Agrarian Colonization and Franquista neo-traditionalism

Daniel Carmona, Raúl Travé Universidad Miguel Hernandéz

1. Introduction

General Franco’s Agrarian Colonization Project, which was carried out instead of the Agrarian Reform Law planned by the government of the Second Spanish Republic, spread lots of new villages across the Spanish geography. Within the context of the controversy provoked by the recovery of historical memory in Spain1, the agrarian colonization villages have been one of the major issues in dispute, as some considered them to be part of ‘Franco’s Heritage’2, a fact that is not only patent in place names, which still refer to the former Head of State (Llanos del Caudillo, in the province of Ciudad Real, for instance), but also in their very existence, which is yet another clear proof of the fact that today’s Spain has not en-tirely broken with its past.

More than three hundred villages were built as part of the Agrarian Colonization Project between the beginning of the 1950s and the end of the 1960s. Although the INC (Instituto National de Colonización)3 was created in 1939, colonization plans were not implemented until the 1950s because of the economic problems of the post-war period. These plans were carried out mainly in rural regions where land ownership was highly concentrated. The INC expropriated (and paid a fair price for) uncultivat-

1 There was public debate around the passing of the historical memory law in 2007, about the need to reopen unsolved cases from Franco´s dictatorship.

2 The issue 52 of Revista de Patrimonio Histórico Andaluz deals with this under the meaningful title: “Pueblos de Colonización 1939-1971: ¿Recuperar el patrimonio rural de Franco?” (‘Colonization Villages 1939-1971: Recovering Franco´s rural heritage?’): “Debate e investigación: Pueblos de colonización 1939-1971”, Revista de Patrimonio Histórico Andaluz, 52 (2005), pp. 38-127.

3 National Institute of Colonization.

Carmona-Zubiri, D. and Travé Molero, R. (2015) Perverse identities. Identities in conflict, Sabaté, Flocel (ed.), pp. 249-257. Peter Lang AG. Bern.ISBN:978-3-0343-1556-2

250 Daniel Carmona, Raúl Travé

ed and unused plots from big landowners, which they then equipped with hydraulic infrastructures (from which landowners’ non-expropriated plots could take advantage too), and later divided and shared out among the future settlers, after the villages were put up4.

Three colonization villages – Mingogil, Cañada de Agra and Nava de Campana – were placed in the municipality of Hellín, in the province of Albacete during the first half of the 1960s. The Hellín area had been in decline since the downfall of the sulphur mines and the esparto grass in-dustry. The settlers, who began to arrive there in 1964, were country peo-ple coming from the surrounding areas. Many of them had obtained the right to live there, which entitled them to a land plot and a house, because the construction of two dams, Cenajo and Camarillas, had displaced them from their small home villages (Alcantarilla de Jover and Camarillas). Others were simply local country people with no properties, former INC workers, and even people coming from far-away regions such as Granada.

Figure 1: Location Map.

These three villages have recently been the object of ethnographic field-work, motivated by a heritage-valuing initiative focusing on Intangible Heritage. The initiative decided to make the recovery of these communities’

4 Carlos Barciela, María Inmaculada López, “El fracaso de la política agraria del primer franquismo 1939-1959. Veinte años perdidos para la agricultura española”, Simposio sobre política agraria 1939-1959 (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 2005), p. 43.

Agrarian Colonization and Franquista neo-traditionalism 251

collective memory a top priority, considering collective memory as one of these communities’ most significant expressions, as well as the basis and framework on which their social identification process stands.

Maurice Halbwachs5 defined collective memory as ‘the process of reconstruction of the past as lived and experienced by a particular group, community or society’. A social sense of belonging is built upon this ex-perienced past – this sense of belonging could be defined as a set of ideas regarding a concrete reality developed by certain social sectors with the aim of ensuring or emphasizing a hierarchical social structure and provid-ing a reference with which individuals who occupy a territory can identify themselves6.

2. The Founding Father’s Good Children

In the colonization villages in Hellín we could ascertain that collective memory is expressed through a discourse with a clear core: the matter of their origin. This seems understandable since many of the current resi-dents lived the villages’ foundation in first person, whether it was as part of the starring cast (i.e.: the settlers themselves and the INC workers), as supporting actors (late settlers), or as the privileged audience (children).

This discourse points to Franco as the person responsible for the villages’ origin, according to it, he was the founder and the indisputable creator of the colonization villages, the person who ‘took the land from the rich to give it to the poor’ in order to make it productive. Furthermore, he provided the settlers with homes with running water and electricity, and equipped each village with a school, a doctor, and sometimes even a cinema. Of course, not everybody entirely subscribes this discourse. There is an important variation to it, not as ideological as it is generation-al, that denies such a generosity from the regime, a parallel discourse that

5 Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), p. 174.

6 Pablo Palenzuela, Javier Hernández, Poner Monachil en el mapa. Estudio an-tropológico de un proceso de transformación cultural (Granada: Universidad de Granada-Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1995), p. 18.

252 Daniel Carmona, Raúl Travé

assumes that the Caudillo used the settlers as a means to get a colossal and arduous work done, one that sees the house and the land plot as hardly a present.

On the other hand, the discourse fails to provide an explanation re-garding the motivations that led Franco to undertake such a huge endeav-our, besides the fact that, after the construction of the dams of Cenajo and Camarillas the people living in the areas to be flooded had to be relocated elsewhere. Interestingly, those who don’t support the interpretation according to which the colonization was more of a Robin-Hood-like deed than a dic-tator’s whim don’t appear to suggest any alternative explanation (it even seems as though they might not need it). However, criticism towards the impact of colonization in the following generations is commonplace and unanimously shared, inasmuch as it is a practical issue that affects every-one (i.e.: indivisibility of houses and plots).

Figure 2: The colonization project tried to create a society based on traditional social relations (Mingogil 1960s).

The goodness behind the colonization initiative is definitely the axis of the discourse. Despite the criticism expressed by the younger generations, this idea of goodness surpasses even the settlers’ personal ideologies, a fact that is especially significant if we take into account that these communities have mostly emerged from the peasantry and the local rural proletariat and

Agrarian Colonization and Franquista neo-traditionalism 253

that, from the beginning of democracy up to the last municipal elections in 2011, left-wing parties PSOE and IU have always been the most voted candidacies in the villages. The idea that ‘Franco made us rich by expro-priating the masters’ properties leaves room for a curious contradiction: ‘In the last moment, Franco must have turned into a socialist to do this’. Obviously, this is not a coincidence. This idea is the main identity refer-ence developed by Franco’s regime with the aim of ensuring a hierarchical social structure. It is particularly supported by the first generation (settlers and former INC workers), not only because they had the State to thank for their houses and plots, but also because being a settler involved being subjected to a process of equalization (the guardianship) which consisted of treating them as the children of good old Daddy State for five years, while denying them any chance of taking their own decisions regarding the house, the plot, the crops or the community. In the case of the INC workers, they consider themselves privileged for having worked for the State, which was certainly much better than working on their own or for a master. In 1971 the INC was eliminated and substituted by the IRYDA (Instituto Nacional de Reforma y Desarrollo Agrario)7, which led to all of the INC workers in the colonization villages losing their job and being offered to be settlers. The first social structure of the colonization villages was extremely homogeneous and characterised by the gratefulness to the State, and val-ues such as solidarity and equality (dangerously understood as equaliza-tion) were recurrently claimed.

After Franco’s demise in 1975 and Spain’s subsequent transition process towards democracy, the colonization villages, by then officially dependent of the IRYDA, accelerated their adaptation to the new circum-stances in a context of deep economic crisis, a crisis that the agricultural sector (the one and only economic activity of the villages) had already been suffering in a very serious way for a while.

The transition opened a long period of uncertainty during which the villages felt abandoned by the State and doomed to disappearance. The progressive deterioration of the villages’ public spaces since the demise of IRYDA was perceived as proof of the decline of the communities them-selves. This perception is reflected in the discourse through statements

7 National Institute of Reform and Agrarian Development.

254 Daniel Carmona, Raúl Travé

about the communities’ social relationships (‘We all used to help each other in everything, but now they do things in their own way’) and public spaces (‘Now everything is in a mess. They don’t care about anything. IRYDA used to have gardeners take care of all this, but they are no longer around’). The tone gets reproachful in some cases: ‘You treated us as your sons and then you abandoned us’.

This fatalism feeds not only on the past but also on present solid evidence, such as the demographic stagnation in Cañada de Agra and Mingogil, and it is also projected into the future by a dark omen: the ‘sin-gle estate’, some sort of myth of the eternal return, in which the slow aban-donment of farms and the concentration of plots would turn the land again into a single estate in the hands of a single owner, a new master (señorito), thus closing the circle initiated when the Caudillo tried to change the nat-ural order of things by giving the land to people who would work it.

It is very important to point out that never in the colonization vil-lages in Hellín have been there any monuments or place names specifically related to the Caudillo, no matter how common this was elsewhere. Nonetheless, Franco is still alive in the collective memory discourse of the local people as the ‘Founding Father and Great Builder’, not only repre-senting the State symbolically, but also physically embodying it and taking it all up. Consequently, once the Maker disappeared, his work was headed down the path to decay, one that could as well lead to extinction.

Conclusion

In brief, the villagers’ social identity could be synthesized in them being the good children of Franco, the Great Father (who was at the same time the personification of the State and a weird kind of revolutionary capable of providing those who work the land with plots of it). This identity is sup-ported by the unquestioned and unconditional gratitude to the dictator for having granted the villagers means of support, at least theoretically, and for having socially promoted them to the status of land owners.

This is all theoretical because, while it is true that settlers were provid-ed with means of support, these were not a gift. Settlers had to pay a price for them, a price that was actually higher than the amount of money set to

Agrarian Colonization and Franquista neo-traditionalism 255

buy the plot and the house; much higher than the work of removing the stones from the plots in order to cultivate them was worth, and higher than the amount of money they had to invest in the plots until they were productive. The real price they had to pay was having to relate to an iden-tity that is perverse inasmuch as it was deeply manipulated, as the product of the subjection to a rigid process of political and social control exerted by and during the process of colonization, including the selection of the settlers, their equalization and inclusion in the INC and IRYDA hierarchy, and the period of guardianship during the first five years. A process that took advantage of the settlers’ vital needs in order to get supporters, if not attached-debtors and/or clients, people who were forever politically neu-tralized by being denied participation in public issues, by being deprived of that sphere of their lives which was overshadowed while they were busy trying to satisfy their individual and family needs and combine them with the country’s modernization.

Figure 3: Sección femenina exhibition during the 1960s. (Mingogil).

256 Daniel Carmona, Raúl Travé

The process went beyond ideological proselytism, even though this was a fundamental part of it, as shown by the direct presence of the social-izing institutions of the regime (Sindicato Vertical, Falange, Movimiento Femenino), and other institutions certainly close to it (Church).

The most effective strategy in this symbolic process was paternalism, as shown by the practical assumption of patronizing premises in the dis-course of the settlers themselves. A good example of this is a recurrent reasoning, suspiciously similar to the biblical parable of the talents, used as in the New Testament for classifying people, in this case the settlers, into ‘good kids’, those who made the most of the opportunity they were given, and ‘wayward children’, those who not only wasted that chance but didn’t even do a single thing right because of their lazy and erratic behaviour: ‘For those who worked, things went well. But for those who spent their time sitting by a bar, there was no way things could go well’.

The true social and political nature of the colonization is thus made clear. It goes beyond the official/economic aim of the modernization of agriculture. Its true nature plays an important role in the project of creat-ing a new fascist society8, a society conceived of as technically modern, but based on traditional social relationships in order to sustain a strongly hierarchal power structure, as it was the case with the army. The settlers and the INC and IRYDA officials were part of that troop and to a great extent they were treated as soldiers under the paternalistic surface of the regime’s social policy.

The fissures in the discourse of memory began to emerge with the second generation and increased with the third and the fourth. The legal ban on plot and house divisions has generated plenty of family conflicts among the children and the grandchildren of the settlers since only one person can inherit the family estate.

In addition, there are also agriculture’s everlasting difficulties, which have definitely made it impossible to earn one’s living with a single land plot. This has led to a majority of the people leaving the village or getting jobs elsewhere and making farming their second activity. We also need to take into account the current neighbours’ weak decision-making power regarding the settlements’ public spaces. The result is an identity discourse

8 Bibiana Treviño, “La utopía ruralista del primer franquismo en los planes de recon-strucción de posguerra”, Actas de la II Conferencia de Hispanistas de Rusia (Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1999).

Agrarian Colonization and Franquista neo-traditionalism 257

of the younger generations that is as vague and inconsistent as it is full of criticism, a cry-out for change that fails to find clear references that could help them sketch a new identity.

Annex

Bibliography

Carlos Barciela López, Maria Inmaculada López Ortiz, “El fracaso de la política agraria del primer franquismo 1939-1959. Veinte años per-didos para la agricultura española”, Simposio sobre política agraria 1939-1959 (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 2005), pp. 1-52.

Gregorio Canales Martínez, David Jerez Cordero, “La actuación del Instituto Nacional de Colonización en el municipio de Hellín (Albacete)”. Investigaciones geográficas, 11 (1993), pp. 71-92.

Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950).

Pablo Palenzuela, Javier Hernández, Poner Monachil en el mapa. Estudio antropológico de un proceso de transformación cultural (Granada: Universidad de Granada-Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1995).

Pablo Palenzuela, “El patrimonio inmaterial de los pueblos de coloni-zación: memoria colectiva y culturas del trabajo”, PH Boletín del Instituto Andaluz del Patrimonio Histórico, 52 (2005), pp. 94-101.

Bibiana Treviño Carrillo, “La utopía ruralista del primer franquismo en los planes de reconstrucción de posguerra”, Actas de la II Conferencia de Hispanistas de Rusia (Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1999).