‘Este cortijo es para los jornaleros en paro de Marinaleda’ (this farm is for the unemployed labourers of Marinaleda) was written in massive capital letters along one stretch of wall, punctuated with a painting of the village’s iconic tricolour flag. On the other side was a giant socialist-realist painting of two fifteen-foot tall jornaleros emerging proudly, tired, from their work in the fields, with TIERRA UTOPIA written underneath.
A family lives on the El Humoso farm as caretakers, running the day-to-day operations; but they are neither bosses nor owners – this is a co-operative, my guide stressed. This is the co-operative, in fact: the symbolic and actual cornerstone of Marinaleda’s utopian achievement – a 1,200-hectare farm won through thirteen years of relentless struggle. In 1991 the land was expropriated from the Duke of Infantado (in exchange for an undisclosed sum in compensation) and awarded by the Andalusian regional government to the people of Marinaleda.
We walked over to the farm’s olive oil processing plant, where four or five men in blue overalls were operating the machinery. The olives are stripped from any twigs by the first machines, then cleaned by blasts of water, then smashed into pulp. From this mash the gooey oil is siphoned off, then filtered, and filtered again. The collective produces 300,000 litres of olive oil a year. Scattered around the gleaming pipes and machinery were boxes stamped with the Marinaleda Cortijo El Humoso logo, in red, white and green, and a stamp of the same tierra utopia painting from the farm.
The stock room felt like an ersatz version of big-C Communism: identical piles of boxes, stacked high, all bearing the farm logo; a colour-coded livery of plenty. Before it’s bottled, the olive oil is stored in giant cylindrical silos, and even there the Marinaleda aesthetic is evident: the floor is green, the walls are white, the measuring sticks on the side of each silo are red. Outside, the factory walls themselves, and even the little pavement around the edge of the building are painted in the tricolour: the ubiquity of the colour scheme makes the farm and the oil factory feel like a sports stadium complex – indeed, it makes fidelity to the village, and the project, feel like supporting a football team.
Antonio Sánchez actually looked like a character from Asterix – tall, broad and fit despite his advancing years, with a big bushy moustache. At times it feels like every third person in Marinaleda is called Antonio, and so he is known as El Bigotes, ‘the whiskers’. He has worked in the oil factory for all of its twelve years in existence, and before that was a town hall employee for twenty years – ever since the struggle began in 1979. He’s been close to Sánchez Gordillo since the beginning. He briefly lived in Cordoba in the 1970s, migrating to the city for work like so many others, but returned when the struggle began.
Those first few years, Antonio recalled with a big grin that disturbed his moustache, were a red-hot period, a boiling point. Diving back into those formative memories, he transmitted a similar excitement to that I’ve seen on the faces of young members of Spain’s indignados: the intense thrill that comes from determinedly standing together against the status quo and announcing you are going to make something new. The ineffable, irrepressible subjectivity of solidarity.
We talked about the land seizures, the hunger strikes, the arrests, the tireless years of struggle which at last earned them the farmland that stretched beyond our view for miles. This was a struggle that brought not just work to the people of Marinaleda, but life to 1,200 hectares (close to five square miles) of idle fields. Antonio seemed quite pleased to talk about the old days; unlike Sánchez Gordillo, his job does not regularly involve recounting tales of yesteryear, certainly not to foreign journalists. It was never as simple as just one occupation, he explained; in fact they had to occupy these very fields over and over again – the marinaleños would be arrested, sometimes imprisoned or beaten, and then they’d regroup and start over again.
‘The Guardia Civil would be here, defending the Duke. Look at the trees,’ he gestured, his arm casting a long shadow beneath the low-lying winter sun. There was a line of leafless, sorry-looking trees lining the path from the main road into El Humoso, which appeared to have been not so much pruned as amputated. ‘When we first came here to protest it was the summer, and very, very hot. The Guardia Civil cut the tree branches off, so we would have no shelter.’ With normal summer temperatures around forty degrees, removing the only natural source of shade in sight is evil genius worthy of a cartoon villain. He shook his head; the memory still burned through. ‘They wanted us to give up and go home.’
In those early days, to work on ‘the project’ together, trying to create utopia from scratch after decades of dictatorship and centuries of poverty, was the only option. It was, the veterans say now, necessary just to survive. For all that la lucha was bred out of misery and hopelessness, it fired their synapses, it was thrilling – a release of that unique kind of energy you can only get from knowing you are fighting for a just cause. And that maybe – just maybe – you might win.
Before tracing la lucha itself, it’s worth recapitulating the historical background: the Spanish left had had a democracy – even a revolution, perhaps – snatched away from them. In 1931’s general election, left-wing parties of all varieties thrived, the monarchy was banished, and on 14 April that year, the Spanish Second Republic was declared. But in rural areas this was a victory without gains – it did not in itself herald a new era of the one thing that could stabilise rural Spain and feed its people: agrarian reform, and land redistribution.
The prospect of land and freedom suddenly appeared tantalisingly close, and yet the reality was still sorely lacking. As a result, rural Spain witnessed intense, frequent peasant mobilisations, land seizures, clashes and strikes. In Gilena, a pueblo ten miles from Marinaleda and about the same size, there had been no voting, because the socialists had been barred from standing by a corrupt cacique who was also a landowner. Increasingly disgruntled as the summer wore on, in October 1931 the infamous Gilena Events took place. What began with a general strike quickly degenerated into confusion, a heavy-handed response, stand-offs, a stolen gun, rapid escalations on both sides: the upshot was one dead Guardia, five dead workers, and fifty injured.
It was not the only such tragedy, or even the worst. Casas Viejas was yet another Andalusian pueblo the size of Marinaleda, with the same composition of desperate, landless labourers, further inflamed by their new anarchist faith. In January 1933 there were anarchist uprisings in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia, which were quickly suppressed, but news of their failure did not reach Casas Viejas in time. Believing the revolution had finally arrived, armed workers surrounded the local Guardia Civil barracks; there was an exchange of fire, and two of the guards were killed. Reinforcements were sent in, the village was occupied, and a massacre ensued. The beatings, reprisals, and a siege-via-fire resulted in a total of twenty-eight deaths over the following forty-eight hours.