Diego Tavero I Seville, (EFE). The book ‘La obra de Costa’, a short volume published in 1916 that included the text read by Blas Infante at the evening organized by the Ateneo de Sevilla on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the death of Joaquín Costa, sees the light again one hundred years after the homage of the father of the Andalusian homeland to the Aragonese scholar.
One year after publishing ‘Ideal Andaluz’, one of the most important works of Blas Infante’s career, in which he includes many of the political and social postulates that the intellectual developed and defended throughout his life, this book about its most inspiring, especially in the early years of Andalusia.
Despite Costa’s influence on Blas Infante’s thought, ‘Costa’s work’ had not been published since then until now, recovered by the Fundación Centro de Estudios Andaluces and the Fundación Blas Infante, and which will be presented on the 21st of February at the Ateneo de Sevilla, where he read the original text.
In this work, Blas Infante made a synthesis of Costa’s thought, addressing the most representative themes of that current of homeland regeneration, characteristic of the first decades of the 20th century.
Three introductory studies on their links
The volume has three introductory studies signed by three professors that address different aspects of the connection of the Andalusian thinker and politician with the Aragonese regenerationist intellectual, of whom he felt “very close” both for his status as a notary and as a defender of freedom. and social justice, according to Professor Manuel Delgado Cabeza, patron of the Blas Infante Foundation.
The first of the studies, entitled Two parallel lives? It is signed by the Aragonese economist and historian Eloy Fernández Clemente, Professor of Economic History at the Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences of the University of Zaragoza, recently deceased and the greatest connoisseur of the work of Joaquín Costa.
The second of these studies ‘On the reference of Joaquín Costa in the thought of Blas Infante’ is carried out by Manuel Delgado Cabeza, while Manuel González de Molina, professor of Contemporary History at the Pablo de Olavide University, signs the text ‘Between Joaquin Costa and Henry George; Blas Infante and the redemption of Andalusia’, where this expert on the agrarian question in Andalusian history delves into the agrarian problem.
In this book, the thirty-year-old Blas Infante points out and justifies the aspects that have most influenced him in the work of Joaquín Costa, those that best served to make his best diagnosis of the ills that afflicted the Andalusian people and to propose their remedies.
Pedagogy and fight against caciquismo
The author dwells on the conception of Joaquín Costa, a pedagogue, promoter of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza together with Francisco Giner de los Ríos, and both agree on the need to dedicate resources to public education that strengthens knowledge and understands education as the best instrument to transform the Andalusian reality.
The second and main aspect that the book deals with refers to the fight against caciquismo, as the cause of bad government and the recognition of the agrarian question as the epicenter for social change, and for this, Blas Infante drinks in the work de Costa ‘Oligarquía y caciquismo’, published in 1902.
Both agree on several diagnoses and demand “the disappearance of the cacique”, end “those who live by making others die”, and Blas Infante follows Joaquín Costa in his recommendation of new agricultural use policies, from irrigation to the end. fallow through the elimination of cereal crops.
In the same way, they coincide in their vision of placing the accumulation of land ownership in a few hands and the absence of a peasant middle class as the true cause of the agrarian, social and political problem in Andalusia.
Blas Infante’s articles
In the words of Manuel Delgado Cabeza, there were three areas in which the spirit of Costa is very present in the work of Blas Infante: “the agrarian question, the rejection of the oligarchy and caciquismo, and the role of pedagogy as a tool of liberation”.
The book finally includes an annex made up of a selection of articles published in the press of the time signed by Blas Infante, such as the one entitled ‘El campesino andaluz’ which was published in the Bética magazine in January 1914, and twelve others published in the magazine ‘Andalucía’ between 1916 and 1919.
These include the series of seven texts entitled ‘Los latifundios de Andalucía’ that was published between January 15 and March 15, 1919. EFE