Granada February 2022
The first public event of our project took place at the beautiful Corrala de Santiago in Granada. Over the course of two and a half days, we held a series of public talks, round-table discussions, and artistic performances, exploring how the Franco-dictatorship has impacted and is remembered by a local community of flamenco artists.
More information about specific sessions and activities can be found below.
3 February 2022: Round-table discussion on the Spanish Roma and historical memory. with Ángel Rodríguez Chanquete and other participants. Moderated by Raúl Comba.
The initial purpose of this round-table discussion was to integrate speakers into the memory debate in Spain that haven’t yet have a chance to speak in public, or whose voices and perspectives have been ignored for other reasons. Despite the absence of various invited speakers due to illness and other unforeseen factors, an interesting (and heartfelt!) debate took place with other flamenco artists in the audience, such as the singers Curro Andrés and Paco Moyano, and the famous luthier and guitarist Francisco Manuel Díaz. The participants discussed the role of the Sacromonte neighbourhood in giving continuity to the flamenco tradition in Granada. Chanquete, moreover, shared his childhood memories of moving to Haza Grande in Granada during the early stages of the dictatorship; and other memories of living and working as a flamenco singer at Venta El Álamo in conditions of hunger, poverty, and repression. As they remember, artists often needed to get by by participating in what the Comba called a “picaresque economy”.
3 February 2022: Round-table discussion on memory and flamenco with José Antonio González Alcantud, Alicia González and Pedro Ordóñez
Alicia González, writer and musicologist, showed an interesting video fragment of a performance by Zambra María de la Canastera, performed during a visit of Eva Perón in Granada on 15 June 1947. González traces the political history of several participants in the performance whose family members were killed by the Franco regime. The video encapsulates, as González suggests, not only the ways in which flamenco became officially known under Franco —as a folkloric spectacle offered to foreign visitors— but also the harsh reality of repression and violence that underpins it.
Pedro Ordóñez read from the diaries of the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who described the misery of the community living in Sacromonte when he visited the area in 1952.
José Antonio González Alcantud, a renowned anthropologist who was (and still is) active in the political life of Granada, discussed his personal memories of the floods of 1962-1963 that would forever change the Sacromonte. He also recounted his experiences as part of Granada’s underground culture in the late Franco and post-Franco years, and the role of flamenco in it.
3 February: Panel on memory, flamenco and popular music during the years of tardofranquismo, with Diego García Peinazo, César Rina Simón and Carlos van Tongeren.
César Rina is a historian who has published widely on popular and religious culture in modern Spain. In his talk, he took a historical approach to flamenco and its representation by the Franco regime, by the Francoist press and by intellectuals such as Ramón Serrano Súñer, Ramiro de Maetzu, Domingo Manfredi and others. As Rina analyses in further detail in his article “¿Flamenco Marca España? Trayectoria de un icono nacional durante la dictadura franquista” (Spagna contemporanea, 53 [2008], pp. 145-164), many of these intellectuals saw the exotic and folkloric content of flamenco as harmful for the ‘regeneration’ of the Spanish nation that they envisioned. Rina’s analysis of these view shows that a variety of attitudes to flamenco were present in the inner circles of the Francoist regime at different stages of its rule. In other words, the so-called “co-optation” of flamenco by the regime was far from the only attitude towards flamenco that existed under Franco.
Diego García Peinazo, a musicologist at the University of Córdoba, analyses the role and representation of flamenco in the press and cultural magazines released between 1969-1976. Focusing on journals such as Discóbolo, DiscoExpress, Arte Vivo, García Peinazo discusses how these outlets contributed to the search for new, young, and ‘popular’ audiences for flamenco, in attempts to counter official representations of flamenco by the regime.
Carlos van Tongeren discussed the ways in which nostalgia, caused by profound urban changes and the disintegration of flamenco communities in Seville (1962) and Granada (Winter 1962-1963), have been registered in different instances of flamenco dance and song. He analyses these issues further in a forthcoming article in Twentieth-Century Music.
4 February: Panel on memory, flamenco and urban space, with María García Ruiz and José Daniel Campos Fernández
The artist and scholar María García Ruiz summarised her work as part of the multi-year artistic project Máquinas de vivir. Flamenco y arquitectura en la ocupación y desocupación de espacios in which she collaborated with Pedro G. Romero. In her talk, she traced a genealogy for the emergence of the polígonos (housing projects in marginalised urban areas) in Francoist Spain, linking them to architectural projects from the early and mid-twentieth century that were created to provide segregated housing for Gitanos —including early Zigeunerlager and concentration camps in France, Germany and elsewhere. García Ruiz draws on interesting footage from the BBC documentary film The Romany Trail, which contains unique footage of a now-disappeared area of segregated housing called La Virgencica, which was created in the aftermath of the floods in Granada in the Winter of 1962-1963.
The architect José Daniel Campos analysed the way in which urban changes in Granada between 1962 and 1977, from the floods that destroyed the Sacromonte until the inauguration of the first polígonos in the city, have impacted the local flamenco tradition. In particular, he examines how these urban developments are registered in Mario Maya’s Camelamos naquerar (1974, co-written with José Heredia Maya) and ¡Ay, jondo! (1977, co-written with Juan de Loxa).
4 February: Panel on memory, podcasts, and audio platforms, with Isabel Cadenas Cañón and Elsa Calero Carramolino
Isabel Cadenas Cañón received her PhD in Spanish Cultural Studies from New York University and works as a journalist and memory scholar. She is the director and host of the award-winning podcast De eso no se habla, which deals in innovative and intimate ways with the many and resounding ‘silences’ that (still) exist in Spanish society and beyond.
Elsa Calero Carramolino received her PhD in Musicology from the University of Granada. Her research deals with the role of music in Francoist prisons, and she has created the online repository ‘El silencio roto’ that documents various (clandestine) musical practices and other outputs of her research. Her work has received extensive media coverage.
Given their extremely rich background in different forms of memory scholarship, journalism and activism on a variety of audio platforms, we asked Isabel and Elsa to share their views on how flamenco, music, and sonorous media more broadly, can (still) be meaningful in helping Spanish society come to terms with its Francoist past.
4 February: Flamenco recital with Paco Moyano and José Fermín Fernández
This special encounter between a veteran singer and a rising star of flamenco guitar took place in the intimate atmosphere of the independent bookstore Sostiene Pereira. Paco Moyano embodies the legacy of a generation of flamenco singers that dared to stand up against the Franco regime and that participated actively in the political struggles of Spain’s transition to democracy. With his sober and profound voice, he performed traditional styles like bamberas, tarantos and siguiriyas in front of a welcoming audience of old friends and local aficionados.
Click here for a colourful testimony (in Spanish) and collection of pictures of the performance by Carlos Fernández ‘Curro del Realejo’.
5 February: Panel on nationalism, patrimony and memory with Claudio Hernández and David Martín López
The historian Claudio Hernández presented his research on what he dubs “la cultura de evasión” (culture of evasion) and “’nacionalismo banal” (banal nationalism): two terms that refer to the dynamics of entertainment and popular culture during the Franco dictatorship. Hernández examined how flamenco and other forms of popular culture did not only serve the regime to distract the population from real political issues, as is often stated in traditional analysis of ideology, but also how the population renegotiated the meanings of these different media and cultural forms.
The art historian David Martín discussed the history of several monuments and other types of material patrimony during and after the Franco dictatorship, as well as the institutional and popular battles over their meanings in contemporary society. Whilst focusing on these wider processes of resignification of the Spain’s material heritage, Martín makes a stance for the ongoing importance of resignifying flamenco, which is still commonly associated with the Franco dictatorship, through the work of memory.