A Celebration, a Storm, and Memory

 At midnight, the city rocked with explosions.  

Not to worry, although for a moment I did. It was a large fireworks show, I assume in honor of the día festivo, holiday, declared for today and tomorrow which gives people four days off, essentially, 

Spain values celebrations and the resultant time off from work. 

Last evening, when I went to the supermarket to buy raw ingredients for at least today, the clerk—a lovely man named José, told me he couldn’t wait. He looked forward to kicking back and relaxing, he said. 

While the main businesses take the holiday some smaller ones do not, especially those providing necessary servicies such as many cafes. That was fortunate for me.

I left home shortly after sunrise—no I did not get up that early. The noise last night kept me stimulated and awake. And, anyway, it does not turn light until around 8 AM. As I left my place, I saw the homeless man across the street putting on his shoes and carefully arranging his things to stow them somewhere. 

Spain does indeed value celebrations and so, the fireworks as well as many official acts, just not the massive thunder storm that has also cut loose today.

The day is an intriguing one of keeping historical memory alive and tying it to the present, It is a celebration of when the King of Aragon and duke of Barcelona, the young Jaume I (Jaime 1), after failing in his endeavors to acquire land by conquest north of the Pyranees in what is now France, turned south and conquered Valencia. 

The festivo remembers that event, something also marked in street names and other events in this dependency of Valencia, by linking it to a celebration of the Community of Valencia, of which Alicante is a part. 

Communities in Spain, roughly equivalent to US States, also mark historical, economic, and cultural units. 

In the present, the memory is tied to a political effort to rid the Community of its president, Mazón, who happens to be from Alicante, for his abysmal failure of leadership a year ago when a different massive storm hit, caused extensive flooding, and the death of more than 200 people due to government inaction. The poll released today says 70% of the Community’s population demands he resign. As that number has grown he drops his eyes and toughs it out. 

Today, this may be about poll results, marches and court actions, but it is notably not supported by the movement of troops and sword or cannon battles. 

While the image is one of a day in which there was a clean break; Valencia changed from being Arabic and became Valencian and Spanish, although that is a hot topic these days and many, especially in other parts of Spain say it is OK if they keep their language related to Catalan, but they should officially speak Spanish and just be Spanish.  

In days in which the airwaves and internet are filled with images of Israelis trying to destroy Arabic Hamas in Gaza, and perhaps “cleanse” the area for Israeli settlement, a bit of attention to the notion of ethnic and religious replacement here is a question worth reflecting on.

The moment of the reconquest is ostensibly memorialized in the battles between Christians and Moors celebrated here in almost every town and neighborhood though on different dates. I say ostensibly because, they have come more to represent the little invasions of slavers from North Africa who would strike almost at random along the coast and even a bit inland to take merchandise and perhaps even more important humans as slaves to sell in the markets of Algiers and perhaps elsewhere.  

Those moments of invaders from the sea—a brief entrance and not a long lasting one with a population replacement—came to be the material for the celebratory representations and popular memory.

In them, we note the population has already been Christianized, They unite against the invaders, the Islamic moors who come from the sea. 

I do not know the history of this transformation, although it is an important one. The whole Mediterranean coast of Spain has stone watch towers, look outs and castles on hill tops to see and give early warning of the invaders as well as to serve to defend against them. When the invaders could they would sneak up and catch people unawares, working in the fields or elsewhere, even mending their fishing nets, to capture them and take them to North Africa. 

That moment in history changed almost two centuries ago with the destruction of the regimes in Tangiers and Algeria. Yet the memory remains, codified, and annually performed. People come of age playing roles in these dramas in the streets.

Today, though, Valencia has a new Moorish population, as the rightwing Vox would call them, the Moroccans and Algerians who have come to work, especially in agriculture and construction. That relationship has tension in historical memory and gets activated every year when people dress up as Moorish pirates and Moorish women to have sword fights with Christians in the streets. I am told contemporary North African immigrants do not participate in this and, I imagine, many stay home those days. 

This day pretends a triumphal entry of Jaime I on horseback with his soldiers into the glorious and ancient city of Valencia. That may be fictitious, but one wonders how they were received, especially in the middle ages, i.e.October 9, 1237. 

These seem to have been changes of feudos, where the people became vassals of a new Lord. I imagen that moment was dramatic and emotional. But, there does not seem to have been a major exchange of population. Some of Muslim lords had supported Jaume for a time and Valencia had been paying an onerous tribute to the throne of Aragon, which had also been a major Muslim center. 

Alicante still was not in Jaume’s hands. It ended up attached to Castilla and Alfonso el Sabio, its great monarch.  

In 1264 the Muslims of Alicante and near by down to Murcia, rose up. They were still numerous, but slowly the pressure was on to convert such that by the nineteenth century there were few if any Muslims in Alicante or Valencia. 

That story of change of religion, language, and perhaps of people is one I shall study a bit and write about later. 

For today we will celebrate with the rain fall and waters running in the region’s exotic streams and rivers the existence of a Valencian Community, now perhaps the most diverse in Spain even if fraught with politics over language and perhaps, if Vox has its way, over ethnicity and race.   

Meanwhile lightning explodes in the sky and rain beats a tattoo on the awnings and side walks of the city. 

A Walk into Shadows

Last evening, while leaving a sadly closing bookstore I love, I had an intriguing conversation. IN my stroll to my path home, I walked a ways with a colleague from my writer’s group. He is a film-maker and is seeking stories from Alicante.

As we walked in the now dark streets—amazing how quickly the sun sets now and how late it rises—I was struck by the lugubriousness of the street. 

Even in broad day, there is a strange quality to these streets, or maybe it is just in the eye of this beholder. I do not know about the latter and so will just give you my observations. 

Alicante was heavily bombed during the Spanish Civil War by Italian bombers (although I believe Germans were also involved) in alliance with the fascists who carried out a coup against the elected Republican government. 

People talk about the market bombing—I wrote a poem about it, I was so. moved when I found out—when at the height of shopping for lunch, the bombers dropped their load on the public market and killed some 300 people in one fell swoop. 

When I think of that, the images that come to mind are immediately those of warred-out cities in the Middle East, including horribly Gaza. But I also think of the core of Berlin and the places they have left unreconstructed as memorials, such as the missing dome of the Reichstag, the congress building.  

Yet I did not hear about how the market bombing was just one of hundreds of explosions in this city as part of the war effort. 

I noticed the shed-looking, small metal buildings with gates to stairwells. These go down to bomb shelters; people can take tours into them. I did not realize that there were many more entrances and bomb shelters; a network in this central part of the city. I read somewhere that at the time, they could accommodate most of the residents of the city.

However, during the long Franco dictatorship whose victory over the republicans ended the war, the shelters languished and decayed. Many have still not been restored. Though I do not know, I imagine others disappeared in the construction of the web of parking lots under parts of the city’s center.  

I imagined these underground spaces, dank and filled with cobwebs and probably rats, maybe even bats. They seemed eerie to me, witnesses to a past preferably forgotten and hidden.  

It seemed likely that over the decades youths and maybe unsheltered people had entered them for their own ends: residence or spaces beyond control for parties or to just be for a bit. That reminded me of graffiti-ridden decaying buildings in other cities, like the bombed out spaces the anarchists took in Berlin to make cooperative living spaces and government-free spaces. 

This made me recall the bat is an important symbol to Valencians. Called the Rat Penat, it is an official heraldic symbol of Valencia. 

Legends tell of how bats, which the Arabs used to control the inevitable mosquitos in the very swampy land of Valencia’s capital city and hinterlands of the same name, turned against them and enabled Christians to become victorious. As a result, the bat is seen as a protector and vanquisher.

I assume as a symbol it can switch and also speak as a denizen of the night. 

to the dangers of official power.

Alicante has a castle above it, on whose slopes the Arabic city was built. Of course there are stories, such as of the king who had a beautiful marriageable daughter. He set up a contest among two suitors to see who could build a canal to bring water to this ultra-dray place. One of them won, but also lost as the princess died leaving the space of epic in which to construct adventures. 

However, the city bravely expanded away from its walls and down the coast into the domain of fisherfolk. I do not know these tales but I am sure the people had many about the sea. Some probably remain today. 

Houses were not built, unlike today, to maximize views of azure waters and the expansive sea.  People constructed with uninterrupted back walls to the sea for protection. Only in the nineteenth century with the fall of Tangiers did this change. The result is a small warren of narrow and odd angled streets. 

From the sea, before this, came pirates to steal cargo and crops, murder and rape, as well as enslave Alicantinos. Many Spaniards, not just Alicantinos were captured, enchained, and taken to the Maghreb in north Africa.  

I am sure there are (or were) amazing stories about the pirates, the pirate wars, and family members captive among the Arabs

Today the pirate wars are a key part of the celebration of Moros y Cristianos, Moors and Christians, a feast and drama that is central to festivities throughout the region. Sword fights with the pirate king occupy a key place in the re-portrayals.

In fact, the cinema’s of the city have just opened Amenabar’s new film—the Captive— just opened in this city. It relates how the great writer and icon of Spain, Cervantes, as a young man was enslaved in Algiers. This work marks a change in Spain’s portrayal of self and its understanding of masculinity, just as Cervantes’ Don Quixote does if read and examined. 

With the destruction of the Alicante’s walls, one of which ran along the coast, the city built a  modern fin-de-siècle town, simply called El Centro today. From a hundred and fifty to maybe forty years old, these constructions are either decaying or being restored. One see abandoned buildings, or gaps where buildings were with their tiles still pasted against the neighboring building’s wall. 

Each of those has stories and is source material for stories, along with the prison camps and the mass killing of Republican captives not quite a century ago. 

One can only imagine the despair of Republicans gathered in Alicante’s port for transport out of Spain as the war came to a bitter end. Surrounded by fascists, Italian and Spanish, weapons raised, they were never rescued and their bodies now occupy mass graves around the city. 

This is a city of stories, many unheard and untold though they leave traces for those who wish to read them. 

 

My colleague and I parted company, he to seek stories and tread on in the domain of film, and I towards home and the shadows of my anthropological mind.