890s—women’s role in Spanish society. The novel critiques the contradictory model of the angel in the house and ultimately shows how the adherence to this model by the bourgeoisie and aristocracy has negative effects on the number of offspring produced by the upper classes, thus also limiting how much influence these classes can have on the shaping of Spain’s future as it continues on its journey, albeit slowly and unevenly, into modernity. In conclusion, Pardo Bazán in Los pazos de Ulloa highlights the important influence of social conditioning that was central to most bourgeois and aristocratic women’s upbringings, and also to men’s evaluation of their future wives’ suitability. Given that these women are told since their earliest days that their most valuable assets are their innocence and virtue, the novel interrogates the ways in which these cultural values ultimately limit the prominence of the social classes in which they are preached— since prizing chastity and purity is at odds with women becoming prolific mothers. At the same time the novel problematizes the biological determinism that rests at the core of the social role assigned to women by these same classes. When considering Pardo Bazán’s purpose in Los Pazos and its sequel La madre naturaleza, Alicia Sánchez posits, En la España histórica de ese periodo, la autora no encontró el elemento de conciliación capaz de integrar el pasado aristocrático (representado por la estirpe noble de los Moscoso, que está desapareciendo) con los nuevos rumbos que tomaba el mundo moderno. (…) La nobleza española—su propia clase—comenzaba a ser remecida y desmembrada por una historia diferente. [During this historical moment in Spain, the author did not find a unifying

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element that would be capable of integrating the aristocratic past (represented by the noble lineage of the Moscoso family that was disappearing) with the new direction of the modern world. (…). Spanish nobles—her own class—began to be shaken and broken up by a different story]. (Sánchez 1991: 159)56

It is clear in Los pazos de Ulloa that despite Julián’s best intentions, the match between Nucha and Pedro was a misguided one. The novel implies that had Pedro followed his heart—and his eyes—which very quickly were able to assess Rita’s potential as a mother, together they might have had several strong, healthy offspring that could have carried on their aristocratic blood line and, at the same time, contributed to the prominence of their social class in Spain’s ongoing march toward modernity.

Bibliography Bieder, Maryellen. 1990. Between Genre and Gender: Emilia Pardo Bazán and Los Pazos de Ulloa. In In the Feminine Mode: Essay on Hispanic Women Writers, ed. Noel Valis and Carol Meier, 131–145. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP. Bretz, Mary Lee. 1977. Naturalismo y feminismo en Emilia Pardo Bazán. Papeles de Son Armadans 87: 195–219. MLA Bibliography. Charnon-Deutsch, Lou. 1994. Bearing Motherhood: Representations of the Maternal in Los Pazos Ulloa. In New Hispanisms: Literature, Culture, Theory, ed. Mark Millington and Paul Julian Smith, 69–95. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions. Feal Deibe, Carlos. 1987. La voz femenina en Los Pazos de Ulloa. Hispania 70 (2): 214–221. MLA Bibliography. Gullón, Germán. 1986–1987. La densidad genérica y la novela del ochocientos: Los Pazos de Ulloa de Emilia Pardo Bazán. Anales de la Literatura Española V: 174–188. MLA sBibliography. Hemingway, Maurice. 1983. Emilia Pardo Bazán: The Making of a Novelist. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hoffman, Joan. 2016. The Death of an Angel: A Mother’s ‘Failure’. In Los Pazos de Ulloa and a Daughter’s ‘Success,’ in La madre naturaleza. Hispanic Journal 37 (1): 109–125. MLA Bibliography. Jagoe, Catherine. 1994. Ambiguous Angels: Gender in the Novels of Galdós. Berkeley, CA: UC Berkeley Press. Labanyi, Jo. 2000. Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel. London: Oxford UP. 56  Sánchez, “Emilia Pardo Bazán y el naturalismo español.” La Palabra y el Hombre 79 (1991): 159.

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Pardo Bazán, Emilia. 1999a. La galantería y el culto a la mujer. In La mujer española y otros escritos, ed. Guadalupe Gómez-Ferrer, 308–311. Madrid: Cátedra. ———. 1999b. La mujer española. In La mujer española y otros escritos, ed. Guadalupe Gómez-Ferrer, 83–116. Madrid: Cátedra. ———. 1994. Los pazos de Ulloa. Madrid: Alianza. ———. 1992. The House of Ulloa. Trans. by Roser Caminals-Heath. Athens, GA: University of Georgia. Ragan, Robin. 2004. Another Look at Nucha’s Hysteria: Pardo Bazán’s Response to the Medical Field of Late Nineteenth-Century Spain. Letras femeninas 30 (1): 141–154. MLA Bibliography. Sánchez, Alicia. 1991. Emilia Pardo Bazán y el naturalismo español. La Palabra y el Hombre 79: 139–159. MLA Bibliography. Versteeg, Margot. 2008. ‘Una mujer como las demás’: el deseo de maternidad en cinco cuentos de Emilia Pardo Bazán. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 14 (1): 39–50. MLA Bibliography.

Displacement and Rediscovery of a Multifaceted Galician Woman: María Vinyals (1875–?) M.ª Ángela Comesaña Martínez

During my time as a graduate archivist in training at the Museum of Pontevedra, in the early 1990s, I had the opportunity to catalogue the Solla Collection, made up by documents from the neighbouring Soutomaior Castle. Among those bundles of papers, I came across some documents about the Marquesa de Ayerbe, about whom I had heard some legendary stories, particularly about her socialist affiliation. I did some research into her and in 2017, together with Aurora Marco, I published the first book-length monograph about María Vinyals: a today little-­ known Spanish and Galician activist, writer, and feminist pioneer (Marco and Comesaña 2017).1 1  Marco, Aurora; Mª Angela Comesaña. De María Vinyals a María Lluria. Escritora, feminista e activista social [From María Vinyals to María Lluria. Writer, feminist and social activist], 2017.

M.a Á. Comesaña Martínez (*) Museum of Pontevedra, Pontevedra, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Castro et al. (eds.), Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98861-6_8

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From a very young age, Vinyals became an advocate of education as a means for women to attain a certain degree of independence from men. With regard to her intellectual legacy, a thorough search in the press enabled me to find most of her published works. As an author, María Vinyals cultivated various genres and themes and signed her works under three different names: Marquesa de Ayerbe, Joyzelle, and María de Lluria, corresponding to different stages in her broader opus. She signed as María Vinyals in her teenage years, before her manuscripts were able to be published. Later, she used the name Marquesa de Ayerbe, to identify herself as the author of works such as the book El Castillo del marqués de Mos en Sotomayor (1904), as well as the lectures she delivered as the head of the Centro de Cultura Femenina. She used the pseudonym Joyzelle in 1905 for Rebelión, a socially engaged novel, and, later, for other written works: especially in the queries section on domestic issues published in the newspaper El Telegrama del Rif. Finally, after marrying for the second time and adopting the name María de Lluria, we could divide her activity into three further periods: the first one, as a socialist and a feminist activist and writer giving talks both in Galicia and in Madrid; the second, which encompasses her time in Cuba; and, lastly, the one following her return to Spain. Throughout this time, we can observe changes in certain facets of her feminist values as a result of historical and social transformations. The change is most evident is in her thoughts regarding women’s voting rights. In 1906, she declared that the granting of suffrage to women could only occur when they had acquired the rights that were denied to them, and further stipulates that they could gradually acquire the vote as their education improved (Ayerbe 1906).2 Later, in the 1920’s, in Havana, she declared that if women had equal duties with men, they should also enjoy equal rights. And she asks for the right to vote because as long as women did not have it,3 they would be ignored by rulers: “and between being ignored and being oppressed, there is very little difference” (Lluria 1921).4 During the following decade, back in Spain, during the Second Republic, she would finally see her dream women’s suffrage come to fruition: women could finally elect and be elected, in what would turn out to be a transformative moment.

 Marquesa de Ayerbe. “El voto de la mujer”. Galicia, n° 8, 15 de noviembre de 1906: p. 3.  Ezama, Ángeles “De aristócrata a socialista: María Vinyals, escritora, periodista y oradora”. 4  Lluria, María de. “Femeninas”. La Lucha, 27 febrero de 1921, p. 4. 2 3

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From very early on in her literary career Vinyals/María de Lluria was aware of the importance of female education as a form of progress and of the need to work for women’s social, cultural, and professional emancipation as a means of breaking through the traditional obstacles that prevented their formation and development as people. María de Lluria’s philanthropic works, such as the creation of a home school aimed at women with limited resources, are proof of her dedication and engagement. She also defends women’s associationism, following the example of what was happening in Anglo-Saxon countries, where she would find women’s activism very different from that of Latinas (a term which she uses to refer to both women from Mediterranean countries and from Latin America). She also brought up the need to modify the Civil Code to give women a series of rights that at that time were denied to them. All these topics will be the object of study in future works. Here, however, we will provide those not yet familiar with Vinyals’ works a much-­ needed introduction to the life and career of this Galician intellectual who, though very well-known during her lifetime, became practically invisible to the literary world for an extended period, only to be re-discovered decades later by scholars like Ángeles Ezama (2015), and through our own archival work at the Museum of Pontevedra. María Vinyals y Ferrés, the daughter of Aureliano Vinyals y Bargés and Agustina Ferrés y Viñolas, was born in Soutomaior Castle on 14 August 1875. She was baptised at the castle’s chapel three days later and was given the name of María de la Asunción Rosalía Josefa Agustina Zenobia Eusebia Anastasia. She was the niece-in-law of the Marquis of La Vega de Armijo, Antonio Aguilar y Correa (1824–1908), a politically active man who was a member of the party “Unión Liberal,” appointed member of the Spanish Cortes in 1854, Minister in Leopoldo O’Donnell’s cabinet, three times Secretary of State and President of the Spanish cabinet. He was also the Chair of the Academy of History and of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. María and her parents lived for a time in Terrassa and also in Madrid, where they shared a house with María’s aunt and uncle (given that Aureliano and her sister Zenobia had a very close relationship). When María was left fatherless at the age of six she became the daughter the Marquis and Marquise of La Vega de Armijo had never had, given that the latter were married at a mature age. Zenobia remarried the Marquis, having already bourn a son from her first marriage, who was already an adult when María, her niece, was born. The girl received a first-class

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education from governesses at home, following the liberal model followed by the Marquis and Marquise. In addition to the subjects intended for women of her social position, she was taught languages (French, English, and German). Being an only child, little María grew up among adults and older cousins. She spent her childhood surrounded by writers, academics, lawyers, humanists, diplomats, and artists, most of whom were quite old, and she used to converse with them at the gatherings held at the marquis’ house. Such an environment made her mature early and develop exceptional intelligence and sensitivity. In 1896, when she was twenty years old, she was married to the Marquis of Ayerbe, Juan Nepomuceno Jordán de Urríes y Ruiz de Arana, a forty-five-year-old widower who had a son the same age as his new wife. Together, they would have a son, Antonio Jordán de Urríes y Vinyals, born in 1897. Since their marriage was only based on economic and social interests, it soon fell apart. María found passion, love, spiritual understanding, and affinity of thoughts when she met Enrique Lluria, a doctor and sociologist of Cuban origin, disciple of Ramón y Cajal.5 María and Enrique were forced to keep an extramarital affair, as divorce did not exist in Spain at that time and social conventions did not allow for marital separation. In February 1909, María and Enrique got married in the parish of Santa Bárbara, in Madrid, less than a year after her uncle’s death on 13 June 1908, and barely a month after the passing of her husband, the Marquis of Ayerbe. They soon became parents to a son, Roger Lluria Vinyals. Together with Antonio, the Marquis of Ayerbe’s son, and Enrique, Emilia and Teresa, Lluria’s three children from his previous marriage (he had lost his wife in 1904), they created a large unconventional family. They first lived in Madrid and later moved to Soutomaior Castle, which María had inherited from her uncle. There they tried to pursue several business projects, the hospital Sanatorio Lluria being the most well-known. At the same time, they also ran a mechanical sawmill, a cowshed and a cheesery. In July 1917, influenced by Lluria, María Vinyals, who had previously shined at aristocratic salons as the Marquesa de Ayerbe, joined the Socialist Party and became known as “Marquesa Roja” (The Red Marquise). Various setbacks eventually put an end to the couple’s aspirations. In mid-August 1917 during a crisis that provoked political and social military 5  Santiago Ramón y Cajal was the first person of Spanish origin to receive the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906. Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1901–1921, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1967.

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movements, a revolutionary general strike took place called by the socialist party and its union UGT (General Union of Workers) as a result of which the military authorities decreed a thorough search of the Sotomayor (Soutomaior) Castle. Some written media came to pick up the news of the couple’s arrest, which later had to be denied. Three months later, news of the public auction of the Castle would become public: its owners had not been able to face the payment of their mortgage. Hand in hand with the relocation of sick people received by the sanatorium due to the effects of World War I came the suspicion that the Fortress was a centre of socialist political conspiracies. The couple initially returned to Madrid, in 1918, and later they moved to Havana, where they started a new life. However, the wind was not at the couple’s back there either. In 1925, soon after opening a new surgery in Cienfuegos, Enrique Lluria died, putting María into a situation of precarity that was only worsened by his daughter Teresa’s illness (she would also eventually pass away). It was then that a group of friends created a fund which would allow her to return to Spain, where she would make ends meet (barely) by writing articles, translating texts and giving talks. One loses trace of her in the mid 1930’s, sometime after she found out about the death of Enrique Lluria Jr., in 1932, and her youngest son, Roger, a year later.

1   A Writer in the Making: María Vinyals María was a voracious reader, from a very early age. Consequently, she also began writing early, during her teenage years. The Marquis of Laurencín, Francisco Rafael de Uhagón, said about her: desde sus tiernos años, según indiscretas confidencias de amigos y deudos, componía cuentos y novelas con tan precoz ingenio, que alarmaron, por razones de salud, á su próxima familia, obligándola á formal secuestro de libros y papeles, atenta á que el desarrollo intelectual no sobrepujara al físico. [from a tender age, according to indiscreet confidences of friends and relatives, she would write tales and novels with such precocious talent, that, for reasons to do with the child’s health, they warned her closest relatives,

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forcing them to formally confiscate her books and papers, and making sure that her intellectual development did not surpass the physical.]6 (405–9)7

Both her birth and the long periods of time that she spent at Soutomaior Castle, especially in the summertime, undoubtedly contributed to her finding her “Galician muse,” which she described as: hija de la luz y del ambiente, de los prados y de las florestas la musa gallega es una aldeana muy culta, muy sensible y muy tierna, muy traviesa y muy sutil que se enreda en los lazos multicolores de las gaitas, escondiéndose bajo las cofias y pañuelos de las rapaciñas rubias, y que vibra en todas las manifestaciones sinceramente genuinas de la raza. La musa gallega tiene una vitalidad poderosa y fecunda, por cuya razón resurge en los medios más inadecuados. [daughter of light and air, of pastures and woods, the Galician muse is a very cultured, very sensitive and very tender, very naughty and very subtle villager who entangles herself in the multi-coloured ribbons of bagpipes, who hides under the coifs and scarves of those blonde little girls, and who vibrates in all the sincerely genuine displays of race. The Galician muse has a powerful and prolific vitality, and that is why she reappears in the most inadequate environments.] (Lluria 1922, 5)8

Among the documents from the Castle collection, the archive of the Museum of Pontevedra contains some examples of correspondence from her childhood years, both letters her aunt and uncle sent to her (the niece they loved so dearly), and those in which the girl dedicated her first words to her beloved “second dad,” Vega de Armijo, “who loved me more than a daughter and whom I loved more than a father” (Muñoz and Vinyals 1935, 29).9 In her teenage years, she often wrote to him when they were 6  The translations of quotes in this chapter are authored by María González García (Servizos Lingüísticos Deputación de Pontevedra). 7  Marqués de Laurencín. “El castillo del Marqués de Mos en Sotomayor: Apuntes históricos por la Marquesa de Ayerbe”. Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, t. 45 (1904): pp. 405–409. 8  LLURIA, María de. Conferencia leída en la velada necrológica celebrada en homenaje a la memoria de la ilustre escritora condesa de Pardo Bazán por su autora María de Lluria, Habana, 12 de mayo de 1922. [Lecture read at the obituary soiree celebrated in honour of the illustrious writer Condesa de Pardo Bazán by its author, María de Lluria. Havana, 12 May 1922]: p. 5. 9  “La Europa que yo vi … Memorias de doña María Vinyals, que en tiempos de la Monarquía fue marquesa de Ayerbe, Grande de España y embajadora en Cortes extranjeras.

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apart, proving how much she missed him. In addition to her familiar and relaxed manners, her epistolary style showed, even then, a fine sense of humour that we could very well connect with Galician retranca (wit).10 María Vinyals wrote her first literary work at the age of thirteen as she herself would recount in 1929 in the newspaper El Socialista, in an article titled “Cuento de Navidad” [Christmas Tale] published on December 26: Lo primero que yo he escrito en mi vida fue precisamente un cuento de Navidad. Toda la sensiblería barata, toda la alegría ficticia y de pacotilla, tenían necesariamente que influir en mis nervios de chiquilla precoz y desorbitada. El cuento—naturalmente—se desarrollaba dentro de los límites previstos del nacimiento del niño rico y de la ambición del niño pobre …, todo acababa lo mejor del mundo: con un milagro. [The first thing I have ever written in my life was precisely that: a Christmas tale. All the cheap sentimentalism, all the fictional and shoddy cheerfulness, could naught but affect my nerve as an exaggerated and precocious little girl. Naturally, the tale unfolds within the expected limits of the rich child’s birth and the poor child’s ambition … It all came down to the best thing in the world: a miracle.] (Lluria 1929b, p. 4)11

Her literary vocation also produced mixed reactions within her immediate family circle, namely, concern on the part of her mother along with her uncle’s admiration and surprise: El cuento produjo en el medio ambiente que me rodeaba dos efectos diametralmente opuestos, que habían de influir en toda mi existencia. De agradable sorpresa en mi tío. De estupefacción y desagrado en mi madre.

Datos recogidos, ordenados y comentados por Matilde Muñoz”, chap. XIII. Crónica, 12 May 1935: p. 29. 10  Galician humour, better known as Galician retranca, is characterized by practising a good-natured irony, without malice, always with a double intention and very difficult to explain. As an example, we will quote this famous phrase from Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao (1886–1950) a Galician writer, illustrator, painter, physician, and politician—deputy in the Cortes and, and member of the government of the Republic in exile—who would become one of the fathers of Galician nationalism, as well as defender and promoter of Galician culture and autonomy: “I became a doctor for the love of my father; I do not practice my profession out of love for humanity.” Castelao defended the statute of autonomy for Galicia, and the recognition of historical nationalities for Galicia, Euskadi, and Catalonia. See also: Seixas Seoane, Miguel Anxo. Castelao, builder of the nation. Galaxia, Vigo, 2020. 11  Lluria, María De. “Cuento de Navidad”. El Socialista, 26 December 1929: p. 4.

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Mi madre veía con disgusto que yo tuviese vocación de escritora, […] las mujeres escritoras que había conocido, […] fueron desgraciadas, teniendo que vivir en continua pugna con la sociedad o realizando hechos que, dado el criterio por aquel entonces establecido, venían a catalogarlas entre las descalificadas. […] “Todas las escritoras son unas locas”. Ese era un concepto que se oía sin cesar, y nadie se preocupaba de averiguar si la escritora era loca porque escribía, o si la “locura” era la causa determinante que la impulsaba. [The tale caused two diametrically opposite effects in my environment which would later affect my whole life: pleasant surprise in my uncle; astonishment and displeasure in my mother. My mother viewed my vocation for writing with disappointment … The female writers she had known … had been miserable, having to live a never-ending conflict against society or doing things that, given the criteria established at the time, would classify them among the discredited. … “All female writers are crazy”. That was a concept which was heard constantly, and nobody bothered figuring out whether the writer was crazy because she wrote or whether that “craziness” was her driving force.] (p. 4)12

Her experience as a writer developed from then on, sometimes in an irregular and, as she stated herself, even capricious manner depending on the life stage she was in. “Por mucho que hayan combatido mi vocación, yo he escrito siempre; pero en vez de haber aprendido a escribir, desarrollando mi vocación o mi afición, dentro de las reglas de una carrera, lo he verificado desordenadamente, al azar de mi capricho o de las circunstancias.” [No matter how much they have fought my vocation, I have always written, but instead of learning how to write, developing my vocation or my passion within the rules of a career, I have verified it in a disorderly manner, leaving it up to my whim or circumstance] (p. 4)13 In late 1891, seeking criticism, reviews, and advice, María sent a short novel called El señor de Fornelos to José Fernández Jiménez, el Moro (The Moor), an intellectual from Granada with whom she had a beautiful friendship judging by the tone of the missives this elderly man sent to her, which are included in the Solla Collection at the Museum of Pontevedra. Fernández Jiménez (1832–1903) was a Doctor of Jurisprudence, a writer and a diplomat. He also held various political offices: he was an ambassador in the Vatican City and Rome, a member of the Spanish Cortes  Lluria, “Cuento de Navidad”, 4.  Lluria, “Cuento de Navidad”, 4.

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representing the Canary Islands and Assistant Secretary of State in the cabinet of Praxedes Mateo Sagasta (Leader of the Liberal Party). He spoke several languages, had a passion for art, and was a member of the literary group La Cuerda Granadina, where he was known by the nickname Moro Ivon because he had lived in Tangier for six months. Just as his young friend had requested, he answered with his comments in a letter which is still preserved incomplete and gives some hints about the writing’s plot: Expuestos los dos reparos que anuncié, y sin insistir más pesadamente en ellos, creo inútil descender a menudencias de dómine miope. De esa clase de quisicosas de poca monta, como irregularidades de dicción y otras por el estilo, espero que hablemos despacio cuando podamos leer el manuscrito juntos, porque son palillos más para tratados de viva voz y sobre el papel que para escritos en una carta. Ahora, volviendo la hoja, diré a V. que en la novela hay trozos que anuncian una mano de verdadero escritor […] Supongo que no creerá V. este elogio mera lisonja o caricia literaria para endulzar la crítica, nada de eso: prometí ser sincero y, aún sin prometerlo, con V. lo sería siempre; (con los demás hubiera dado la callada por respuesta) y sincero he sido lo mismo en el elogio que en la censura. Perdóneme la segunda en gracia del cariño que me la dicta y tengo por seguro que con el primero pretendo haber dicho lo bastante para que V. se arrime e insista en escribir. Este, como todos los oficios, es penoso, difícil y tan prosaico en su manejo como ideal en sus fines. Creo firmemente y repito que tiene V. facultades de sobra y, si en mi mano estuviera, aseguro a V. que haría lo posible y lo imposible por cultivar su principal defecto: la niñez. [Now that I have expounded the two faults that I had announced, and without tediously insisting on them, I believe it is futile to get mired in such minutiae typical of a short-sighted pretentious highbrow. In regard to these sort of trivial conundrums, like irregularities in diction and such, I hope we can speak more in detail when we have the opportunity to read the manuscript together, because that is the type of irrelevant talk that is better discussed out loud or on paper rather than written on a letter. Now, back to the page, I will tell you that the novel contains passages that reveal the hand of a true writer … I suppose you will not take this compliment as a mere flattery or literary caress to sweeten my critique. Nothing could be further from the truth: I promised to be honest and, even if I had not promised it, I would always be honest with you (I would have turned a deaf ear to the rest) and I have always been just as honest with praise as I have been with criticism. Forgive me for the latter on the account of the affection that dictates

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it to me. I know for certain that I have intended to say enough of the former to bring you closer and make you insist on the writing. This profession, like all professions, is arduous, hard and as mundane in its management as ideal in its aims. I firmly believe, I repeat, that you possess more than enough ability. If it was in my hands, I assure you that I would do anything possible and impossible to develop your main flaw: childhood.]14

This tale could be among the writings that she destroyed when she married the Marquis of Ayerbe in 1896, a common practice among female writers at the time. She probably signed it as María Vinyals Ferrés, a name that she would only use once afterwards—as far as we know—in the translation of the novel Pirates of Venus, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which was published as a collectable supplement, in January 1935, in the magazine Blanco y Negro. It is worth mentioning here the importance that the epistolary genre had from a very early stage in her written works. From childhood, María Vinyals had had a liking for writing letters. We have examples of the ones she sent to her parents when she was visiting the Marquis and Marquise of La Vega Armijo, or to her aunt and uncle when she was still living with her parents in Terrassa. Throughout her life, she corresponded with a great number of people, as is evident from the letters addressed to her that are kept in the archive of the Museum of Pontevedra. Although we barely have any records of letters sent to her in other archives, some more might be found in the future. Without a doubt they would be worth studying. As stated previously, if we examine María Vinyals y Ferrés’ known works we can identify three distinct “identities” corresponding to different life stages or themes: Marquesa de Ayerbe, Joyzelle, and María de Lluria, some of them with certain variations as we shall see below.

2   Marquesa de Ayerbe Marquesa de Ayerbe is the name María Vinyals used in her first printed works. Her first book was El castillo del marqués de Mos en Sotomayor. Apuntes históricos, which was published in Madrid in 1904 by the printing house “Establecimiento Tipográfico de Fortanet” as a 144-page volume. A more carefully produced limited edition of 200 copies was printed and bound at Antonio de Río y Micó’s workshop in Pontevedra the following  Letter from José Fernández Jiménez to María Vinyals, n.d. AMUPO. Solla, 184–1.

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year. For this edition, gothic typeface and coloured ink were used. The paper’s quality was also better compared to the first edition and the binding was made with parchment paper, giving the book an antique look. Both editions were illustrated by the artist José Garnelo, who in 1906 painted a fantastic oil on canvas portrait of the Marquise and her son that is currently displayed at the Garnelo Museum in Montilla, Córdoba. The essay is one of the most beautiful monographies ever published about Soutomaior Castle. The author tells the story of the Señores de Mos from their uncertain origins to the moment they left the castle, focusing especially on the figure of Pedro Madruga. The monograph comprises ten chapters based on various sources of information—as she explains in the preliminary notes—, such as the “classics” by Vasco de Aponte, some contemporary works by authors like Fernando Fulgosio and López Otero, writings from the Archaeological Society of Pontevedra and articles published on magazines and newspapers. She regrets not being able to access the original documents due to the fact that many of them were lost in fires and pillages during the Napoleonic raids. That is the reason why she especially thanked the Duke of La Roca for kindly letting her consult his family’s archive. María’s essay was subject to various reviews and comments in the press, where it generally received great praise, but there were also some critiques in a different fashion, like the one by the writer Francisco Tettamancy from A Coruña, who reproached her in several issues of the newspaper El Correo Gallego15 (1905) for not considering Galician historiography and listed a series of errors contained in the book (Tettamancy 1905). In the magazine Revista Gallega, a critic who used a pseudonym complained that she had not written it in the Galician language and that she had confused the two branches of the Soutomaior family: the branch from Tui, who lived in the castle, and the one from Lantaño, who lived in the traditional Galician manor house Pazo de Rianxo (Revista Gallega, 1906).16 Between 1905 and 1907, under the name Marquesa de Ayerbe, she also signed several articles and some tales in El Mundo Ilustrado, Unión Ibero-americana, Galicia (Buenos Aires) or Gran Mundo y Sport, among other magazines. She also wrote journalistic texts about the social 15  Tettamancy, F. “Notas bibliográficas. El castillo de Mos en Sotomayor”. El Correo Gallego, 28 January, 13, 14, and 17 February 1905. 16  El Mariscal D. Suero 1° Gómez de Sotomayor 5° señor de Rianxo. “Sobre un libro. Sra. Marquesa de Ayerbe”. Revista Gallega, no. 569, 10 February 1906: pp. 3–4.

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influence of women, women’s suffrage, and Galician writer Rosalía de Castro, as well as a letter to Pedro A. Boissier talking about Enrique de Lluria which was published in El Correo de Matanzas (1906). At the same time, she began her career as a public speaker giving numerous lectures and speeches, like the opening remarks at the “Centro de Cultura Femenina” and the “Escuela de Madres de Familia de la Unión Ibero-Americana” on 18 March 1906 (Marquesa de Ayerbe 1906),17 a highly praised rhetorical piece in which she explains the reasons that had driven her to help found this institution: namely, alleviating the pitiful state of female education. Indeed, education, and particularly women’s education, would be a recurring theme in her written works. On 14 May 1907, she spoke at the opening of the “Liga Española para la Instrucción Popular” at the “Centro Ibero-Americano.” Her main lecture regarding a visit to Versailles, was accompanied by several projections. A month later, in a second lecture that complemented the first one, she talked about the building of Real Sitio de San Ildefonso, built as a model of Versailles, once again aided by the use of projected images. (El Imparcial, 3)18

3   Joyzelle Joyzelle is the second identity used by María Vinyals chronologically, a pen name taken from the homonymous theatre play written by the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlink. In 1905, Rebelión19 (Joyzelle 1905a) was released. The novel, consisting of an introduction, three parts, and an epilogue, tells the unfortunate story of Lucía, the viscountess of Lora del Río, who after her mother’s death is taken by the Duke of Cazalla and married off to his son Álvaro. Their loveless union soon leads to a spiritual and material separation. Álvaro lives a frivolous, dissipated life and incurs debts due to his gambling addiction. In contrast, Lucía is an independent, well-informed, free-­ thinking woman who falls in love with George Smithson, an engineer with socialist ideals that she later ends up sharing with him. When her protector 17  marquesa de Ayerbe: Centro de Cultura Femenina y Escuela de Madres de Familia. Discurso leído en su apertura el 18 de marzo de 1906 por la Excelentísima Sra. Marquesa de Ayerbe. [Centro de Cultura Femenina y Escuela de Madres de Familia. Opening speech read on 18 March 1906 by her Excellency Marquesa de Ayerbe]. Unión Ibero-American. Madrid, Impr. Hijos de M.G. Hernández, 1906. 18  “Liga española para la instrucción popular”. El Imparcial, 15 November 1907: page 3. 19  Joyzelle. Rebelión, 1905.

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dies, Lucía is left at the mercy of her husband, who intends to declare her insane and later sue her for adultery. A misunderstanding when she is alone (and while George is on a trip in the United States) makes her commit suicide. Considering the narrative strategies used in the novel (the letters, the diary, the narrator’s discourse) and the many points in common shared between Lucía and the author, who felt trapped in her own marriage to the Marquis of Ayerbe (especially when she started an extramarital affair with Enrique Lluria), we can safely assume that Rebelión is an autobiographical novel. Joyzelle also happens to be the name Vinyals had previously used in 1905 to sign a reply to a review by Azorín published in the newspaper ABC20 about Enrique Lluria’s book Evolución Superorgánica which also addressed the prologue’s writer, Santiago Ramón y Cajal.21 She took up this pen name again after her return from the isle of Cuba in 1929, in the newspaper Telegrama del Rif, where she was responsible for sections like “Cosas del hogar,” “Dos consejos por semana,” and “Correo indiscreto” in “Página de la mujer,” where she would give advice about home decoration, discussed women’s elegance, protocol, or manners, and even answered her readers in non-love-related problems. All this occurred during a critical time in Vinyals’ life in which she would need to earn a living by writing all types of texts.

4   María de Lluria This name, along with its variations—María Lluria and M. de Ll.—is the one she used to sign her works after she married Enrique Lluria Despau, a man with whom, by all accounts, she managed to attain a complete, mutual, affective, and intellectual understanding. They lived a passionate romance that started as a clandestine affair, continued as a marriage, and ended, after suffering a series of shared misfortunes, with Enrique’s death, leaving María in a state of inconsolable grief and in the worst possible financial misery. Our team of scholars—composed of Professors Ricardo Hernández Otero, Elena Adell and myself—has found more than 400 articles authored by María de Lluria, which need to be analysed in depth for later classification and detailed study. As we previously mentioned, we can broadly  Azorín. “Oráculo manual”. ABC, 26 June 1905: p. 4.  Joyzelle. “Azorín festivo”. La República de las Letras, no. 10, 8 July 1905: p. 5.

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distinguish three periods in María de Lluria’s written works: the first decade of the twentieth century in Spain; the second period, coinciding with her stay in Cuba (1920–1928); and the third and last period, starting with her return to the Iberian Peninsula. The first-known article signed as María de Lluria appeared in Galicia. It was titled “Feminismo”22 and published in 1914 in Vida Gallega (1914, 12). This illustrated magazine announced the beginning of the author’s collaboration in subsequent issues which would not come to fruition. From her first period as María de Lluria, we know of one short novel, La Roxa, published in 1918  in the newspaper El Día, and around twenty short stories of inconsistent quality dealing with different themes. In those tales, María gives evidence of her narration skills, showing her gift for describing and building characters and her command of a rich and expressive vocabulary and syntax. Though they span numerous themes and locations, those set in Galicia are particularly remarkable, offering aesthetically provocative portrayal of villagers and of the rural Galician world that she knew so well. Spoken dialogues in her narrative works often employ the use of Galician, the language she heard her fellow countrymen and countrywomen speak when she spent time at the castle, though Spanish translations are also provided. The main characters are very often rural women who must fight a hostile environment, such as women who suffer from solitude when their husbands emigrate or abandon them or who are victims of different types of abuse. We have found records of approximately twenty-five collaborations with El Figaro between August 1917 and December 1918. They make up most of her total work in this period. Describing María de Lluria’s production in detail is not an easy task because she addresses a great variety of topics. She deals with feminism (tackling women’s rights and duties), childhood (emphasising the importance of issues like child hygiene, juvenile delinquency, infanticides, etc.), education (particularly with regard to the teacher’s dignity, female education, and bringing art closer to the public), and during World War I, pacifism. She also mentions some more well-­ known women’s names—like the Galician writers Concepción Arenal and Emilia Pardo Bazán, Marie Curie or Margarita Nelken—and writes memoirs recalling all manner of prominent individuals with whom she lived during her time as an aristocrat. Furthermore, she published articles

 Lluria, María de. “Feminismo”. Vida Gallega, no. 58, 30 June 1914: p. 12.

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covering an array of topics related to political, social, and cultural affairs (including forms of cultural diversion and free time). Under the name María de Lluria, Vinyals continued giving lectures, such as the one organised at the Casa del Pueblo, in Madrid, by the Agrupación Feminista Socialista on 11 December 1915, titled “Woman as a Companion of Man” (La Época, 1915, 3).23 “Feminism and Gallantry” was the title of the speech given on 25 January 1916 at the artisans’ association Círculo Recreo de Artesanos de Pontevedra (Diario de Pontevedra, 1916a, 1).24 One month later, at a meeting of the Artisans’ Association of A Coruña, she gave a lecture entitled “Idealistic and Realistic Concept of Happiness” (El Noroeste, 1916b, 1–2).25 A further talk given at the Ateneo, in Madrid, on 14 January 1919 had as its principal theme “The Lack of Social Sense of Spanish Women” (Nelken 1919, 3).26 After the failed business ventures set up at Soutomaior Castle, the Lluria family arrived in Havana in March 1920 in search of better fortune. It did not take long before María began collaborating in the Havana press, where her activity was nothing short of prolific: in 1921, she wrote around sixty articles for the section “Femeninas” in the newspaper La Lucha, tackling a wide range of topics, including feminism, suffragism, cinema, flowers, and public figures from all over the world (Adell and Hernández Otero 2018, 43–46).27 She balanced this collaboration with contributions to El Heraldo de Cuba, a newspaper aimed mainly at the working class. In July and August, she wrote five articles for the section “Patronos y obreros” and continued collaborating with this newspaper in “Movimiento obrero,” for which she wrote more than eighty articles covering news related to various trade unions, federations, conferences, strikes, and so on, both in Cuba and abroad. Additionally, she contributed to newspapers, such as La Nación, Bohemia, Diario de la Marina, Social, La Correspondencia and Eco de Galicia, among others. She did not abandon 23  “En la casa del pueblo. Conferencia de una exembajadora. La mujer compañera del hombre”. La Época, 12 December 1915: p. 3. 24  “La marquesa de Ayerbe en el Recreo de Artesanos. Párrafos de su conferencia”. El Diario de Pontevedra, 27 and 28 January 1916: p. 1. 25  “En la Reunión de Artesanos. Dª María Vinyals de Lluria”. El Noroeste, A Coruña, 27 March 1916: pp. 1–2. 26  M. N. (Margarita Nelken). “Conferencia de María de Lluria en el Ateneo”. El Día, 15 January 1919: p. 3. 27  Adell Tejedor, Elena and Hernández Otero, Ricardo Luis, “Trayectoria en Cuba de la intelectual y activista gallega María de Lluria” 2018: 43–46.

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her role as a lecturer, and activity for which she decidedly had a great talent (as can be deduced from numerous compliments reported in the press). As in her writing, the primary focus of her public speaking centred around social questions of class, inequality, and women’s rights. Shortly after her arrival in Havana, she was invited to give a lecture by the city’s Club Femenino, who begged her not to mention the word “feminism” and not to talk about women’s suffrage: “Espantajo tan grande resultaba ya por aquel entonces, que las feministas cubanas, que tan entusiasta recibimiento me hicieron cuando llegué a La Habana, al solicitar una conferencia mía para el Club Femenino, me insinuaron desde luego que eludiese la cuestión del sufragismo.” [Already back then the question had become such a boogieman that the Cuban feminists,—who had given me such and enthusiastic welcome when I arrived to Havana— suggested that I should definitely elude the question of women’s suffrage when they asked me to give a lecture for the Club fememino] (Lluria 1929a, 1; 1931a, b, 1).28 She had the opportunity to discuss different issues at the Casa del Emigrante, the Centro Gallego and other important institutions in Havana (and in particular among the Spanish and Galician diaspora). Considering the extensive coverage it received in the press, it is worth highlighting her speech in May 1922, at a soiree celebrated in honour of the first anniversary of the death of Emilia Pardo Bazán, the writer from A Coruña with whom María had established an intense intellectual and friendly relationship both in Madrid and Galicia (Diario de la Marina, 1922, 1).29 During her speech (Lluria 1922),30 she talked about the mark that Galicia left in Pardo Bazán’s work and mentioned Los Pazos de Ulloa as the best and most Galician of all the works that had flowed from her prolific pen. In 1925, the death of her life partner in Cienfuegos inspired her only known poem, “Soledad,” published on 27 February 1926 in the newspaper from Cienfuegos La Correspondencia (Lluria 1926a). At the time, her financial situation was uncertain, and she was left completely helpless. Added to this loss was the sorrow that came with the illness and passing of Teresa, Enrique Lluria’s daughter from his first marriage, whom María had raised as her own since she was a baby, a situation which was only 28  Lluria, María de. “Pareceres. A paso de gigante”. El Socialista, 1 September 1929a: p. 1; “El voto femenino”. El Socialista, 3 October 1931: p. 1. 29  “Una velada necrológica en el Centro Gallego”. Diario de la Marina, 13 May 1922: p. 1. 30  Lluria, Conferencia leída.

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made worse by the absence of her youngest child Roger and some health problems of her own, as she would recount to María de Maeztu in a desperate letter written in late 1926: No sé si habrá llegado a sus oídos el fallecimiento de mi marido. Yo lo adoraba; era mi razón de ser, mi vida, mi ilusión. Me quedaron Teresita y Roger; a Teresita ya la conocía usted, pero lo que V. no sabe es que había dado de sí todo lo que o esperaba y estaba terminando brillantemente el bachillerato, para prepararse a la carrera de leyes. ¿Han minado los estudios su delicado organismo? ¿Ha cometido alguna imprudencia? No se sabe; pero en cuatro meses me la arrebató una tisis galopante. Su cariño, su solicitud, su constante preocupación de que yo no podía vivir sin Enrique, han durado toda su vida. Momentos antes de morir me dirigía frases de ánimo y consuelo. Quedé a su muerte en un estado de abatimiento tan grande, que hube de ingresar en un hospital (!), donde he pasado más de tres meses en un estado de semi-inconsciencia. La solicitud y cariños de las enfermeras, más que las recetas de los médicos, me han devuelto la salud. No sé si es un beneficio; una fracasada como yo no precisa vivir, y menos con una salud precaria. Ahora necesito operarme de un tumor glandular en el cuello; Enrique afirmaba que los disgustos alteraban las secreciones glandulares y he de ser fiel a sus teorías hasta en mi propio organismo. Del fracaso de mi existencia queda una obra: mi hijo Roger. Su hermano Enrique—que me odia, fiel a la tradición de odiar a la madre política—lo ha llevado a España con el único objeto de separarlo de mí. [I do not know whether the passing of my husband has come to your attention. I adored him, he was my reason to be, my life, my joy. I was only left with Teresita and Roger; you had met Teresita before, but what you do not know is that she had already given all that I expected from her, and she was finishing her secondary school education with brilliant results to prepare for Law school. Have her studies undermined her frail organism? Has she been irresponsible? Nobody knows, but in four months she was taken away from me by an uncontrollable typhus. Her affection, her thoughtfulness, her constant concern about me not being able to live without Enrique have lasted her whole life. In her final moments, she would still give me words of encouragement and comfort. After her death, I was left in such a great state of depression that I had to be admitted to a hospital (!), where I spent more than three months in a semi-conscious state. The nurses’ devotedness and love, more than the doctors’ prescriptions, have restored my health. I do not know whether that is a blessing, since a loser like me does not deserve to live, let alone with my poor health. Now I need to have surgery on a glandular tumour in my neck. Enrique claimed that worries altered glandular secretions and I shall be loyal to his theories even with my own organism.

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As a result of my failed existence there is one piece of work left: my son Roger. His brother Enrique—who hates me, faithful to the tradition of hating one’s step mother—has taken him to Spain with the only aim of separating him from me.] (Marco and Comesaña 2017, 173–174)31

In December 1926 she wrote a complimentary comment about Zogoibi, a novel by the Argentinean author Enrique Laureta, in which she showed, once again, her advanced critical literary knowledge (Lluria 1926b).32 This might have been her last collaboration written during her stay in Cuba. In August 1927, the newspaper Diario de la Marina included a loose-leaf document reporting about the kind action taken by a journalist from Matanzas, Corpus Iraeta Lecuona, who started a subscription in the newspaper La Nueva Aurora to cover the expenses of María’s passage to Mexico: Sin amparo hoy, la que no ha mucho fue gran dama de las sociedades de Cuba y España, sin amigos, sin recursos María de Lluria, su orfandad encontró eco en el corazón de ese compañero, que entre amigos varios suyos logró la cantidad necesaria para que la que ciñó a sus sienes la corona del Marquesado de Ayerbe pueda intentar nuevos horizontes para su vida llena hoy de los más nobles celajes. La señora Lluria embarcará el veinte y nueve rumbo a tierras aztecas. [María de Lluria, the woman who not so long ago was a grand dame of the Cuban and Spanish societies, today is helpless, friendless, destitute. Her orphaning resonated in a colleague’s heart who, with the help of some friends, obtained the needed sum so that the woman who once wore the crown of the Marquisate of Ayerbe could try new horizons in her life, now filled with the noblest omens. Mrs Lluria will embark on the twenty ninth for Aztec lands.] (Diario de la Marina, 1927)33

In April 1928 she was back in Spain. As soon as she arrived in A Coruña, she sent a letter to Diario de la Marina, which shared María de Lluria’s words of gratitude to all of those who had made it possible for her to return to her home country, where she expected to be reunited with her 31  Letter from María Lluria to María de Maeztu. Havana, 21 December 1926. (Signatures: 37/17/5 to 37/17/8). Archive of the Residencia de Señoritas. Fundación José Ortega y Gasset-Gregorio Marañón. 32  Lluria, María de. “Zogoibi (de Enrique Larreta)”. Diario de la Marina, 24 December 1926: p. 18. 33  “Una buena obra”. Diario de la Marina, 28 August 1927: p. 2.

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family (Diario de la Marina, 1928).34 However, according to the scarce information at our disposal, such reunion either never took place or was a disaster, because her situation of poverty and her financial needs would continue until practically the end of her days. From that point on, writing became her refuge and her livelihood. El Socialista, the voice of the party she re-joined in 1931, published several of her articles between 1928 and 1932. In those articles, she reviews lectures and speeches, talks about education, literature, theatre and cinema, readings, childhood and sexual education, the act of writing and her vocation for writing, animal cruelty, her thoughts about pacifism, socialism, and so on. From time to time, she was not shy to condemn certain events. As she did when she denounced the excessive mortality of children in the asylum of the Inclusas (Lluria 1930, 1) or the misunderstood charity practised by the senior female management in the Red Cross during the Melilla War. (Lluria 1931, 1; Ezama 2015, 255).35 She also collaborated in several newspapers and magazines such as Estampa, La Voz, El Pueblo (a republican newspaper from Valencia), La Libertad, Tierra Charra, La Tarde de Lorca, La Rábida, Revista Colombina Hispanoamericana, or Transporte. La Casa del Pueblo, in Madrid, was once again the stage of María’s lectures after her return to Spain. On 13 March 1929, in the context of a series of conferences organised by the Federación Local de Obreros de la Industria de la Edificación, an association of construction workers, she gave the speech “Woman as a Companion of Man”. In June of the following year, on the twenty-eighth anniversary of the Sociedad de Lavanderas, Planchadoras, y Similares, an organisation of female workers of the textile sector, an artistic and literary soiree was held in which María de Lluria spoke about the “Advantages and Disadvantages of Emigration”. In March 1931, she exceptionally came back to the circles in which she used to move during her youth. In a soiree organised by the Marquis and Marquise of Ter, attended by women from the intellectual and aristocratic society, María gave a talk about female emigration to the Americas, particularly to Cuba, which would be later reported by the illustrated weekly paper Mujeres Españolas.

 “La Sra. Lluria llegó a España muy agradecida”. Diario de la Marina, 27 April 1928: p. 2.  Lluria, María de. “¡Caridad, caridad, cuánto crímenes encubres!”. El Socialista, April 21, 1931: p. 1; Ezama Gil (2015) 34 35

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Her voice in the media faded away when she published “La Europa que yo vi … Memorias de doña María Vinyals, que en tiempos fue marquesa de Ayerbe, Grande de España y embajadora en cortes extranjeras. Datos recogidos, ordenados y comentados por Matilde Muñoz” in the magazine Crónica. The fifteen issues that appeared at irregular intervals over the course of four months in 1935 came to an end in late June with the announcement of the following chapter, which was never released. These “memoirs” are not quite an autobiography, but a sequence of memories of events that she lived during her aristocratic period and shared with many leading figures of great social relevance, about whom she also provides some biographical notes. Prior to the future long-term analysis and in-depth study of her published works (we have found approximately 450 records), her unpublished manuscripts and all that chance brings our way, I would like to finish this brief introduction to the writer and speaker María Vinyals/de Lluria, with the author’s own words: Yo no sé si el mero hecho de escribir es un don que recibimos al nacer, como el de cantar, hacer versos o pintar; si emana de la educación y el impulso recibido, o si es meramente un oficio a que nos acogemos ante el terrible problema de ganarnos el sustento. El caso es que somos legión aquellos que escribimos cuentos, novelas o sencillamente artículos, que a su vez se convierten en cierto codiciado valecito. [I do not know whether the act of writing is a gift that we receive when we are born, like the gifts of singing, composing verses or painting; whether it emanates from the education and stimuli we receive or whether it is merely a profession we turn to when we are faced with that terrible problem of earning a living. The thing is that there is a legion of us who write tales, novels or simply articles which, in turn, convert into a certain sought-after little voucher.] (Lluria 1929, 1)36

From this point on, the end of María’s story is open, as we do not know where or when the Santa Compaña37 (Holy company) found her and enlisted her on its eternal procession through Galicia, the land that served as the backdrop for most of her life and stories.  Lluria, María de. “Ante una cuartilla en blanco …”. El Socialista, 1 November 1929: p. 1.  The Santa Compaña is a legend from Galician mythology. It is a procession of the dead or lost souls who walk at night through woods, forests, crossroads, or the roads and houses of a parish to announce an upcoming death. 36 37

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Bibliography Adell Tejedor, Elena, and Ricardo Luis Hernández Otero. 2018. Trayectoria en Cuba de la intelectual y activista gallega María de Lluria. Espacio Laical Año 14 (3): 38–48. ———. 1907b. Liga Española para la instrucción popular. El Imparcial: 3. ———. 1915. En la Casa del Pueblo. Conferencia de una exembajadora. La mujer compañera del hombre. La Época, December 12: 3. ———. 1916a. La Marquesa de Ayerbe en el Recreo de Artesanos. Párrafos de su conferencia: El Diario de Pontevedra: 1. ———. 1916b. En la Reunión de Artesanos. Da. María Vinyals de Lluria. El Noroeste, A Coruña: 1–2 ———. 1922. Una velada necrológica en el Centro Gallego. Diario de la Marina: 1 ———. 1927. Una buena obra. Diario de la Marina. ———. 1928. La Sra. Lluria llegó a España muy agradecida. Diario de la Marina: 2 Ezama Gil, Ángeles. 2015. La educación de la mujer a comienzos del siglo XX. El Centro Iberoeamericano de Cultura Popular Femenina (1906–1926). Málaga: Universidad de Málaga. Joyzelle. 1905a. Rebelión. Madrid: Librería de Fernando Fe. ———. 1905b. Azorín festivo. La República de las Letras, no. 10, July 8: 5. Letter from José Fernández Jiménez to María Vinyals, n.d. AMUPO.  Solla Collection: 184–1. Letter from María Lluria to María de Maeztu. Havana. 21 December 1926a (Signatures 37/17/5-37/17/8. Archive of the Residencia de Señoritas. Fundación José Ortega y Gasset-Gregorio Marañon. Liga española para la instrucción popular. 1907. El Imparcial, November 15: 3. Lluria, María de. 1914. Feminismo. Vida Gallega, n° 58, Juny 30: 12. LLuria, Maria de. 1921. La Lucha, Seccion Femeninas, La habana, Enero a diciembre, 1921. ———. 1922. Conferencia leída en la velada necrológica celebrada en homenaje a la memoria de la ilustre escritora condesa de Pardo Bazán por su autora María de Lluria, Habana, 12 de mayo de 1922, Seoane y Fernández, Compostela, 121, Havana. ———. 1926a. Soledad. La Correspondencia. February 27: 7 ———. 1929a. Pareceres. A paso de gigante. El Socialista, September de 1: 1. ———. 1929b. Cuento de Navidad. en El Socialista, December 26: 4 ———. 1930. Pido la palabra. El Socialista, March 18: 1 ———. 1931a. ¡Caridad, caridad, cuántos crímenes encubres!. El Socialista, April 21: 1 ———. 1931b. El voto femenino. El Socialista, October de 3: 1. ———. 1926a. Soledad. La Correspondencia, February 27: 7. ———. 1926b. Zogoibi (de Enrique Larreta). Diario de la Marina, December 24.

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M.N. (Margarita Nelken). 1919. Conferencia de María de Lluria en el Ateneo. El Día, January 15: 3. Marco, Aurora, and Mª. Ángela Comesaña. 2017. De María Vinyals a María de Lluria: escritora, feminista e activista social. Pontevedra: Museo de Pontevedra. El Mariscal D. Suero 1° Gómez de Sotomayor 5° señor de Rianxo. 1906. Sobre un libro. Sra. Marquesa de Ayerbe. Revista Gallega, no. 569, February 10: 3–4. Marqués de Laurencín. 1904. El castillo del Marqués de Mos en Sotomayor. Apuntes históricos por la Marquesa de Ayerbe. Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia tomo 45: 405–409. Marquesa de Ayerbe, La. 1906. Centro de Cultura Femenina y Escuela de Madres de Familia. Discurso leído en su apertura el 18 de marzo de 1906 por la Excelentísima Sra. Marquesa de Ayerbe. Unión Ibero-Americana. Madrid, Impr. Hijos de M.G. Hernández. Muñoz, Matilde (comp.). 1935. La Europa que yo vi … Memorias de doña María Vinyals, que en tiempos de la Monarquía fue marquesa de Ayerbe, Grande de España y embajadora en Cortes extranjeras. (Datos recogidos, ordenados y comentados por Matilde Muñoz, series of articles in Crónica. Madrid, 10,17 and 24 February; 3, 10, 17, and 31 March; 7, 14, 21 and 28 April; 12 May; 23 and 30 June. Nelken, Margarita. 1919. Conferencia de María de LLuria en El Ateneo. El Día: 1 Nobel Lectures. 1967. Phisiology or Medicine 1901–1921. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company. Tettamancy, F. 1905. Notas bibliográficas. El castillo de Mos en Sotomayor. El Correo Gallego, Ferrol, January 28, 13, 14, February 17. Vinyals, María. 1935. La Europa que yo vi … Memorias de doña María Vinyals, que en tiempos fue marquesa de Ayerbe, Grande de España y embajadora en cortes extranjeras. Datos recogidos, ordenados y comentados por Matilde Muñoz. Crónica, Madrid 10, 17, and 24 February; 3, 10, 17, and 31 March; 7. 14, 21, and 28 April; 12 May; 23 and 30 June.

Documents (original documents

consulted)

Letter from María Lluria to María de Maeztu. Havana, 21 December 1926b. (Signatures: 37/17/5 to 37/17/8). Archive of the Residencia de Señoritas. Fundación José Ortega y Gasset-Gregorio Marañón. Correspondence of José Fernández Jiménez to María Vinyals. AMUPO. Solla, 184–1.

PART IV

Folk Arts and the Professional Art Circuit: Artistic Production and Cultural Dissemination

Notes on the Cultural Policy of the Commons in a Cooperative Framework: NUMAX’s Presence in Santiago de Compostela Palmar Álvarez-Blanco

1   The Voice of the Working Class: Yesterday and Today1 The current essay salvages only some notes from a much broader research project on which I have been working during the last five years: a project on the emerging movement of the Commons and self-organized

1  The author of this chapter is grateful to Ramiro Ledo and Irma Amado for taking time out to answer her questions and to Diego Baena for translating the Spanish version of this text, including all direct translations.

P. Álvarez-Blanco (*) Carleton College, Northfield, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Castro et al. (eds.), Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98861-6_9

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communities of practice throughout the Spanish State.2 Said movement represents a variety of citizen responses that together work as a kind of emergency brake or life boat before the acceleration of the current global civilizational crisis, as well as the worsening of economic recession and the accelerating deterioration of our climate, common natural resources, and ecology. The simultaneous occurrence of these events in different localities across the planet has freed up time to think about the governance and management of the “cosa pública,” or public thing more generally, as well as time to think about forms of communal and planetary interrelation. From an expanded cultural and pedagogical perspective, the movement of the Commons and of particular communal lived experiences presents an opportunity to participate in the dialogue concerning other possible sociopolitical models at a time in which what is intended is to put questions of eco-social justice and the democratization of daily life at the center of any serious debate: particularly in regard to the democratization of access to the necessary and sufficient conditions for having a life worth living. In this sense, this movement represents a seedbed of proposals and concrete practices (by no means naïve) through which to continue to support the birth of the political, social, economic, and cultural (re)organizations to come. This text, within the broader frame of the movement of and for the Commons, seeks to bring attention to the limits currently confronted by the those taking part in the cultural cooperative process of NUMAX Galicia, the obstacles to its ultimate survival as well as its function as an instrument capable of propagating a cultural and institutional climate alternative to that imposed by capitalism. As we shall soon see NUMAX, 2  Part of this research is compiled in the online research project called the Constellation of the Commons (CC). It is an open archive and audiovisual cartography, a co-dictionary and seminar space lying at the confluence between formal and informal education; a point of meeting and collaboration, as well as a downloadable book. Its constellation-like format represents a critical, multiscale, relational, and transdisciplinary position that is necessary in order to think through this current moment of transformation. At the same time, the CC is a digital practice or commons of knowledge that functions as a(n) (in)formative point of departure which is at the same time not-for-economic-profit and very much for social profit. Very much in favor of forms of profit that reproduce forms of socializing and organizing a life in common. It is the result of a research situated (applied and implicated) in the noncapitalist “protocommon” and in modes of participation and citizen organization across Spain. In this constellation one can find, to date, up to 48 intertwined conversations with various communities of practice found throughout the Spanish State; because it is an open archive, the constellation will come to house many more conversations in its coming phases.

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the Galician cooperative, is not only the inheritor and standard-bearer of an open social process—the struggle of a today-precarious and impoverished working class dispossessed of the means of production—but also a manifest enclave for the development of a cultural politics opposed to the one on the agenda of the capitalist culture industry. The study of a process such as the one undertaken by NUMAX, besides allowing us to expand our scholarly understanding of a cultural politics of the commons in the frame of a cooperative, allows us to closely observe the systemic and structural factors that impede or limit a possible alliance between the social and institutional spheres. For its part, and as shall be seen over the course of the essay, the varied activity of NUMAX becomes critically entangled with a tradition of the Commons each time the former serves as a form of demanding, by way of grievance, the right to a good job and to a good wage, to justice and to social equality, as well as access to a good home and to high-quality public culture, education, and healthcare. A historicized and relational analysis of both the structural and systemic causes and conditions for its rise and evolution can help to provide some crucial cultural and political cues by which to ultimately aid in the ongoing process of social transformation.

2   NUMAX Galicia: First Steps In 1979, the director Joaquim Jordá filmed the documentary Numax Presenta3 at the request of a group of workers at the NUMAX appliance factory in Barcelona. The documentary was funded with the last 600,000 pesetas from the Workers’ Assembly strike, or “resistance” fund. The documentary itself presents a unique experience of worker self-management in response to the closure of the NUMAX enterprise by its owners. Years later, also in Barcelona, a similar action would take place; it was to be the origin of what would later become the financial services cooperative known as Coop57. According to the testimony of Paco Hernández,4 one of the initiative’s cofounders, Coop57 was created as a response to a suspension of salaries announced by the Bruguera publishing house in 1982. From that moment on, the working people affected by these cuts would attempt to clear a path for pressure through litigation, attempting, as had  Jordá. director. 1980. Numax Presenta. Asamblea de trabajadores de Numax.  Link to the video commemorating the 20th anniversary of this process: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=AUSdOaRNtjk. 3 4

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been the case with NUMAX, to implement a self-management model in the creation of a workers’ sociedad anónima (Librebsa) which would effectively take charge of Bruguera’s product stock and infrastructure. Though the specific goal of collective self-management failed in both instances, much was truly gained, as can be discerned if one looks elsewhere. For example, thanks to the concrete experience of the Bruguera mobilization efforts, one can see the emergence of the financial services cooperative that we know today as Coop57.5 Its founding was made possible through the use of another workers’ resistance fund: the sum of the severance pay received by the workers over the course of three years between their laying-­off and the eventual court ruling in their favor. As stated on their official website, from 2005 onward, Coop57 would become organized into a nation-wide network of social economy and solidarity with local self-managed nodes. Coop57’s model, as well as its technical and juridical structure, thus began to proliferate in different locations across Spain. To date, these include Coop57 Madrid (established in 2006), Coop57 Andalucía (2008), and Coop57 Galiza (2009). This expanding growth as a network is what would eventually allow for the founders of the Galician NUMAX cooperative to start their own cooperative in 2015, all with the aid of Coop57. It is at this important crossroads that the cultural cooperative of NUMAX, Santiago de Compostela, took root. With respect to the ultimate origins of this cultural workers’ cooperative, it must be noted that they came precisely at the moment in which the old movie houses of the Santiago de Compostela city center disappeared. In light of this situation, it is Margarita Ledo, university professor and filmmaker, who awoke in Ramiro Ledo the restlessness necessary to open up an entire field of possibilities not yet articulated in the city. What we may call the “root” or “seed” of this creative impulse is embedded within the frame of the conversation that follows. However, as I explained earlier, it was not until direct contact was established between cultural NUMAX and Coop57 that a true door would be opened: one that would lead to the material crystallization of that initial spirit into a real communitarian process, the cultural coop.6 5  For more information, please see the Coop57 official website: https://www.coop57. coop/es/informacion/qui%C3%A9nes-somos. 6  I recommend hearing the first part of the interview with Constelación de los Comunes, in which Ramiro Ledo details just how this type of aid functions within the broader network of social economy and solidarity. https://constelaciondeloscomunes.org/numax-2/.

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The thread that connects the stories of labor demands on the part of the Catalan NUMAX cooperative and the working people of Bruguera was continued, albeit at a different scale and in a very different geographical space, through NUMAX Galicia. In this Galician cooperative, political-­ cultural concerns centered on the question of the Commons go hand-in-hand with a project in favor of worker self-management that is not without difficulties. An economistic reading of this process would point to the idea that the birth of NUMAX Galicia was due to the line of credit granted by Coop57; however, it is no less true that this cooperative cultural and self-employment initiative wouldn’t have been possible in absence of mediation with an entire tradition of cooperativism, activism, and protest organized by the working sector at large. As Ramiro Ledo, one of the founders of NUMAX Galicia, explains: NUMAX fue, básicamente un proceso en donde los trabajadores, ante el expediente de regulación de empleo y despido por abandono de la fábrica por parte de los dueños, deciden retomar la producción auto-organizándose de una forma que ellos mismos tienen que definir. En eso son parecidos a nosotros como un proceso de aprendizaje, de capacitación laboral, pero de la vida también y afectivo, entre un grupo de personas que deciden retomar la producción, la fábrica, acompañar los movimientos sociales de la época. (…) Esta película era conocida por todos los que formamos parte del núcleo promotor y de aquí salió el nombre. Era un vínculo más, como ir concretando cómo estos procesos siempre sacan una idea de qué nos une. NUMAX nos unía y ahora otro NUMAX nos une. También es bonito esta idea de recuperar la historia [NUMAX was, in basic terms, a process in which the workers themselves—before the filing of new regulations on the part of the owners concerning the regulation of work and layoffs in the case of factory abandonment—decide to resume production by self-organizing collectively in a way that they themselves have to define. In this they are quite similar to us as a learning and labor-skilling process, but also as a deeply vital and affective process, one that occurs between a group of people that decide to retake control of production and of the factory itself, accompanying the social movements of the time. (…) This film was well-known by every one of us that belonged to the central group of promoters and the name came from here. It was one more link, it was like discerning how these processes always put forward an idea that unites us. NUMAX united us and now another NUMAX is uniting us. It is also quite beautiful, this idea of recovering history]. (Álvarez-Blanco 2017)7  Álvarez-Blanco, Constellation of the Commons, 2017. https://constelaciondeloscomunes. org/numax-2/. 7

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As in the case of many of the stories of worker cooperation across Spain over the last ten years, the initial driving factor behind the material existence of the Galician NUMAX cooperative is a resistance fund. In this case, we are talking about a fund created with the backing of 182 employees that, jointly, put together the quantity necessary so that the credit cooperative, Coop57, could concede the initial sum of 300,000 euros (to be returned in seven-years’ time without the need to go through a traditional bank). In the interview I conducted with Ramiro Ledo, founder of NUMAX—done with the goal of incorporating NUMAX’s experiences into my own research as part of the Constellation of the Commons (CC) project—the process is explained in the following way: (…) la principal vía de financiación fue Coop57 porque, y esto engarza con el sentido comunitario del que me hablabas antes, te permite acceder a crédito poniendo trabajo en común y un poco de capital para la cooperativa de socios de trabajo. Nosotros pusimos 8.000 euros cada uno y luego hasta llegar a los 400.000 [the principal avenue of financing was Coop57 because—and this connects with the sense of communitarianism you spoke about to me earlier—it permits access to credit by working in common and to a little bit of capital for the workers’ cooperative proper. We contributed 8,000 euros each and eventually reached 400,000  in total]. (Álvarez-­ Blanco 2017)8

In this way, from its very foundation, we can see that the cooperative exercise of NUMAX is directly tied to the establishment of a community of trust and mutual aid that creates an intricate patchwork of relationships that it quite different to that which incentivizes extending credit based on the interests of banking institutions embedded within the current capitalist economic milieu. In the founding of NUMAX, financial support was just as important as the commitment gained and given by the group of people that trusted the founders’ vision: a small group of people that, as Ramiro Ledo explains in his interview, were mostly in their 30s in 2013, and which were collectively reckoning with a precarious job landscape (salaried workers, self-employed persons, and jobless people alike). As is also typical with many of the cooperatives created in the last ten years in the Spanish State—whether they be cultural, labor-oriented, or oriented about questions of nutritional and informative independence, 8

 Álvarez-Blanco, Constellation of the Commons.

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ethical credit-debtor relations, or responsible consumption9—NUMAX Galicia arose altogether autonomously, which is to say, without seeking any form of state aid for the development of its cooperative labor project, or its cultural one. It is only when the project was already underway that NUMAX, still from an autonomous standpoint, started to strategically seek out institutional connections. This was done precisely because NUMAX is, at its core, a political project that does not see itself as a figure directly antagonistic to the state as a public entity; but rather as a counter or check to it, which is to say, a guardian, defender, as well as a microphone and amplifier for those outside of it.10 I spoke with Ramiro Ledo about this deep sense of commitment with the joint-public, or mancomunado space, while we also reflected on some of the necessary and sufficient conditions for there to be a de-facto frame of cooperation and collaboration between public institutions (including government) and the social and public spheres at large. We agreed that within the broader process of the transformation of the current capitalist system and the ultimate dismantling of its traditional institutions, the capitalist State ultimately gains from the existence of these citizen efforts— much in the same way as it gains from NGO’s—because their existence allows it to ignore or outsource its own social functions and responsibilities wherever they are required. To give an example: the fact that a cultural cooperative should have to take charge of combating informational and cultural impoverishment points to a cultural and state-linguistic (educational and informative) politics that is ultimately deficient; in the same way, were it not for the institutional alliances that commit both parties to their role and duty as cultural and educational co-agents, NUMAX would effectively be held hostage by cultural and linguistic policies that are wholly dependent on either the state of organization of the citizenry at

9  In HISPACOOP’s online portal (https://www.hispacoop.com/home), one can find important examples of coops dedicated to critical and responsible, sustainable, and ethical consumption (both energetic and nutritional). One can also consult the portal of COOP57, the network for economic and social solidarity REA (https://www.reasred.org), and the portals of AGACA (http://agaca.coop/cooperativas) and ESPAZO COOP (https:// espazo.coop/es). 10  Many of the initiatives mapped out in Constellation of the Commons adopt a position of political solidarity with the defense of the public sphere, dedicating part of its work to pressure from below and the de-mercantilization of a public sphere currently sequestered by capitalist interests.

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large or on the poorly compensated work of third parties and volunteers.11 The fact that we note these reservations should not serve to disparage the crucial role, as well as the impact, that these processes provide for the communities in which they develop. Planning for contingencies in moments of transition is something altogether necessary. The same can be said to occur with a form of self-critical exercise that refuses to ignore just how important it is to pay attention to the inner workings of the broader collective process (its make-up, structural development, internal governing structure, and collective self-­ management), plus the continuous efforts to organize protests that ultimately characterize and denounce the logic of neoliberal austerity measures and cuts to social rights more broadly. On this point, I believe it is important to present in full the response from Ramiro Ledo’s interview, which exemplifies the existing disconnect between the capitalist-­ institutional public sphere and those social spheres and grassroots institutions that favor other forms of public organization: Ayudas estatales cero. Ni se contemplan porque el Estado no contempla ayudas para proyectos como el nuestro (…) ni a nivel de Estado, ni a nivel de gobierno autonómico hemos recibido ayudas. (…) Tengo que decir también que fuimos muy bien acogidos a nivel institucional; desde que nacimos el proyecto tuvo un gran impacto y recibimos el premio al mejor proyecto cooperativo en el año de la apertura. Recibimos el año pasado el premio de la cultura gallega, que es el premio nacional del audiovisual. La academia del audiovisual de Galicia nos concedió el premio Mestre Mateo a la mejor iniciativa empresarial. Llevamos dos años y medio y ganamos como los tres premios más importantes. De estos tres premios sólo uno tenía dotación económica, que eran 5.000 € que fue el premio al mejor proyecto cooperativo. Sí, todo el mundo nos felicita, pero a día de hoy no hay ayudas. (…) Tenemos un pequeño acuerdo que conseguimos con la política lingüística de la Xunta de Galicia con el cual subtitulamos cinco títulos. Ponemos en marcha un proceso con la distribuidora estatal para traducir los subtítulos que se incorporen en los másteres que después se estrenan en todas las salas, que se pase a los Blu-ray de exhibición para centros culturales y cuando se edite comercialmente la película y aparezca el DVD con subtítulos en gallego. Son 5 títulos al año. Es el único apoyo institucional que es como un 11  These facts directly bring us to one of the primary debates in the sphere of the commons: the debate surrounding the design of institutions of the commons with the goal of developing new policies on high-quality and accessible public services, in accordance with fundamental social rights.

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convenio casi privado que nos supone muy poquito dinero y es un dinero a cambio de trabajo (…) Intentamos hacer un catálogo que después nosotros mismos intentamos mover por colegios, por institutos para que vengan los chavales y las chavalas a ver películas al cine por las mañanas a cambio como de un trabajo mucho más activista por nuestra parte. El apoyo es muy residual, son cositas así; por ejemplo, las máster-clases que hacemos son con apoyo municipal. Es un programa que presentamos al Ayuntamiento y el Ayuntamiento lo financia. (…) Haces un aula gratuita porque tienes la colaboración del Ayuntamiento para esto. (…) Con lo cual, todos estos vínculos deberían con el tiempo ir reforzándose e ir entrando en objetivos, pero nos queda un montón de cosas por hacer, somos muy conscientes [State aid or subsidies: zero. We don’t even think about them because the State doesn’t contemplate aid for projects like ours (…) not at the State level, nor at the local autonomous community level have we received [state] help. I must also say that we were well-received at the institutional level; where from the time we were born the project had a great impact and we received the prize for best cooperative project during our founding year. We received, just last year the premio de la cultura gallega [Galician culture prize], which is the national prize for audiovisual expression. The Audiovisual Academy of Galicia gave us the Mestre Mateo prize for the most enterprising initiative. We have spent two and a half years and we won, like, the three most important prizes. From these three prizes only one included a cash prize, which was 5,000 euros from the prize for best cooperative project. Yes, everyone sings our praises and congratulates us, but to this day there is no aid (…) We have a small deal that we got thanks to the current linguistic policies of the Xunta de Galicia, with which we subtitled five titles. We put into motion a process with the state distributor to translate the subtitles that are put into the master-copies that later are premiered in all the venues, and to transfer to Blu-ray exhibitions for cultural centers, and to edit the movie for commercial distribution for when it appears on the DVD with subtitles in Galician. There are 5 titles a year. It’s the only institutional aid, which is like an almost private agreement that really represents very little money for us and is money in exchange for work (…) We tried to put together a catalogue that later we ourselves tried to bring around primary and secondary schools so that the kids could come see movies at the cinema in the morning in exchange for (…) much more activist-like work on our part. The aid is residual, with little things like, for example, the master classes we give are done with municipal financing. It’s a program that we presented to the Ayuntamiento [City Hall of Santiago] and the Ayuntamiento finances it (…) Meaning, all of these ties should, over time, start reinforcing themselves and achieving specific objectives, but we still have a ton of things to do; we’re very aware of this]. (Álvarez-Blanco 2017)12  Álvarez-Blanco, Constellation of the Commons.

12

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When the head editor of the current volume, professor Obdulia Castro, invited me to present a contribution from the Constelación de los Comunes project, I decided to retrace my steps and write to NUMAX with the ultimate goal of revisiting some of the questions we discussed in 2017. When I asked them about the work done in search of stable state and institutional alliances, Irma Amado (the current president of the co-op and director of the NUMAX social library) answered as follows: Sobre la cuestión de las ayudas, la situación no ha cambiado demasiado. Seguimos recibiendo ayudas por la incorporación de socios trabajadores (un programa de la Xunta de Galicia que favorece estas incorporaciones con partidas para las personas socias así como para la cooperativa receptora); pequeñas ayudas al comercio local, por ejemplo para sufragar gastos de comunicación o pequeñas intervenciones para mejorar la experiencia del cliente o el mantenimiento del espacio; y después ayudas a la realización de actividades, cuyo coste jamás podríamos asumir en solitario. Nos hemos beneficiado los últimos dos años de las ayudas del Ministerio para la modernización de las librerías, gracias a lo cual hemos podido remunerar el trabajo de nuestro socio informático, al que continuamente le demandamos mejoras en la web; seguimos con ese “testimonial” convenio para subtitular 5 películas al idioma gallego y mantenemos con la universidad el programa que mencionaba Ramiro: “Os ollos verdes. O cinema inédito de NUMAX”, por el cual los estudiantes acceden al crédito de libre configuración y que nos acerca público joven a la sala, lo cual es realmente interesante, pero que no implica ningún apoyo económico directo. También este año hemos recibido el Premio a la “Mellor Iniciativa de Creación de Emprego”, que otorga la Diputación de A Coruña. Estaba dotado económicamente con 15.000 euros. Seguimos también “cumpliendo” con los umbrales exigidos por Europa Cinemas para formar parte de esta red (y no es fácil, con una sola pantalla). Además, nuestro proyecto NUMAX na Escola, ha ido estabilizándose y creciendo y, aunque tuvo un apoyo puntual municipal, a tal altura sigue siendo una iniciativa de carácter privado con la que intentamos atraer a público infantil y juvenil a la sala, toda vez que la alfabetización audiovisual se ha vuelto crucial en los marcos educativos de referencia. Este año preparamos un proyecto para presentarlo a apoyo institucional [Regarding the question of financial aid, the situation hasn’t changed too much. We still receive aid for the incorporation of worker-members [a program by the Xunta de Galicia that favors these additions and corresponding assigned shares of funds for individual members as well as for the receiving cooperative]; small contributions to local commerce, for example, to pay for

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expenses in communication or small payments to improve client experiences or infrastructural maintenance; and in addition, aid for putting on particular activities, whose cost we could never assume in full ourselves. We have benefited, over the last two years, from help from the Ministry earmarked for the modernization of book shops, thanks to which we have been able to compensate the work done by our IT specialist, whom we constantly ask to make improvements to our webpage; we still count on the “testimonial” agreement in order to provide 5 movies with Galician subtitles and we maintain the program with the University that Ramiro mentioned: “Os ollos verdes. O cinema inédito de NUMAX,” by which students can freely gain credit and which brings in young people to the venue, which is really interesting, but that does not involve any form of direct economic aid. Also, this year we received the premio a la “Mellor Iniciativa de Creación de Emprego” [prize for the best job-creation initiative, also noted above], given by the Diputación de A Coruña. It was endowed with a sum of 15,000 euros. We have also continued to “comply” with the demands of Europa Cinemas in order to remain a part of their network (which is not easy, with only a single screen). Additionally, our project NUMAX na Escola [NUMAX at school] has gradually been stabilizing itself and growing. Although it initially had municipal funding given on one single occasion, to this date it remains a private initiative with which we seek to attract an audience of children and young people at a time when audiovisual literacy has become crucial within the accredited educational framework. This year we are preparing a project with the goal of presenting it as a candidate for institutional support].13 (Amado 2020)14

Following receipt of the response cited above, and scarcely a few days after the fact, Irma once again wrote to me to communicate that NUMAX had been excluded from consideration for competitive cultural sector grants in the city of Santiago. The censure was due to the fact that “las bases reguladoras de convocatoria de axudas de apoio a actividades culturais para o sector profesional 2020” [the regulatory bases for the call for 13  Irma’s response takes on a new meaning in light of the European accord reached on July 21, 2020, which sought to confront the economic crisis by supporting the transformation of European economies. Thinking about the possibility of attaining a rule of law by opening up institutions to the logic of the commons, the exercise of social pressure from below becomes urgent when the goal remains to maintain the diverse grassroots ecosystem of pro-commons communities of practice. 14  Amado, Personal communication, 2020.

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aid to support cultural activities for the 2020 professional sector]15 included only “persoas físicas ou xurídicas dedicadas profesionalmente á produción de actividades culturais e artísticas que non sexan asociacións, fundacións ou ningunha outra forma xurídica de entidade sen ánimo de lucro” [physical or juridical persons professionally dedicated to the production of cultural and artistic activities who were not associations, foundations, or other non-profit juridical entity].16 In spite of being a recognized cultural and educational agent in the city, NUMAX was effectively excluded from being able to receive public funds precisely because of its existence as a not-for-profit worker co-op (“cooperativa de trabajo asociada sin ánimo de lucro”). This fact, as Irma explains, becomes recurrent, whether because of the “enterprise” status given to different economic sectors under the auspices of a single CIF (Código de Identificación Fiscal), or by virtue of being a specifically not-for-profit enterprise (Sin Ánimo (o Fines) de Lucro). This example of failing to be able to compete for funds exemplifies the types of systemic pitfalls and contradictions awaiting resolution. Resolving them would depend on a reformulation of the concept of “the public” as common good and on a careful revision of its productive and redistributive channels. As stated earlier, NUMAX seeks to bring the struggle for a culture of dignified work to the forefront of the city of Santiago’s cultural policies 15  This call for applications for government subsidies says the following: “(1) Esta convocatoria de subvencións ten por obxecto o fomento das actividades culturais organizadas polas persoas e entidades dedicadas profesionalmente á produción de actividades culturais e artísticas do concello de Santiago de Compostela durante o ano 2020, coa finalidade de dinamizar a vida cultural no noso concello e estimular e apoiar os seus proxectos e programacións. (2) As actividades obxecto de subvención mediante esta convocatoria van dirixidas á promoción de procesos e actividades culturais e artísticas de amplo espectro, orientadas a todo tipo de públicos e idades e relacionadas coa música, teatro, exposicións, cine, fotografías, conferencias, performances ou, en xeral, calquera acción cultural ou artística” [(1) This call for grants is intended to promote cultural activities organized by people and entities professionally dedicated to the production of cultural and artistic activities in Santiago de Compostela county during the year 2020, in order to energize life culture in the county and to stimulate and support its projects and programming. (2) The activities that are the object of the subsidy through this call are aimed at promoting cultural and artistic processes and activities of a wide spectrum, aimed at all types of audiences and ages and related to music, theater, exhibitions, cinema, photographs, conferences, performances and, in general, any cultural or artistic action]. 16  The full database can be consulted through the following link: http://santiagodecompostela.gal/imxd/noticias/doc/1591012384Convocatoria_subvencions_sector_profesional_2020.pdf.

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and programs. They understand the concept of dignified work, or work in dignity (trabajo digno), as a right, and not as a privilege. If, on the one hand, NUMAX chooses to define itself as a non-profit worker’s cooperative, it is precisely in order to create labor practices alternative to the evident precarization of labor conditions and practices under capitalism.17 Precarization, it must be said, is a phenomenon that, since the onset of the economic crisis of 2008, has done little but worsen over time, resulting in an escalating climate of impoverishment, not only in terms of the necessary material conditions for a life of dignity for the majority of people, but in terms of their diminishing possibilities as well. In this context, Ramiro Ledo tells us, “in a society in which every day work becomes more precarious, [and] in which the very word ‘labor’ is difficult to define,” protests and strikes have come to be quite frequent.18 As is the case with many of the workers’ cooperatives operating within the Spanish State, in NUMAX one can breathe the same air of general civil indignation as could be found in the streets during the particular “happening” known as the 15M protests.19 As pointed out by political-cultural researchers Steven L. Torres and Oscar Pereira-Zazo,20 such a happening does not emerge as an isolated event in time but as one more link in the chain of a broad socio-historical process in favor of reestablishing social rights and services 17  For a deeper interdisciplinary analysis of the precarious conditions of capitalism and of that part of the working sector known as “precariado” [precariate], I recommend the interdisciplinary compiled volume by Álvarez-Blanco and Gómez López-Quiñones La imaginación hipotecada: Aportaciones al debate sobre la precariedad del presente. Madrid: Libros en Acción, 2016. 18  Álvarez-Blanco, Constellation of the Commons. 19  15M refers to the Indignado Movement (also known as 15M). The study of the 15M movement has already produced many research papers, conferences, and books in the United States and Spain, but few critics have taken the opportunity to examine, from an interdisciplinary point of view, the social and political consequences of this historical event. The book Spain After the Indignados/15 M Movement: The 99% speaks out, edited by Pereira-Zazo and Torre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), conveys the complexity of an interdisciplinary analysis carried out by well-known experts in the fields of economics, politics, ecology, sociology, media studies, and cultural studies. This collective volume successfully contributes to a profound understanding of the aftershocks of the 2007 Great Recession while explaining how this event has restructured Spain’s political sphere and political imagination. In addition, it offers a detailed explanation for emerging forms of sociopolitical activity, self-organization, democratic participation, and radical politics, while also making essential connections to the recent history of the country. 20  Pereira-Zazo and Torre, eds., “Introduction.” In Spain after the indignados/15 M movement: 1–17.

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that have little by little been decidedly cut by the State, including, but not limited to, the right to work. One of the key differences between yesterday and today—between those original workers kicked out of their jobs at NUMAX and Bruguera and those currently working in and for NUMAX Galicia—is conditioned by the fact that, statistically speaking, the foremost stream of the various tributaries that led to 15M, those agents which would become its primary protagonists, are members of a middle class sliding into economic precarity, as noted by Torres and Pereira-Zazo in their introduction. A middle class which, I may add, following the testimonies compiled in the CC project, seems to be waking up to a much broader and long-term historical struggle. As we shall soon see in the following section of this piece, the multiplication of this movement into various autonomous and self-­ managed, uncoordinated processes represented a real risk for its ultimate survival and development. The lack of a program of basic principles and the lack of coordinated, organized structure at the national and international scales obligated many cooperative processes to depend largely on their own strength. This helps to explain the closures of many of these cooperative processes due to sheer group exhaustion or problems relating to their ultimate fragility before adverse capitalist conditions. The reflection provided by Irma Amado on NUMAX confirms a real worry that is shared by many people engaging in processes of collective self-­management throughout Spain: El proyecto, a pesar de las muchas dificultades, ha demostrado solvencia y una capacidad de supervivencia abrumadora gracias al esfuerzo y trabajo de todas y cada una de las personas (socias y no) que han contribuido de algún modo con su trabajo. Y digo abrumadora porque mantener en marcha un proyecto cultural y laboral como NUMAX, en un lugar periférico y con muchas limitaciones como es Santiago de Compostela, no es fácil. Hemos tenido la suerte de contar con todo ese apoyo social de los inicios (campaña de avales) y hemos trabajado muy duro para mantenerlo y ampliarlo a una parte de la comunidad local (y foránea), en unos tiempos muy complicados económicamente y con adversidades añadidas (…) además de las propias debilidades y amenazas internas; pero también gracias a sus fortalezas: la creación de una estructura sólida que ha ido poco a poco incorporando perfiles especializados que han permitido crecer a las distintas áreas de actividad e incorporar con estas personas nuevos valores (…) A mayores de lo expuesto hasta aquí, el nuevo paradigma derivado de la pandemia de la covid-19 implica que tengamos que hilar muy fino si queremos sobrevivir a

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un año tan complicado como este” [The project, in spite of its many difficulties, has shown both solvency and an overwhelming capacity to survive thanks to the effort and work of each and every one of the people—both members and non-members—that have contributed in some way. And I say “overwhelming” because keeping a cultural and work-oriented project like Numax up and running in a peripheral place like Santiago de Compostela, with all its limitations, isn’t easy. We have been lucky to be able to count on all the initial social support—[the] endorsement campaign—and we have worked very hard in order to maintain it and expand it for a part of the local and non-local community during times that are very complicated economically speaking and with added adversities (…) in addition to our own internal weaknesses and threats; but also thanks to the project’s strengths: the creation of a solid structure that little by little has incorporated specialists that have allowed us to expand to our current level of activity and incorporate new values from these people as well (…) Beyond what I’ve said until now, the new paradigm presented by the Covid-19 pandemic implies that we have to be meticulous if we want to survive a year as complicated as this]. (Amado 2020)21

3   Commons, Cooperative Culture, and a Scenario of Limitations As I have shown above, NUMAX responds to a political and cooperative project that unfolds in a doubly-transformative intention; on the one hand, it is a space by which to cultivate a cultural politics contrary to that prescribed by capitalist interests, and, on the other, it responds to the climate of political disaffection and working peoples’ precarization through the creation of a workers’ cooperative from which it is possible to think through common problems. As is the case with other cultural cooperatives, NUMAX shares a function as a link within an entire chain of communities of practice that I have identified, collectively, as an expanded cultural and educational movement in opposition to capitalist values and principles. NUMAX primarily conducts this pedagogical work through its so-called social library, its community movie theater, and its open classroom space. In NUMAX’s only movie theater, the organization promotes native language screenings22 and independent cinema, thus facilitating the  Amado, Personal communication, 2020.  This eventuality, which may seem like something arbitrary, becomes essential given that, in Spain today, dubbing of foreign films persists. Largely as a result of the Francoist “defense of the mother tongue” law put in place in 1941. 21 22

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process of cultural democratization of films made by local producers and distributors: through its curatorial practice, NUMAX tries to exert influence through the attainment of institutional alliances according to a model similar to that which exists in Euskadi, and, to some extent, in Catalonia. As Ramiro Ledo explains: En Euskadi el modelo institucional que tienen aplicado al cine (…) está dando apoyos que son importantes a las salas de distribución, a la exhibición en lengua vasca. Por lo menos intentan pensar continuamente la exhibición independiente. A nivel institucional sí tienen una política que puede servir de modelo, no solo a comunidades con lengua propia, como es Galicia, sino hasta un modelo de Estado. En Cataluña hay también por lo menos unos intentos de pensar en la exhibición independiente y la distribución, si bien, menos ambiciosos y en algunos puntos más arbitrarios. [In Euskadi [Basque Country], the institutional model which is applied to cinema (…) renders forms of aid that are important to distribution venues, and to exhibition in Basque. At least, they try to think continuously about independent exhibition. At the institutional level they do have a policy that can serve as a model, not only to communities with their own languages, such as Galicia, but as a State-wide model. In Catalonia there are also at least some attempts to think about independent exhibition and distribution, albeit less ambitious and, in some respects, more arbitrary]. (Álvarez-Blanco 2017)23

With respect to its non-formal work in education and cultural promotion, NUMAX is confronted with the same systemic limitations that can be encountered by any cooperative, autonomous, and collectively self-­ managed organization. On the one hand, the capitalist agenda which dictates institutional functionality represents a real obstacle to weaving together a public culture subsidized through institutional and social alliances. On the other, browsing through these varied experiences allows us to document a certain reticence on the part of the institutional sector with regard to accepting cooperative entities as partners. Both eventualities are evidence of a political and territorial problem—not to mention a problem at the level of competencies—that is directly opposed to the logic of the Commons and its vision of the public sphere as a common good. In spite of this hesitation, NUMAX, as is the case with the majority of such citizen-­ led initiatives, strives to make progress and to establish itself in its respective localities as a co-educational agent alongside the state. Nevertheless,  Álvarez-Blanco, Constellation of the Commons.

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we cannot stress enough that what often determines the success of a particular initiative receiving local and institutional support, is largely a function of the social and cultural capital it holds. This reality ironically results in a reproduction of discriminatory practices at various scales. There are many other factors which can hinder cooperatives’ activity within the broader movement for “expanded” cultural education, though this is not the place to elaborate further. What is important to emphasize is that the work of seeking alliances between the social and institutional realms appears to be a subject still awaiting resolution; not only as far as the survival of collective projects such as these are concerned, but with regard to the broader process of cultural and educational democratization, uncoupled from capitalist interests and demands. In this sense, the efforts of NUMAX to seek alliances with the University of Santiago cultural Vice-­rectory, and thereby find a way for its own students to receive university credit, are quite laudable. We can also make special note of the cooperative’s agreement with the Xunta de Galicia to develop the film-cycle: “Os ollos verdes. O Cinema inédito de Numax,” as well its perseverance in the matter of keeping its informal movie theater open by negotiating with the Santiago City Council. In addition to seeking out these institutional alliances, NUMAX also mobilizes demands to create a cultural policy which would recognize both the rights of citizens to organize and their right to co-own the public means of production, distribution, and communication. Within the frame of the current struggle for co-management of the public domain, we find all manner of obstacles, whether they be economic, juridical, social, or cultural. The most relevant relates to a thought mentioned by Ramiro Ledo in my interview with him, and which can also be found in various other interviews compiled in CC: Namely that in Spain, it is not an easy task to give an okay to a cooperative organization, mainly, because the legislative rules change from one Autonomous Community to another. This regional variation with regard to State rules and regulations can explain not only the unequal development of cooperatives between specific regions but, in addition, the reasons for which many collectives opt out of formally incorporating as a coop, choosing instead the juridical definition of non-profit Association (which often streamlines the bureaucratic process). Another obstacle in the way of further developing the cooperative model of cultural co-management and co-production has to do with a deep-seated social prejudice whenever the word “coop” is heard, as is indicated by Ledo and others in numerous interviews. The word is commonly associated, according to Ledo, with a certain “falta de

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rentabilidad, falta de profesionalidad” [lack of profitability, lack of professionalism]; or, more often than not, coops are written off as an “unsustainable economic model, little more than an NGO or child’s game, something done by someone who doesn’t actually need the money, who is doing it for love of their craft” (Álvarez-Blanco 2017).24 Another factor that gives pause has to do with the sheer sustainability of cooperative values once the organization enters into a broader market. NUMAX’s diverse activities are, quite obviously, embedded within a market economy. It is for this reason that NUMAX—however much it voluntarily decides to organize itself from a marginal space of cooperation and solidarity—struggles to reckon with its own reality. And the reality, as Ledo explains, is that NUMAX “nunca es al margen de todo, pero de una manera distinta, no significa que no tengas que estar en el mismo mundo que el resto con un modelo totalmente contrario al tuyo e incluso agresivo contra el tuyo” [is never completely separated, but in a different way, this does not mean that you aren’t obligated to be in the same world as everyone else, with a model totally contrary to yours and even openly hostile to it] (Álvarez-Blanco 2017).25 Three years after the 2017 interview with Ramiro Ledo, Irma expands on Ramiro’s reflections, mentioning, alongside the obstacles already identified, the added difficulty of reckoning with so many diverse activities: El crecimiento de la cooperativa exige un plan de sostenibilidad que pasa por establecer de manera clara cuáles son los objetivos del grupo (para mí, sin lugar a duda, se trata de mantener una estructura, NUMAX, que ha sido muy positiva para la comunidad y también para nuestras perspectivas laborales y profesionales; pero no a según qué precio) y estar preparados para actuar en la forma que sea más conveniente para llevar a cabo esos objetivos. Quizás el paradigma pida una reformulación. Esto lo vinculo con el asunto del “nuevo CIF” que también mencionaba Ramiro. Una parte de la singularidad de NUMAX es el hecho de que se dedica a muchas actividades económicas de naturaleza muy diversa (diferencias laborales—naturaleza de los trabajos, modalidades—, necesidades, diferencias fiscales, y un largo etc.). Lo que es posible o deseable para un trabajo “de oficina”, es inviable para un trabajo de atención al público; comercio minorista frente a comercialización de servicios, etc. Cada área de negocio funciona con su propio plan, sus necesidades, sus previsiones. Y el movimiento natural de la coop Álvarez-Blanco, Constellation of the Commons.  Álvarez-Blanco, Constellation of the Commons.

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erativa ha sido la tendencia a una especialización de los puestos y funciones, lo que también exigía un aumento de facturación, para mantener la viabilidad. Esto no es óbice para que la cooperativa funcione de manera solidaria en conjunto, a nivel de las cuentas globales. Y de hecho así es. Pero ocurre (y esto es un problema propiciado por el desconocimiento por parte de la administración) que a menudo perdemos convocatorias porque nuestra actividad principal (según esas convocatorias, la actividad principal de una empresa es aquella con mayor facturación) es el cine, cuando queda fuera de toda duda que NUMAX es también un estudio de diseño y una librería, entre otras cosas. La justificación de ayudas a través de presentación de facturas de terceros obligaría, por ejemplo, a que un trabajo que se puede contratar internamente a la cooperativa (por ejemplo, un diseño de cartelería para la distribución en salas de una película) fuera contratado fuera— con otro CIF que pueda facturar ese servicio—. Y se pierde algo verdaderamente interesante: que en NUMAX podemos realizar (y controlar) todo un proceso. ¿Acaso nuestro servicio interno no es susceptible de ser valorado en términos económicos? ¿Acaso nuestro diseñador gráfico realiza ese cartel gratuitamente en su tiempo libre? Seguramente cada actividad debería operar con un CIF diferente, al menos mientras la administración no esté preparada para contemplar casos como el de NUMAX y, en virtud de lo que hemos ido sabiendo, no lo está. Así fue que, tras un largo proceso en el que se consideró la pertinencia de que nuestro Laboratorio (que finalmente se trasladó a un espacio externo, unas oficinas no lejos del local del cine y la librería) solicitara un nuevo CIF, tras múltiples contactos para asesorarnos legalmente y quedando la cosa estancada, fue Ramiro quien, finalmente, propuso “sacar” la distribuidora de la cooperativa, mediante la creación de una nueva sociedad, toda vez que nos encontrábamos en un callejón sin salida y que precisamente era Distribución el área acuciada por este problema de facturación interna de cara a la solicitud de ayudas estatales y justificaciones ante terceros a la hora de continuar generando carga de trabajo para el Laboratorio. El área de Distribución, dicho sea de paso, fue creada por Ramiro y que actualmente, a través de otra sociedad, sigue contratando los servicios de NUMAX—en comunicación, gráfica y vídeo—), y además se ha convertido en un cliente estratégico. Ramiro sigue siendo socio trabajador de NUMAX, pero ya no forma parte de su Consejo Rector [The growth of the cooperative requires of us a sustainability plan that has to clearly establish what our objectives as a group ultimately are—for me, without a doubt, my priority is to maintain a structure, NUMAX, that has been so positive for the community and for our own professional outlook; but not at this or that price. We have to be ready to act in the way that is most convenient to bring these objectives to fruition. Maybe we need to reformulate the overall paradigm. I associate this with the question of the new CIF that

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Ramiro talked about. One aspect of NUMAX’s peculiarity is the fact that it is committed to so many economic activities that are quite different from one another—there are differences at the level of nature and modality of employment, differences at the level of individual necessity, differences at the fiscal level, and a long list of etceteras. What is possible or desirable in an ‘office’ job is unviable for a job in public relations; retail is different from commercialization of services, etc. Each business area functions with its own plan, its own necessities, its own preparation for contingencies. The natural movement of the cooperative has been the tendency toward specialization of positions and functions, something which also necessitated higher turnover, in order to remain viable. This does not mean that the cooperative can’t function in solidarity and in collaboration, at the level of our accounts as a whole. And as a matter of fact, that’s the way it is. But as it happens—and this is a problem that arises because of the administration’s lack of knowledge—we often lose out when it comes to convocatorias [public backing] because our primary, most lucrative business is movies—and according to the convocatorias, a company’s primary activity is by definition its most lucrative—even though we know beyond a doubt that NUMAX is also a design studio and book shop, among many other things. Providing justifications for public aid through the presentation of third-party billing, for example, would require us to demonstrate that a particular job that can be done within the cooperative as such—for instance, a poster design for the marketing and distribution of a particular film in multiple venues—was in fact contracted to someone else—with another CIF that could bill for the service—. And something truly interesting is lost: that in NUMAX we can bring about and control an entire process. Are our own internal services not capable of being valued in economic terms? Does our graphic designer create that poster pro bono in his free time? Assuredly, each activity should work with its own CIF, at least as long as the overall administration just isn’t ready to deal with cases like ours. In light of what we are finding out, it is very clear to us that it is not. This was how, after a long and drawn-out process of questioning the value and pertinence of our Laboratory (which was ultimately moved to an external space, to offices close to the movie theater and bookstore), NUMAX sought out a new CIF. After talks with multiple contacts to assess us legally, as the whole thing ground to a halt, it was Ramiro who finally proposed ‘removing’ the distributor from the cooperative through the creation of a new organizing body: all this happened as we hit a dead end, precisely because Distribution was the area haunted the most by this problem of internal billing when dealing with applying for state aid and with justifications of third-party work as workload in the Laboratory increased. The Distribution subsection, by the way, was created by Ramiro; currently, it continues to contract for NUMAX’s services, in communica-

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tion, graphic design, and video, through another sociedad. It has become a strategic client. Ramiro is still a working member of NUMAX, but he is no longer part of its Governing Council]. (Amado 2020)26

Clearly, NUMAX’s cooperative economic activities occur within a specifically capitalist frame. Even when it is possible to do the work within a network of economic solidarity, it is all too true that it is oriented toward the question of profitability, which at times makes it quite impossible to avoid the competitive and coercive logic of the market. The ultimate result of this clash of irreconcilable logics (cooperative logic, on the one hand; market logic, on the other) is a performative state of contradiction: one which must be confronted by any collective process that develops in, and at the same time, against the purview and laws of capitalism. These contradictions, however, are inseparable from any process of transition or paradigm shift. Thus, accepting them permits us to remove the processes in question from more categorical or purist value judgments. Instead, reckoning with their consequences allows us to insert a process like NUMAX into the field of inherent and inevitable difficulties that confront any social process aspiring to transform the very forces which shape it. Nevertheless, it is important to pay attention to this type of contradiction. Neglecting it could very well mean unduly devaluing the cooperative process. It was observations of this kind that caused the physicist and philosopher Mario Bunge, author of Democracias y Socialismos (2017), to proceed with caution when celebrating the pro-cooperative wave as a possible alternative to the extant dominant model of capitalist employment and firm management. According to his own reflections, if it is true that “cooperativism is socialism in action” (Bunge 2017: 26),27 we cannot forget that this action is forcibly limited by the socioeconomic and juridical framework of capitalism. In addition, in a certain sense, the appearance of a cooperative in a capitalist society can be interpreted, as Bunge does, “as little more than a pail in an ocean, because it only affects its own members and their families and cannot compete with the oligopolistic sectors of a capitalist economy” (Bunge 2017: 28).28 The cooperative sphere shares Bunge’s reservations. It is known that this economic model, in itself does not have the capacity to replace the extant capitalist one; nevertheless, it is  Amado, Personal communication, 2020.  Bunge, Democracias y socialismo. Pamplona: Laetoli, 2017: 26. 28  Bunge, Democracias y socialismo: 28. 26 27

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seen as a co-participant in the ongoing systemic transformation. In this sense, it is necessary to remember—as economist Richard Wolff (2019) has when considering the end of Feudalism29—that it was merchants, with the improvement of their own living conditions, that managed to gradually usurp the privileges of the aristocracy and eventually to replace them.

4   Final Notes I wish to conclude this conversation by making reference to the recently deceased sociologist Erik Olin Wright, author of Envisioning Real Utopias. In an article by Massimo Modonesi, dedicated to Wright after his death, Modonesi notes how Wright “left, by way of intellectual will and testament, a provocative proposal in the form of a question: how to be anti-­ capitalist today?” The provocation consists, as Modonesi explains, “in sustaining that there exist four anti-capitalist pathways that point at either destroying, taming, escaping, or eroding capitalism, but that only the combination of the second and the fourth constitute a full and viable option” (Modonesi 2019:1).30 The text to which Modonesi refers is titled “Destroy, tame, escape, or erode? How to be anti-capitalist today?”31—a journal article by Wright which precedes the writing of his book Envisioning Real Utopias. From reading it one can effectively conclude that to be anti-­ capitalist today means renouncing the revolutionary fantasy of pretending to settle the capitalist question in one blow: El capitalismo no es dinamitable, al menos si se quiere construir realmente un futuro de emancipación. Uno personalmente puede ser capaz de escapar del capitalismo saliéndose fuera de la red y reducir al mínimo su participación en la economía monetaria y el mercado, pero esto no es una opción atractiva para la mayoría de las personas, especialmente las que tienen hijos, y sin duda tiene poco potencial para fomentar un proceso de emancipación social más amplio. Si uno se preocupa por la vida de los demás, de una 29  In Economic Update, a weekly nationally syndicated radio program produced by Democracy at Work and hosted by professor Richard D. Wolff. In the chapter titled “Political Strategy for Transition” professor Wolff discusses a political strategy for transition beyond capitalism to an economy based on democratic worker-owned cooperatives. November 18, 2019. https://www.democracyatwork.info/eu_political_strategy_for_transition. 30  Modonesi, “Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019): Variantes anticapitalistas.” Rebelión, 12 February, 2019. https://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=252430. 31  Olin Wright, “¿Destruir, domar, escapar o erosionar? Cómo ser un anticapitalista hoy.” Viento Sur, 20 January, 2016. https://vientosur.info/como-ser-un-anticapitalista-hoy/.

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manera u otra tiene que hacer frente a las estructuras e instituciones ­capitalistas. Domar y erosionar el capitalismo son las únicas opciones viables. Es necesario participar tanto en los movimientos políticos para domar al capitalismo a través de políticas públicas como en los proyectos socioeconómicos de erosionar el capitalismo a través de la expansión de formas emancipatorias de la actividad económica. Debemos renovar una democracia social progresista fuerte que no solo neutralice los daños del capitalismo, sino que también facilite iniciativas para construir utopías reales con el potencial de erosionar el predominio del capitalismo [Capitalism is not capable of being blown up, at least if what we want is to truly build an emancipatory future. One can personally be capable of escaping capitalism by exiting the net and reducing to a minimum their participation in the monetary economy and in the market, but this isn’t an attractive option to the majority of people, especially to those who have children. Without a doubt, it has little potential to foment a broader, emancipatory social process. If one is concerned for the lives of others, one way or another one will have to confront capitalist structures and institutions. To tame and erode capitalism are the only viable options. It is necessary to participate both in political movements—in order to tame capitalism through public policies—and in socioeconomic projects that erode capitalism through the expansion of emancipatory forms of economic activity. We should renew a progressive social democracy that would not only neutralize the harm done by capitalism, but also facilitate the construction of real utopias with the potential of eroding its predominance]. (Olin Wright 2016)

In line with these words, I can put the finishing touches on my portrait of the Galician NUMAX cooperative by noting that the paths taken by this and other projects organized about the idea of “the common” orient themselves precisely in the “taming” and “eroding” directions that Wright describes. In spite of many adversities, NUMAX’s resistance actually opens up spaces for the cultivation of a critical social fabric awakening to its own capacity to transform things politically at the communitarian, local, and territorial level. The health of a social process, whatever form it takes, depends not only on keeping sight of the systemic and structural limitations that stand in the way of achieving a proposed objective. It is also necessary to take stock of what has been accomplished. NUMAX provides an interesting example of a cooperative process that, while not immune to difficulties, has succeeded in intervening in a particular place and moment, weaving together a network of social and institutional solidarity and aid that extends both

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throughout and beyond Galicia and over a long span of years. Thanks to NUMAX’s devotion to curating audiovisual and educational materials critical of the extant cultural model, today Santiago boasts a space dedicated to the screening of independent films by both male and female authors in Galician. Guided by this same spirit, they maintain a social book shop that facilitates the proliferation of a culture that is ultimately different from the one promoted by hegemonic capitalist actors. As we have seen throughout this text, through my conversations with Irma and Ramiro, NUMAX is by no means a naïve process. On the contrary, as we can garner from the conversations collected in CC, NUMAX believes that a non-­ capitalist order can only be brought about through working from within it, as Wright has astutely demonstrated. In other words, by seeking opportunities in extant reality and closely observing the very limits capitalism imposes: the limits inherent in any process of exiting a hegemonic frame. No government will ever adopt progressive policies if it isn’t pushed, and it is for this reason that NUMAX—as a part of the broader civil movement of the Commons—also takes on the challenge of pressuring and monitoring institutions to intervene in this process. Meanwhile, it also dedicates a significant portion of its work to expanding the cultural horizon and remedying the informational impoverishment imposed by the reigning cultural, political, and economic system. From an optics of rupture, there is always room for negative criticism of such processes. Nevertheless, it is necessary to note how the prolific expansion of the Communal ecosystem could very well put at risk a part of the established order. It does this by opening a door to the imagination of that kind of socialist horizon envisioned by the recently deceased Mario Bunge:32 a place where care of the common space and free agency can exist in interdependence. In the transitory journey implied by any significant systemic transformation, political imagination is by necessity imbued with forms of critical analysis and forms of explicit enunciation of the problems yet to be solved. It must project a future of alternatives and possibilities. The cultivation of a critical culture that proposes such an alternative, on its own, cannot intervene in the larger system. Nevertheless, without the proliferation of such a tool, one runs the risk of coming to lack the immaterial conditions necessary for aiding in the material transformations still to come.

 Bunge, Democracias y socialismo. 2017.

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Bibliography Álvarez-Blanco, Palmar. 2017. Constellation of the Commons (La Constelación de Los Comunes. https://constelaciondeloscomunes.org. ———. 2020. Route with the Commons. Archive and Memory of a Possible Constellation (2017-18-19). Santander: La Vorágine. Álvarez-Blanco, Palmar, and Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones. 2016. La imaginación hipotecada: Aportaciones al debate sobre la precariedad del presente. Madrid: Libros en Acción. Bunge, Mario. 2017. Democracias y socialismo. Pamplona: Laetoli. Gramsci, Antonio. 2004. Los intelectuales y la organización de la cultura. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión. Jordá, Joaquim. director. 1980. Numax Presenta. Asamblea de trabajadores de Numax. Modonesi, Masimo. 2019. Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019): Variantes anticapitalistas. Rebelión, 12 February. https://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=252430. Olin Wright, Erik. 2010. Envisioning Real Utopias. New York: Verso. ———. 2016. ¿Destruir, domar, escapar o erosionar? Cómo ser un anticapitalista hoy. Viento Sur, 20 January. https://vientosur.info/como-­ser-­un-­ anticapitalista-­hoy Pereira-Zazo, Óscar, and Steven L.  Torres, eds. 2019a. Spain after the Indignados/15M movement: The 99% speaks out. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019b. Introduction. In Spain After the Indignados/15M Movement: The 99% Speaks Out, 1–17. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolff, Richard D. 2019. Political Strategy for Transition. Economic Update. https://www.democracyatwork.info/eu_political_strategy_for_transition.

The Forest for the Tree: Artist Wily Taboada and the Galician Transition to Neoliberalism Germán Labrador Méndez

1   Antonio Taboada Ferradás “Wily” at the Crosswalk of Xacobeo 93’ The artist Antonio Taboada Ferradás “Wily” (1962–2006) belonged to an iconic generation in recent collective history, that of the so-called Movida, the third and last batch of a youth who lived intensely the so-called Spanish transition to democracy. I say “last” batch because between 1968 and 1986, three successive tides of a same generation emerged (Labrador Méndez 2017).1 In the first place, the progressives of 1968, who fought Franco’s regime politically, as is the case of Reimundo Patiño, Carlos Varela Veiga or Ricardo Pachón. Secondly, the 1977 free-thinkers [ácratas], born in the second half of the 1950s, such as Camarón, Francisco Leiro or Menchu ​​Lamas. They asked for ruptures while others made 1  Labrador Méndez. Culpables por la literatura. Imaginación política y contracultura en la transición española (1968–1984). 2017.

G. L. Méndez (*) Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Castro et al. (eds.), Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98861-6_10

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reforms and were interested in the confluence of culture, life and politics. And finally, and in third place, the youth of the Movida (the Spanish 1980s New Wave), the baby boomers, born in the early sixties, like Wily or the members of Vigo’s punk-rock group Siniestro Total. They were late to all the parties. In the art world, their older brothers inhabited the cultural institutions of democracy with varying degrees of criticism and accommodation. These new institutions needed to develop new content at full speed. For this they created a circuit of competitions, scholarships, awards and faculties of Fine Arts. The contemporary post-Francoist art scene was born progressively detached from other cultural communities and other collective contexts. Official art thus became autogenous insofar as it was progressively apolitical, that is, celebrative and abstract. Between 1962 and 2006 two transitions were completed. A shorter one, from Franco’s regime to a constitutional monarchy. And another major, longer transition, from Franco’s developmentalism to neoliberal globalization. In this double political and economic transition—but also cultural and ecological—it is possible to frame Wily’s short life. The historical condition of his art can be evoked through two iconic events, producing each its own particular piece. On the one hand, Wily made a small set of boards with sports-themed drawings: athletes, tennis players and runners, in struggling poses. They have the naïve and clean line with which, in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the political normalization of the country was expressed through sports. Only one year later, the Xunta de Galicia chaired by Manuel Fraga promoted a cultural design called to last, imitating what Cardinal Payá had done in Santiago a century earlier when rediscovering the bones of the Apostle. But in 1993 what was rediscovered was the Xacobeo, as a mark and postmodern story around the old Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route, a design based on mass tourism, heritage brandification and financial speculation. The second of Wily’s works that serve to inscribe him in his time must be located within the Xacobeo around the Holy Year of 2004. Since 1999, the so-called French Way (the version of the “Camino” that starts from Jaca or Roncesvalles) had become overcrowded. With the turn of the millennium, the Camino was risking dying of success. Just then, councilor Pérez Varela rushed to open new ways to get more tourists and money to enter, relaunching the so-called Ruta de la Plata (The Silver Route). It was the old road that connected Galicians and Andalusians by land. In its last sections before Santiago it crossed the lands of the Deza river, in the surroundings of Lalín, through the village of Botos. There, next to his own

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house, Wily designed a campground. It was a piece of political art, since Wily replicated, with scarce resources and without public aid in a precarious accommodation, the brand new thirty beds of the nearby A Laxe hostel, which officially cost taxpayers 663,000 euros in that same year. This hostel had an avant-garde design but no associated equipment. It was the continuity of a model based on the production of “cultural containers” that began in the heyday of the 92 Olympics and was to proliferate in the years of so-called Spanish brick bubble, a speculative economic cycle (Labrador Méndez 2016a).2 In Galicia, the road to postmodernity is marked with the image of the Apostle dancing techno on a screen with the Chemical Brothers in the so-­ called New Millennium Concerts of 2004. In less than ten years, all cultural policies had been reorganized around a model that some critics named “the Galician reservation” (Linheira 2018).3 The monoculture of eucalyptus in Galicia’s vast extension of forests finds a parallel in the symbolic sphere with the monoculture of Xacobeo. In this way, culture bilocates, disconnecting from its foundations to reimagine itself oriented toward a fabulous exterior. Peasants and countrymen so became consumers of that same Camino that, suddenly, they discovered passing through the very doors of their homes. Little by little, the cultural producers, through subsidies, legitimized the model. On a micro scale, things always seem easier to observe. Thus, in the Deza Valley, today some cultural promoters, in order to finance their activities, disguise themselves as the famous local artist, the painter Laxeiro, but dressed as a pilgrim. In this way, they accompany schoolchildren on field trips. The latter, in buses, can rediscover (as pilgrims in their homeland) their world as part of an infinite Xacobeo. Laxeiro also disguised himself as an Apostle years ago. Because history is made in layers like trees. Wily’s camping project intended itself to be different, seeking to operate as a timeless island in the middle of the Camino capable of extracting some bodies from the flow of experiences of tourism. It is necessary to stop in order to see the worlds that the Camino blurs. I like the image of that campsite (camping) in Botos, only sketched in some drawing, which 2  Labrador Méndez, “Un museo de grandes novedades. La crítica estética del boom inmobiliario y la monumentalización de la crisis.” In Filosofía y culturas hispánicas. Nuevas perspectivas, eds. Nuria Morgado and Rolando Pérez. Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 2016: 225–256. 3  Linheira, La cultura como reserva india. Trinta e seis anos de políticas culturais en Galiza. Madrid: libros.com, 2018.

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for Wily would perhaps be a space from which to overflow the personal isolation that he ended up finding in his own village. The Wily campsite in front of the d’A Laxe hostel: in this way, we can use the project of a minor work, as a counter-account of the official “Camiño,” and of its ways of moving both money (silver—plata) and bodies. This is not about feeding the myth of the artist as a lonely genius, but about asking how another passage between epochs was then possible, a different path that does not lead us directly from Franco’s dictatorship to the neoliberal environmental crisis, one that might open memory toward a more sustainable future. With that perspective, we can understand Wily’s campground as a “fold” (Deleuze 1988)4 in the Xacobeo’s neoliberal desire of stretching and reshaping traditions, landscapes, rhythms and spaces over the ground.

2   A Wild Technique: A Material History of the Chainsaw in Galician Art «In the  Landscape There Are Pictures but  Also Chainsaws» (Luz Pichel, Personal Communication)

An epoch exists only in relation to the experience of a place, constructed by the bodies that move across it. The place here is Botos, a small village parish (parroquia) of half a thousand inhabitants today, in Lalín’s municipality, in the northern area of the Galician province of Pontevedra. The Xacobeo also opened a paradoxical journey here, because in the years in which the new Ruta de la Plata “entered” the region, its inhabitants “entered” (even without moving) in a more abstract place named Europe. This imaginary movement (“towards Europe, so that Europe can come”) is part of the long transition that took place between 1962 and 2006. That other path, in this case in the direction of the global economy, was radically transforming the ways of working and existing production in Galicia through successive land concentrations, the abandonment of non-­ monetary economies, and of the ways of life that used to make that country-­like world a culturally sustainable place. In this transition there is a long and a short history that explain the current scenario of “crisis and destruction” of the rural world, marked by population aging, the abandonment of villages, ecological catastrophe, giant forest fires and one of 4

 Deleuze, A dobra. Leibniz e o Barroco. São Paulo: Papirus, 1988.

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the lowest indices of human birth rates on the planet. Each one looks for the symbol with which to name this green desert, in which, fifteen years ago, writer Manuel Rivas said that a million cows grazed (Rivas 1990).5 The anguish that runs through all of Wily’s art is not unrelated to this catastrophe, documented at the same time by the archeologist González Ruibal  (1998), very close to Botos, through the study of abandoned farmhouses.6 It is enough to look at a specific episode in this long march of smallholder (minifundio) agriculture toward the disappearance of the rural environment: the transformation of the most important European reserve of communal forests (Labrador Méndez 2016b).7 If, since the late 1950s, Franco’s regime had tried to alienate collectively shared natural properties, a long decade of peasant struggles ended up with the recognition of the collective property of the common lands. It was just a truce. The communal associations were incorporated into the new forestry model, as Lara Barros (2019) studies: they were given a piece of the cake on the condition that they did not discuss how the cake was made, or for whom.8 After Franco’s death, opposition from neighbors and political organizations returned. They could do little in the face of the “wooden Xacobeo.” Timber trucks drove from Lalín to Tafisa, in Pontevedra. Tafisa was a typical company created under the wing of the dictatorship: highly polluting, highly profitable. Not as much as its neighbor ENCE-ELNOSA, still in operation after sixty-five years. In Tafisa the workers paid well. This is how extractivism transformed the Galician forest universe, producing the immediate “[loss] of functionality of the forest and its degradation,” by basing “its production” on “cheap and low-quality wood for the pulp industry.” This also prevented cultivation of the “other types of wood that the Galician economy demanded” (Doldán and Villasante 2015).9  Rivas, Un millón de vacas. Vigo: Xerais, 1990.  González Ruibal, “Etnoarqueología de los abandonos en Galicia. El papel de la cultura material en una sociedad agraria en crisis.” Complutum 9 (1998): 167–191. 7  Labrador Méndez, “Las Églogas de la Acumulación Originaria. Paisajización, desposesión y memoria demopoética en Rosalía de Castro (1868–1884).” In Revisitar el costumbrismo, eds. F. Martínez and K. Soriano. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2016b: 251–269. 8  Barros, “Montes veciñais, mulleres e un ecofeminismo posible.” Árbores que non arden. As mulleres na prevención de incendios forestais. Vigo: Catroventos Editora, 2019. 9  Doldán and Villasante. “El metabolismo socioeconómico de Galicia, 1996–2010.” In El metabolismo económico regional español, ed. O.  Carpintero. Madrid: FUHEM, 2015: 621–690. 5 6

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In Wily’s municipality, due to its colder climate, the eucalyptus trees took longer to be profitable. When they were finally planted, they did so with local opposition: in 1990 a thousand residents demonstrated in Lalín against the rental of communal forests for the cultivation of this species. Thirty years later, there are more than seventy sawmills, financed by the Xunta, which represent about half of the whole local industry. It is convenient to take charge of the structural dimensions of these transformations to learn how to listen to the thunderous sound of the chainsaw in the landscape of a time and a space. And I say “listen,” because according to the story of the artist Ángel Calvo Ulloa, Wily knew how to use his electric saw as a musical instrument in local underground concerts. Like all technology, the chainsaw also has its own political history. The first electric saw appeared in Galicia around 1959, as part of the government innovations toward an extractive forest management. Two decades later, these modern saws were in the hands of any woodworker. It is an ominous tool, even if, on the Iberian Peninsula, it does not acquire all the North American cultural resonances, since this is the favorite weapon of every neoliberal psycho killer, at least since the movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974, and since its seven sequels, of men made of wood. But, in spite of everything, the news about accidents, mutilations and suicides associated with chainsaws, together with their involvement in a not inconsiderable number of sexist crimes, draw attention in the Galician context. Wily was aware of this insofar as he named his “technique” as “savage.” His friends titled his posthumous exhibition thusly. I cannot forget the face of the television presenter José Manuel Orriols, when he saw Wily debarking a log live with his saw. It was years before performer Leo Bassi wanted to transform a Citröen Picasso into a truly cubist car in a television studio with the help of a chainsaw. Orriols’ surprise was alien to the powerful global current that was gathering momentum. From the United States to Sweden, from Canada to Australia, loggers compete on YouTube to make bulls or birds with mechanized saws in record times. Other artisans carve sculptures out of ice or build sand monuments. Wily only went with the sign of the times. The Basque woodcutters (aizkolaris) consider that cutting by hand is a form of poetry that should not be missed. However, at their parties, they organize competitions of electric loggers to engage young people, in which new woodcutters, Asturians, Galicians and Euskaldunes, participate. Bottom line: many lumberjacks make art for fun, but there are few artists who would cut wood for money.

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Obviously, it is not the seam to earn a living as a woodcutter with the fellings than to force through—with laws and subsidies—a change in the production model from the state. It is important, however, not to place Wily on the side of the forestry industry, neither as a worker nor as an entrepreneur. The only cuts he made were for his house-workshop and those associated with the 2004 campsite. But I am interested in the displacement that Lalín supposes, there, then, in the eighties, taking the mechanical saw as a tool to make art. Sculpting with the chainsaw has something of a surreal gesture, a technological union of terror and poetry, delicacy and barbarism. It is important to point it out to understand the punk gesture of an artist who defined himself as an environmentalist and worked with waste materials. There is even a photo in which Wily was hugging a tree. This tree-­hugger from Lalín wanted to save nature from its destruction by violently inscribing the wound that its time caused it on the loose pieces of dead wood. Those were the years of the first (and corrupt) waste recycling plan in Galicia, Plan SOGAMA, based on the burning of garbage. Thus, Wily conceives his workshop as (he literally says) a “transfer plant.” His was the job of a collector-citizen in the woods. Always searching for scraps of wood, in the communal lands. With those pieces and the garbage, he made dolls. Thus, collecting sticks and taking care of the state of the forests, Wily continued (in the artistic sphere) a regime of peasant land management then economically threatened. This is how the various senses of what we do are born from the modes of production that go through us. Not the other way around. Thus, Wily’s totems are the remains of a change in a model of forestry. Their fetishes, corpses temporally embalmed by art. This is where its force of expression comes from.

3   The Spring of the Parishes (parroquias): Counterculture and Activism in the Spanish Transition Technocratic language habituates one to thinking that the territory seems “messy,” when local peasant communities still organize urbanism, economy and human circulation on their own. That is also true for Wily’s world. It is the villages, their experience of life as autonomous political spaces, that allegedly mess the territory up. For the state, village life should be dissolved in favor of the administrative structure marked by the

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Diputación Provincial (a possible parallel with a US large County Council). And that would happen, precisely through the changes in the exploitation of the communal forests already mentioned. But in the world where Wily was born—that rural boy from the small village of Botos—places were still everything. Art, village and parishes are the coordinates in which Ángel Calvo remembers the work done by the O Naranxo Cultural Association around the Algarabía Festival, where Wily seemed to assume an important role (Calvo Ulloa, 2020). Exhibitions in parks, performances, sculptures in bars, neighborhood parties, carnivals, parades, monicreques (puppet-­ theater). All these activities speak to us of a robust fabric of neighbors that emerged precisely after Franco’s death and lasted until the middle of the following decade. In some photos we see Wily disguised as a porno-­Don Quixote, exchanging spear for a carnival phallus, marching along with his faithful squire friend and artist Paío. In other images, Wily acts as the bullfighter Frascuelo with a huge cardboard head to kill a papier-­mâché bull. It was the same energy with which the puppeteers made Don Cristóbal or Barriga Verde fight. There are more photos: parades of giants in robes, totem structures, scepters and posters, in a true Breads&Puppets style. They are the same dates in which Ocaña, many kilometers to the south, in the Cantillana of 1983, organized the tragic parade where he died. If during the dictatorship, popular celebrations had been repressed, watched or redirected, after Franco died, people tried to regain their sovereignty through enjoyment. Young, artistic, party people were Wily’s generation mates. In the world of popular festivals during the Spanish transition to democracy, politics should be understood also as an exercise of shared creativity. The collective production of forms—often ephemeral—that help the community to come together on its own and to transmit to children the spirit of neighborhood participation was intensely political. Being part of a dense process of activating popular forms, in its course, creators and participants “remember.” They initiate complex dialogues with the forms of popular creativity of their ancestors. It happened in many places at once. It was Abrente Movement in Ribadavia, as Sabela Fraga Costa (2019) studies.10 Or the circus tent with which Kukas turned his countrymen upside down, with puppets and projections of porn films at rural festivals. In southern Spain these places were called La Cuadra, or La Carbonería. It is the spirit 10  Fraga Costa, A colección Abrente. Arte galega no desafío cultural dos ‘70. Santiago de Compostela: Museo Etnolóxico de Ribadavia, 2019.

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of a time, which Anxo Rabuñal (born in  1963) reflected in a founding exhibition O lado da sombra (2005).11 Or Pedro G. Romero in Vivir en Sevilla (2005).12 Here it is important to point out that the counterculture of the seventies, in Galicia or Valencia, but also in Catalonia or Andalusia, had rural “tentacles” (not to say roots). It is not usually told, but the Transition had its libertarian spring in the parishes. At least in some.

4   In the Puppet’s Head: Wily in the Conjunction of the Avant-Garde and Popular Art In Wily’s workshop there are carved heads with feet, like those used in hand puppets for the direction of the glove or like those that serve to hold the cardboard folk masks of Giants and “Big Heads” (cabezudos). The lands of Lalín are rich in the tradition of “monicreques” [Galician hand puppets], reactivated since 1982 by the Viravolta company. There is a longer history that goes back to the mythical Barraca Resol company, to the “fantocheiros” [puppet-masters] of Misiones Pedagógicas in the years of the Spanish II Republic. The painter Laxeiro himself recognizes that his interest as an artist in the “cosas de los hombres” [the things of men] comes from an experience of childhood enlightenment, witnessing the spectacle of the Galician master of puppet-theater (fantocheiros) José Silvent, the creator of the famous Green Belly’s puppet [Barriga Verde]. The iconoclastic force of popular violence that arose from his shows conformed his own sensibility as an artist. Between hand puppets and “Big Heads” masks (cabezudos) there is only a matter of scale. Cabezudos were also common in the local festivities around the Algarabía Festival, as seen still in pictures. Of the many Big Heads masks made by Wily, two are still preserved, mutants, amorphous and polychrome, like the rest of his work. With its expressionist marks, folk masks of Giants and Big Heads speak of a strange monumentality. Its physiognomy is the meeting of popular mythologies with the historical memory of a specific town. The most unique inhabitants of a place, as A. R. Castelao recounts in Retrincos, are those who end up having a cardboard head in their homage. Wily himself evokes that same idea when, in 11  Rabuñal, O lado da sombra. Sedición gráfica e iniciativas ignoradas, raras ou desacreditadas entre 1971 e 1989. A Coruña: Fundación Luis Seoane, 2005. 12  Romero, “Vivi ren Sevilla. Construcciones visuales, flamenco y cultura de masas desde 1966.” Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo. 20 January–27 March, 2005.

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an interview in a TV cultural show named “Metrópolis,” he affirms that behind each of his figures there is a specific human character, a singular vital force captured in art. When they get together, a group of Big Heads represent, in its inner diversity, that every community is heterogeneous, at least when the community is represented from inside. The parade of Giants and Big Heads seems to be “folks,” part of a strange family where each figure talks about a particular way of life. The old rural people used to say that, two generations ago, in the villages every neighbor was a very particular character, a singular and irreducible personality, remembered through nicknames and anecdotes. Only some few got the tribute of a mask on top. Wily was aware of the powerful demotic force that the puppet community embodies. Perhaps that is why, regarding the dense presence of figures in his own workshop, he affirmed: “they look like an army.”

5   Kings of the World: The Local Lineage of Outsiders The organizers of La Algarabía chose for their Cultural Association the name of O Naranxo. By doing so they honored the nickname of Manuel González Ferradás (1879–1945). O Naranxo was a famous Lalin’s madman painted posthumously by Laxeiro in 1970, characterized as “o Rei do Mundo” [the King of the World]. It is a folk character: a King of Carnival, the Sovereign of O Entroido. This tradition goes back to an old humanist theme, the laus stultitiae, which without distancing us from the political cosmogony of Carnival, brings us before King Momo, the jester that becomes Prince for some few days, the Italian “Re dei Ciarlatani,” the Testamenteiro in Laza’s Carnival. By choosing this character as a collective patron, the Cultural Association of Algarabía wanted to summon the vello “tolo da vila” [the official “village’s madman”] as a trigger for the community’s memory. They also incorporated an art legacy, that of the Naranjo’s portrait by Laxeiro. Indeed, the Naranxo Cultural Association reissued a book of stories by the exiled writer Ramón de Valenzuela, one of them starring: O Naranxo. His ideas fit well within what the ancients called cynical philosophy, that of a Can sen Dono, a dog without a collar, that rejects money while affirming omnia sunt communia, that all goods should be jointly owned. Seen with irony and affection by Valenzuela from his exile, the ideas of O Naranxo are born from a politically located common sense: he affirms that money only replaces social relations, that true wealth consists in mutual-help and networks of solidarity. In the

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traditional rural paysan’s society, coins were not necessary until the moment in which banks substitute material wealth for the abstract representation of that same wealth (“banknote portraits”) and they capture labor on the way. Paper money or financial assets would be nothing more than a convention, he says. As part of that collectivist ideology, studied by anthropologists such as David Graeber, O Naranxo reclaims for himself, as a Carnival King, all the goods of the world, to later fully distribute them among his own neighborhood. Valenzuela’s story summons a collective knowledge interrupted by the Civil War. Psychiatry depoliticized O Naranxo’s ideas. However, under Franco, madness became one of the few private havens from political terror. Art was one of the few spaces where madness can be elaborated (Labrador Méndez 2019).13 In the Conxo Psychiatric Hospital, in Santiago’s postwar period, as in many other places, there were several “tolos” [madmen] demanding the abolition of money and the distribution of property. They are not necessarily manias: Republican psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles Llauradó came to treat people who actually burned money. At the time of O Naranxo, the cancelation of capitalist money, and its replacement by new forms of solidarity currency, was also part of a political program (Labrador Méndez 2021).14 Utopia and violence cross the worlds from which madmen are born: O Naranxo being just an infant, his countrymen blew up the house of the local “patrón” [boss] with dynamite (with an “infernal torpedo” [hellish torpedo], according to the period’s press). That boss would later take revenge. A quarter of a century later, the savage massacres of the Civil War will be a watershed in the collective memory of the people. Because the “madness” that many times is attributed to the “tolos das vilas” has to do with the impossibility of recovering the meaning of their thoughts once the world that produced them disappeared. The impossibility of sharing a political memory that, while everyone is forgetting, they still, in some way, continue to preserve. Psychosis arises from the impossibility of inhabiting socially accepted fantasies, due to the special violence that these involve on one. We sometimes

13  Labrador Méndez, “Que traballo común nas pedras é a memoria. Arte e resistencia na Galicia da posguerra: unha introdución ao caso José Meijón.” Grial, 57.222 (2019): 34–53. 14  Labrador Méndez, “Hogueras del capital. La memoria del dinero y de la revuelta en la España moderna (1868–2019).” In Los dineros, ed. Pedro G. Romero. Sevilla: Athenaica, 2021: 227–255.

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call a psychosis utopia when we are able to share it in a collectively emancipatory way. Laxeiro, O Naranxo, Colmeiro or “o marquesado da Romea” [Marquisate of Romea]. An artistic and literary lineage of which Wily himself—as Ángel Calvo recalls (2016)—was very aware. That tradition is his true audience, or so Wily says in a text that appeared in 1991, dedicated to 1990s Lalin’s contemporary artists (“the last generation of trapeze artists”). These inherit a local tradition presided over by O Naranxo whom, from the “trapeze,” “greets and blesses the crowd.” Wily (1991) thus tells us that avant-garde life is a circus: the deadly acrobatics of those called to transform their lives into an art show. Wily knew the names of his bandmates (Francisco Lareo, Damián Payo “Paío,” Guillermo Aymerich, Armindo Salgueiro, José Couto Codeseira, etc.). In 1991, Wily still had a tradition. And his contemporaries. The structural position of the artist, activist or countercultural thinker condemns him to great tension and great helplessness. Ángel Calvo speaks of the “overexposure” that arises from the need to achieve recognition at the cost of becoming socially unreadable. Extravagances cease to be understood as part of a character to eat the person. This typically happens when recognition communities vanish (n.d.). It is not a particular fact of Lalín during the nineties. But then, in the here and now of the post-Franco Deza Valley, all the political and creative energy of the 1970s and early 1980s will have vanished by the end of the millennium. The new institutional powers of democracy developed the capacity to channel the critical energies of anti-Franco cultures in a new ideological-propaganda regime. Some call this new state of culture the “C. T.” (Culture of the Transition), which in Galicia could well be called the “Culture of Normalization” or, directly, o Fraguismo.15 In this country, cultural “mandarins” proliferate which seek to use culture as a tool to build political stability. Over the years, the construction of culture in cities gave way to the construction of so-called Cities of Culture, more typical of neoliberalism. Cities of the Arts and Sciences, temples to the Future, to Design, to contemporary Art (Labrador Méndez 2016a).16 In each place of the Spanish state a similar story is recorded, with significant variations.

15  Editors’ note: Fraguismo, so-named after Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Franco’s former propaganda minister and President of the Xunta de Galicia between 1990 and 2005. 16  Labrador Méndez, “Un museo de grandes novedades.”

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“Guilt” was the tragic drive that animated the aesthetic-political project of Wily’s generation in the 1970s. For them, creation was played in the space between what already exists and what does not yet exist, between reproduction and invention, a territory of anxieties and doubts, where the “heretical artist is condemned to an extraordinary uncertainty, a source of terrible tension.” There, “the creator himself in his privacy” is debated in the promise of being one day recognized as the architect of a “symbolic revolution” and against the threat of the “unsuccessful artist,” the “bohemian” who “prolongs the adolescent rebellion” still a bit more (Bourdieu 2002: 102).17 But how long can the trapeze artist stay in the air? In that same year, 1991, Laxeiro wrote a dedication to Wily and his friend Paío, encouraging them to “continue climbing the beautiful mountain of art”: “The burden of the worlds that you carry in you is wonderful, misunderstood, and costly.” It would be worth it, if we listen to Laxeiro, because the final prize of the climb will be “immortality,” and glory. Prize away from the desire for life that beats in the works of these three artists, however. Laxeiro’s art religion is that of those born for art before 1936. Another valley neighbor, the writer Xosé Neira Vilas, the well-known author of Memorias dun neno labrego [Memoirs of a Peasant Boy] stated that “wanting to be avant-garde is getting used to being alone.” The generations of war and exile’s artists made a strong faith in themselves and in their creative solitude, an ethical and political drive. After all, literary immortality is nothing other than the promise of being, at the same time, a trapeze artist and a spectator of oneself. This is how the suicide imagines the world after him. Glory would be the reward of a heroic struggle in art, a correlate of other utopian promises, of faith in a future capable of redeeming the pains of a terrible history. But, without the confidence in collective emancipation and in the role of art, what reasons would the artist on the trapeze have to remain hanging?

17  Bourdieu, Las reglas del arte. Génesis y estructura del campo literario. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2002: 102.

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6   Totems and Taboos: An Artistic Economy of Popular Celebrations It was the summer of COVID-19 and a joyous entourage visited the remains of Wily’s workshop, prompted by the family’s desire to care for a legacy that no Museum assumed for itself. The day was beautiful. The house was decorated with a mosaic making the shape of a huge sun. We were welcomed by an extensive ground floor full of sheets and structures, some display between the storage room and a sacristy. Then Anxo Rabuñal had one luminous idea: to celebrate annually the feast of Saint Wily, taking all these monstrous sculptures out from this warehouse, spreading them through the orchard, the fields and the roads, through the village, reuniting friendships and neighbors at a great banquet. In other words, to celebrate a sort of cultural pilgrimage, “unha romería.” The peasant societies of the Mediterranean made Catholicism a polytheistic religion thanks to the cult of the saints. The therapeutic flows between cultural memory and magic, which Rita Segato (1995) recognized in Afro-Brazilian cults,18 are stirred in Galician “cruceiros” [carved stone crosses] and “ermidas” [small stone chapels] nowadays. San Roque and Inle. Oggun and Santiago. As Ángel Calvo confirmed to me, Wily had paid his toll with Galician sacred art, making a stone cross for his own village. Without giving up being a bit postmodern, of course: this stone cruceiro was in fact a wooden trompe l’oeil. In the interview Wily did for the “Metropolis” television program, he talks about the energy of the statues of his atelier, the power they capture. It seems clear that we are in the workshop of an image maker (imaxineiro), but dedicated to what cult? To what religion do these idola rise? Africanist tropisms are strong in many of these sizes. I thought of the Picasso afro-cubist connection. But at the same time, Wily’s aesthetic genealogies become more localized, and for that reason they are more ambitious. Because all the formalisms of the avant-garde have a previous history in the forms of popular culture. Only in popular aesthetics, cultural forms have not yet lost their function. Wily’s totems are thus, res sacrae, religious images, precisely to the extent that they are quite the opposite, the pagan forms that precede them: harvest puppets and scarecrows. What Wily does has a lot of the religious dimension of carnival: rites of sacrifice related to land farming. His totems summon the Mecos, the San 18  Segato, Santos e Daimones. O politeísmo afrobrasileiro e a tradição arquetipal. Brasilia: EUB, 1995.

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Carnales, the Momos and the Mikaelas, figures that in Lalín are identified with “O Cacharelo,” a character from another painting by Laxeiro. In the “Entroido,” puppets offer their sacrificial bodies, made to burn in the bonfires, announcing the future proximity of Easter, Midsummer Day and All Hallows. They are the effigy of Guy Fawkes in England. Judas dolls, they are called in Germanic countries. And in Portugal. In Laxeiro’s paintings (O Mascarón, Cencerrada) there are many large totemic groups in procession. A pagan Holy Week, in which are still today expressed old remains of Roman Saturnalias. The kinship of Wily’s sculptures with folk puppets becomes even more transparent when discovering that, in villages like As Teixugueiras, the Mecos are made directly from the trunk of a firm tree. Half old Carnival puppets, half postmodern totems, Wily’s figures sometimes mutate toward the technological—recycling cyborgs—because in the neoliberal era communal forests shelter plastics and metals, televisions, telephones. The peasant scarecrows do not give up scaring the birds by using contemporary objects. And so Wily’s plastic human forms are that hybrid between the statue and the scarecrow, made to live in the open, and let the light pass through them; shapes made with the wish that “they could be inserted into a forest.” Angel Calvo commented on Wily’s intense relationship with his art (2016). If he wanted to make a churrasco and had no wood, he did not hesitate to send some of his pieces to the stake, such as the terrible puppeteer Mangiafuoco, who almost burned Pinocchio to heat his dinner. A remnant of a burned statue in his atelier testified that Wily was capable of going all the way. They are images that remain as testimony of the destruction of an era. Wily’s sculptures emerge as a remnant of ecological and cultural devastation. One that still involves us.

7   The Last Train: Wily at the Political Crossroads of a Generation Wily’s contemporaries were, like him, first of all poets, because a name for the period’s desire for creation and adventure was many times “poetry” before “art.” After all, poetry is just a cheap art, one that works in the communal lands of free speech and open text. Wily can also be described

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as a “literary culprit” (Labrador Méndez 2017)19 as I have seen in the poetic notebooks that his family guards. Sculpture sketches, song lyrics, dietary fragments, dream transcriptions, love and heartbreak letters are part of in his writing. Reader of poets Manuel María and Carlos Oroza, from that very second Wily took oral composition techniques for the songs actually recorded. Because of his date of birth, but also in relation to his death, his isolation, his radical idea of ​​coherence in the face of a lack of social and economic capital, Wily was a representative member of his generation. I am thinking of poets and cultural activists such as Lois Pereiro (1958–1996) or Xela Arias Castaño (1962–2003), contemporaries of Wily (1962–2006). Or I think of the artistic life, apparently less dramatic, of Rafael Pintos Méndez (born in  1964), a writer and performer known as Wladimir Dragossán (Draculín) in Pontevedra (Labrador Méndez, 2017). I think of the fuzzy border that goes from the village’s madman to the brilliant artist of a generation. In Wily’s vitae, on the other hand so intense, the last thing to appear is the interview he recorded for the Metropolis program during the fall equinox of 2005. Then there are nine empty months until June 10. As if the wheel of desire did not give more of itself. In the debates between Felipe González and Aznar in 1993, they talked all the time about trains, that old metaphor of modernity as technological progress and infrastructure. They pretended to warn their voters that “Spain” could no longer loose locomotives. Faced with a history of “backwardness” and underdevelopment, where citizens stayed, like cows, on the platforms watching the trains of other people’s progress pass by, for once, Spaniards were going to be passengers toward ultra-modernity. This conflict between cows and travelers, between democracy and high speed, is also inscribed in the territory. The wounds of modernization set successive layers over the space they traverse. It is easy to recognize them in the surroundings of the village of Botos, a territory progressively disorganized by construction work of the AP59 tollway—which separates Botos from Lalín—and by the works of the high-speed train, which began, precisely, in January 2006 (and which fifteen years later remains unfinished). These two barriers transform the parish into an island, fragmented between supposed roads of progress, new «silver routes» from which neighbors were explicitly excluded. Furthermore, in that unfortunate summer of 2006, 19  Labrador Méndez, Culpables por la literatura. Imaginación política y contracultura en la transición española (1968–1984). Madrid: Akal, 2017.

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Renfe abolished the Botos station. It was the most explicit metaphor of a developmentalism from which rural inhabitants were excluded. Very near that station Wily died, on the train track. A year later another neighbor died there as well. The train that took Wily no longer passes that way. When I passed by, I was on a different train, faster. It was there that I started this text. We were going so fast that I don’t know if those houses were Botos indeed.

8   Our Old Friend, Our Old Woodworm, Who Knows So Well How to Work Underground In his unforgettable A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, the English novelist Julian Barnes put together history and fiction to tell a story of the world, from Adam and Eve to Paradise, from the time of the “first parents” to one’s own death. The subject of this story was not the economy, nor war, nor power, all of which were dealt with in the novel. Nor was it desire or the search for freedom. Here the real protagonist was the woodworm. The woodworm caused the shipwreck of the other Biblical Arks, in which the sons of Noah traveled with all the mythological animals that we only know from legends. Woodworm was also responsible for the collapse of the Old Regime by gnawing, literally, the legs of episcopal chairs. Earlier, it had also devoured the gates of Jericho. Then the timbers of the ship de La Méduse. It was the biological way that Barnes found to express the idea of chance ​​ as a contingent principle that determines the long and short marches of history. The literary place that Barnes attributes to the woodworm seems to ironically replicate an old Marxist metaphor, coined in the 18th Brumaire: the revolution as the “old mole” (“der alter Maulwurf”) that invisibly gnaws at the roots of power structures to emerge only at precise historical moments. That metaphor will travel a lot until Deleuze and Guattari capture it for their understanding of history as a rhizome, as a burrow. Viewing the history of the revolution as the work of a woodworm is a less epic, but perhaps more true-to-us update of the Marxian metaphor. It speaks of the impossibility of things to last and of the slow work to get rid of constraints, feeding ourselves on that same thing that limits us in the meantime.

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With the death of Wily, the institutions promised to take care of his artistic legacy. They did not, despite the insistence of friends and family. Things belong to the one who takes care of them, but the problem with politics is always timing. Time determines what is possible or not. In the humid and cold climate of Lalín, in a shelter in poor condition, the sculptures got “the bug.” Woodworm came. And for that reason, these totems will no longer be able to enter the Provincial Museum. Because they would eat it. Simply. They are contagious pieces of an aesthetic pandemic. They have so much life inside that they would eat all the art that was in front of them. If they were admitted to the interior of a contemporary art center (such as the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela), the force that inhabits them would spread without remedy, in a piece really to Wily’s taste. True: the past is always slipping away. Or, as Wily said: the “real problem with wood is preservation.”

Bibliography Barros, Lara. 2019. Montes veciñais, mulleres e un ecofeminismo posible. In Árbores que non arden. As mulleres na prevención de incendios forestais. Vigo: Catroventos Editora. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2002. Las reglas del arte. Génesis y estructura del campo literario. Barcelona: Anagrama. Calvo Ulloa, Ángel. 2016. Wily: unha técnica salvaxe, Exposición. Museo Municipal de Lalín. Concello de Lalín D.L. ———. 2020. Exponerse hasta ser devorados. Fundación Cerezales. Unpublished document. de Valenzuela, Ramón. 2002. O Naranxo. Lalín: Asociación Cultural O Naranxo. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. A dobra. Leibniz e o Barroco. São Paulo: Papirus. Doldán, Xoán, and Sebastián Villasante. 2015. El metabolismo socioeconómico de Galicia, 1996–2010. In El metabolismo económico regional español, ed. O. Carpintero, 621–690. Madrid: FUHEM. Fraga Costa, Sabela. 2019. A colección Abrente. Arte galega no desafío cultural dos ‘70. Santiago de Compostela: Museo Etnolóxico de Ribadavia. González Ruibal, Alfredo. 1998. Etnoarqueología de los abandonos en Galicia. El papel de la cultura material en una sociedad agraria en crisis. Complutum 9: 167–191. Labrador Méndez, Germán. 2016a. Un museo de grandes novedades. La crítica estética del boom inmobiliario y la monumentalización de la crisis. In Filosofía y culturas hispánicas. Nuevas perspectivas, ed. Nuria Morgado and Rolando Pérez, 225–256. Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta.

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———. 2016b. Las Églogas de la Acumulación Originaria. Paisajización, desposesión y memoria demopoética en Rosalía de Castro (1868–1884). In Revisitar el costumbrismo, ed. F.  Martínez and K.  Soriano, 251–269. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. ———. 2017. Culpables por la literatura. Imaginación política y contracultura en la transición española (1968–1984). Madrid: Akal. ———. 2019. Que traballo común nas pedras é a memoria. Arte e resistencia na Galicia da posguerra: unha introdución ao caso José Meijón. Grial 57 (222): 34–53. ———. 2021. Hogueras del capital. La memoria del dinero y de la revuelta en la España moderna (1868–2019). In Los dineros, ed. Pedro G. Romero, 227–255. Sevilla: Athenaica. Linheira, Jorge. 2018. La cultura como reserva india. Trinta e seis anos de políticas culturais en Galiza. Madrid: libros.com. Rabuñal, Anxo. 2005. O lado da sombra. Sedición gráfica e iniciativas ignoradas, raras ou desacreditadas entre 1971 e 1989. A Coruña: Fundación Luis Seoane. Rivas, Manuel. 1990. Un millón de vacas. Vigo: Xerais. Romero, Pedro G. Romero. 2005. Vivi ren Sevilla. Construcciones visuales, flamenco y cultura de masas desde 1966. Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, 20 January–27 March. Segato, Rita. 1995. Santos e Daimones. O politeísmo afrobrasileiro e a tradição arquetipal. Brasilia: EUB. Wily, Antonio Taboada Ferradás. 1991. A última xeneración de trapecistas. Xornal diario, 22 March.

Emilio Araúxo and the Foundations of a Galician Poetic Ethnography Miriam Sánchez Moreiras

1   The Poetic Gesture Emilio Araúxo (Coles, 1946) is a Galician publisher, translator, ethnographer, photographer, professor, philanthropist and poet, among other things; and yet, despite the variety of areas that comprise his extensive and singular work, they all have one thing in common: being under the imperative or “condition of the poem” (Badiou 2003: 29).1 Indeed, as will be seen, the poem is the true catalyst and the one that shapes each and every one of the author’s productions and interventions aimed to preserve the voices and practices of the Galician rural world. Thus, special attention will be paid to the ways, belonging to the order of the poem, in which the commitment of Araúxo’s work to Galician culture takes place. As a 1

 Badiou, A idade dos poetas. Santiago de Compostela: Amastra-N-Gallar, 2003: 29.

M. Sánchez Moreiras (*) Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Regis University, Denver, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Castro et al. (eds.), Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98861-6_11

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publisher and translator, Araúxo has carried out his work mainly through the publishing houses of Noitarenga (from 1995 to 1999) and AmastraN-Gallar (from 2001 to present). Noitarenga published some of the first Galician translations of texts by the French philosopher of Maoist orientation Alain Badiou. Amastra-N-Gallar is characterized by its unmarketable editions and the publication in Galician of contemporary French poets (more than half of the catalog, often in bilingual edition) and other poets from around the world. As an ethnographer, his work focuses on the dissemination of the Galician carnival, the “Entroido,” and the preservation of the almost extinct customs of Galician rural life. As an artist, he is characterized by the production of an extensive poetic, narrative and photographic work. His role as teacher and philanthropist is also noteworthy, influencing generations of intellectuals and creators. His creative exchanges with his poet friends also must be highlighted, which result, among other things, in fruitful collaborations through the issues of the poetry magazine Amanstra-N-Gallar and in the series of booklets called “felotextos.” In this chapter we will delve into “the latent poem” that underlies each of Araúxo’s professional tasks to identify the gesture that brings together all other gestures (of the publisher, translator, ethnographer and artist) and gives them meaning: the gesture of the poem. It is not so much a hermeneutic attempt to frame Araúxo’s work within a specific theoretical framework from which to draw critical conclusions. That task has been successfully undertaken recently by the scholar Arturo Casas (2019),2 who has proposed an approach to Araúxo’s work from feminist, posthumanist and animal ethics perspectives, among others. The fundamental interest of this chapter is the introduction of Araúxo’s extensive and singular work to the international public mainly through the voice of the author himself, which gives an account of the multiple dimensions of his cultural project and of the poetic gesture that shapes it. Hence the need for direct quotes that run through these pages. It is about collecting Araúxo’s voice, writing somehow with him, the same way that he collects and writes with “the voice of the other,” echoing the expression used by Carlos Lema (2011b)3 to describe the presence of the voice of the old peasant Isolina Pumar in three of the author’s books. 2  Casas, “Ética das verdades, urda de voces.” In Emilio Araúxo Libro da Ribeira Sacra (Cinsa do vento). Monforte de Lemos: Biblioteca de Mesopotamia-Chan da Pólvora Editora, 2019: 7–23. 3  Lema, “Tres libros de Emilio Araúxo.” Festa da palabra silenciada 27 (2011): 152–153.

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The poetic gesture is composed of a “double split” between its aesthetic dimension and its ethical dimension, as Araúxo explains (in Iglesias 2007):4 “Eu estou a proba nesa dobre escisión entre o xesto deconstructivo de Derrida, segundo o cal vivir é traducir, engadir unha homonimia máis, e o da dimensión do acto de Badiou. O obxecto deconstructivo é máis doado cá aposta polo acto” [I am tested in that double split between Derrida’s deconstructive gesture, according to whom living is translating, adding another homonymy, and that of Badiou’s act dimension. The deconstructive object is easier than the commitment to the act].5 The latter points directly to the successive poetic interventions of Emilio Araúxo in the fields mentioned, when poetry, if not political, becomes ethical with its contribution to the community: “Eu non teño unha experiencia política que me permita extraer verdades ou directrices. Si considero, porén, que os libros que fago teñen unha dimensión ética” [I do not have a political experience that allows me to extract truths or guidelines. I consider, however, that the books I make have an ethical dimension] (unpaginated).6 Later, due account will be given of the ethical dimension of Araúxo’s work and its strong connection to the community.

2   The Publisher, the Translator In her study on the reception of international poetry in Galicia, Rábade Villar (2015)7 noted the “prospective” character that Galician translations of foreign poetry share. For this scholar the poetic field would import “aquellos elementos a los que, por determinadas razones, se les confiere el poder de anticipar o de inaugurar nuevas posibilidades expresivas en la propia tradición” [those elements that, for certain reasons, were given the power to anticipate or open new expressive possibilities in their own tradition] (171).8 Such an anticipatory and inaugural purpose will be the one that guides the translations of poetry and poetic thought carried out by Emilio Araúxo, first in Noitarenga and later in Amastra-N-Gallar. Regarding Noitarenga, the exquisite translation of Claude  Iglesias, “Asistimos ao holocausto do rural galego.” El País, 2007.  All direct translations are my own. 6  Iglesias, “Asistimos ao holocausto do rural galego.” 7  Rábade Villar, “La recepción internacional de la poesía en Galicia.” In Literaturas extranjeras y desarrollo cultural. Hacia un cambio de paradigma en la traducción literaria gallega, eds. Luna Alonso et al. Berna: Peter Lang, 2015: 9–36. 8  Rábade Villar, “La recepción internacional de la poesía en Galicia”: 171. 4 5

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Royet-Journoud’s As naturezas indivisibles (2000)9 can be highlighted as it allows the Galician public to have access to the innovative poetic voice of this contemporary French poet. Araúxo founded Noitarenga in 1995 together with Luis Martul, a professor at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Santiago. The main interest of this publishing house was the translation into Galician of political, philosophical and artistic works of minority and innovative character, which aimed to transform artistic-cultural practices in the Galician cultural scene. With this purpose, a series of texts by the philosopher Alain Badiou were published, exactly three titles during its first year: Arredor da cuestión nacional (1995a),10 Mundo contemporáneo e desexo de filosofía (1995b)11 and A ética: ensaio sobre a conciencia do mal (1995c).12 These texts were decisive in their attempt to rethink communism after the weariness of the revolutionary thought that came out of May 1968. A year before, Araúxo and Martul had already translated for the Galician publisher Sotelo Blanco Badiou’s Rapsodia polo teatro: breve tratado filosófico (1994),13 a book that Araúxo would also translate into Spanish for the publisher Ágora. The political commitment of Noitarenga can be traced in the play on words that gives it its name, composed by “noite” [“night”] and “arenga” [“exhortation”]; a “nocturnal exhortation” that would publicize Badiou’s new insurgent communist discourse. The important work of translation and dissemination of Badiou’s thought in the Galician cultural field, which was almost non-existent in Spanish (the first Spanish versions, except for Manifiesto por la filosofía published in 199014 in Cátedra, were Latin American editions) is accounted for by Daniel Salgado (2009).15 In his article Salgado points to Emilio Araúxo’s university years in post-1968 Paris when he had Alain Badiou as a professor. From those years he recalls “os tabiques estreitos da École Normale Supérieure e o histerismo da aula lindeira, onde impartía Gilles 9  Royet-Journoud, As naturezas indivisibles (trans. Emilio Araúxo). Santiago de Compostela: Noitarenga, 2000 10  Badiou, Arredor da cuestión nacional. Santiago de Compostela: Noitarenga, 1995a. 11  Badiou, Mundo contemporáneo e desexo de filosofía. Santiago de Compostela: Noitarenga, 1995b. 12  Badiou, A ética: ensaio sobre a conciencia do mal. Santiago de Compostela: Noitarenga, 1995c. 13  Badiou, Rapsodia polo teatro: breve tratado filosófico. Santiago de Compostela: Sotelo Blanco, 1994. 14  Badiou, Manifiesto por la filosofía. Madrid: Cátedra, 1990. 15  Salgado, “A conexión galega da insurxencia.” El País, 2009.

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Deleuze (…) ou a Badiou encabezando unha delegación de alumnos pechados no reitorado” [the narrow partitions of the École Normale Supérieure and the hysteria of the classroom next door, where Gilles Deleuze taught (…) or Badiou leading a delegation of students locked in the rectorship] (unpaginated). In addition to Araúxo and Martul, Francisco Sampedro must also be mentioned for his Galician translations of the French philosopher, with works published in Laiovento (Dun desastre escuro e outros textos 1995)16 and in the publisher’s magazine A trabe de Ouro, directed by Méndez Ferrín.17 After abandoning Noitarenga for differences with Martul about the publisher’s line, Araúxo founded Amastra-N-Gallar, a publishing house characterized by the fact that the poem is the prevailing condition, as well as by the unmarketable character of its publications, guided by the principles of generosity and non-commodification that rule poetry. “O acto poético” (2001)18 was the title of the first issue of its poetry journal; there, the bases that would characterize the successive numbers of the publication were established. In all of them Badiou’s reflections on the poem, as well as the poetics and poems of mostly French authors (many of them with dedicated bilingual dossiers: Anne-Marie Albiach, Claude Royet-­ Journoud, Philip Beck, Paul Celan, Bernard Noël, Florence Pazzottu or James Sacré), are prominent. One of the most extreme examples is its last issue 16 (2014),19 a dossier dedicated to Natacha Michel and written entirely in French except for a brief text in Spanish. The dominant subject that runs through all the journal issues and the Amastra-N-Gallar’s booklets, presented as a true matter of life, is to elucidate the real nature of the poetic act and of the thought that the poem generates. Rábade Villar (2015)20 echoes the narrow link between the poem and the theory about the poem in Amastra-N-Gallar’s poetry translations and, to a more general level, in the current Galician poetry: Como lo demuestra el trabajo constante y silencioso de un agente como Emilio Araúxo, la periferia hace posible uno de los fenómenos más ­singulares 16  Badiou, Dun desastre oscuro e outros textos (trans. Francisco Sampedro). A Coruña: Laiovento, 2015. 17  Badiou, “Entrevista entre un filósofo francés e un filósofo chinés” (trans. Francisco Sampedro). A trabe de ouro: publicación galega de pensamento crítico 91 (2012): 51–56. 18  Araúxo, “O acto poético.” Amastra-N-Gallar 1 (2001). 19  Araúxo, “Natacha Michel.” Amastra-N-Gallar 16 (2014). 20  Rábade Villar, “La recepción internacional de la poesía en Galicia.”

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en el campo poético: a diferencia de lo que ocurre en otros géneros como la narrativa o el teatro, la práctica de la traducción poética tiende a aliarse con la difusión del pensamiento y del ensayo, sin duda en estrecha correlación con el carácter reflexivo que caracteriza la constitución moderna de la lírica (…) Y esta tendencia se halla en una relación de natural convergencia con la impronta de la autorreflexividad metaliteraria en poetas gallegos contemporáneos como Manuel Outeiriño, Arturo Casas, Chus Pato o Xabier Cordal [As demonstrated by the constant and silent work of an agent like Emilio Araúxo, the periphery makes one of the most unique phenomena possible in the poetic field: unlike what happens in other genres such as narrative or theater, the practice of poetic translation tends to ally with the diffusion of thought and essay, without doubt in close correlation with the reflective character that distinguishes the modern constitution of the lyric. (…) And this tendency is in a relation of natural convergence with the imprint of metaliterary self-reflexivity in contemporary Galician poets such as Manuel Outeiriño, Arturo Casas, Chus Pato or Xabier Cordal]. (Rábade Villar 2015: 170)21

Rábade Villar must be added to the list as the poet María do Cebreiro. In the particular approaches of the poets and thinkers gathered in Amastra-­ N-­Gallar, a shared vision of the poem can be identified: an understanding of the poem as a procedure of truth that results from the donation of matter (body of the world, the poet and the conventional words) to the inaugural and presential thinking that the poem is. As Badiou clarifies in different places (2003,22 201623), it is not about a Romantic conception of the poem that considers it the container of an absolute and transcendental truth, because the truth that the poem conveys and welcomes is the truth of the matter. Nor is any corporeal formulation that reduces it to a mere empty signifier (play of language or textual jouissance), since there is thought in the poem, and that thought holds truth. In “Acto analítico, acto político, acto poético” (2001: 62–78),24 a text published in the first number of Amastra-N-Gallar’s journal, Badiou considers the poetic act a type of intervention of an ethical nature: “Pódese dicir que o obxectivo da poesía é cambiar a vida e nese sentido sí existe unha intervención poética” [It can be said that the objective of poetry is  Rábade Villar, “La recepción internacional de la poesía en Galicia”: 170.  Badiou, A idade dos poetas. 23  Badiou, Que pense le poème? Caen: Nous, 2016. 24  Badiou, “Acto analítico, acto político, acto poético.” Amastra-N-Gallar 1 (2001): 62–78. 21 22

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to change life and in that sense there is a poetic intervention] (62).25 Opposite to philosophy, that forgets the thing and the thing’s pleasure with its habit of defining, delimiting meanings and establishing concepts, poetry will be the one that restores the thing and the thing’s pleasure (we can also call it the thing’s “joy”; the body and matter’s joy) into words. What characterizes the poetic word is its unmediated relation with the world: “Sabemos que o que hai é o que atopamos e non o que interpretamos. Entón estamos de acordo con aquilo que eu podo considerar un acto poético e que é o enunciado un poco misterioso de Alberto Caeiro (…) ‘ser unha cousa é non aceptar ningunha interpretación’” [We know that what is there is what we find and not what we interpret. Then we agree with what I can consider as a poetic act and that is the somewhat mysterious statement by Alberto Caeiro (…) “being a thing is not accepting any interpretation”] (71).26 As Badiou explains, such a restitution is carried out through the two poetic operations of subtraction (depuration of language) and transposition (metaphorical dissemination), by which the conventional word is transformed into the thought-word of the poem (Sánchez Moreiras 2018).27 The poetic thought-word is an “advanced word”; it goes ahead of any meaning and of any action as declared by the poet René Char (in Lema 2011a).28 It is to know before even knowing, establishing concepts, generalities, universals. Or to “apprehend” the reality with the body and the mind at the same time before “comprehending” it. That of the poem is an unconscious-conscious, unintentional-­intentional thought, a thought located in the limits. As mentioned by Lamela Couto (2007)29 in the issue dedicated to the poet Florence Pazzottu: “na postergación sucesiva da idea dun sentido coma produto final e fixado, se sitúa a restitución do goce” [in the successive postponement of the idea of ​​a sense as a final and fixed product, the restitution of joy is placed] (8).30 Also: “a lingua poética como lugar de acubillo a iso que advén coma proceso, tránsito, desprazamento, pegada, polo tanto, posibilidade de dispendio de goce, pensamento e beleza” [the  Badiou, “Acto analítico, acto político, acto poético”: 62.  Badiou, “Acto analítico, acto político, acto poético”: 71. 27  Sánchez Moreiras, “Poesía e veredición. Unha aproximación ao pensamento de Alain Badiou.” Anotacións 18 (2018). 28  Lema, Poesía, linguaxe e acción (con René Char). Santiago de Compostela: Amastra-NGallar, 2011. 29  Lamela Couto, “Os dous poemas.” Amastra-N-Gallar 13 (2007): 7–12. 30  Lamela Couto, “Os dous poemas”: 8. 25 26

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poetic language as a place of shelter for what comes as a process, transit, movement, footprint, therefore, the possibility of joy, thought and beauty] (12).31 Florence Pazzottu herself defined the place of her writing as “un afora, un lugar aberto (…) un fora ou dentro. Unha impropiedade—ben singular. Non unha erranza logo este desprazamento; é o que eu chamo habitar” [an outside, an open place (…) an outside or inside. An impropriety—although singular. Not a wandering, then, this movement; it is what I call to inhabit] (27).32 The “outside” is the place, too, for Emilio Araúxo, who defines himself as a poet above all: “Eu non son nin de lonxe un filósofo, senón simplemente un poeta (…) Eu son un ex poeta. Un poeta é sempre alguén que debe estar fóra porque o seu traballo é enigmático para el mesmo. O poeta non sabe o que di [I am not a philosopher, but simply a poet. (…) I am an ex poet. A poet is always someone who must be outside because his work is enigmatic for himself. The poet does not know what he says] (In Iglesias 2007, unpaginated).”33 The play on words in the name “Amastra-N-Gallar” is a reference to the work of the poet’s body with words that takes place in poetic creation: Amastragallar, na terra de Caldelas, é unha palabra que designa o xesto de pisar e apertar co pé, esmagar. Extrapolado ó ámbito da poesía: a tarefa é a de esmagar as palabras, trituralas, e relanzalas cara a novos sentidos. O “n” engadido, é para que resoe tamén nese imperativo a dimensión de xogo (trangallada) [Amastragallar, in the land of Caldelas, is a word that designates the gesture of stepping on and squeezing with the foot, crushing. Extrapolated to the field of poetry: the task is to squeeze the words, crush them, and relaunch them into new directions. The added “n” is so that the game dimension also resonates in that imperative (trangallada)]. (Araúxo 2017a)34

3   The Ethnographer, the Photographer, the Poet The poem’s gesture will also guide the ethnographic work of Emilio Araúxo (he defines himself as a “wild ethnographer”), so that the borders between poetry and ethnography are often blurred, tensed to the  Lamela Couto, “Os dous poemas”: 12.  Lamela Couto, “Os dous poemas”: 17. 33  Iglesias, “Asistimos ao holocausto do rural galego.” 34  Araúxo, Personal communication, 2017a. 31 32

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maximum: where ethnographic work ends and the poem begins or vice versa. We can talk of a “poetic ethnography” as well as of an “ethnographic poetry”—on those occasions when the poem is chosen as the discursive form to express the ethnographic fieldwork experiences (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor 2010)35—and, in this way, consider each of Araúxo’s forays in the field of ethnography as poetic acts dedicated to preserving the memory of the Galician rural world at the very limit of its extinction. But, if melancholic, we are not faced with an exercise of nostalgia for a lost past but with an exercise of progressiveness that leaves open a possibility of future for the rural. About the publication of Act ivida desc ulturais (2006),36 a long visual poem that gathers the photographs made by Araúxo from an old farm kitchen of Terra de Caldelas since 1986 “á busca dalgún recurso de pensamento para a supervivencia” [in search of some resource of thought for survival] (in Iglesias 2007, unpaginated),37 the author declares: “Nesta shoa [holocausto] do rural á que asistimos parece que é imposible o recurso ao poema. Penso que na desaparición do mundo labrego haberá que loitar polo principio de unicidade e alegría que implica todo poema” [In this shoa (holocaust) of the rural that we are witnessing, it seems that the use of the poem is impossible. I think that in the disappearance of the peasant world we will have to fight for the principle of uniqueness and joy that every poem implies] (in Iglesias 2007, unpaginated).38 In the same interview, Araúxo explains that the origins of his ethnographic approach to the carnival celebrations of rural Galicia go back to his years as a student in Paris, when he discovered, thanks to the French theater specialist François Regnault, the studies on carnival by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. The book of poems Os Eidos, by Uxío Novoneyra, apart from the influence of his high school teacher Ferrín, would play a decisive role in his attempt to turn ethnography into a poetic task. Araúxo’s poetic understanding of ethnography can be connected at an international level with the “poetic turn” that some areas of ethnography have been experiencing since the beginning of the 1980s as part of the so-called new ethnography or postmodern anthropology, which proposes 35  Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor, “Anthropology at the Edge of the Words. Where Poetry and Ethnography Meet.” Anthropology and Humanism 35.1 (2010): 2–19. 36  Araúxo, Act ivida desc ulturais. Santiago de Compostela: Amastra-N-Gallar, 2006. 37  Iglesias, “Asistimos ao holocausto do rural galego.” 38  Iglesias, “Asistimos ao holocausto do rural galego.”

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new ways of writing ethnographic discourse replacing and questioning the authority of the positivist prose traditionally used in the scientific writings as well as the scientific-objective purpose of anthropologic practices (González 2003).39 The new ethnographic discourse is influenced by the last French philosophers of the 1970s, especially Deleuze and Derrida with their formulation of the end of any secure interpretation of reality, as well as by Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work about the carnival put an end to the separation between actors and spectators, and therefore to any ethnographic practice not affected by the object studied since there is no objective observer. Bakhtin’s notions of “dialogic,” “heteroglosy” and “poliphony” are at the base of the ethnographic dialogic practiced by Tedlock and the studies carried out by experimental ethnographers such as Tyler or Diamond. As González explains, poetic anthropology, the term used by Rose for the first time in the official anthropological literature in 1983, is linked to the experimentalist modality, in that the presentation of the story is its fundamental concern. The traditional ethnographic objective narration is replaced by forms typical of poetic language, so the discourse becomes “más críptico, polisémico y cargado de subjetividad, en una suerte de ‘subversión’ epistemológica al llevar la descripción a una forma radicalizada de subjetividad por parte del autor, en cuya cabeza, que opera como tamiz, aflora el ‘otro’” [more cryptic, polysemic and charged with subjectivity, in a sort of epistemological subversion where description is brought to a radicalized form of subjectivity by the author, in whose head, which operates as a sieve, the “other” emerges] (192).40 As we will see in the case of Araúxo’s essays and poetry it is mainly the “voice of the other” which emerges, making his poetic ethnography a dialogic one as well. Araúxo’s ethnographic-poetic task, a unique case not only in Galicia but in the Iberian Peninsula, has been giving rise to an extensive production of works, interventions and photographic exhibitions, such as that hosted in 2013 by the international poetry center of Marseille with the name voir/disparaître, where parts of his film Na Castañeira, starring the 39  Among its main representatives are M. Agar, David Schneider, Marshall Sahlins, Clifford Geertz, J. Clifford, D. Tedlock, S. Tyler in the USA; Victor Turner and Mary Douglas in England; Michel Izard and Dan Sperber in France (González, “Nuevas prácticas etnográficas: El surgimiento de la antropología poética.” In Movimientos de campo, en torno a cuatro fronteras de la antropología en Chile, ed. Nicolás Richard. Guatemala/Francia: ICAPI and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2003: 185–202). 40  González, “Nuevas prácticas etnográficas”: 192.

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peasant Isolina Pumar, were shown. It has also led him to the creation of a “poemuseo” in the little village of Sacardebois (Ourense), intended to recreate the material conditions of the existence of the peasant people through the objects and the images  (Fig.  1). Among Araúxo’s photographic actions are books such as the already mentioned Act ivida desculturais (2006),41 capturing the remains of an old rural kitchen  (Fig.  1); Chancras (2017b),42 on the traditional footwear of the Galician peasantry; Miltempos (No inmemorial, na labranza) (2017c),43 with its images of the farmer world fading away; and Ons ondas do mar riso (2018a),44 on the sailor traditions of this island. Regarding his poetry books and essays, a common characteristic to all of them is the articulation of the voice through the immortal word of the eternal rural old woman, the same one

Fig. 1  Old farm kitchen and Cádido Caneiro’s sculpture for the “Poemuseo,” by Emilio Araúxo. Images courtesy of the author

 Araúxo, Act ivida desc ulturais.  Araúxo, Chancras. Noia: Toxosoutos, 2017. 43  Araúxo, Miltempos (No inmemorial, na labranza). Noia: Toxosoutos, 2017. 44  Araúxo, Ons ondas do mar riso. Santiago de Compostela: Amastra-N-Gallar, 2018. 41 42

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Fig. 2  Isolina Pumar (the “muse”), by Emilio Araúxo. Image courtesy of the author

that stars in many of the photographs and to whom Araúxo’s muse Isolina Pumar lends her image and voice on many occasions (Fig. 2). Among the poem books are Cinsa do vento: Libro da Ribeira Sacra (1996,45 2019a46), Pois (1998a),47 As chairas da letra (1998b)48 and Seica si (2017d)49—an updated version of Pois, which was published under the title Aquí (2017e)50 in a micro-edition in Amastra-N-Gallar. Here is the poem “Eu non lle podo dar forza ó fouciño” [“I can’t put enough force on the sickle”], from Seica si, as an example of the rural old woman’s voice of resistence:  Araúxo, Cinsa do vento: Libro da Ribeira Sacra. Santiago de Compostela: Noitarenga, 1996. 46  Araúxo Libro da Ribeira Sacra (Cinsa do vento). 47  Araúxo, Pois. Santiago de Compostela: Noitarenga, 1998. 48  Araúxo, As chairas da letra. Santiago de Compostela: Noitarenga, 1998. 49  Araúxo, Seica si. Santiago de Compostela: Chan da Pólvora, 2017. 50  Araúxo, Aquí. Santiago de Compostela: Amastra-N-Gallar, 2017. 45

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“déixolle unha fogueira á pota/e ímonos/pago por non me erguer/eu sentada ou deitada//eu non lle podo dar forza ó fouciño/dous braciños/ doen/ai/para me erguer/ai/as perniñas” [I leave a fire on the pot/and we go/what I would give for not getting up/my sitting or laying down//I can’t put enough force on the sickle/two little arms/they ache/ow/to get up/ow/my little legs] (Araúxo 2017: 143).51 In his already mentioned prologue to the recent edition of Libro da Ribeira Sacra, made by Chan da Pólvora, Arturo Casas (2019)52 offers an elaborate and insightful analysis of the Arauxian poems-act and the type of testimonial and spectral enunciation that characterizes them by sustaining the imminence of disappearance of rural Galician lifestyle. Casas connects this type of enunciation with notions such as Deleuze and Guattari’s “nomadological,” Bakhtin’s “dialogic” and “poliphony” and Lucien Goldman’s “transindividual” to describe a voice characterized as being multiple, fragmentary, non-authoritative, autonomous and anonymous “pois non importa quen fala mais ‘fálase’” [because it does not matter who speaks but it “speaks”] (13).53 He also calls it “transversal” because of the relationship that the voice establishes with the photographic image. Most of all, it is the voice of the others, “the part without part,” as Jacques Rancière called them, and particularly the voice of the old peasant woman because more often the poorest are the elderly hard-working women from the rural areas (15).54 It is a voice of resistance, with an ethical dimension and an ethnographic function in giving voice to poverty and subalternity, to marginalized social sectors, attentive to register and document the practices of secular domination. It must be clarified that the biopolitics pointed out by Casas does not imply subordination of poetry to politics or vice versa but rather “sobredeterminación entre diversas prácticas sociales” [overdetermination between various social practices] (26),55 which are in an homology relationship: the socioeconomic structures of smallholding and communal lands corresponds to the artistic structures of multiple enunciation, short poems-act and discursive fragmentation (32).56 However, for Casas, in the light of Lemas’ reflections, there exists an ethical dimension: The poetic act, in conjunction with the poems-act  Araúxo, Seica si: 143.  Casas, “Ética das verdades, urda de voces.” 53  Casas, “Ética das verdades, urda de voces”: 13. 54  Casas, “Ética das verdades, urda de voces”: 15. 55  Casas, “Ética das verdades, urda de voces”: 26. 56  Casas, “Ética das verdades, urda de voces”: 32. 51 52

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understood as speech acts that allow that a same factual time can be shared between author-enunciator/Araúxo-Isolina Pumar and the reader in a way that poetry becomes “poetry-with” and “poetry-between” (Lema 2011b: 152–153).57 An ethic of truths, Casas says, that does not give up, a resistance ethics.58 As the poems, Araúxo’s essays also respond to the urgency to recover the lost voices of the Galician peasantry. In Balbina (2015), for example, through an almost literal transcription of the verbal flow that characterizes the oral speech (digressions, space-time jumps, interruptions, colloquial register, etc.), the protagonist relates her vital events, from her years working for the resistance in the Spanish Civil War, first in Barcelona and later in France as a nurse, to her participation in the Cuban Revolution and, finally, her return to the village of her birth. Next to the verbal excess and the anecdotes that populate the discourse of an historical I, Balbina, relating orally her life, and which follows along the lines (albeit with its own peculiarities) of an ethnographic field work, is Mal Mor (2017f).59 This Araúxo masterpiece is the culmination of the author’s constant determination to provide voice and visibility to the Galician peasant under the mandate of the poem. Taking as reference Samuel Beckett’s nouvelle, Mal vu mal dit (1981),60 Araúxo carries out an exercise of verbal containment, debugging of any anecdote, in which the narration in indirect style continues the voice of his poems to build a universal voice of the old woman, through which all rural women speak (“mal mor” here meaning “bad and

 Lema, “Tres libros de Emilio Araúxo”: 152–153.  Even without a declared political intention, Araúxo’s ethnographic-poetic acts of resistance to the disappearance of the Galician rural world share certain features with the dynamic formulation of resistance or “porous resistance” proposed by the members of the Poetics Resistance network (among which are Casas and Rábade Villar) in works such as those collected in the special issue of the journal Cosmos and History “The Poetics of Resistance” (Gräbner and Wood, Cosmos and History 6.2 (2010)), focused on analyzing and discussing the relationship between creativity, culture and political resistance in the context of neoliberal globalization. The somehow “spectral” dimension of Araúxo’s ethnographic-poetic resistance can be connected with the link between resistance and historical memory addressed by Rábade Villar (Rábade Villar, Fogar impronunciable. Poesía e pantasma. Vigo: Editorial Galaxia 2011) through the study of the “spectrum” figure in Galician literature. For Rábade Villar, poetry would be defined as a zone of resistance and challenge to the statements of formal politics, even when the latter is presented as a counter-power. 59  Araúxo, Mal mor. Rianxo: Axóuxere, 2017. 60  Beckett, Mal vu mal dit. Paris: Minuit, 1981. 57 58

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much worse than bad”; Araúxo 2018b).61 It is called “essay,” but in the sense of being an essay of a writing that crosses different literary genres (narrative, theatrical monologue, poetic prose, etc.). As in Beckett’s nouvelle, in the words of the old peasant woman the poem is latent: Sempre baixa. Traballando. Así andou sempre. Nai morreu nova. Pai non podía. Todos os sacos pasaban polo lombo dela. Colleu máis pesos que estrelas hai no ceo. Non sabe cómo ten un óso sano. Nin costela. Sempre baixa. Mirando para o chan. Para o que está facendo. Se anda sachando. Ou se anda cavando. Ou se anda segando. Hai que mirar para abaixo. Para o que fai [Always down. Working. That’s how she always was. Mother died young. Father couldn’t. All the sacks went to her back. She has carried more loads than stars are in the sky. She does not know how she has a healthy bone. Or a rib. Always down. Looking at the ground. At what she is doing. If she is hoeing. Or she is digging. Or she is mowing. You have to look down. At what you do]. (Mal Mor: 59)62

In a 2019 essay, Ceo cerca da terra (Cara a Requeixo de Queixa),63 and along the lines of his most ethnographic works, Araúxo offers a live testimony of the rural traditions, customs and language of the Queixa mountains, localized in the Galician province of Ourense. At the end of the book, a glossary with terms and expressions that belong to the Galician variety of this part of the region is provided. We are before another manifestation of that urge of recovering the lost voices of the Galician peasants that runs through all Araúxo’s work. An aspect by which Emilio Araúxo is best known to the general public is his dissemination of the Galician carnival traditions since the 1980s, particularly, but not limited to, the carnival of the valley of Maceda, in Ourense, and the felo, its traditional mask (Fig. 3). In an interview for the O Sil newspaper (in Rodríguez 2014),64 he pointed out that one of the crucial elements of the carnival is its symbolism reserve at a time of great symbolic poverty; the carnival’s ability to re-symbolize: that is, to conceive of another future and celebrate the joy of change and renewal. Araúxo’s ethnographic fieldwork on the rural Galician carnival is not limited to the main dates, as he explains: “teño unha relación de convivencia máis  Araúxo, Personal communication, 2018.  Araúxo, Mal mor: 59. 63  Araúxo, Ceo cerca da terra (Cara a Requeixo de Queixa). Noia: Toxosoutos, 2019b. 64  Rodríguez, “Especial entroido.” O Sil, February, 2014. 61 62

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Fig. 3  Felo mask and Madamita mask, by Emilio Araúxo. Images courtesy of the author

extensa, máis ampla con esas aldeas, ao mellor noutras épocas do ano viaxo alá e non só as visito, senón que en ocasións resido alí durante tempadas. Entón hai un traballo de campo que desborda o que é meramente o calendario carnavalesco” [I have a broader, more extensive relationship with these villages, sometimes I travel there other times of the year and not only do I visit them, but maybe I live there for periods of time. Then there is a fieldwork that overflows what is merely the carnival calendar] (in Rodríguez 2014, unpaginated).65 Araúxo acts as an ambassador for the Ourense carnival before a considerable number of foreign researchers and poets, of whom he emphasizes their amazement to the feeling of community and prodigality of the celebration, which led the poet Claude Royet-Journoud (2009) to the idea (elaborated in the form of his booklet’s title) that “A máscara non instaura unha distancia, senón outra proximidade” [The mask does not set a distance,  Rodríguez, “Especial entroido.”

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but another proximity].66 The Swedish poet Helena Eriksson participated as a felo mask, walking the mountains and valleys of Maceda for a whole day; an experience that she reflected on in Entre ou A outra proximidade [In Between or The Other Proximity] (2010),67 as a response to ​​Royet-­ Journoud’s idea. The two texts are part of more than sixty felotextos, that is, texts about the felo mask (the last’s being so far Xestos primaverais, by Cécile Guivarch, 2014),68 that Araúxo invites to write to his poet friends, inspired by the carnival experience. Galician poets such as Lupe Gómez, Arturo Casas, Carlos Lema, María do Cebreiro, Santiago Pro, Daniel Salgado, Luís García Soto, Anxo Pastor, Bieito Iglesias, Séchu Sende, José Manuel Bouzo Limia, Alexandre Nerium and other poets worldwide participate in the elaboration of the felotextos. Many of the felotextos originate as a proposal for dialogue formulated by Araúxo, who provides the author with one or more pictures of felos from the photographic archive he has been creating since 1987. Araúxo explains his mission with Galician carnival this way: Unha vez que fun capturado por este mundo, sentín a obriga de ser un pasador, unha especie de pequena ponte para transmitilo. O Carnaval axudou a crear en min a conciencia e o deber de transmitilo, de gardar a memoria viva pola relación que ten a memoria co porvir. Iso influíame ata o extremo de obligarme a editar sistematicamente libros sobre o Carnaval, que, primeiro, non vendo, gardando así o espíritu carnavalesco de non mercado; e, en segundo lugar, que comparto coas máscaras e que procuro que sexan homenaxes a esos Entroidos. Uso os libros para saudar ás xentes desas zonas e para animalas e decirlles que o que fan é extraordinario e que paga a pena que o sigan facendo [Once I was captured by this world, I felt the obligation to be a facilitator, a kind of small bridge to pass it on. The Carnival has helped to create in me the conscience and the duty to transmit it, to keep the memory alive by the relation that the memory has with the future. That influenced me to the point of forcing me to systematically publish books on Carnival, which, first, I do not sell, thus keeping the carnivalesque spirit of non-market; and, secondly, which I share with the masks and which I try to be tributes to those Entroidos. I use the books to greet the people of those

66  Royet-Journoud, A máscara non instaura unha distancia senón outra proximidade. Santiago de Compostela: Amastran-N-Gallar, 2009. 67  Eriksson, Entre ou A outra proximidade. Santiago de Compostela: Amanstra-N-Gallar, 2010. http://felosdemaceda.com/os-felos-homenaxean-a-emilio-arauxo/. 68  Guivarch, Xestos primaverais. Santiago de Compostela: Amanstra-N-Gallar, 2014.

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areas and to cheer them up and tell them that what they do is extraordinary and that it is worth it to keep doing it]. (In Rodríguez 2014, unpaginated)69

In light of the above words it is essential to stress the philanthropic dimension that is at the heart of Emilio Araúxo’s work; the fruitful, generous exchanges that he has been establishing ranging from the rural Galician people, through the Galician cultural scene, to his poet friends worldwide. Significant examples have been offered here. Such a philanthropic commitment of his work has been the subject of various recognitions, among them the tribute that he received in 2015, which took place in the city hall of Maceda, for his international dissemination of the Galician carnival and the felo mask.

4   Final Reflections In an age of post-truth, post-memory and fluid identities (including the “Galician”), the use of poems by Emilio Araúxo in his proposal of a Galician poetic ethnography offers an outlet for the negationist positions of memory as well as those Romantic conceptions of memory which understand it in an essentialistic and fixed way: as nostalgia anchored in the past without the possibility of generating future. To the contrary, as shown in the various ethnographic-poetic interventions presented here, the poem appears as an effective means to rescue, sustain memory and make it available to the future. Araúxo’s poetic gestures thus become powerful updating devices of the progressive potential of memory.

Bibliography Araúxo, Emilio. 1996. Cinsa do vento: Libro da Ribeira Sacra. Santiago de Compostela: Noitarenga. ———. 1998a. Pois. Santiago de Compostela: Noitarenga. ———. 1998b. As chairas da letra. Santiago de Compostela: Noitarenga. ———. 2001. O acto poético. Amastra-N-Gallar, 1. ———. 2006. Act ivida desc ulturais. Santiago de Compostela: Amastra-N-Gallar. ———. 2014. Natacha Michel. Amastra-N-Gallar, 16. ———. 2015. Balbina. Noia: Toxosoutos. ———. 2017a. Personal communication. ———. 2017b. Chancras. Noia: Toxosoutos.  Rodríguez, “Especial entroido.”

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———. 2017c. Miltempos (No inmemorial, na labranza). Noia: Toxosoutos. ———. 2017d. Seica si. Santiago de Compostela: Chan da Pólvora. ———. 2017e. Aquí. Santiago de Compostela: Amastra-N-Gallar. ———. 2017f. Mal mor. Rianxo: Axóuxere. ———. 2018a. Ons ondas do mar riso. Santiago de Compostela: Amastra-N-Gallar. ———. 2018b. Personal communication. ———. 2019a. Libro da Ribeira Sacra (Cinsa do vento). Monforte de Lemos: Biblioteca de Mesopotamia-Chan da Pólvora Editora. ———. 2019b. Ceo cerca da terra (Cara a Requeixo de Queixa). Noia: Toxosoutos. Badiou, Alain. 1990. Manifiesto por la filosofía. Madrid: Cátedra. ———. 1994. Rapsodia polo teatro: breve tratado filosófico. Santiago de Compostela: Sotelo Blanco. ———. 1995a. Arredor da cuestión nacional. Santiago de Compostela: Noitarenga ———. 1995b. Mundo contemporáneo e desexo de filosofía. Santiago de Compostela: Noitarenga. ———. 1995c. A ética: ensaio sobre a conciencia do mal. Santiago de Compostela: Noitarenga. ———. 2001. Acto analítico, acto político, acto poético. Amastra-N-Gallar 1. Santiago de Compostela, 62–78. ———. 2003. A idade dos poetas. Santiago de Compostela: Amastra-N-Gallar. ———. 2012. “Entrevista entre un filósofo francés e un filósofo chinés” (trans. Francisco Sampedro Ojeda). A trabe de ouro: publicación galega de pensamento crítico 91: 51–56. ———. 2015. Dun desastre oscuro e outros textos. Trans. Francisco Sampedro. A Coruna. Laiovento. ———. 2016. Que pense le poème? Caen: Nous. Beckett, Samuel. 1981. Mal vu mal dit. Paris: Minuit. Casas, Arturo. 2019. Ética das verdades, urda de voces. In Emilio Araúxo Libro da Ribeira Sacra (Cinsa do vento), 7–36. Monforte de Lemos: Biblioteca de Mesopotamia-Chan da Pólvora Editora. Eriksson, Helena. 2010. Entre ou A outra proximidade. Santiago de Compostela: Amanstra-N-Gallar. http://felosdemaceda.com/os-­felos-­homenaxean-­a-­emilio-­ arauxo/. González, Yanko. 2003. Nuevas prácticas etnográficas: El surgimiento de la antropología poética. In Movimientos de campo, en torno a cuatro fronteras de la antropología en Chile, ed. Nicolás Richard, 185–202. Guatemala and Francia: ICAPI and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Guivarch, Cécile. 2014. Xestos primaverais. Santiago de Compostela: Amanstra-N-Gallar. Iglesias, Óscar. 2007. Asistimos ao holocausto do rural galego. El País. https:// elpais.com/diario/2007/06/01/galicia/1180693110_850215.html. Lamela Couto, Celia. 2007. Os dous poemas. Amastra-N-Gallar 13: 7–12.

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Lema, Carlos. 2011a. Poesía, linguaxe e acción (con René Char). Santiago de Compostela: Amastra-N-Gallar. ———. 2011b. A voz e o outro. Festa da palabra silenciada 27: 152–153. http:// consellodacultura.gal/mediateca/extras/CCG_ig_pub2001_Festa-­d a-­ Palabra_27.pdf. Maynard, Kent, and Melissa Cahnmann-Taylor. 2010. Anthropology at the Edge of the Words. Where Poetry and Ethnography Meet. Anthropology and Humanism 35 (1): 2–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-­1409.2010. 01049.x. Rábade Villar, María do Cebreiro. 2015. La recepción internacional de la poesía en Galicia. In Literaturas extranjeras y desarrollo cultural. Hacia un cambio de paradigma en la traducción literaria gallega, ed. Ana Luna Alonso et al., 9–36. Berna: Peter Lang. Rodríguez, Ángeles. 2014. Especial entroido. O Sil, February. http://www. galeon.com/sloren/carnaval_ourense/emilioarauxo.htm#O_entroido_ %C3%A9_unha_reserva_de_simbolismo0. Royet-Journoud, Claude. 2000. As naturezas indivisibles. Trans. Emilio Araúxo. Santiago de Compostela: Noitarenga. ———. 2009. A máscara non instaura unha distancia senón outra proximidade. Santiago de Compostela: Amastran-N-Gallar. Salgado, Daniel. 2009. A conexión galega da insurxencia. El País. https://elpais. com/diario/2009/04/24/galicia/1240568313_850215.html. Sánchez Moreiras, Miriam. 2018. Poesía e veredición. Unha aproximación ao pensamento de Alain Badiou. Anotacións, 18. https://euseino.org/ anotacions-­no-­18-­poesia-­e-­veredicion-­unha-­aproximacion-­ao-­pensamento-­de-­ alain-­badiou-­por-­miriam-­sanchez-­moreiras/.

The True Story of Three Musical Prodigies from Ferrol: José Arriola, and Pilar and Carmen Osorio Rodríguez Julia María Dopico Vale

We find ourselves before a small city situated toward the north of the Province of A Coruña: Ferrol, a wide coastal inlet, washed by the Atlantic, where the principal activities of the population are oriented toward its fishing and industrial ports, its civil and military shipyards, as well as bases of operation for the Spanish Fleet. Its incomparable beaches and coastline, which extend toward the counties of Eume and Ortegal, together encompass what is poetically called “Ferrolterra,” a city whose history is as ancient as that of the various archeological sites that dot the surrounding countryside, and that have been witness to the different human groups A first version of this essay was the recipient of the “Camilo José Cela Prize in Journalistic Narrative,” bestowed by the Sociedad Artística Ferrolana (SAF), 2019. Translation from the original Spanish text by Diego Baena. J. M. Dopico Vale (*) A Coruña, Spain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Castro et al. (eds.), Gender, Displacement, and Cultural Networks of Galicia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98861-6_12

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that have settled in the region since the onset of the Neolithic age, right up through the French Invasion and its cries of “liberty,” “equality,” and “fraternity.” These principles have resonated here perhaps more than in any other city or town in Galicia, to the point where the city itself has come to be known by the name “Ferrol de la Ilustración” [Ferrol of the Enlightenment] or “Ferrol Ilustrado” [Enlightened Ferrol], birthplace of intellectual figures as important in scope as Concepción Arenal (1820–1893),1 or Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (1910–1999).2 We find ourselves, also, at a specific moment in time: at the end of the nineteenth century, and during the artistic moment of late Romanticism, in which the city was undergoing a true industrial, as well as cultural revolution. Music, literature, painting, journalism, and so on all were prospering (Piñeiro de San Miguel et  al. 1996).3 Within this geographic and chronological context—specifically, in the house situated at Number 181 Calle Magdalena—a woman is born to a liberal middle-class family. Her name is Josefa Rodríguez Carballeira, daughter of Don Francisco Rodríguez Arriola, an enlightened Ferrol freemason, lawyer, and ecclesiastical notary, who would rise to the rank of concejal [town councilor]. The year is 1873. This woman, Josefa Rodríguez Carballeira, is the starting point from which to begin the very real story of these otherwise mythical characters. Complex characters, to be sure, which bespeak lives that are as luminous as they are melancholic, every bit as tragic in their destinies as in the medieval goliardic verses dedicated to Fortuna, Roman goddess of chance: O Fortuna, velut luna/statu variabilis … (“Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi,” Anonymous poem, thirteenth century).4 1  Concepción Arenal was a pioneer of the Spanish feminist movement. See, among others, Pérez Montero, “Revisión de las ideas morales y políticas de Concepción Arenal.” PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid. 2004. 2  Gonzalo Torrente Ballester was a well-known Spanish writer. See, among others, Valcárcel Martínez, Torrente Ballester, el intruso de la literatura española. León: Universidad de León, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2016. 3  Piñeiro de San Miguel, Gómez Blanco and González Collado, Así se fixo Ferrol. Coñece a súa historia. Ferrol: Ferrol Embora, 1996. 4  “Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi,” anonymous thirteenth-century Goliardic Poem, which became part of the famous Carmina Burana put together by Carl Orff between 1935 and 1936. See, among others, Clem, David. “Medievalism goes Commercial: The Epic as Register in Contemporary Media.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Advertising, eds. James Deaville, Siu-Lan Tan and Ron Rodman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021: 488–504.

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Josefa Rodríguez Carballeira was a strong woman of volcanic temperament, active, indomitable, and capable of overcoming all manner of obstacles with her great musical sensibility and social know-how. A loving and beloved mother who would exert her influence via a kind of artistic symbiosis with her children, in which the creative process would take flight. Mother to Pilar and Carmen Osorio Rodríguez, and to their illegitimate brother, José Rodríguez Carballeira—the eldest of the three children, born when Josefa was still unmarried—now widely known by his self-­ adopted nom de plume, José Arriola (his maternal grandfather’s name), Pepito Arriola, or the “Galician Mozart:” a young man who would demonstrate an exceptional talent as a pianist and performer from his earliest years, earlier even than his celebrated composer-counterpart from Salzburg. The young Arriola would be the first to truly stand out in this family saga of child prodigies, setting out on his artistic journey at a time when his mother had left him in the care of her sister, Aurora, who would become the child’s first music teacher. It is during this time that Josefa would discover her son’s talent and make the decision to move from Ferrol to the Spanish Capital. Mother and son would arrive in Madrid on November 2, 1899, a trip that will veritably light up the young boy’s future. In Madrid, Josefa Rodríguez’s prodigious ability to navigate the social scene makes it possible for the boy to be heard in the concert hall of the Señores de Montano, an event celebrated with great success and acclaimed by the society which would attend to the “Arriola phenomenon,” highlighting his talents and foreseeing his glorious success in the musical arts for all time. Arriola surprises his astounded audience with his genius. The boy’s aura would extend to the Royal Palace itself, and, soon enough, he is found playing before the Royal family and the high aristocracy of Spain. The Queen Regent María Cristina and Infanta Isabel will declare: “¡Dios conserve a este niño para orgullo de la Patria y gloria del Arte!” [God preserve this boy, for the pride of the Fatherland and glory of the Arts!] (Mera 2010: 23)5 bestowing on him a monthly grant of 500 marks so that he may study in Germany. Specifically, in Leipzig, where the young Arriola will receive lessons in composition from no less than Maestro Richard Strauss, as well as classes on performance technique and 5  Mera Castro, “José Arriola, un compositor de Galicia. Flamante revelación.” In Arriola. Obra musical. Santiago: Consorcio da Cultura Galega and Consorcio de Santiago, 2010: 23.

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expression from the talented Spanish pianist, Alberto Jonás. Pepito is also heard by the mythical Arthur Nikisch, then Director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra—one of the most important ensembles in the world—who offers the boy a chance to perform in concert. From there, he goes on to the Berlin Opera, the Bayreuth Festival (alongside Toscanini), the Vienna Philharmonic, and so on. He plays in the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II, before the entire Imperial Family, who admires the young musician from Ferrol and qualifies him as a veritable genius, going so far as to name him the official Court Pianist (Dopico Vale and Mera Castro 2003e: 59–68,6 Marco Aragón 1993: 49–60).7 The critics immediately brand him a “musical myth,” and his name joins the ranks of the most famous performers in Europe, headlining shows in England, the Netherlands, Russia, Milan, and the new musical paradises of the United States: the Metropolitan and Carnegie Hall. In California he puts on a show before a crowd of 20,000, before continuing his tour through Canada, Argentina, Mexico … returning to Ferrol and to the famous Teatro Jofre on October 14, 1911. Years of triumphs and glories lived to the fullest, years that soon fade and would somehow end up condemning Arriola to live and to be remembered in history forever as a child, as an artistic portent that left the entire world in awe, but all too briefly. The journalist Juan Carlos Paraje Manso would write: “A los 24 años está en la primavera de la vida y ha comenzado su declive como artista. Es simplemente un extraordinario pianista, como hay muchos” [At 24 years of age he is in the spring of his life, and yet his decline as an artist has already begun. He is merely an extraordinary pianist, among many] (Paraje Manso, “La Comarca del Eo,” n.d.).8 However, the genius of Arriola would manage to surprise us yet again, not as a performer, this time, but as an eminent composer, through works of great personal originality, sensibility, cultivated taste, and universal character. A work which now allows us to place ourselves before the man, the creator, the great musician, José Arriola (Dopico Vale and Mera Castro 2003d: 77–86).9 6  Dopico Vale and Mera Castro, “Pepito Arriola, un músico de una generación”. Ferrol Análisis, revista de pensamiento y cultura 18 (2003): 59–68. 7  Marco Aragón, Historia general de la música IV. Madrid: Istmo, 1993: 49–60. 8  Paraje Manso, in “La Comarca del Eo,” n/d. 9  Dopico Vale and Mera Castro, “La obra compositiva de Pepito Arriola.” Ferrol Análisis, revista de pensamiento y cultura 18 (2003): 77–86.

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Such is the magnitude of our first protagonist, something which should be taken into account so that we can better situate ourselves and take stock of what he meant and what he still means to the Galician classical music scene, and in order to understand the inevitable influence that he will exert on the lives of his two sisters, born from the later marriage of Josefa Rodríguez Carballeira to the doctor Amadeo Osorio y Zabala, native of the small town of Vegadeo in Asturias. A medical professional who had explored the northern part of Guinea, who had fought in the Cuban War and who helped found the famous Instituto Ruber in Madrid. Arriola’s sisters, Pilar and Carmen Osorio Rodríguez, would be born in Germany: Pilar, the eldest of the two, in Leipzig, in 1903, and Carmen in Berlin, in 1907. From the get-go, they showed the same stupendous musical inclination as their brother. The dawning of their own skills as pianists once again conjures the fascination of the surrounding social scene, and soon enough, the papers cannot help but comment: “Pepito revealed himself as a case of artistic precociousness, and this is also the case of his two sisters; a phenomenon that has piqued the curiosity of the most famous (musical professionals) of Berlin and Paris” (The Lady, 1909).10 Pilar Osorio Rodríguez would be educated in Berlin, in the care of an English governess, given how difficult it would have been to prepare herself adequately for a musical career when obliged to accompany her brother on his various tours throughout the world. At just three years old, the girl will debut in London, an event which has left us a written testimony in celebration of Pilar’s truly extraordinary youth—she had already built a reputation as a renowned pianist in Berlin at this age—proof of the tendency that musical prodigies seemed to have been getting younger and younger every year, and of the new limits reached by little Pilar. This, unsurprisingly, did not go unnoticed by her mother, who marvels at the girl’s prodigious abilities to the point of commissioning the construction of a special, smaller-sized piano, more adaptable to her tiny fingers. At just three years, Pilar could perfectly interpret the works of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, and so on. The siblings seemed to have been touched by a grace and a gift that overnight turned them into veritable gold. Thanks to the power of their incomparable, emphatic piano-playing, they obtained world-wide success and acclaim (Dopico Vale and Mera Castro 2003b: 53–58).11  Anonymous, “Children of Genius.” The Lady. London, 1909.  Dopico Vale and Mera Castro. “Entre la música y la intimidad de la familia Arriola.” Ferrol Análisis, revista de pensamiento y cultura 18 (2003): 53–58. 10 11

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The youthful piano career of Pilar is no less bright than that of her brother Arriola. However, it is far briefer and far by far less known. She would be another excelling virtuoso of her instrument, but her life as a pianist would be a short road indeed, one which would both begin and end with her childhood. Her meteoric career concludes with her audition for the Berlin Symphony, a moment at which she would abandon music entirely, for reasons which are currently unknown. As with everything in this family which lies at the intersection of light and dark, Pilar Osorio will remain in the shadow, suffering first-hand, in addition, the tragedy of the Second World War, which finds the family still living in Berlin. Their home would be bombarded by the Russian Army, and numerous invaluable memories, along with the personal library and compositional work of the elder brother, will be lost, along with any possible audio recordings which could have conserved some record of their talents. The disasters of war will force the family to relocate once again to Spain, this time, to Barcelona. It is there that Pilar Osorio would spend the rest of her life, dying on a certain December 21 at the age of 78 in her home on the Carrer de Sants. Their mother Josefa, too, as essential as she had been in the lives and early musical careers of the three children, would die in 1945 shortly after the end of the War. We are now before a tumultuous time in the family’s life that has little to do with the great triumphs of the children’s youth. Family conflicts over material goods and inheritances, problems upon problems … The glory days are gone, and nothing, it seems, will bring them back. Carmen will be the third and last of the siblings to recreate the great works of piano’s repertoire with her talent, passion, and dedication. With her, our triumvirate of child prodigies comes to a close. And she is ultimately the one who would best know how to decisively balance her musical career with her personal life. With the same early good fortune as her brother and sister, she presents herself before the public alongside little Arriola in a “four-handed” piano performance. Her intense musical life drives her to become an accomplished concertista that will likewise grace the stages of Europe and the Americas. The second Great War will also leave its mark on the life of Carmen Osorio. She will be obliged to play just to get by, recording music for silent films, or, together with her brother, interpreting the great Spanish maestros in the studios of Radio Berlin. Even performing as entertainment for crowds in military detachments and hospitals: strategies of survival in a world that had become inescapably hostile. Like the rest of the family,

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Carmen would relocate to Barcelona after the war. A return “home” which was by no means easy, lacking even the most basic economic resources. She had married a tenor, by the name of Ochs (in some concert programs her name appears not as Carmen Osorio but as Carmen Ochs). He founds during this time a six-piece orchestra, with the ultimate goal of touring internationally. One such tour will lead them to Baghdad, to Lebanon, and finally, in 1954, to Tehran. Initially called by the beauty and by the “exotic” appeal of these locales—which had given them both economic security and opportunities—they decide to stay in Tehran permanently, even becoming civil servants of the Iranian Government and finding work as musicians with the Tehran Opera. Carmen, in addition, finds work as a conservatory instructor. Her presence in Iran leaves a mark, and she soon becomes associated with various musical societies. One can find programs of her various performances and interpretations of western composers: the Lieder of Schubert, the works of Fauré, Rossini, and even a few Spanish concert staples—the music of Falla or Granados, as well as the Danzas arranged by her brother, José. Carmen will remain in Iran for some 40 years. All the while, back in Spain, José lives through a slow and steady decline, suffering from a pronounced depression and dedicating his time solely to composition, poor and forgotten. Carmen, meanwhile, performs on numerous occasions in the Palace of the Shah, and even before Farah Diba. Gone are the days of the infancy in Ferrol, it seems, and there is little or nothing that would indicate that Galicia remained anything but a distant fog in the lives of the three globetrotting and once universally-acclaimed artists. It seemed almost unthinkable that Carmen Osorio would go back to her origins and to her home, Ferrol, though that is indeed what really happened. She recovered, thus, a space that for her had all but seemed to vanish over the course of so many years. In 1990, we find Carmen in the nursing home “Mi Casa,” where she would meet regularly with her friends of the Salón de la Cafetería Ryal—located on the now disappeared Calle Galiano—to make small-talk. Some of them still remember her words: about how all she had inside her was memory and things forgotten, ruin and plenitude. She would die being cared for and in the company of the nursing home’s nuns, leaving behind her a series of old files and papers that wouldn’t seem to have been of much interest to anyone, but that she nevertheless guarded and hid away jealously in a small trunk. It was no less than the compositional work of José Arriola, from the very last years, miraculously preserved.

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I had the opportunity to live first-hand the process of recovering this music, from the first stages, in Ferrol, guided by the cultural activist Luis Mera, up through its eventual recording in collaboration with the label Brilliant Classics, and the laudable efforts of the Consello da Cultura Galega which, following its mission to preserve the cultural legacy of Galicia, is now able to present the painstakingly curated edition of Arriola’s musical scores, together with the book Sobre Arriola (Úbeda et al. 2010).12 The music here recovered belongs to the last creative stage of the composer’s life, written after 1946; a time where figures like Albéniz, Granados, Turina, or Falla, in Spain more broadly, and Gaos or Montes, in Galicia, specifically, began to look toward the popular musical tradition in search of the sublime. Arriola was not himself inspired in this tradition. His creative universe was fundamentally different, steeped in the “German” classical traditions in which he was trained. His creations are fundamentally statements of postromantic ideals, desiring to retain part of a life that seemed to have been eluding his generation, experimenting with textures, chromaticism, unusual tonal combinations, mournful dissonance, colorist chord structures, melodies of a sensual and sentimental nature … A music charged with meaning and with melancholic lyricism (Dopico Vale and Mera Castro 2003d).13 The Real Filharmonía de Galicia, the world-renowned orchestra directed by Maestro Maximino Zumaleve, has also lent a hand to this “musical rescue,” recording, in conjunction with one of the best music editors in the world, the CD “José Arriola. Orchestral Music.” Within it, one can hear the work of Arriola that has been recovered over the years: The brilliant and poetic Concertino para piano y orchestra, the agile and expressive Divertimento Concertante, the two songs from the Seis poesías de Antonio Machado—the profoundly dramatic La Aurora asomaba/el Cadalso and La primavera besaba (“juventud vivida, quién te volvería a sonar!”)—the solemn Epílogo, the Tres textos Cervantinos—with Aquí lloró Dulcinea, Mal me Guardareis and Marinero soy de Amor—and, finally, the Concierto para trompa …. The baritone Javier Franco contributes with his magnificent voice (Dopico Vale 2018).14 12   Úbeda, Mera and Trillo, Arriola: Obra musical. Sobre Arriola (I). Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura Galega, 2010. 13  Dopico Vale and Mera Castro. “La obra compositiva de Pepito Arriola,” 2003. 14   Dopico Vale, “Notas al programa,” Real Filharmonía de Galicia. “José Arriola. Orchestral Music,” 2018.

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One should also mention the Cuarteto para cuerdas and his work for piano: the Impresiones Argentinas and the Homenaje a Manuel de Falla, along with a number of Marother short pieces. This double CD was presented in Santiago de Compostela only a few months prior to the Symposium at which the first version of the current paper was presented. It was also promoted through a series of concerts by the Real Filharmonía in the principal cities of Galicia, including, of course, Ferrol. The work of Arriola becomes, in this regard, an absolute … “Revelation.” Its recovery is also a revelation for the life stories of Pilar and Carmen Osorio Rodríguez, women who lived rather atypical and unusual lives, and which passionately dedicated themselves to their respective careers in music. Pioneers in how they were able to adopt an existential position well beyond the confines and conventions of their time, they created an important historical and artistic precedent. Attending to the condition that still weighs heavily on women in music even today—but that was especially significant coming from the heart of the Ferrol of their own time—they demonstrate a truly outstanding talent that, perhaps because of their feminine condition, has unfortunately faded away in a process that incredibly, still endures to this day.

Bibliography Anonymous. 1909. Children of Genius. The Lady. London. Clem, David. 2021. Medievalism Goes Commercial: The Epic as Register in Contemporary Media. In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Advertising, ed. James Deaville, Siu-Lan Tan, and Ron Rodman, 488–504. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dopico Vale, Julia, and José Luis Mera Castro. 2003a. Las cuestiones de familia y los dineros de los niños músicos. Ferrol Análisis, revista de pensamiento y cultura 18: 69–76. ———. 2003b. Entre la música y la intimidad de la familia Arriola. Ferrol Análisis, revista de pensamiento y cultura 18: 53–58. ———. 2003c. La familia Arriola—Hildegart, árbol genealógico. Ferrol Análisis, revista de pensamiento y cultura 18: 50–51. ———. 2003d. La obra compositiva de Pepito Arriola. Ferrol Análisis, revista de pensamiento y cultura 18: 77–86. ———. 2003e. Pepito Arriola, un músico de una generación. Ferrol Análisis, revista de pensamiento y cultura 18: 59–68. ———. 2003f. Sobre los hermanos Arriola. Ferrol Análisis, revista de pensamiento y cultura 18: 87–92.

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Dopico Vale, Julia. 2018. “Notas al programa,” Real Filharmonía de Galicia. “José Arriola. Orchestral Music”. Marco Aragón, Tomás. 1993. Historia general de la música IV.  El siglo XX. Madrid: Istmo. Mera, Luís. 2010. José Arriola, un compositor de Galicia. Flamante revelación. In Arriola. Obra musical. Santiago: Consorcio da Cultura Galega and Consorcio de Santiago. Paraje Manso, Juan Carlos. n.d. In La Comarca del Eo. Pérez Montero, M.  Eugenia. 2004. Revisión de las ideas morales y políticas de Concepción Arenal. PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid. https:// eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/4612/. Accessed 28 June 2021. Piñeiro de San Miguel, Esperanza, André Gómez Blanco, and J.M.  González Collado. 1996. Así se fixo Ferrol. Coñece a súa historia. Ferrol: Ferrol Embora. Úbeda, Rafael, Luis Mera, and Joám Trillo. 2010. Arriola: Obra musical. Sobre Arriola (I). Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura Galega. Valcárcel, Martínez. 2016. Torrente Ballester, el intruso de la literatura española. León: Universidad de León, Servicio de Publicaciones.