Enrique is a ‘hipster’ leaving the Madrid neighborhood of Lavapiés and the politique urbanita to spend a season in a small town in Aragon. Installed in the house of his uncles, this well-intentioned stranger organizes a workshop on the so-called ‘new masculinities’ attended by only a couple of women from the town, pedestrianizing the streets of the municipality (he will baptize one with the name of the Marxist theorist Gramsci) and rejects chicken coops for being “something very heteropatriarchal.”
This crazy resume is that of the protagonist of the novel by the journalist and writer Daniel Gascon ‘A hipster in empty Spain’ (2020, Random House), in which the ‘city hick’ that disembarks in the
Rural Spain and strives to launch a political program to correct the drift of life in the countryside that –in Enrique’s eyes– is anti-environmental, sexist and racist. All one stereotype inversion from the films by Paco Martínez-Soria, in which the redneck was the villager who arrived disoriented to an unknown city that became immense, immense.
Rediscover the usual
Although taken to the extreme from humor, Gascón’s novel is a reflection of that new social and political trend for which idealize the environment rural from the distorted optics of cities. «The fashion of empty Spain exists and is in many places. Although there are now books that believe they are rediscovering life in the country, there have always been authors such as Delibes or Ramón J. Sender whose narrations took place in country settings. There are the ‘Campos de Castilla’ by Machado or Don Quixote himself. The literary traditions are a bit Guadian, sometimes we have forgotten a theme for a long time and suddenly we remember it, “he says. This writer believes that although there is a certain Adamism that makes us believe that we are the first In talking regarding what has now been called empty Spain, it does not rule out that perhaps each generation needs to give a new name to the issues that culture has always discussed.
The concept that now inspires the name of political formations and that is used to denominate the demographic phenomenon of depopulation arises from the success of the Sergio del Molino’s book ‘Empty Spain, travel through a country that never was’, published by the Turner publishing house in 2016. That text records its first impact on the success of Teruel Existe in the 2019 general elections and in the creation of the platform Spain Emptied, which brings together a large number of associations and groups and aspires to be a hinge party. But the fruits of the movement are more noticeable today than ever. In the early regional elections to be held on February 13 in Castilla y León, more candidates than ever will attend, the vast majority of alternatives linked to the rural world: Soria ¡Ya !, Palencia España Vaciada, Palencia Existe, Burgos Enraíza …
But empty (or emptied) Spain is also present in the harangues of national parties. In the words of Andrés Fernández-Pose, at the head of the Princess of Asturias Chair in Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, the speeches are full of “very well-intentioned policies, such as those that seek to fight once morest climate change that, a priori, are difficult to discuss. However, when push comes to shove mostly benefit the elites from cities and end up damaging rural environments. Fernández-Pose criticizes that the European trend (we saw it in France with the ‘Yellow Vests’) is to mark increasingly abstract goals that “are disguised as favorable for agricultural areas.” It is precisely this universality – he points out – that prevents practical solutions from being provided for specific territories.
«I do not agree that from the cities we cannot know the problems of the rural world. Yes they can be known. But the problem is what is proposed as a policy for agrarian development and what interests does it respond to ”. This expert in demographic economics alludes to the diesel problem to explain his argument and recalls that farm workers had been advised years ago to buy diesel cars, as the most efficient and economical vehicles. At times it was even said that it was better than the gasoline one.
However, he points out that “alternative public transport services that served not only towns, but intermediate cities have been in decline. Now the farmer has been told that he is going to pay more because he has the most polluting car and that he is going to have to retire his vehicle in ten years. The towns then come to the conclusion that it is a good measure for everyone but the ones who pay the cost are them», He concludes.
«What is happening in the Spanish countryside and in rural areas has very little to do with what this imposed and hypocritical whining it presumes that it is concerned and pretends that we believe it aspires to solve. The empty Spain is not a rural concern, but urbanites, the capital. As such it began and as such it progresses into the new cause of good universals. Poor empty lands, we must fill them … with verbiage! “, States the journalist and writer Antonio Pérez Henares bluntly, who blames – in addition to politicians – journalists and columnists for” falling into the fashion of going to the towns to do interviews and ‘selfies’ with those who are there “. In the opinion of Daniel Gascón, it exists in the press «a tic in looking for the picturesque in the rural. The world of clicking plays tricks on us and many times we use the agrarian and end up portraying the realities of the countryside in a hasty or sensationalist way.
The editor in Spain of the magazine Letras Libres continues that this rediscovery of the rural arises in a context in which life in the country and in the city are less and less remote: «I am struck by the fact that now the trend is think of the rural environment as something exotic. Many times, that contrast is exaggerated. When I spent time in town as a child, back in the nineties, there were more pronounced differences: in some small municipalities the newspaper arrived the next day and in many there was no cinema, nor did we talk regarding the internet … Now you go anywhere town and what used to be a hostel is now the spa, “he says.
Philo for publishers
This journalist believes that a large part of the problems of the depopulation phenomenon are not well described: «There are some mayors who already talk regarding something like ‘The Spain that doesn’t matter’, referring to the middle cities, to those provincial capitals where it is important to maintain the labor supply and the services of schools or hospitals … That, for example, we do not see and before we build a kind of ‘spanish invented town‘in our head. You can’t reduce everything to a stereotype, it doesn’t make sense. The romantic vision of the rural prevents us from seeing the real problems, but also the true virtues », ditch. The reality is that there are many publishing labels attracted by similar themes in which the rural is viewed from nostalgia. The bookstores of the last years are full of titles like ‘Los asquerosos’,’ El viento demruido. The vanishing rural Spain ‘or’ The Spain of silence ‘, to mention some of the best sellers. But neither are few novels that even use the term coined by Del Molino as ‘Routes through emptied Spain’.
From Turner, the publisher that knew how to glimpse the sales potential of the book with which it all began, they explain that “from ‘Empty Spain’ they might not ask for more, since the maximum that an essay can aspire to is to contribute to the discussion of ideas on the reality that surrounds us ». Fernanda Febres-Cordero, editor of Turner, says that “although there were already many texts on depopulation and growth in cities, it is Sergio del Molino’s merit to have found the tone that connects with people. The issue was latent. The book itself is not a manifesto, but adding a syllable to it has become a fighting tool. That there are so many authors who are now writing regarding empty Spain is only a reflection of their success.
Gascón’s ‘hipster’, as he himself says, was a bit like don Quixote: «The ends it pursues may be positive, but the methods it uses to achieve them are debatable and in the context in which they are applied are crazy. The ideological scaffolding, the ideas we have regarding the world, many times do not let us see it ».
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