The skin is either anti-fascist or a Nazi in disguise. These are the words of Fermin Muguruza in the epilogue of Shaved. A history of the indigenous skinhead subculture (Verse), by Carles Viñas. The Basque musician recalls how in the 80s, some of Kortatu’s concerts outside the Basque Country were attended by far-right people who assumed that the short hair and military boots that Fermin and his brother Iñigo usually sported welcomed them. Those faces were more than clueless, excuse the redundancy, but that motivated one of the albums of the Irún group, The state of thingsthe word “antifascists” was clearly visible on the cover. Such became the confusion at the time. The followers of a style, the skin, of clear mestizo origins had to position themselves so much.
In shavedViñas, specialist in the subject who already explored in Skinheads. Global history of a style (Bellaterra), places the focus of its research on our country. Before the internet, fashions traveled slowly. So much so that they attended to human displacements – and opposites to each other – such as a difficult migration or a vacation on the Costa Dorada. If in Great Britain the birth took place in the second half of the 60s when the young local white working class got to know the music and aesthetics of young people who had arrived from Jamaica, in Spain a skin was not seen until the beginning of the 80s. A shame for the Madrid centralism, but this time it was not in the capital of the kingdom, but rather at sea level in towns such as Calafell in Tarragona.
“Young French skins who spent their summers on the Catalan coast came into contact with native kids who were attracted by the aesthetics or the music and began to get to know the style,” says Viñas. Enric Gallart, who over the years would start one of the fundamental musical groups of the style, Skatalà, was one of those kids who received the epiphany. Upon his return to Barcelona after the summer period, in 1980 and moving among mods and punks, witnesses of the time recognized him as the skin pioneer at the state level.
It was a Catalan capital that to today’s eyes would seem like another planet. From when more birds were sold on Las Ramblas than plastic fruit, when there were crests and not digital nomads in the central Café Zurich. The early skins used to meet at the Fantastic Bar, in the old town, and came from neighborhoods such as Vila de Gràcia, Guinardó or Roquetes. Later, gangs would form in the working-class outskirts through which the Besòs and Llobregat wind, such as Santa Coloma or Sant Boi. There is a reason why the experienced Samboyan Kiko Amat signs a juicy prologue to Viñas’ work.
“The first access route was Catalonia, and Barcelona in particular was the epicenter from which the style spread. Let’s take into account what the city was like in the late 70s and early 80s. It had a cosmopolitan vocation and was open to any European influence of the time. Coming out of a dictatorship, the young generation was moving away from the anti-Franco activism that had been so vigorous years before and understood that it was in a new stage in which having a good time should be at the center of everything, also above political militancy. That is why, initially, the style is not marked by politics, on the contrary, the main thing was to be with friends, go to football, bars and concerts,” says the author.
Nowadays it’s a matter of a few clicks and a debit card, but those guys had to build the look as best they could. Here in the early days there were some Fred Perry polo shirts, but mostly jeans bleached with bleach, dropped suspenders, aviator jackets from the national army, the mythical bomberand, in the absence of the canonical Dr. Martens boots, the steel-toed ones used by railroad workers were popular. We would fall short if we only look at aesthetics.
For Viñas, the founding pillars of the style are four. “Music, football, territoriality and masculinity. You can’t understand skin style without music. In Great Britain, the soundtrack began in the 60s with Jamaican music and in the 70s, with punk and oi!, it had other references. Paradoxically, when the skin hatched here, the soundtrack was those last two styles because they coincided with the British chronology. It was later when, as the skin evolved, an archeology was carried out, a search for its origins was carried out, and Jamaican music was discovered. That is to say, the musical transition in the Spanish State is the opposite of that in the British case.”
Together with the aforementioned Kortatu and Skatalà, and sharing background punk with them, Barcelona’s Decibelios were the band par excellence of the takeoff of the skin scene. In the role of football among our shaved heads we also find the trace of its origin. “It has to do with the style being a British import. There he appears in the years of the World Cup organized and won by England. It was already the sport par excellence of the British working class, but then youth felt more attracted to it and it became an inherent feature of skin. In Barcelona, football also had an imprint and you have to think that in the 80s the leisure options for youth were not as many as they are now. Going to the stadium on Sunday afternoon was a main activity for a good part of the young people,” summarizes Viñas.
As the 90s approached, both the guitar and the ball were close to the milestones that broke the waters of the skin subculture. Episodes closer to the black chronicle than to the anecdote. Some definitively broke the coexistence between punks and skins, now with a growing far-right influence among their ranks. In October 1985, a Decibelios concert ended up crowned by Spanish flags and Nazi salutes from the stage due to the group’s passivity. At the beginning of ’86, a fight broke out at the doors of the Zeleste room and fights became common. razias neofascists in the center of Barcelona. The alternative venue Kafé Volter was in the crosshairs of hatred and the hunts reached members of the music scene such as Gallart, from Skatalà, attacked with a motorcycle chain, or Saina, the drummer of L’Odi Social who saved his life after a knife blow In December of that year, the Nazis turned a Toy Dolls concert, again in Zeleste, into a pitched battle. As Viñas maintains, many of these radicalized groups on the extreme right were linked to the Espanyol ultras, the so-called Blue and White Brigades. The person considered to be the first fatality in our football belonged to that group. It was in January 1991 at the hands of his nemesis, the blaugrana Boixos Nois.
There are mentions of English skinheads in the Spanish press in the early 70s, and by the mid-80s the protagonists of the role were already native. But it was in 1991 when public opinion became familiar with the term. Sonia Rescalvo, a transsexual woman living on the street, died in Barcelona’s Parc de la Ciutadella, beaten by neo-Nazis days before they tinged street violence on Columbus Day that year. Weekly Report dedicated the report to them Shaved heads, fascist minds, where it was warned that “they are few, but they are the egg of the snake.”
The news was filled with references to violent shaves connected to the ultra football stands, turning the strengthening of the extreme right in the streets into a matter of urban tribes. Many young people adopted fascist symbols, ideas and attitudes in a mixture of attraction to performance authoritarianism, socialization and identity feedback in stadiums, contact with political organizations that advocated violent action, such as Autonomous Bases, and the echoes of the first electoral successes of the Western extreme right in half a century (between 1984 and 1986 the National Front emerged solidly in the European Parliament and the French Assembly).
Popular movies like The day of the beast either Taxi They fictionalized the skin threat. The word became synonymous with Nazi. For Viñas, the fact that this happened “cannot be understood without the distorting and exaggerating role of the written press and television reports that identified style with racism and violence. This stereotype took root in the citizen imagination until it created a social alarm that configured the skins as popular demons, the so-called folk devils in British sociology. That, for example, they embodied racism served to relieve the conscience of the rest of the citizens.”
That stain caused new maps of Barcelona, Madrid or Valencia to be created. The targets potential of ultra violence, such as young people of aesthetic or left-wing militancy, knew which areas of the city were dangerous territory if one passed through them alone. In Madrid, places with unofficial names such as the Plaza de los Cubos on Princesa Street or the Aurrerá ground floor in Argüelles. Also the surroundings of the Santiago Bernabéu and the demolished Vicente Calderón on match days. The journalist Santi Escribano, author of a trilogy on political music (The wick, The bonfire and a volume in preparation with Ovejas Negrax), he recognizes that, at 40, he still has that chip. “On Rayo match days, especially in the years of 2ªB, Rastro Sundays and certain squats were the places where the most peel off We saw from the left. Outside the capital, Móstoles and Alcorcón had a reputation as good anti-fascist skin strongholds.”
Indeed, the usurpation of the aesthetic and the bad name that the neo-Nazis gave to the style also enabled a reaction to distance themselves and take advantage of its multiethnic origins. They were the sharperosby the SHARP movement: skin heads against racial prejudice. “Cells were created throughout the continent. They were not structured organizations, that was their greatest peculiarity. What differentiates the state SHARP with respect to Europe is that here it is linked to the political context of the struggles between peripheral nationalisms, on the one hand, and Spanish nationalisms, on the other. This is projected in its cells, created mostly in Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia. The apoliticism that was presupposed, summarized in the motto neither red nor racistneither red nor racist, it does not happen here,” says Viñas.
One of the precursor SHARP circles was the Valencian one. Linked to the Kasal Popular social center, it was also the breeding ground for musical groups such as Skaparàpid. “I belonged to the movement, I was the only girl there,” remembers Carmen Cercós, vocalist of the band. “I wrote the theme sharp ska to express frustration at being mistaken for Nazis. You always had to justify yourself. In Valencia, furthermore, at mascachapas and makinetos of the bakalao route they decided to go with bombers or boots. It was a mess. Skin culture is totally anti-racist and anti-fascist. I remember that they said that thing about good and bad skins. No, no, the skins are good. Another thing is the Nazis.”
Today skin is a declining style, as stated by Viñas, which leaves the door open to the possibility that, as a fashion, it could have a future. revival. “I no longer know where many people from my time are or what they do or think,” says Cercós. But there are still many skins at heart with anti-racist and anti-fascist principles. You carry that inside. A shaved heart, surely all of us who were one in their day have.”
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