A walk last Sunday brought me to an unexpected anniversary commemoration...
Actually, the businesses were mostly closed on Saturday afternoon, except for the restaurants and the kids' bouncy castle and the bowling alley. But walking through the doors of the Centro Comercial I was confronted with a large glass case, with what appeared to be a model of Eiffel Tower and a bunch of little Playmobil figures holding a demonstration.
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| A diorama, apparently for children, sandwiched in between Foster's Hollywood Restaurant (visible beyond the glass) and Burger King in the Centro Comercial Ermita del Santo |
I still think this is odd.
I can allow that there are many adults who do not normally have the chance to play with playmobil figures and who are eager to build dioramas, but I'm not quite sure of the intended audience. There were a several small children who recognized the general concept of Playmobil and pressed their noses against the glass happily observing the various little scenes. The central one is presumably the Champs du Mars, presided over by the Eiffel Tower, with French demonstrators, but the buildings framing the central green space also divide the diorama into several spaces, which allowed for various commemorations of a world wide movement. But are the little informative index cards stuck above the scenes for the children's parents, or are they designed as cue cards as part of a "talk to your toddler about 1968" campaign?
In any case, the elaborate French diorama came with the following index card explanation:
It's very sweet, though I think the "post-industrial era" that the card refers to at the end is more associated with widespread unemployment and the collapse of labor unions than freedom and general rejoicing. In any case, the elaborate little signs in French are matched only by the detail of the little police dog (which in deference to the sensibilities of small children and possibly the request of the Playmobil company merely has its ears pricked alertly and does not appear to be biting anyone.
Going around the corner from the "sous les paves, la plage" protesters one comes on another informative index card, about the anti-war and civil rights' movements in the U.S.
It's a bit general, but not a bad summary for beginners, given that a Spaniard my own age recently asked in total innocence why there would have been protests in the US in 1968 "si no había dictadura" and her parents (who are old enough to remember 1968) hadn't quite connected Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement (a lot of people have conveniently forgotten Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech in Riverside Church, and for all that I've seen Muhammad Ali's biopic broadcast on TV here, it's all so much fantasy world for Spaniards). In any case, the little Playmobil figures really were exceptionally carefully molded here, with attempts at flowers and flowing hair (as well as a few with actual brown skin).
And finally, turning the corner, the diorama ends "in sorrow and grief, as it must," to quote Shakespeare in Love, with Mexico, a country geographically further from Spain than France, but linguistically closer.
The polite fictions of victory, about the idealistic students who won a world of peace of music and proceeded to get married, have kids, and not buy them enough full sets of Playmobil figures when they were small, shatters against the rock of Tlatelolco. As if in kindness to the little Mexican figures, the police are least in evidence in this part of the diorama, only observing from the sidelines.
In general, again perhaps in deference to a baby audience, and and perhaps to the Playmobil company's unwillingness to make the proper figures, the clawlike little hands of the Playmobil police are suspiciously empty, and their little round plastic bodies show small evidence of sidearms. But it is a diorama designed to attract three year olds, after all.
Absent also from all of this, of course, is anything local. And that is because (as my Madrid friends who do remember 1968 can testify) the Spanish government made damn sure that absolutely nothing happened. After the student uprisings in May in other parts of Europe, the Madrid Complutense closed for the summer and remained closed until the end of November of 1968. There simply were no classes in the Fall term. When it finally opened (about four weeks before the end of the semester), there were vans of riot police lining the road to my well known Edificio A, and mounted riot police on horseback in the parking lot. And police in riot gear standing in formation on the steps through which students passed into the building. And a few in the hallways that Unamuno thought looked like a pescadería. That was, as my friends pointed out, not counting the ones in plain clothes who were in the classrooms supposedly trying to look like students.
That the Ayuntamiento of Madrid now sponsors a diorama for kids about the fiftieth anniversary of 1968 seems like a quiet way of trying to make it right for those students who didn't get to protest at the time, and who can now take their (generally cute, well-dressed, and well-behaved) grandchildren to look at the little play figures and tell them the stories of "sorrowful deeds which were not wholly in vain."
I still think it's a little weird. Especially sandwiched between the Burger King and the Foster's Hollywood, in a centro comercial which is in form as well as content a tribute to the triumph of global capitalism. But for centuries children have played with toy soldiers of various armies. So I suppose there's some small progress in encouraging them to play with toy anti-soldiers. But who would have thought that the ultimate answer to tin soldiers would be plastic peace-niks?
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