El flamenco y los gitanos como paisaje cultural durante la Restauración española

0,0002416

El Bulletin of Spanish Studies Vol.94 (2017) ha publicado Public Enemy or National Hero? The Spanish Gypsy and the Rise of Flamenquismo, 1898–1922, un artículo de 28 páginas de Samuel Llano (Un. of Manchester), colaborador de Mundoclasico.com desde 2010.

El nuevo artículo del Dr. Llano analiza la reivindicación del gitano como héroe en algunas obras de Manuel Falla y Federico García Lorca, bien conocida por los estudiosos, a través del Concurso de Cante Jondo de 1922. Lo que tal vez es menos conocido es que Falla y Lorca reaccionaron contra una larga tradición de violencia contra los gitanos en los medios de comunicación, que alcanzó su punto máximo durante la Restauración. El Dr. Llano analiza la producción cultural que incitó a Falla y Lorca a escribir en defensa del gitano y presta especial atención a la obra de Rafael Salillas, Eugenio Noel y otros periodistas que escribieron como reacción contra el auge del flamenquismo a partir de la década de 1880. Reproducimos a continuación las conclusiones del Dr. Llano.

Conclusiones

As flamenco spread to Madrid and Spain's largest urban centres during the second half of the nineteenth century, newspapers and other publications progressively emphasized the associations between this music and an underworld of crime and debauchery that others had established before them. At the same time, several Spanish intellectuals who wrote under the influence of the Lombroso school of criminal sociology and anthropology, Salillas and Noel above all, offered a criminalized portrayal of the Gypsy and flamenco, a culture that they presented as the source of all Spain's ills and that, they claimed, had spread from Andalusia to the rest of the national ‘body’. The realities behind anti-flamenquismo, however, show that crimes in taverns and cafés were tied to a drinking culture that relied on a thriving and, therefore, protected alcohol industry, as well as to a macho culture characterized by the regular carrying of weapons, the defence of a centuries-long male honour-code, and the sexualization of the female waitress. That the Gypsy was singled out as a public enemy in an atmosphere where a number of social agents posed a threat to public security proves that the production of heroes and anti-heroes was, to a great extent, the product of prejudice and, related to it, the manipulation of discourse.

Defences of the Gypsy and flamenco came from bullfighting aficionados like Pérez de Ayala, Valle-Inclán and others, or would subsequently take the form of nostalgic reactions by intellectuals like Falla and Lorca, against the commercialization and standardization of this music and culture. No balanced or reasoned accounts of Gypsies and crime emerged between these radically opposed, denigrating and idealizing portrayals of the Gypsy. The problem, I would argue, stems from the insurmountable difficulties of defining and studying the Gypsy, since all approaches (biological, ethnic, cultural, behavioural) are flawed for different reasons and generate exclusion and violence. When journalists and intellectuals scapegoated the ‘Gypsy’, they rarely—if ever—specified what they referred to, and often appealed to vague notions that were mostly predicated on timeworn and unchecked stereotypes. The problem is aggravated by the fact that, in order to avoid legal persecution, self-proclaimed Gypsies have hardly produced any written records or appeared in censuses. This lack of information on Gypsies has not only hindered their serious study, but also led to an abundance of misrepresentations, and is the cause of portrayals of the Gypsy being often either vilifying or idealizing. The ‘Gypsy’ has thus become a tabula rasa on which intellectuals have projected their fears and anxieties. In Spain, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Gypsy was mostly seen as either a hindrance or an antidote against modernization and, therefore, as a public enemy or a hero.