In an unforgettable scene from ‘The Rats’, Miguel Delibes described the hard work of several brigades of rural workers who planted hundreds of pine trees on the burning plain of Castile. Needless to say, the reforestation attempt ended in disaster, as almost all the pine trees withered shortly after being planted. The image illustrated the Franco regime’s attempts to populate rural Spain with new landowners; attempts that, on many occasions, punctured bone. ESSAY ‘Colonization. Stories of towns without history’ Authors Marta Armingol and Laureano Debat Editorial La Caja Books Year 2024 Pages 288 Price 22.50 euros 4The National Institute of Colonization created about three hundred new towns. It is estimated that some 55,000 people benefited from the granting of a plot of colonized land. For the historian Antonio Cazorla (Almería, 1963), the measure is a metaphor for the Franco dictatorship, as well as the distance that intervened between what was said and then done. As he defends in ‘Franco’s towns’, these responded to a desire to alleviate poverty only in theory. ESSAY ‘Franco’s towns. Myth and history of agrarian colonization in Spain, 1939-1975’ Author Antonio Cazorla Sánchez Editorial Galaxia Gutenberg Year 2024 Pages 264 Price 21 euros 3After the disaster of autarchy, the economic policy of the Regime sought to give greater weight to large agricultural owners , expelling day laborers and sharecroppers, perpetuating low wages and converting the surrounding lands from dry land to irrigated land. A large network that drank, and never better said, from the need for irrigation established by the hydrographic plan. Curiously, the authorities defended the measure as a way of providing bread to farmers who suffered from the secular lack of land, which for Cazorla shows the distance between Franco’s narrative and the reality of their actions.Marriage recordsThe historian relies on a a good number of concrete examples: for example, religious missions intended to perform baptisms, communions and marriage certificates in territories where there were no priests. When those missionaries went to the towns, any other type of leisure was prohibited: the bar was closed and the cinema, if there was one, too. According to Cazorla, colonization was, in essence, a matter of propaganda. Very different is the approach adopted by the writers Marta Armingol (Huesca, 1982) and Laureano Debat (Lobería, 1981) in their magnificent ‘Colonization’, which opens with the journey of one of the families that “won a place.” At the end of the long road, two old acquaintances awaited them: hunger – “one meal a day and always the same” – and the endemic lack of water. The narrative approach that Armingol and Debat adopt, giving the text verity and amenity, allows them to fly over the innumerable political, urban and anthropological questions that the issue raises without overwhelming the reader. The intelligent use of dialogues, some of them embedded in interesting sociological reflections, transmit a tone of strangeness that helps to become familiar with an artificial and new reality, which here presents obvious ties with experiments such as the kibbutz or the moshav. to visit those impossible places whose existence was unknown. Highlights the tour they take through the main architectural bizarreness of these towns. Because there are interesting works by architects such as Víctor d’Ors or Fernández del Amo, but also hamlets organized in circular shapes, following the golden ratio, rustic floors deployed like fans and many other rarities. Reading these pages makes you want to visit those impossible places whose existence you didn’t know about. When you look at it, the land problem in Spain is as old as it is wide. If Cazorla’s book, based on an extraordinary profusion of data, helps to understand the origins of its poor distribution (going back to Charles IV), Armingol and Debat’s succeeds in putting a human face on it (highlighting, for example, the determining role that the mayorales and the guards played in these towns). Two opposite approaches and two very different books that, complementing each other perfectly, could be read in parallel.
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