For many years, migrants have come to Spain to work and, in most cases, temporarily and in very precarious conditions. But during the decades of the Franco dictatorship and beyond the democratic transition, until the 90s of the last century, almost four million Spaniards were also temporary workers. They were return migrants. They fled the misery of their daily lives to earn a living that they could not earn in their cities.
Around 100,000 people went to France every year for harvest work and the rice and beet campaigns, and to Switzerland for construction and the hotel business. They did so with round-trip contracts and with stays that could not last more than nine months. Many others did so “illegally”, of their own accord. In total, almost four million people moved. In these countries, they found themselves in terrible living conditions and with very low wages, but many of them also acquired a working-class consciousness and began to get involved in the anti-Franco movement.
This is part of the exercise of historical memory included in the exhibition “Escaping from poverty. “Spanish seasonal workers in Europe”. It is a critical and social denunciation exhibition born within the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM). Available in the Acua room in Cuenca until September 29, its curator and professor at UCLM, Sergio Molina, talks with elDiarioclm.es on the main objective of the exhibition: “We must look back on a present problem to show that rejecting migration today is to deny ourselves.”
The exhibition, which will travel around Spain in the coming months, includes photographs and documents accompanied by explanatory panels that describe the poor working and travel conditions, the reasons for their use and what the cycles of these migrations were like. In addition to the work of the archives, there is the collaboration of citizens, who have not only provided documentation but also testimonies.
Sergio Molina began investigating this issue when he realized that, in Spanish emigration to Europe under the Franco regime, the temporary worker was “practically forgotten.” This is how he discovered the magnitude of these “round trips” of population: almost 100,000 Spaniards per year and almost four million people from the beginning of the dictatorship until the early 1990s.
The importance of these movements, of this way of earning a living, was such that in areas like La Safor, in the Valencian Community, there are residential neighborhoods called “French” because they were able to be built with the money that the seasonal workers of La France earned in rice production.
The exhibition is structured around three axes. The first of them reveals the reasons why seasonal workers decided to leave, almost always due to a lack of basic resources to live. The second block deals with the migration cycle, that is, from the moment of their departure until their return. The researcher and historian places the viewer in front of a dilemma, which is the very title of the exhibition. “They were fleeing poverty, yes, but what poverty? That of Spain in the 50s, 60s and 70s, when the structure of family farming declined or did they also flee what they found there when they migrated?
The conditions, like today for those who come to Spain, were terrible. They lived in wooden shacks, right in front of the modern buildings they were building. And in agriculture, they stayed in haystacks with mattresses, without basic services.
Sergio Molina gives as an example a report from the magazine “Interviú” from 1977 on the grape harvest campaign in France. He explained that because of the working conditions, many called the areas where the grapes were harvested “concentration camps”. They even called the Spanish convoys that took the Spaniards to the border “the new Auschwitz trains”: “Many were wooden trains, without water or electricity, making very long journeys. “People died on these trains.”
“The conditions, like today for those who come to Spain, were terrible. They lived in wooden shacks, right in front of the modern buildings that they were building. And in agriculture, they stayed in haystacks, with mattresses and without basic services.”
The third axis focuses on “the acquisition of democratic awareness” by citizens who emigrated for these jobs. “In most cases, it was the first trip that people from all over Spain had made outside their city. It allowed them to realize that they could go buy bread and talk politics,” the historian explains.
At the same time, the investigation explores how the political parties that campaigned against Francoism in exile, mainly in Europe, such as the Socialist Party or the Communist Party, saw in these movements a “window of opportunity to assert their ideas, because also “These seasonal workers returned to Spain.”
“They did it in meetings in France before September for the grape harvest. They went to the farms where they knew there were Spaniards and there they informed them of the existence of unions and possible wage increases. This allowed anti-Franco activists to exist in many cities in Spain from the 1970s onwards, who sometimes even brought propaganda from the working class.”
The importance of these documents and testimonies, adds the professor, is that if they are not introduced into the history of Spain, we cannot have “an exact X-ray of what Spain was like during those decades of dictatorship, nor of the birth of Spain” of democratic culture.
From workers’ consciousness to fear
A very significant fact, in fact, is that the Franco dictatorship, following the rebirth of working-class consciousness among these temporary workers, set its sights on them with a “very exhaustive attempt at control.” To emigrate legally, they had to have a certificate of good conduct and, moreover, when emigration increased in the 1960s, the Franco regime realized that this could be a problem and founded its “Houses of Spain” in several countries. The aim was to “maintain traditions” and this was done through the Catholic Church, with “many priests throughout Europe to prevent seasonal workers from coming into contact with anti-Franco networks.”
“There was a lot of fear and this is seen in the reports of the unions and the Communist Party. But in the end, it was shown that Franco’s totalizing program was a failure, because you can kill people, but not ideas. “You can’t put doors on the ground.”
It is inevitable that this exhibition will also provoke reflections related to current events and migrations. “There are many debates that only focus on the present when the analysis should be more complete. Europe in general, but Spain in particular, is a society of migrations. If we deny migration, we deny ourselves, because we are its fruit.”
For historian Sergio Molina, the difference is that today the opposite is happening: seasonal workers come to Spain, but their situation is “in the dark”. “Because who defends the temporary migrant? The union in your country, which in most cases does not even exist, or the unions here, which will only do so with workers who pay their membership fees?
“Nobody migrates because they want to. It is always linked to escape, for different reasons. What we need is to have a longer memory and understand that if we are what we are, it is partly because of all this emigration that has been crucial in the development of the country. Taking this into account, it should help us understand the reasons why the population of other countries emigrates and respect human rights,” concludes Molina.
According to the survey, the number of seasonal workers decreased between 1975 and 1982. One reason was the mechanisation of the grape harvest. In 1979, there were 919 machines in the whole of France, while in 1982 this number had risen to 3,800. The gradual improvement of the Spanish economy also meant that every year fewer and fewer Spaniards were interested. They were replaced by temporary workers from Morocco, Tunisia and Portugal. At the same time, the crisis of the 1970s meant that many unemployed French people had to perform these tasks again at specific times.
On the occasion of this exhibition, the rector of UCLM, Julián Garde, celebrated that these facts are made public through the exhibition, which also presents a book published by the university and which can be purchased for free in digital format.
From the Pablo Iglesias Foundation, the head of cultural activities, Óscar Martín, stressed the importance of continuing to talk about migration, referring to our recent history. A premise that was reinforced by the Vice Minister of Institutional Relations of the regional government, Javier Vicario: “It is important to know where we come from to know where we are and where we want to go. “Migration is in the DNA of our culture.”
The exhibition can be visited from 11:00 to 13:00 and from 18:00 to 20:00 from Wednesday to Sunday. The project was funded by the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory through a grant for activities related to the recovery of Democratic Memory and the Victims of the Civil War and Dictatorship. It has the collaboration of the research project “The other emigrants. Temporary workers in Europe, 1945-2022” funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.
