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Fiesta in Almonte
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14213 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1988 |
5,346 Words |
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Michael Dean Murphy and J. Carlos González Faraco
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In one of his many contributions to the study of the festive life of the people of Andalusia, anthropologist Salvador Rodríguez Becerra (1985) points to the fact that southern Spain is enjoying an extraordinary resurgence of interest in traditional festivities, folk rituals, and customs at the very same time that the region is undergoing an unprecedented process of rapid modernization and urbanization. Far from being vitiated by the powerful forces of change operating in modern Spain, traditional festivities grow in scale and social salience despite the seduction of those modern sources of diversion perhaps best represented by television.
That traditional forms of entertainment are culturally robust in Andalusia, of course, does not at all imply that they resist modification. This essay describes one highly successful Andalusian fiesta, Almonte's annual country fair, in order to demonstrate how the event has evolved in the context of the dramatic economic and political transformation of Andalusian social life in this century. Of course, like other Andalusian festivities, Almonte's fair is intended mainly to delight its participants, and in this it succeeds brilliantly. Nevertheless, we hope to show that an examination of this festival from historical and ethnographic perspectives reveals much about the interplay of the political, economic, and social forces at work in contemporary Andalusian culture.
Almonte in the twentieth century
Almonte is a community situated in the southwest of Spain, almost equidistant between the cities of Huelva and Seville. The overwhelming majority of the fifteen thousand people who live in the sprawling municipality of Almonte reside in the town of the same name, although there are several other settlements of some significance. Matalascañas, the most recently developed of the municipality's communities, is located on the Atlantic coast some thirty kilometers from the town of Almonte; it is rapidly emerging as a major center of regional and international tourism. Midway between the town and the resort is the village of El Rocío, famous throughout Spain as the site of a colorful and exceedingly popular pilgrimage to one of the country's most revered statues of the Virgin Mary, La Virgen del Rocío (Our Lady of the Dew). In recent years, the village has annually hosted over one million participants and spectators in the annual spring rituals and festivities in honor of Rocío, Almonte's beloved patroness and corporate symbol. Between El Rocío and Matalascañas and extending to the mouth of the Guadalquivir River lie the magnificent marshlands of the world-famous Coto Donana, Spain's premier wildlife reserve and the site of important biological and ecological research.
Almonte has not always figured so vitally in the affairs of western Andalusia. For all of the past century and most of this one, Almonte was an isolated and impoverished community whose economy depended mainly on agricultura de secano (the "dry" cultivation of olives, cereals, and grapes). A patchwork of very small and intensely cultivated parcels surrounded the town, but most of the 86,500 hectares of the municipality, the bulk of which has never been under cultivation, were owned by a few terratenientes (great landowners). This fact conditioned the social life of the town and its people.
Until quite recently, the social structure of Almonte reflected the lopsided distribution of land in the community.
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