Miguel Salvatierra I Seville, Mar 3 (EFE).- On February 28, the 40th anniversary of the last great festival that the flamenco gitanería from the Triana neighborhood (Seville) celebrated at the Lope de Vega Theater in Seville, in what was a celebration loaded with “vindication” and “nostalgia” towards a neighborhood from which they were expelled.
Ten years ago, the music producer Ricardo Pachón collected in the documentary ‘Triana pura y pura’ the unpublished images of that party, where Pepa ‘La Calzona’ gave her last ‘pataitas’, or the last Cagancho silenced Lope de Vega with the cante of a martinete that momentarily transformed that stage into a Triana forge.
The guitars of Manuel Molina, Manuel Domínguez ‘El Rubio’ and a very young Raimundo Amador enlivened an evening in which not even the great Farruco could avoid participating and which led him to go up from the stalls to the stage.
Lole Montoya, José Lérida, El Titi, El Filigrana… A whole line of artists who turned the Sevillian theater into the mythical tavern ‘El Morapio’, a place of worship for flamenco in the heart of the Triana neighborhood and where this incomparable lineage met of artists.
Juan Gallego Benot (Seville, 1997), a young Sevillian writer and professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid and researcher at the University of Groningen, has studied for three years the ins and outs of this festival and its social background to give birth to ‘Las cañadas oscuras ‘ (Letraversal), a walk through poetry and historical chronicle for this old Triana.
Eviction
In statements to EFE, Gallego has maintained that, in this festival, the songs and dances had a background of “resignation” for what was the end of an era, and at the same time “vindication” of the culture of a gypsy she was evicted in body and soul from her origins.
In Pachón’s documentary about this festival, a story is projected about the reasons why the families of Triana, gypsies and non-gypsies, were forced to leave the neighboring corrals where they had lived, in some cases, for several generations. .
From the urban speculation of the “Franco elites” in an area such as the Triana suburb, where many of these corralas were in a terrible state of conservation, to racism, as Gallego has pointed out, “which caused successive rulers to omit the material needs of those who were evicted”.
And it is that the Sevillian writer compares the expulsion of these hundreds of families with the evictions suffered today by people mired in poverty, and denies that there was a “single night of broken glass”, as the bailaora Matilde Coral relates in the tape, but that this forced exodus was more of a “slow process” that lasted “years”.
Nostalgia
After the expulsion from their neighbourhood, these families wandered through various areas of the city, from the Renfe depot in San Bernardo to the San Pablo industrial estate, passing through Torreblanca de los Caños until most of them ended up in the Tres Mil Viviendas, where , at the date of the celebration of that party, there were already several generations that had grown up in this neighborhood plagued by drugs and crime.
This party, perhaps the last similar to what one could see on a weekend in Morapio, was marked by a deep “nostalgia” for a neighborhood where few of the artists gathered there actually lived.
In the documentary ‘Triana pura, y pura’, Gallego maintains that Ricardo Pachón “gives a name to a series of desires”, those of those later generations, “that had no name” and that allowed the construction of a story in which he he explains to those gypsies “what had happened to them” and that ends up being translated into a party full of flavor and songs with lyrics that recounted the day-to-day life of the Triana neighborhood.
anti-Franco revisionism
But these “old men from Triana”, the ones who did live in that neighborhood, made those tangos, bulerías and seguiriyas “a very interesting way” of claiming their culture and origins.
Some “old gypsies” who did return, despite the fact that Pachón recounts the contrary, to Triana, most of them to perform at weddings and parties “of the ‘gentlemen’ who lived in their old houses”, has pointed out the Sevillian writer , because, “despite the fact that they did not dedicate themselves professionally to cante, they did earn money singing”.
Juan Gallego has confessed that this story is “difficult to tell” due to the amount of nuances that surround both the time and the construction of the story itself, notably influenced by the “logical anti-Franco revisionism” and the need of those gypsies, who had wandered around different areas of the city, to find their origins and cultural and family roots.
The only tangible reality of this festival is the emotion that was experienced on the stage at Lope de Vega thanks to the union of some artists whose purity exuded through songs and dances that have remained for posterity. EFE