There is much to suggest that our study area had many of the features ascribed to successful regional economies like the “Third Italy” and Baden-Württemberg. Combining an arid area of farming and a coastal littoral of (albeit poorly supplied) irrigation, and combining agriculture and rural industry as well, the province of Alicante has long been a place of rural pluriactivity. For years agricultural activities have been complemented by an almost infinite number of nonagricultural jobs, from trading to transport and manufacturing. There was pluriactivity both at the family level, with each member engaging in quite different occupations, and at an...

It is now time to get a sense of the social world that prevailed in the Vega Baja through the 1940s and 1950s. By exploring people’s remembered experiences of the broader regional history, we can see how the common frame of political repression and the postwar black market actually created divisions among ordinary people, privatizing their experiences and thus limiting the possibility of their being voiced. “The terror,” notes Julián Casanova, “succeeded in breaking the ties of friendship and social solidarity, preventing any germ of resistance” (Casanova et al., 2002: 29).

Before the war one could do well withcáñamo...

Here is the setting of the 1940s and ’50s: The terrors (for some) and opportunities (for others) of the immediate postwar period gave way to the habitualization of personalized repression mediated through the semilegal workings of theestraperloand the increasing predominance of the social relations of hemp production. Yet such a simply characterized setting runs the risk of obscuring a wide variety of experienced histories. By collecting together the disparate strands, by the act of packaging for the purposes of coherence, we run the risk of rounding out some kind of regional “culture.” Yet the substance of what we...

For those, like Alicia Fuentes’s family, whose background lies in the corporatist dependencies symbolized by theaniagocontract, the 1940s and ’50s are constructed less as a period of harsh repression than as a time of organic integrity and geographic fixity, withtodo en su sitio(everything in its place), an expression often uttered with an air of satisfaction among such families. For others whose family histories are more closely embedded in the daily uncertainties of thejornalcontract, the repression of this period is rarely discussed openly. The world ofestraperlothough, often is. Since this too was a...

In 1969 , S. H. Franklin wrote an influential book on the European countryside titledThe European Peasantry.Its subtitle captured the sense of the times—The Final Phase.Indeed, in his final chapter Franklin evokes the idea of the few rural smallholders left in the countryside becoming little more than park keepers, preserving the landscape for the urban folk who rush by on weekends and holidays. Yet, as we said at the opening of this book, for some areas of Europe the shift has been less a near-total exodus from the countryside than a shift from industry as an...

Thus far we have seen the effects of the shift from agricultural to industrial predominance on various kinds of small entrepreneurs. In this chapter we take up the story as industry has truly achieved dominance, and we focus on cases that exemplify the different kinds of people affected by these changes. Most of these people are involved in shoe production centered on Elche to the east of Catral and, to a lesser extent, carpet production in Crevillente to the north.

After Franco’s death, union activity became bolder in Elche, and then through the 1980s smaller, nearby municipalities found that they...

One day in the mid-1980s Gavin was sitting in a bar with his friend Pablo. The conversation had come round to the civil war. Pablo was laughing and teasing his English friend: “Why is it the English love to write and talk about the civil war so much? All the fat books on the war are by English people.¹ I’ve never met an English person who doesn’t eventually start talking about the civil war.” Pablo, a teacher in a design school in nearby Orihuela, was then a thirty-year-old married man with two young children who had spent his student years...