Submerged Stories, Neilson Professor Lecture I, Miguel Angel Rosales (transcript)

In the long history of Spanish colonial domination, there is an element virtually ignored by historians: the decisive role that the Spanish and Portuguese Empires played in the African slave trade, dispersing millions of Africans across the shores of the Atlantic. Even less attention has been paid to the fact that, as a consequence, a sizable population of people of African descent lived on the Iberian Peninsula for centuries, settled in large numbers in most of its largest cities, but particularly in the south, at that time the economic hub of the Empire, with its ports distributing the wealth extracted from the newly conquered territories.

We know from many sources that from the 8^th century onwards, the Iberian Islamic kingdoms had highly mixed populations in which Black people formed an important part. Yet it was from the 16^th century onwards that the arrival of the enslaved in the main Spanish ports, mainly Seville, gave Black Africans a much greater social, economic and cultural profile. Today it may surprise us that at the turn of the 19^th century, the Black Spanish population was still recognised as a distinct group, and that in less than 50 years (by the second half of the 19^th century) it had disappeared without trace, in a process of erasure that has drawn a veil of silence over centuries of presence and participation in Spanish society.

This historic population of African descent has been systematically hidden from the history of Spain by a range of apparatuses that have denied not only the possibility of their having played any active role, but even their physical existence. Nevertheless, more and more documents and studies are revealing their presence in almost all areas of society, and the importance they had in shaping many features of Spanish and Andalusian culture.

Yet apart from the archives, what is left of these Afro-Spanish people? Can more than 400 years of constant presence in many Spanish cities have passed without leaving a trace? Where are the Black Andalusians who, in 1812, are referred to in the minutes of the Congress of Deputies as a racially distinct community?

We have evidence of their presence in small communities of historic Afro-Spanish people, still surviving in some places in the southern Spain, who have preserved their memory and traces of their lost identity. Today these people experience their heritage as stigma and shame, many of them refusing to recognise themselves as descendants of Africans; and this tells us much about the depths of prejudice and racial ideology in the history of Spain.

One could speak of several reasons for the disappearance of this historical Afro-Spanish population. Numerous references tell us that enslaved black women were used from the beginning as, sexual companions, prostitutes or directly as breeders of slaves, slaves who in many cases had their own fathers as masters. Historically, marriages between black people were subject to numerous legal obstacles or simply not permitted. As historian Arturo Morgado shows us in the latter part of the 18^th century infant mortality among black families was also extremely high. But perhaps more importantly there was a  particular social and symbolic structure in Spain that promoted the stigmatization of blackness and the idea of aspiring to social ascendence through mixing. Very similar to what happened in many Latin American countries, where racial mixing was promoted as a way of eliminating black populations, in the case of Spain by occurring in populations with much smaller numbers, has had a much more profound effect of erasure.

The story of this Afro-descendant population has been submerged under the “official history” of the Spanish nation. Yet, like turbulence rising from the depths of the riverbed, they perturb the flow of its hegemonic writing, questioning it. Thus I wish to show you here that these stories have indeed survived, and can be heard when we pay attention to the rumours on the margins of history, where we find the sources of other ways of telling its stories. This first talk, “Submerged Stories,” has to do with these hidden narratives and with the difficulty of imagining them in the constricted spaces left by official history. The second talk, “Surviving Stories,” will explore the impossibility of definitively erasing historical actors, and the resistances created by the social and cultural life of subject minorities.

II

Now I will speak to you from the region in the south of the Iberian Peninsula named Andalusia, taking its name from an Islamic kingdom that formerly extended across much of the peninsula, Al-Andalús. This, following the conquest of the America’s became the meeting point of three worlds: Africa, Europe and America, and today is the southernmost area of the Spanish State. Part of its current territory coincides with the last Iberian reign conquered from the Muslims, the Nazarí Kingdom, and many of its cities were still, until recent times, occupied by a mixed, diverse population with its own particular way of seeing life, always both admired and rejected by the dominant Castilian view.

I was born in this geographical and political South; this south that is constructed from the periphery, and which has a deep fissure between its social, demographic and historical reality and the ideological apparatus that has reshaped its identity and written its history. This history has systematically denied its deep exchanges, racial mixing and counter-flows, erasing the memories of the expelled, the pursued, the enslaved, all those who have been consistently negated but who refuse to disappear completely from our stories.

I also speak from this southern border of Europe, which is present-day Andalusia, only 9 miles from the African continent,  from this wall closed to Africa with fences and barbed wire, like a harsh veil that continues to deny our shared history.

On a scale ranking the territories of the European continent according to a hypothetical “Europeanness,” defined by wealth, whiteness and the rootedness of lifestyles associated with contemporary capitalism, Andalusia would doubtless fall at the bottom of the table, along with other peripheric Souths of the old European continent. This South (or Souths) are not only a geographical place but also a political sphere constructed by the hegemonic north. It represents a place that is always “lower than…,” a symbolic site within a set of hierarchical relationships. 

In my view, Andalusia plays the role of the southern periphery of the Spanish State, within relations that could be seen as pseudo-colonial links between the metropolitan centre and the colonized periphery.

The relationship of the central Spanish State, formerly the Castilian kingdoms, to the territories of the south has always been extractive. This is a history that starts with the first Christian conquests and the division of great swathes of land among the Castilian nobles, from which arose the current pattern of property ownership, based on vast latifundia. The appropriation of the land continued with the conquest of the Nazarí kingdom, and the subsequent subjection, extermination and persecution of the Jewish, Morisco and Roma populations. This was a first experiment in the colonial policies that would later be applied in the conquest of America and the subjection of its population. The central state’s economic policy has always aimed at perpetuating this pattern of concentrated land ownership and at preventing the region from exploiting and reinvesting its own resources.

As Professor Alberto del Campo has shown of the Andalusians, a series of stereotypes based mainly on the idea of “suspicion” have been constructed throughout history. This suspicion is the heir to that which fell on the Jewish and Morisco converts to Christianity, the called conversos, who, in the words of the nobleman Nicolás de Popielovo in 1484: “To keep their goods and fortunes, […] accepted the Holy Christian faith; yet amongst a hundred of them you might scarcely find one who truly follows it. They profess and practice their Judaic fantasies in secret, and if caught in the act, they are taken prisoner and burnt without mercy.” Visiting Seville, the famous Spanish mystic Saint Teresa of Ávila also felt the sinful impulses of the burning shores of the Guadalquivir River, and was visited in dreams by the Devil in the form of “a truly abominable black boy”. Even in the 20^th century the explorer and “Africanist” Manuel Iradier, on arriving in Cadiz, wrote of “the Andalusian type, his loquacity and great imagination, which make him more skilful at deceiving;” this character having been inherited from “the invaders of our peninsula.” This idea of a population polluted by the lasting presences of Islam and Judaism is something that has survived and now forms the basis of widespread prejudice.

Compared to the creative activity of the north and its historical leading role, the Andalusians have been relegated to “a vegetative sense of existence,” as the Spanish thinker Ortega y Gasset put it in his Theory of Andalusia, which depicts the Andalusians as living in a kind of garden of the Hesperides, where the mild climate and our ancient history have immersed us in indolence and made laziness our distinctive cultural feature. All these images can be traced back to the racial, religious and ethnic stereotypes built up around the populations who have mostly lived in the cities of the south: Moriscos, Jews, Roma and Black people.

As occurs so many times in this centre-periphery relationship, cultural creations arising far from the hubs of power are loaded with symbolic and identity values and are then appropriated by the centre to systematically sustain its political and economic hegemony. In the case of Spain with regard to its south, Andalusia, this appropriation has been evident, and numerous elements of Andalusian culture have been used to represent Spanish particularity, with Flamenco and the whole aesthetic and expressive universe surrounding it as perhaps the most significant element.

Here I digress briefly to outline an introduction to Flamenco. This is a risky enterprise, since when we use the word “Flamenco” no one can agree on what it means or to what or whom it refers. Flamenco has been commodified and sold as part of the Spanish tourist package for decades, creating a folklorised and caricatured cliché.

But Flamenco, as some of you will know, is a musical genre that appeared towards the end of the 19^th century, gathering together a huge collective of street and popular musicians from an already-existing tradition that had already been in constant development and change over several centuries. Its deepest expression, so-called “cante jondo” –difficult both to perform and listen to– has only a minority audience; but the expressive universe around Flamenco permeates all grassroots Andalusian folklore, which orbits like a satellite around its essence, appearing in all social spheres and in many different styles and making up a fundamental part of the social and cultural life of the Andalusian popular classes. The original forms of Flamenco developed particularly in the area between Seville and Cadiz, and especially Jerez de la Frontera, where I was born.

An area that incidentally coincides with the axis that links the city of Cadiz with Seville, the two great centers of distribution and administration of the Spanish colonizing company with very close cultural links to the Caribbean and, as we know, centers of the slave trade.

Jerez is a city were the knowledge and creativity of this art form is still extremely important, and we might compare its importance to that of New Orleans for blues and jazz. In many neighbourhoods of Jerez de la Frontera, the Christmas celebrations and other social events revolving around Flamenco have become key social performances, a total social fact, as the anthropologist Marcel Mauss would say.

Today Flamenco moves in different social spheres, and thanks to its greatest artists – it is a genre demanding immense dedication and virtuoso skills – it spans the humble, grassroots spaces of Andalusian neighbourhoods with the most prestigious international stages. Only recently, for example, the great bailora (dancer) Rocío Molina was awarded the Venice Biennale Silver Lion one of the world´s most important prices for the arts.

Perhaps a comparison with jazz would bring us closer to Flamenco. They are both types of music originally from the margins of society that have undergone spectacular development due to the virtuosity and limitless creativity of their leading musicians. Evolving in similar spheres and contexts, both Flamenco and jazz attract passionate debates around cultural appropriation and still carry a strong symbolic load due to the communities who created them; Afro-American people in the case of jazz.           

III

It was eight years ago that I began to research the influences of African music on Flamenco for a documentary film, Gurumbé. Afroandalusian Memories. It was clear from the outset that tackling the topic of the African traces in the expressive bases of flamenco could be relatively problematic, since the history of Spanish identity had been constructed precisely around its ideological distance from the African continent lying only 9 miles away.

As soon as I began to study the subject I started to doubt the version spread by most scholars and aficionados on the relationship of Flamenco to American and African music. The most iconic narrative suggests that Flamenco drew on Black rhythms towards the end of the 19^th century, due to links between southern Spanish ports (in Andalusia) and those of America (especially Havana, Cuba), with their large Afro-descendant populations: a phenomenon known as ida y vuelta (literally “outward and return journeys,” or “back and forth”).

This ida y vuelta was that of particular song repertoires thought to have come from the Iberian Peninsula with the migrants and Spanish colonists who travelled to America and then returned influenced (”contaminated,” according to some) by the rhythms and expressive styles of the Black Caribbean. These different musical forms or palos (as these songs or rhythms and tonal structures are called in Flamenco jargon) were also thought to have come from American rhythms that had been “duly flamencoized,” as the researcher Faustino Núñez has recently written. This is how palos classed as “exotic” and “minor,” such as Guajiras, Colombianas, Vidalita, Milonga, etc., are said to have developed. This notion of the ida y vuelta limits to a short period of the 19^th century the minimal influence that Black and African music (filtered and meditated, of course, by the colonial relationship) is supposed to have had on Flamenco.

These ethnocentric ideas, imbued with a type of Hispano-tropicalism, smooth over the violent class, gender and race relationships of the contexts that framed these cultural exchanges (what we now call “whitewashing”), and ignore the racial inequality stemming from the fact that the great majority of the Black men and women involved were enslaved people.

The Eurocentric version also received the UNESCO seal of approval when in 2010 Flamenco was inscribed in the Representative List of the Intangible Culture of Humanity. In the text presenting Flamenco’s candidature we read:

Its inscription will undoubtedly help to promote respect for cultural diversity, given that flamenco is born out of dialogue and communion. It reflects all the cultures and civilizations which have made southern Spain their home over the course of the centuries: Greece, Rome, Islam, Christianity, etc. It is the product of the convergence of diverse but interlinked musical traditions, Arab and Jewish music, the Byzantine liturgy and Castilian balladry and, beyond the Mediterranean basin, Indian and Afro-American styles, along with the contributions of Andalusia's ethnic Gypsy settlers.

As we see, an “African element” is only timidly referred to and only makes an appearance mediated by the American colonial relationship and in a position inferior to other remotely possible or extremely distant influences such as Greek, Roman and Byzantine cultures; secondary even to India, separated from Andalusia by thousands of kilometres and with far-distant or virtually non-existent cultural links throughout history. Yet, in the European imagination, it is doubtless more reassuring to consider Eastern influences -accompanied by Orientalist stereotypes (in Edward Said’s sense of the word)-  such as wisdom, calm, mystery, etc.) than African associations. The orientalization of Spanish history has been used to conceal the depth of its ties to the African continent.

Some accounts of the origins of Flamenco are still based on the narrative linking it to India and the odyssey of the Roma people, who arrived in the Iberian Peninsula in the 16^th century. This version, appearing at the end of the 19^th century, still prevails today; its persistence is surprising (along with that of the mythic images it generates), given that there is not a single credible argument to support it.  

While on their arrival in the Iberian Peninsula, the first groups of Roma people were accepted as civil subjects in accordance with the law, in little more than a century they had come to swell the ranks of Catholic Iberia’s suspect populations. Thus, in the True History of the Cruelties and Great Crimes Committed in the Sierra Morena by Certain “gitanos” (Relación verdadera de las crueldades y robos grandes que hazían en Sierra Morena unos Gitanos), written in 1617, we read:

Side by side with all nations they are Moorish with the Moors, heretic with those who profess heresy, and feign been Christian in Spain.

From the 16^th century on and for centuries afterwards (we could say until the 20^th century) a succession of laws sought to eliminate, imprison or dissolve the Roma into the Spanish population, subsequently destroying their way of life. Yet we should also bear in mind that in Spain, the concept of the “gitano” (stemming from the word “Egyptian”), was used as a generic label for all those who fell outside the system, inhabiting the margins of the way of life shaped by the religious and moral laws firstly of Catholicism and later of the productive system associated with Enlightened thought. Although with a clearly Roma ethnic core, we might say that the “gitano,” especially from the myth-creation of the Romantic period onwards, encompassed all the marginalised, racialised classes of people living on the peripheries of the system. We have good reason to think that many free Black people or cimarrones (probably a highly mixed population from the 18^th century onwards) took refuge and camouflaged their identities under the label of the “gitanos”, just as they were named from the outside by the institutions of power and contemporary records. Thus “gitano”, as has occurred with other racial labels, was used as a pejorative, racist term to bolster ruling class privilege, and has now in turn been reclaimed as a badge of identity by the Spanish Roma themselves.

The testimonies collected by the researcher Antonio Gómez Alfaro in his book The great Gitano round-up: Spain, the general imprisonment of Gitanos in 1749 informs us of the close coexistence of black people and gitanos in many Spanish cities at the time of the great raid of 1749. He gives us the example of Tadeo de Paula Rosario, ´a free black man´ from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, who complains to the courts because he has been included in the census as a "gitano". Tadeo was married to the gitana Jerónima de Vargas.  It must have been very difficult for melanated people to swim between the waters of the dehumanization of blackness and the persecution that threatened the gitano.

In a study of the most common surnames among gitanos in Spain, Moreno (a family name given to black people) or Reyes, which some researchers associate with people enslaved in the service of the crown, are among the top ten. 

From the 18^th century onwards there has been a tendency to represent Spain through the exoticization of Andalusia, particularly through the lens of Romantic French and English/American travellers such as Gautier, Ford, Merimee and Irving, who made the south of Spain their own private fantasy mine, as Achile Mbembe would say. These writers described the Spanish south as a region within the old Europe, with passionate women, men of honour, chancers, knife-wielding thieves and bullfighters who scorn life.

The gitano was a protagonist in this package, as the main representative of these stereotypes. But I suspect that in this label of gitano, black and mixed Spanish people were also included. The most exotic versions of Flamenco and its mythic gitano-related origin stem from these myths, which have prevailed to the present day in many cases, becoming the most deeply-rooted story in the collective imaginaries.

I find it very striking for the case I am considering here, that until practically the 18th century there are few specific references linking gitanos to a particular style of dance or music. Whilst there are many texts that speak of music and dances related to the black community. Their prominence in most popular, religious or even institutional festivities, or, as we will see later, the different legislations to censure their dances, perceived as a social danger, that appear continuously from the 15th century onwards.

IV

Flamenco and its whole expressive universe seemed to me a sphere where the creativity of the African diaspora in Andalusian had taken root. It is for this reason that I became interested in the social and historical contexts of the different musical forms and expressions that gave rise to Flamenco in the 19^th century, and their historical transformations.

Numerous authors revealed to me the importance of Black people in Spain. In addition to this I also began to find, through the work of other scholars that this afro-spanish population had played a leading role in popular street music, in parties and parties, in the theatre and in the world of music and dance in general.

Another factor these studies revealed, particularly those of Nicholas R. Jones, was that historically the Afro-Spaniards had occupied social spaces in which they had been able to strengthen their position and identity as a Black population.

Andalusia, the south of Spain, was perhaps the setting where the heritage of the first groups of enslaved Africans became, to cite P. Gilroy, “a specific modality of experiencing Blackness”. In other words, it was one of the African diaspora’s first creative hubs. Thus Black people in Spain were actively involved in creating culture, and, due to a certain porosity at the base of an otherwise hierarchical society, managed to leave their mark on literature, music and religion.

The fact that the cities in which I have spent almost my whole life (Seville, Jerez, Cadiz, etc.) had had Afro-descendant communities making up more than 10% of the population for more than 400 years, and that they have been recognized as such until the turn of the 19^th century, was something that made a deep impact on me.

In Jerez de la Frontera, my hometown, by the 15th century Black enslaved people were seen as a social order problem by some of the public powers. Documents recently found in the Jerez Municipal Archive record that the first African slave was sold in the city in 1424. Another document describes how later “they gathered in considerable number to hold parties with tambourines and tabales (hand drums) and other musical instruments.”

The most surprising, however, was that four centuries later, in 1880, the Jerez Catholic journal Asta Regia reported on the “immoral” parties organized at “Aunt Mondonga’s” place and “Uncle Manasas’s” farmyard to baptize a child “as black as soot.” Another account of this same celebration, recounts in detail the well-tempered rhythms of the guitars, the “lively and passionate” melodies of the songs and how the “young men and women sang to each other tunes of great invention and passion,” which “they improvised with incredible skill and flair.” This chronicle describes a unique performativity I have seen  many times in Flamenco fiestas (parties), led by the gitano community of my town.

So where were these Black people one century later?, were the Black people described by these accounts, not much more than 100 years ago, already a Black, Roma and mixed-race population? Might some of the current performers in the Flamenco fiestas of Jerez, the gitanos, be the direct descendants of those Black and mixed Andalusians? Or Had the process of racial, social and cultural homogenization that is intrinsic to the history of Spain succeeded in concealing the African pulse in Flamenco, and definitively erasing the memory of the African Spaniards? 

The historical and theoretical writing on the origins and forms of Flamenco has been one of the apparatuses deployed to erase the history of the Afro-descendant presence in Spain and its heritage in Spanish society and culture. This narrative is underpinned by a wider story that, at the same time as occulting the system of slavery that sustained the Spanish colonial empire, perpetrates a memoricide on the Afro-descendant population, refusing to recognise that a large part of Andalusian and Spanish society is made up of a population with a deep history of cross-cultural mixture, and which perhaps may not be truly white European.

The way Flamenco is performed and experienced socially speaks to us not only of the African expressivity imbedded in it, but of the ways in which Afro-spaniards shaped a new language of rhythms, gestures and attitudes -from their original African cultural heritage- that merged with the expressivity of the Roma. Thus the Black African was  subsumed into the gitano.

V

As the Afro-North-American writer Christina Sharpe remarks in her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, we could say that the wakes of the slave ships arriving at Seville and Cadiz from the coasts of Guinea have been prolonged in space and time to deny the history of the afro-Spanish and smother their memory in an ocean of oblivion. In this same sea other negated bodies, presences, and languages have been dragged down, other annihilated “we’s,” unrecognised or pushed out to the limits of the foreign and strange: Sephardic Jews, Moors and Roma. The history of Spain is a five-centuries-long path along which the country has gradually divested itself of everything it saw as a deviation, to forge an ring of iron in which religion, race/culture and territory revolve eternally and without question. In this centrifuge of minorities, the Black Spaniards are the population that has suffered the deepest memoricide.

When this historical Black presence in Spain is omitted it creates a lacuna that prevents the understanding of the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade which is usually centred in North American and Northern European narratives. Furthermore it denies the complexity of race relations in early modernity. The historical afro-Spanish population expands the reach and agency of the African diaspora in the Atlantic world beyond what is usually conceived both in time and geography, and it could be said that flamenco is therefore part of the African diaspora´s cultural legacy.

Hopefully here I’ve been able to demonstrate convincingly to you that in order to study the cultural history of the Black diaspora, and to understand the construction of racial imagery by the hegemonic European colonial powers, we need to revisit the history of Spain. Decentring the perspectives from which these transatlantic cultural exchanges have normally been construed, we can at last discern the submerged stories speaking to us from the depths of history.

 

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