As I was leaving, the mood in Alicante’s Public Market turned fierce this morning. Normally it is calm and businesslike, except when knots of tourists block stands and paths to listen to their guides and then buy nothing.
Today, a small gray-haired man, about my age, raised his arm and shook his fist at two tallish, darker skinned men behind the display case in a meat stand. Their eyes were ready to shoot fire as their skin turned darker with rage.
Inevitably curious about Alicante, I paused.
Spaniards like you went to work in other countries, the gray haired man shouted. That was not so long ago.
It is all because of you guys, the Right. You create these problems
Strangely ceding a couple of points, one of the taller men shouted back, well we did not go to delinguir.
That word means to commit misdemeanors and sometimes crimes.
I moved away before the match drew more people and turned even more angry. In Bars, and elsewhere, Spanish can argue forcefully. Their voices are resonant and really boom. But I have never seen an argument in the market through this whole year of being here.
Part of the reason I walked away was because the context seemed to me explosive and to draw from violence last night and the night before in a neighborhood of farm workers in the next door region of Murcia.
Everyone awakened these days to news that either focused on an elderly Spanish man being apparently beaten by a young Moroccan man whose friends filmed it and put it on a Tik Tok, the news says. I have not seen it. Or, people would perceive hordes of masked self-proclaimed Spanish nationalists marauding through the evening both nights in a hunt (cacería) for immigrants, read Moroccans.
The roving men, armed with machetes and sticks, shovels and hoes, if not more, came from as far away as Madrid, Valencia, or even Alicante, to heed the call of a local leader of VOX, the ultra right wing party to hunt Moros (Moors or Moroccans in local parlance). The call was for vengeance for the man’s beating and to take security into their own hands.
But the call also comes after the national party has called for the repatriation of millions of immigrants and their Spanish-born children using language from Germany that Trump and his ghouls also rely on, including the notion of replacement theory.
At the same time, the ruling party, the Socialists, argue that Spains economy is growing because of immigration to meet the demand for workers, even if young men often find it hard to obtain work.
The issues are hot, inflamed by face to face debates in parliament where VOX and the conservative, post Franco, PP, the People’s Party through verbal thrusts of sharpened rhetoric to slice and wound the country’s president, who of course sends similarly h9ned swords of words to pierce his enemies, the PP’s Feijoo and VOX’s Abascal.
Sanchez, the President, stood at the podium: Señor Abascal, why do you hate immigrants. Abascal merely closed his face and looked smug. His deputies delivered the charge of racial replacement later. In the meantime, to not be left out, Feijoo who most likely will become president should the socialists fall, thrust out, you Mr Sanchez, are a hypocrite. You claim to be a feminist but you have lived from money your father-in-law made from owning brothels and Gay saunas. You literally, have live from the exploitation of women.
Not even the bulls running down the streets of Pamplona and into the bull ring where they will be killed by matadors before thousands have created such tension as Mr. Feijoo slicing Mr Sanchez with the bellowing cry putero, pimp.
To not be out done and to change the focus of national discourse, VOX’s strong young men and more rotund older men have gone hunting for Moroccans.
Here in Alicante, all this appears in the news as neighborhoods that used to be villages carry out one of the most important annual rituals, the Moros y Cristianos, the great battles between Moors and Cristians when the Cristian kings took Alicante from Spains Moorish kings and carried out an ethic cleansing, replacing them with Christians back in the twelfth century of so. Despite nine-hundred years, that event still draws people and creates memory as well as a division in the population between Spaniards (Cristians) and Moors).
Just as I do not know what happened in the market as the smaller man faced off against the two larger men, I do not know what will happen in Spain, nor in Murcia, nor even Alicante.
History is far from dead here. The market celebrates annually the day the Italian fascists, in support of Franco’s fascist forces bombed the town’s market and killed more than three-hundred people. Yet one of the founders of Spain’s fascist party is from here and French right wing Pied Noirs colonists were withdrawn from Algeria and settled in Alicante when not even France would take them because of their history of violence. Still, the city was the last capital of the Republic and has/had a vital Communist and Socialist presence.
I read on line that local Communists are organizing to defend workers rights against VOX’ threats of more general cacerías of immigrants.
Yet the blood has not settled into the bricks and stones of the streets in Murcia, nor has it fully joined the sand in Parliament. Swords, lances, and colorful banderillas (hooked stakes) have not been put in lockers. More is sure to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment