San Isidro: cocido, churros y chocolate (part 3 of 3)

Eating and drinking are fundamental, not incidental to the Fiesta de San Isidro

Waiting on line for the free cocido madrileño in the Parque San Isidro on the Día de San Isidro

Ok, I promise this is the last entry about San Isidro, but it was two days of cool and intense activity, with lots of photos and videos, and many interesting things, and while I was originally planning to make yesterday's entry "chotis, chulapos, and churros" I realized that song, dance, and funny costumes deserved their own entry separate from food, drink, and picnicking (not to mention the fairground ride and fireworks).

Possibly because a friend and fellow researcher I've met here is writing a dissertation about food and politics in 1940s Spain, and possibly because of older research interests of my own, I couldn't help but notice how much importance food is given in the fiestas de San Isidro.  This is a city which has known hunger, and a fair number of the popular songs for San Isidro come close to "food porn."  I was initially impressed on Sunday afternoon in the Plaza de Vistillas that the song which got the audience up from their chairs and dancing (as well as singing along) was something which I initially, listening, thought was a love song, but which actually I would classify more as a "food song" called "Cocidito madrileño."  (A few hours later I mentioned to the friends I was with that there appeared to have been a song dedicated entirely to cocido, whereupon the two of them - mother and daughter, both Madrid-born - exchanged sheepish grins and began to sing "cooocidito madrileñooo...")  Picture an entire plaza full of people singing "porque eres gloria pura, porque eres gloria pura, cocidito madrileño!" in a spasm of civic pride and hungriness and you get a sense of the scene.

San Isidro: Chotis and Chulapos (Part 2 of 3)

 

¡Viva Madrid! ¡Viva San Isidro!

 

Or how an international city does a local party

 

There's a whole wonderful set of silly traditions around San Isidro.  And the best thing is that they're all unashamedly modern and cheerfully not purely "Spanish."  Just purely Madrid. 

San Isidro was canonized sometime in the seventeenth century when Spain's new capital city needed a local saint.  By the late eighteenth century, the sleepy backwater town had doubled and quadrupled in size into a capital city of a flailing empire with huge inequality and plenty of political problems, already about to be eclipsed, but still with a far-flung influence that stretched from Mexico to Manila to Milan...and of course back to Madrid.  By this time San Isidro was well ensconced in his hermitage, and the tradition of the verbena was a standard rite of Spring.  Goya captured the scene in 1788:

Goya's version of the Pradera de San Isidro.  All the buildings in the background are still there, and you can still see some of them.  But there are a lot more buildings blocking the river nowadays.  And a lot less river.

For comparison, here's a picture of the same place I two weeks ago.  Not as different as you'd think:

Note royal palace (Palacio de Oriente) in the distance on the left, and people sitting on grass, as in Goya's painting.

A further note on Spanish custom and gender norms....

 

Having just watched "El Intermedio" I have a quick further thought

 

 In light of the current (and recurring) hysteria about sexual harassment by politicians and so on in the Anglosphere, I watched the final (absolutely funny and charming) segment of "El Intermedio" this evening with something like shock.  I think it's superb that the Spanish manage to be concerned about sexism while still managing a considerable sense of humor about what my Complutense mentor refers to as the "national characteristic of invading people's personal space."

On Ads and Aspirations....

Some speculative and unscientific hypotheses I have developed watching the "publicidad" on Spanish TV

 

Faithful readers who are practicing their Spanish may appreciate the clips below, as they are narrated nice and slowly and clearly.  Be warned, however, that while repeated viewings will lead to full comprehension, they may also lead to a strange desire to buy beverages and cleaning products.

I'm just back from a fun but exhausting weekend in Belgium, and feeling very happy to be back in my cozy city once more, where I can see the sun.  I've been given another good archive lead, which I will follow up shortly, as tomorrow and Friday are both puentes which I plan to use for rest, recuperation, and possibly some writing time.  In the meantime, here are a few thoughts about Spanish TV which have been kicking around my head for a while (I watch way too much TV here), and which being away for a few days brought into focus.

A Russian friend of mine this weekend, in the attempt to persuade me that the world was not falling apart, said that she traced social progress through Hollywood movies because they are mass, popular culture, so once an idea is there it is never radical or elitist, but by default mainstream, and said that she traced the rise of tolerance to the ways movies were made now as opposed to fifty years ago.  I see her point, but what I didn't say at the time is that even Hollywood movies are frequently aspirational: they don't so much reflect an actual social consensus as the social consensus that the people in Hollywood wish existed.  In that respect they may be more progressive than the US as a whole.  (My friend doesn't know the US at all except from the movies, so she has no way of realizing that.)  I assume that the same is true for Spanish TV advertisements, and perhaps even more so since the point of a TV ad is even more explicitly to get people to buy stuff, so obviously the ads present an aspirational lifestyle --- a world which doesn't exist but which could if you are willing to buy X product (or a dystopia which doesn't exist but which might if you don't buy X product).  Still, to the extent that ads reflect both the preoccupations and the dreams of their target demographics, I have made a few tentative hypotheses about Spain the present day.  These are unscientific and unsupported by any hard demographic data, but I bet they could be confirmed (because I bet the highly paid people who made the ads confirmed them).  Read on for my thoughts, and for some funny youtube clips.

Trying a new angle

 

Rain and cool weather more typical of October blew me to the Complutense and into the Residencia de Estudiantes today

After heading to the Complutense in the morning for a really fascinating talk by the early modernist Luce López Baralt about the literatura aljamiada of the sixteenth century, I went to the Residencia de Estudiantes to follow up on the Gustavo Durán Martínez character I discovered earlier.

Briefly, so that the topic of Luce López Baralt's talk makes sense, because it was super interesting, aljamiada is the name given to work written by Spanish Muslims in a Romance language -- usually Castilian but also sometimes Portuguese or Valencià -- using Arabic characters.  It comes from an Arabic word meaning "foreign" or "not-Arabic."  There was quite a bit of this written in sixteenth century Spain, and it persisted up until the final expulsion of the moriscos in 1609.  Most of it was lost then, when people walled it up behind false partitions or buried it or similar because (don't I know it!) books are heavy and hard to carry when you're relocating, and there was the hope that you could come back for them soon.  Every so often another cache is found when an old wall falls down.  (I remember seeing an exhibit of books found in walls nearby at the Biblioteca Nacional, I think at the four hundredth anniversary of the expulsion.  Time flies.)  Professor López Baralt explained that the aljamiado texts have been relatively little studied because the first people to look at it recognized the writing as Arabic, and took it to Arabic speakers who read it phonetically and said "this is gibberish."  (Or rather, given a couple of funny 19th C quotes she used, "this must be some kind of North African dialect.  Or maybe Turkish.  Or maybe even from Iran, though it's hard to see how it got all the way to Spain.")  Spanish speakers can read sixteenth century Spanish pretty easily (more easily than English speakers read Shakespeare, even), so they would have recognized it, except that it wasn't transliterated, so they didn't know.  It wasn't until there were Spaniards who studied Arabic and looked at the manuscript that the nickel dropped.

National Holiday

What started as a quiet working at home day turned into much more...

I knew that October 12 was the Día de la Hispanidad in Spain (formerly, in the Franco years, the Día de la Raza) and it became clear over the course of this week that it was a rather larger holiday than I had imagined, or than its equivalent Columbus Day in the US.  One of my fellow Fulbrighters told me that a professor she was working with had told her that the disgusting display of air power that I assumed was the central government flexing its muscles the week before last was not courtesy of Catalunya but rather a practice for the parade today, and my Madrid friends said that they thought it was unusual tact on the part of the central government to not include tanks in the parade this year.  (Seriously, tanks?  In a holiday parade?  WTF, Spain?  I suppose it's better than giving them to their local police departments the way the US does, but it still strikes me as weird.)  The afternoon TV news over the last couple of days has covered "operación salida" for what is for many people a four day weekend here (schools are off Friday as well), complete with notices about the extra holiday trains, planes, and buses starting Wednesday evening, and interviews with extremely happy members of the hotel industry, who are practically salivating since the prolonged summer temperatures that are probably a herald of global doom also mean that the hotels on the beach in Cádiz and Alicante are at near 100% occupancy this year, while everyone takes advantage of the equivalent of Labor Day six weeks later, for a last long beach weekend.  There were also shocked and disapproving notices about how businesses and (even more scandalously) ayuntamientos in Catalunya were showing defiance by refusing to close today.  Since I find closed businesses annoying, and since everyone here is super aware of the way this holiday is tied to the dictatorship anyway (the war planes and tanks are kind of an obvious clue), my sympathies are with the Catalans on this one.  (Mind you "closed" here is a relative concept.  Schools and government buildings are.  To my surprise my local and much beloved Mercadona was tightly shuttered, but the Dia Maxi supermarket by my friends in Aluche was open.  Small family owned businesses run by Spaniards were shut, but run by immigrants were open.  Restaurants were open as a matter of course.  So it's complicated.)

In any case, archives were definitely closed, so I planned to spend the day writing, and possibly cleaning up a little.  That plan changed fairly early in the day, when my Aluche friends called and invited me to have lunch, and then go to a flamenco concert with them in the evening "if we can get tickets."

"Song of Spain"

"Come now, all you who are singers,

and sing me the song of Spain...

...a bombing plane's

the song of Spain."

-- Langston Hughes, 1937

 

What.The.Actual. F..."estamos en horario infantil" as they say on Al Rojo Vivo, so I won't complete that phrase, but seriously, the Spanish government needs to chill out, and stop buzzing the embassies of friendly countries (not to mention many pleasant and innocent archives and the researchers therein) in a dubious show of military force.

I know intellectually that Spaniards do desfiles militares rather the way Americans have flags and play the anthem everywhere.  It's basically meaningless, and no one takes it that seriously, or considers it anything other than one of those regrettable relics of the 1950s, that people salute out of habit without particular critical thought or conviction.  But at the point when you send not one or two but a whole flotilla of military planes (a fleet of planes?  a flock of planes?  What's the collective noun here?  Squadron?) plus helicopters, zooming up the length of the Castellana, and flying so low that the nice librarians at the Fundación Ortega y Gasset-Gregorio Marañón have to close the windows against the booming noise, I would say there's a problem.