Canta la Calle. Sonic affirmation and the politics of the carnivalesque in Cádiz

ABSTRACT

This article combines ethnographic research and debates on cultural activism to challenge canonical views on carnival by positioning the festivity’s sonic dimension as an active force of placemaking that extends beyond the official timeframe of carnival. The paper centres on Cádiz, a Spanish city that celebrates one of the oldest and most influential carnivals of Southern Europe. Cádiz’s carnival is famous for the inventiveness of carnival groups made of local citizens who gather every year and dedicate months to prepare an original music repertoire. Seeking to expand our understanding of contemporary carnival, this article looks at how carnival in Cádiz has provided ground for a radical understanding of citizenship and political agency against neoliberal appropriations of the public space, as evident in the increasing weight of surveillance and gentrification. This article argues that carnival music provides a platform for radical ways of mobilising creativity to redefine placemaking.

KEYWORDS:

• Carnival
• cádiz
• informal placemaking
• informal urbanism
• Cultural Activism
• Spain

Introduction

This article examines carnival popular music as a privileged site of informal placemaking. Its main aim is to explore carnivalesque creativity from Cádiz, a port city in the Southernmost region of the Spanish State, as a source of informal urban reconfiguration and democratisation in times of neoliberal cultural commodification, neo-authoritarianism, populist politics and environmental crisis. Avoiding a romanticised view of agency in both carnival and spatial politics and bringing together ethnographic research, carnival studies and debates on cultural activism, this essay sets out to understand how carnival makes space, that is, how carnival projects a kind of openness mobilised to generate public, democratic space.

Figure 1. Map of Cádiz Downtown (Cádiz Island).

Source: Open Street map (https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=6/53.465/-8.240).

Figure 2. Map of Cádiz.

Source: Open Street map (https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=6/53.465/-8.240).

Figure 3. View of downtown Cádiz. Image: Carlos Garrido Castellano.

Figure 4. Falla theatre. Image: Carlos Garrido Castellano.

Figure 5. Falla theatre. Image: Carlos Garrido Castellano.

Figure 6. Map of La Viña neighbourhood.

Source: Open Street map (https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=6/53.465/-8.240).

Figure 7. Visual memoir of a carnival copla. La Viña neighbourhood. 2023. Image: Carlos Garrido Castellano.

Figure 8. Creative intervention. Mercado central [central market]. 2023. Image: Carlos Garrido Castellano.

Figure 9. Creative intervention. Mercado central [central market]. 2023. Image: Carlos Garrido Castellano.

Figure 10. Bilingual visual information displayed by the City Council on the occasion of the 2023 Cádiz carnival. Image: Carlos Garrido Castellano.

Figure 11. Local design celebrating carnival as a platform for respect and tolerance. Downtown Cádiz. Image: Carlos Garrido Castellano.

Figure 12. Monument to the carnival composer and musician Paco Alba. La Caleta Beach. Cádiz Downtown. https://pixabay.com/photos/cadiz-spain-statue-bust-paco-alba-682623/.

Figure 13. La Caleta Beach. Image: Carlos Garrido Castellano.

Figure 14. La Caleta Beach. Image: Carlos Garrido Castellano.

The main hypothesis advanced in the paper is that carnival popular music (sung and performed in the street as well as in the theatre) provides fertile ground for a democratisation of street politics, generating a forum use by regular citizens to politicise pressing urban and societal concerns in their own terms, thus expanding the scope of top to bottom urban interventions and more formal forms of cultural creativity. My main concern in this article is with popular music as a platform of sociopolitical debate and collective mobilisation.

One of the main attractions of Cádiz carnival is the official contest of carnival music, which is organised every February in Falla Theatre (see Figures 4 and 5). The expression “official carnival” refers to that contest, whilst “carnaval de calle [street carnival] is used to address carnival groups that refuse to perform in the theatre and take the streets every February. Although there are discrepancies around the division between the “official” carnival contest and carnaval de calle, such clear-cut, as well as the positive and negative valorisations made around it, are by no means straightforward. If it is true that the groups joining the contest at the city’s theatre are more organised, the transition from the street into the theatre venue (and vice versa) is still common. Despite this porosity, street carnival is characterised by more diversity in terms of class and above all gender (as opposed to the mainly masculine composition of “official” groups), as well as for an interest in problematising the degree of control and censorship that carnival musicians associate with the regulations of the official carnival contest. A third and final element is the lack of an assigned space. It is common that street groups wander around, looking for receptive audiences and the best spot to develop their musical performance. There is in these groups, therefore, a continuous adaptation of street performativity to the city’s shifting geography during carnival times (Al-Jende, Guerrero, and Manjavacas 2008, 150). At the same time, carnival groups are well acquainted with the city’s environment, and the choice of specific spaces is also the result of a dialogue with the tradition of carnival as well as with past personal experiences. Historically, the consolidation of street carnival groups owes much to the socio-political climate of the transition to democracy within the Spanish State, when many demanded a more participatory and democratised access to the carnival festivities, as well as a less constrained celebration (Ibid, 146). Street carnival should not be automatically linked to lack of preparation, however, as each group provides a “space of sociability” (Al-Jende, Guerrero, and Manjavacas 2008, 142) consolidated through the collaboration of its components across the months prior to carnival in February.

During and beyond carnival time (February), in Cádiz canta la calle [the streets sing]. The unique musical tradition linked to Cádiz carnival, popularly known as coplas,¹ brings together socio-political criticism and humour and is often performed in the street and the theatre by groups of amateur carnival musicians who dedicate a large part of the previous year to prepare a repertoire and create a type, a character.² It is estimated that every year, up to 350 groups are registered for singing in the theatre (the number in the street outnumbers this cypher), which means a total of around 4000 persons participating and 600 new carnival tunes being produced (Sacaluga Rodríguez 2015, 9). Importantly, these tunes represent more than a soundscape, as they shape public life beyond carnival in active ways, allowing Cádiz citizens to politicise subjects of debate that are not part of the agenda of the main local and national political parties.³ Carnival coplas are therefore are not part of the sonic landscape of the city; rather, they represent an urban forum, a vehicle of popular mobilisation. In Cádiz, regular citizens use carnival music to be together in public and discuss public matters; as a popular manifestation, carnival popular music emerges from and belong into the streets. “The streets” does not refer here to an idealised, homogeneous subject; rather, the term hints at a conflicted organic entity that is often simultaneously loud and voiceless. As this article hopes to demonstrate, carnival sound/noise plays a central part in the configuration of informal processes of placemaking.

The choice of Cádiz as the main case study of this article is justified for several reasons: the city’s investment in carnival and the numerous attempts to control and “organise” the festivity attest to the porosity of formal and informal processes of placemaking. At the same time, Cádiz is known within the Spanish State as the place where the country’s first democratic constitution was composed. The idea of carnival as a subversive force is, therefore, not abstract in Cádiz: at one level, carnival folks (most of them amateur musicians that keep working on their regular jobs whilst gathering and performing in the streets during carnival time) have faced censorship and even the cancellation of the festivities from 1948 to 1967. Existing for as long as carnival music is known of, censorship, especially the one suffered during the long dictatorship of Francisco Franco in mid-20th century, has always conditioned the evolution of the fiesta, as it made carnival authors aware of the obstacles that coplas had to overcome to reach the people. Linked to censorship are the attempts to control carnival and limit its transgressive potential, as when the festivity was transformed and controlled during dictatorial times with the objective of securing an economic output through tourism while reducing subversion to a minimum (see Moreno Tello 2022). In Cádiz, carnival is tensioned by the same forces that have marked the evolution of the city and the province from a privileged trading post to scoring the highest numbers in unemployment within the Peninsular context.

Arising in Catholic territories during the Middle Ages, carnival functioned as a relapse, an opportunity to turn things down and collectively occupy the space of the square and the fair. Carnival precedes and opposes Lent, a period of austerity and containment, which also implies a coming back to the reality of work and “serious life.” Carnival is a global phenomenon, spreading from Nothing Hill to Rio de Janeiro, from Montevideo to Venice. Carnival is not just a festivity it also entails a way of being in common and in public, a desire for a fairer and more democratic reality that is temporary put into practice every February as a rehearsal or a preamble of more permanent change. Carnival, in any case, should not be seen only as an opportunity for revolt; its history is also one of containment, of power managing and limiting transgression.

In the context of this article, carnival is understood from a perspective equidistant from the regulated, annual festivity taking place in Catholic countries before Lent, and the utopian and extemporal force of sociopolitical change that some critics have wanted to read in Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) celebrated and oft-quoted theorisation of the carnivalesque. Through a focus on popular music, carnival is reconceptualized here as an affective and material process of finding spaces where collective and public life can be liveable (see Anderson 2009; Buser 2013; Buser et al. 2013). Informal placemaking goes, therefore, beyond the production of urban spaces at micro or macro levels; that is, beyond ornamental patching up and urban window-dressing. Informal placemaking is seen here as a way of turning urban struggles into social struggles (see Harvey 2019), but also as a platform for grounding new social coalitions and emergent progressive forces.

Methodology: making sense of Cádiz carnival and Coplas

Before undertaking the examination of recent coplas, a word on methodology is in order. The main object of study of this article are carnival coplas, the main cultural manifestation associated with carnival popular music from the Andalusian city of Cádiz, a port city and historic town located in the southernmost region of Spain (see Figures 1, 2 , 3 and 6). Carnival and Cádiz go hand by hand at least since the 15th century (Mintz 1997). The city’s long-lasting relationship with the February festivity summarises well its history as the main enclave – together with Seville – centralising the trade with the Americas in colonial times, as a burgeoning, effervescent and unique commercial metropolis economically dominated by Genovese and Venetian merchants during the modern age. In fact, it is commonplace to acknowledge both afro-Cuban and Italian influences in the configuration of carnival aesthetics in Cádiz (see Mintz 1997; Ramos Santana 1985, 2002; Solís Llorente 1988). Although the festivity is documented since the modern age, it will be in the late 19th century when Cádiz carnival acquires its original characteristics: the importance given to carnival groups⁴; the organisation of parades and balls, and the connection between carnival music and socio-political affirmation (see Ramos Santana 1985; Fernández Jiménez 2020/2021).

Carnival in Cádiz is often read as a chronicle, as a “sung newspaper” that gives account of all sorts of important and juicy events happening locally, nationally and internationally. Without disregarding the capacity of carnival music as a vehicle of information, this article seeks to conceptualise carnival sonics more broadly, as the acoustic way of making things happen as politically and socially significant events. Engaging with the acoustic register of contemporary Cádiz carnival implies acknowledging the creative force of a city where an increasing number of carnival groups participate every year in the festivity. By looking at this body of sonic production, it can be seen how carnival music does not just “tell” stories and voices inherent “secrets” about Andalusian people (see Gilmore 1998). Rather, it is a fundamental vehicle for voicing and sounding street politics in ways that continue and expand well beyond the official period preceding Lent in the Catholic calendar.⁵

In other words: carnival in Cádiz is not just a festivity; the city’s urbanism is shaped by this cultural manifestation.⁶ Since the late 19th century, carnival was seen as a source of civic participation and debate, but also as a potential thread for bourgeois businesses and political interests, as something that should be banned and/or contained. The balance between toleration and transgression is translated to the streets of Cádiz. Thus, for example, the organisation of an official carnival event in the theatre space responds to an attempt to control popular festivities and turn them into a respectable event. Since the 19th century, carnival was seen also as a potential source of touristic income, hence the interest of many restaurant owners to include carnival sessions. The historical record of carnival during the 19th century mentions how specific streets and neighbourhoods were seen as “fashionable” or avoidable depending on the degree of popularity carnival had. Since that early moment, carnival transgression was associated with incivility and revolt, and “mapped” into specific areas of the city centre. At another level, carnival lyrics function as a centuries-old unofficial historical record providing us with crucial information about how popular neighbourhoods in the city saw themselves as places of culture. Carnival coplas, therefore, are a unique register that allow us to see the correlation between informal placemaking and cultural mobilisation.

The historical evolution of this correlation is well studied, and will not be the focus of this article. Instead, borrowing on existing scholarship and fieldwork research undertaken in 2023,⁷ the following sessions will explore how contemporary carnival coplas deal with present-day processes of culture-led gentrification and neoliberalisation; offer a response against the neoconservative turn of Spanish and European politics; and finally, make space for insurgent ways of being in public together, collectively. The idea of carnival as a tool of placemaking is actively problematised and embraced by local musicians, many of whom are aware of the impact that carnival itself has in the process of touristification and commodification of Cádiz. A good example is La Viña, a popular neighbourhood within the city centre that is considered the epicentre of carnival culture. Nowadays a major touristic attraction, La Viña is decorated with a series of permanent artistic interventions that rememorate specific carnival coplas and celebrate their composers (see Figure 7). Simultaneously, many buildings within the area have lost their inhabitants and become hostels and AirBnBs. This transformation is actively problematised by carnival groups that often occupy the area and mobilise their lyrics to protest against gentrification.

Linked to these topics, the following example reveals how carnival music is used in Cádiz as both an alternative record that registers popular views on urban transformations and a democratic forum where local citizens can express their opinions beyond the prefigured options offered by the main political parties. The lyric is apparently simple: it reproduces one of the most repeated tropes of carnival music in Cádiz: the use of music to praise the city. The idea of cantarle a Cádiz [singing to Cádiz] is a one of the most popular currents in carnival music in the city reaching back to the late 19^th century. Traditionally, these pieces celebrate the beauty of the old city, but are also an occasion to criticise situations of neglect and the impassiveness of the local and national ruling classes. Through these pieces, it is possible to track all the main reforms the city experienced since the late 19^th century. More than this, cantarle a Cádiz examples often mention informal uses of public spaces (including bridges, marketplaces, beaches, plazas and a long etcetera.) They register popular appropriations of the public space, composing an alternative urban history that is shared and sung out loud. Carnival coplas about Cádiz should not be seen, therefore, as just a nostalgic and romantic gesture. Rather, they provide the audience with a space of dialogue where alternative views on urban transformations can be discussed and informal occupations can be formalised and negotiated (see González Martínez, Pasamar, and Jorge 1984) (see Figures 8 and 9).

These elements are visible in the following cuplé, which brings the listener to a journey through the most visited spots of Cádiz⁸:

Table

A mi es que me encanta Cádiz	I really like Cádiz
Desde que entro por el Puente	From the moment I cross the bridge
Me gusta hablar con su gente	I love talking to its people
Me vuelve loco el poniente	I really like the west wind
A mi es que me encanta Cádiz	I really like Cádiz
Su muelle y todo el puerto	Its dock and the entire port area
Pero cuando voy a aparcar	But when I try to park my car
la verdad me acuerdo de tos sus muertos	In truth I curse it all along
Me gusta su casco antiguo	I love Cádiz’s old city
Con sus piedras y sus murallas	With its old stones and walls
Me gustan sus plazoletas, sus callejones	I love its little squares and alleys
Sus barrios y todas sus playas	Its neighbourhoods and all its beaches
Y de su Alameda estoy enamorado	And I am really in love with its Alameda
Porque tanto gritos en el cuplé	Why so many ups and downs in this cuplé
tú estarás pensando no suena bien	You might be thinking, this doesn’t sound ok
y to esto a qué viene	What’s the point of all these shouts?
esto es un paseo por Cádiz	This is a journey through Cádiz
con tos los muertos de los badenes	As it sounds with all the bloody speed bumps

In a typical twist of carnival coplas, the pinch of humour and the resolution of the story is kept to the final verse, which is dramatically preceded by a longer silence. This example would be unoriginal without the strident intonation of the syllable highlighted in bold. Through this difference, the copla conveys the specific experience of driving around the old town while trying to cushion the experience from the interruptions caused by the speed bumps strategically positioned to slow traffic down. Through a simple mechanism, that of synchronising intonation and a détournement experience that needs no explanation for any inhabitant of Cádiz, the cuplé contrasts the official landscape of the city with the prosaic of navigating a more chaotic urban space. The point is not to criticise speed bumps nor the urbanist decision of installing them; rather, carnival sonics are used here to create a shared, humorous celebration of the adaptability of the people from Cádiz to shifting and precarious living conditions.

Lack of parking space and an interrupted, syncopated urban soundscape operate here a subtle but decisive transformation of the otherwise traditional enumeration of streets and locations offered in the copla. Humour here arises from the adoption of Situationist strategies of defamiliarization; yet in this case there is an emphasis on shared experience and acoustic accountability: by listening to the copla and singing it aloud, a possibility of critical discussion and negotiation emerges. Sound provides carnival groups with a tool to register popular perception of the urban space (Yildirim and Arefi 2021), yet it also opens up a platform where carnival groups and participants can voice their own ideas in ways that challenge and transcend parliamentary politics.

Crucially, this copla counters the idea of carnival as a sung newspaper, as chronicle of the most important events taking place in Cádiz: cantarle a Cádiz coplas are performative events, often followed by a heightened response (which can be both positive or negative) by side of the audience. Affect play a central role here, as the idea is to shape and modulate a specific view of a well-known urban spot, so that individual experience and perspective hopefully becomes a source for social outrage and mobilisation. Although political criticism is common in these pieces, which often allude to the indifference of the local and national Spanish governments towards the state of neglect the city suffers since its “golden period” as a merchant metropolis, they are often concerned with micropolitical elements whose implications are difficult to grasp to foreigners. This micropolitical level still prevails despite the commodification and spectacularisation of carnival in neoliberal, post-dictatorial times (on this topic, see Fernández Jiménez 2020; Sacaluga Rodríguez and García 2017).

Given the amount of carnival groups and lyrics, the examples examined in the following sessions are presented as a limited and very much partial sample from a much broader corpus. Although there are increasing hierarchies resulting from the touristification and professionalization of Cádiz carnival, the fact is that 99% of the groups remain amateur and therefore combine their interest in carnival with a wide range of remunerated occupations. The main reason behind the choice of coplas is the suitability to discuss the processes of placemaking addressed in this article; readers should take into consideration, however, that similar topics are often addressed by carnival musicians in Cádiz; that the size of this repertoire of popular music is so vast that even participants involved in the festivity for decades only know a fraction of what is produced every year; and finally, that coplas are produced in close dialogue with the tradition of carnival music as well as with the spontaneity of the festivity, something that makes impossible to conceive them of as independent “songs” performed by autonomous musicians (see Páramo 2017). The selection of groups and coplas examined in this article should therefore be seen as a sample of a broader and highly heterogeneous body of sonic production that has its own internal values, norms and hierarchies. This article’s main objective, in any event, have not to do with exploring the entire musical production deriving from Cádiz carnival, but rather to explore how specific sonic interventions engage in practices and politics of informal placemaking.

At another level, the analysis of carnival musical creativity in this essay attempts to avoid an exclusive emphasis on the lyrics, as if these were prepared to be read instead than to be listened to and performed. Each copla should not be seen as an individual composition, but rather as a complex intervention organically entangled into everyday life politics and carnival acoustic archives. It is common, for example, for a carnival group to refer to the type of music and to coplas from previous years; to incorporate fragments of popular songs, but also of television and internet advertisement and viral messages from social media; to comment on the type and the pieces made by other carnival groups. Understanding carnival sonics from this perspective has three main consequences: it makes authorial concepts relative: for as important as these can be, they are in no way exclusive and conditioning factors when it comes to such an amorphous and malleable body of musical production. Secondly, it helps avoiding an excessive literalisation of carnival lyrics. Finally, it challenges the idea of carnival groups as illiterate, joyful “singers and performers” of “popular music.”

There is much to gain from looking at contemporary carnival sonics as a radical tool of informal placemaking that counters centuries of contained and regulated subversion. Importantly, carnival can also affect “official,” parliamentary politics. In one of the most original articles written on Cádiz carnival recently, Katerina Sergidou (2020, 173) characterises carnival as “a stage where power relations are articulated, expressed, experienced, and challenged.” Sergidou demonstrates how feminist interventions seeking a more equalitarian participation in carnival festivities are also interventions in the public sphere and decisive steps towards the achievement of gender justice and democratisation at a broader level (see Figures 10 and 11). For example, the action of feminist carnival groups led to the creation of a punto violeta [purple point], a system of “safe places” and practical support to avoid sexual aggression during carnival times. This example proves that carnival sonics are a force of political and feminist mobilisation and not just a representation of anything. Carnival defamiliarises existing political positionings and voices and expands emerging social demands. As the following section demonstrates, carnival acts as a sort of catalyst where affirmative actions and coalitions are created with unforeseen results.

Carnival, class struggle and urban emergence

It is February 2020, few weeks before the first COVID-19 lockdown in Spain. Several dozens of singers and players dressing as ants are piled up into a mobile platform, standing over a crowd of hundreds in the middle of one of the main streets of downtown Cádiz. As they sing the tangos that made the group popular and granted them the first prize for choruses in that year’s official carnival contest, the audience sings aloud, listen attentively, and record the performance with mobile phones. The musicians are on top, leaving the singers at the bottom of the platform, as close to the audience as possible. In fact, the agglomeration eliminates any distance between singers, performers and listeners, leaving the audience reachable at hand. The chorus singing, La Colonial, is well known among Cádiz carnival aficionados. It is also one of the most celebrated groups of the year, one that includes some of the most talented voices and music players from other choruses. The musicians look exultant and confident for a reason: this is the second year they win the main award at the carnival event.

The type chosen this year replicates an ant colony meticulously organised and carefully coordinated. In fact, the costumes do not just attempt to represent regular ants; rather, they are customised with specific details, the most important one a helmet referring to manual and industrial labour, but also mining paraphernalia including picks and lanterns. The main idea is to generate the impression that the ants have made a pause to perform in their working day. For as the group repeats often, this is not a regular colony, but rather la clase obrera [the working class]. Animal types have been common in Cádiz carnival for decades or even centuries. Apes, wasps, lizards, fishes, have regularly feature among carnival groups, both as part of the official carnival contest and at a street level.

The interesting thing about La Colonial, however, is that ants are not chosen just as resource to enable a recurrent pun in the group’s lyrics. In this case, the entire performance is dependent on the specific positionality and experience that the type allows: that of a community that cannot be seen in plain sight, that is hidden beneath the grandeur of colonial architecture and the historic city, but one that nevertheless has been central for the making of Cádiz as a city for centuries. La Colonial can be read as an allusion of the singularity of Cádiz as the “first Western city founded by the Phoenicians” (Cádiz is known as the oldest city in Europe). Yet at the same time, the chorus makes reference to an urban space colonised by authoritarian regulations, where the basic living conditions for the working class have remained very much unchanged. Against the official historical record, against the idea of Cádiz as the “oldest city in Europe” and the privileged trading post with the Americas, the chorus claims a spatiality resulting from popular mobilisation that is not immediately visible by looking at the city’s monuments and official records.

La Colonial, therefore, resources to the slow but steady work of a group of “invisible, transtemporal workers:” not a homogeneous social class, neither a classless group of creative practitioners; rather, a strange mixture of factory and dock workers, underpaid manual labourers sustaining the spectacularised, Youtube-oriented carnival of nowadays, enthusiastic musicians and singers with multiple jobs, etcetera. This strange mixture periodically emerges from the grounds up to reassert its role in the process of configuring the urban environment at a tangible, material level. Gregory Shollete (2012) uses the term “swarmology” to refer to assembly and protest movements emerging during the first two decades of the 21^st century. Swarms are seen as nurturing and dreadful forces in equal terms. From a similar perspective, the type adopted by La Colonial clings on the animalesque forces unleashed by the “low” and popular classes during carnival, which were often contrasted by the attempts by the upper social strata to “humanise” and control the masses.⁹ Through the act of publicly appearing as La clase obrera, through the lyrics, the type and the group’s public performance La Colonial echoes the swarmed nature of these insurgence movements, while also pointing at the centrality of subversion in the making of Cádiz urban space as well as local and Andalusian history.

In the case of La Colonial, then, the type should not be seen simply as a costume that is borrowed and superimposed during the festivities. Rather, it is part of a conscious aesthetic and political gesture strongly linked to material processes of informal placemaking. In many cases, the type becomes a locus of enunciation and a space for sonic appearance. More than a fixed identity, the choice of the type that each carnival group develops every single year implies a process of social mobilisation arising from a specific locus of enunciation, one that in this case echoes with the genealogy of industrial labour that has characterised Cádiz for centuries. The allusion to la clase obrera [the working class] in La Colonial does not have anything to do with a nostalgic gesture of class affiliation. As most of the carnival musicians are amateur and participate in carnival music by using the free time left by their professional occupation, the claims for class identity are more immediate and accurate that it might seem. It is worth remembering that the Cádiz province has a centuries old tradition of anarchist and communist mobilisation¹⁰; the evolution of the province’s capital is also deeply linked to labour unions and to the working life in the city’s shipyard and port.¹¹ In fact, some of the first carnival groups documented are clearly linked to specific working spaces and workers unions (see Pérez de Guzmán 2011; Ramos Santana 1985).

The idea of a clase obrera, then, engages with a complex, centuries old, urban struggle that has actively defined how Cádiz looks like at least since the 19^th century. The urban configuration of Cádiz is indissolubly linked to the subversive emergence of carnival, but also, as it happens in many other locations, to the bourgeois attempts to sanitise and confine the festivities in fear of the popular classes that could be found “in the open” during carnival time in February (see Stallybrass and White 1986). As Alberto Ramos Santana explains, this “fear of animalesque masses” led to the organisation of private balls and theatres and can thus be seen as an agent in the configuration of Cádiz’s urban space. From this perspective, the history of carnival in Cádiz is the history of the kidnap of popular creativity and working-class affirmation by the equally controlling force of local and national authorities and bourgeois taste. At the same time, however, the participants in carnival also revealed to be uncontainable, mobilising diverse social groups across specific barrios and actively shaping the city through this mobilisation.

La Colonial challenges the idea that carnival just reproduces a kidnapped practice. While recognising the weight of censorship and capitalist control, their lyrics engage with a kind of sonic emergence that goes beyond the spatial sanitisation of carnivalesque forces. This convoluted history resonates in one of the first verses sung by La Colonial:

Table

A la vieja Cádiz llaman “colonial”	Old downtown Cádiz is called “colonial”
Y nadie puede explicar mejor su interior	and nobody knows it from inside [better than us]
Voy a parar de trabajar para contarlo yo	I will stop working to tell the story

These verses encapsulate several elements of interest: the first two verses contrast the “official” history of Cádiz as a city that benefitted from the monopoly to trade with the Americas in the 18^th century with the silenced reality of the working-class movements that helped shaping the city’s urban pattern. Moreover, the verses also convey the idea that everyday manual labour provides the best perspective to understand both carnival and Cádiz. From this perspective, the chorus also claims that carnival constitutes more than a sanitised and tolerated “space-time for subversion” and that singing should be seen as an active task that happens in correlation with working. In these initial verses, La Colonial also celebrates the centrality of labour to understand carnival beyond the usual associations with uncontrolled celebration and leisure time. Finally, this fragment also conveys the idea that carnival has the potential to generate social coalitions that can result into an active occupation of the urban space.

A similar perspective emerges from a tango dedicated to praising Cádiz. The piece is connected with the tradition of praising the city we saw in the methodology section, yet it adds an interesting twist: as a driving force of gentrification and urban transformation, carnival is presented here as responsible for the disappearance of manual labour and small-scale, sustainable forms of life:

Table

Un tango como la tierra que debe ser pal que la trabaja	A tango like the soil that should be for these who work them
Pal obrero que no se rinde y no se conforma con las migajas	For the worker who doesn’t give up and content themselves with the spoils
Pal pedrero que te defiende de Cortadura hasta la Caleta	For the stonemason who defends you from Cortadura to the Caleta
Pal que no le sirven los versos de blanca espuma y de plata quieta	For the one who are not happy with the verses of white sea foam and quiet silver
Pal que explora cada rincón desde los pretiles a los lavaeros	For the one who explores each corner from the parapets to the washing places
Pal que sabe encontrar un tesoro entre tus ladrillos y tu blanca cal	For the one who knows how to find a treasure among your bricks and your lime
[…]	[…]
Cádiz la vieja obrera	Cádiz the old worker
Cádiz la más guerrera de las colonias de Andalucía	Cádiz the bravest of all Andalusian colonies!

It should be remembered again that most of the singers and musicians participating in carnival are amateurs with a different professional occupation. With a clear Brechtian overtone, this piece claims that the true knowledge and enjoyment of Cádiz arises from the direct participation in the production of the city’s urban landscape (see Figures 12, 13 and 14). The celebration of the city that is so common in these coplas should not overshadow the fact that Cádiz results from the everyday effort of a shifting and precarious urban working class. From this angle, this enumeration of actions and professions recalls the warn against uncritical celebrations of carnival as a revolutionary force.¹²

In another copla, La Colonial makes even more explicit the social dimension of urban struggles framed in, and provoked by, the commodification of carnival. The tune deals with the evermore difficulty to find tickets for the final rounds of the contest. The main point expressed by La Colonial is that despite the increased repercussion of the contest brought by its dissemination via social media, the enjoyment of and participation in carnival should start by taking into consideration the invisible and nevertheless crucial everyday labour that makes carnival possible in the first place. The organisation of carnival under neoliberal times (and not just the official carnival contest) is seen here as a double-edged weapon: on the one hand, it has acquired more visibility than ever, thus providing carnival groups with a unique opportunity to articulate alliances across social strata, age groups and physical boundaries. On the other, the festivity also runs the risk of marginalising and overshadowing the clase obrera, the “ants” whose work sustain these alliances. In this piece, the main argument expressed (that the international success of Cádiz carnival and the difficulties to access the official contest should not hinder the capacity of locals to enjoy the festival as much as any foreign booking resold, ultra-expensive tickets) is less important than the overall contextualisation of the politics of unrecognised and precarious labour mobilised by carnival:

Table

Que tu casa es tuya y puedes tratarla como tú quieras	That your house is yours and you can treat it as you please
A ella puedes llevar a las personas que te rodean	You can bring and invite there those surrounding you
Y una vez que pasan y que se sientan junto a tu vera	And once they enter and sit by your side
Jamás debes olvidar quién vive dentro y quien es de fuera	You should never forget who lives inside and who’s from outside
Es por eso mismo que la familia carnavalera	It is because of this that the carnival family
Permite que pueda entrar aquel que venga para sumar	Welcomes whoever comes in bringing something positive
Caben televisions, Caben retransmisiones, Cabe la prensa escrita	Television channels are allowed, broadcasts are welcomed, and also the written press
Y cabe la radio del carnaval	And carnival radio
Pero aquí los dueños son esos obreros	But the ones who rule here are these workers
Que trabajan dentro y trabajan fuera para febrero	Who work inside and outside to make February happen
Lo mismo el que va a ensayar que el que viene a trabajar	Including these who rehearse and these that you can see working here
Clavando cada puntilla de un decorado, de cada atrezo	Nailing each lace from the scenery and theatre props
Y el que a butacas viene a limpiar	As well as the one who cleans up every seat
Que la casa del carnaval es como las casas de los vecinos	The house of carnival is like any other of any neighbour
Donde sobra mesa y mantel pa los familiares y pa los amigos	Where there is plenty of space at the table for family and friends
Es normal que hasta se peleen y que haya celos por los derechos	It’s normal than they argue sometimes and have rivalries for their rights
Pero igual que en todas las casas aquí hay un dueño bajo su techo	But as in any house there are the ones who rule under this roof
Los vecinos le agradecemos la difusión a quien nos ayuda	The neighbours express their gratitude to those who help with dissemination
Pero que nadie tenga dudas que esta es mi casa y que mando yo	But make no mistake: this is my house and I’m in charge
Y si guardamos entradas en la final del Falla para los gaditanos	And if we keep tickets for Cádiz people to see the official contest’s final
Que no se enfaden en Nueva York	People in New York shouldn’t be upset
El carnaval ya lleva mas de cien años siendo del pueblo	Carnaval belongs to the people for more than a century
Y su casa es este patio hasta el gallinero	And carnival’s house is this patio up to the gods
Y eso nadie lo compra ni con derechos ni con entradas ni con dinero	And nobody can buy it, not with rights nor with tickets or money

As this copla shows, La Colonial gives voice to a variety of social groups that are active participants in the city’s political and social life despite not being part of any formal strata. The piece reveals the mobility and malleability of popular mobilisation, simultaneously understood as a precise social cause and a malleable, always-shifting openness to coalition. From this angle, this copla recalls Terry Eagleton’s apt appreciation of carnival in Bakhtin as a force that “at once cavalierly suppresses hierarchies and distinctions, recalling us to a common creatureliness not irrelevant to an age gravely threatened with common biological extinction, and at the same time does so as part of a politically specific […] practice – that of the lower classes” (1993, 188).

The clase obrera type also resources to the idea that for urban struggles to become social struggles, they have to be grounded on the particular needs and aspirations of specific agents: hence the emphasis in the last tango analysed in this section on the individuals and collectives that make the carnival event possible. The emphasis on the hidden labour beneath the celebration (and monetisation) of creativity the chorus is part of in the first place reveals the contingencies of carnival as a sonic place of collective emergence: La Colonial avoids setting into motion romantic and nostalgic working class affiliation; instead, their lyrics and public performances resort to the informal act of claiming specific urban spaces as a way of tracking continuities and ruptures across different historical social movements.

Finally, the modulation of accumulative subversion made by La Colonial acquires a special relevance when translated into acoustic practices of informal placemaking, as it implies an occupation of the urban space that goes beyond the regular carnival space-time. The acoustic agency that La Colonial sets into motion goes beyond resilience and resistance to the powers “from above,” as it is a celebration of a kind of emergence resulting from slow but steady processes of popular socialisation. Through a sonic universe that adopts the shared perception of an ant colony, the group portrays Cádiz as an inexhaustible creative trench. Importantly, this trench is not a fixed space of resistance, but rather a shared environment shaped after, while shaping, popular initiatives.

Carnival and the spatial politics of “creative capitalism without creatives”

Carnival sonics in Cádiz has become a platform to negotiate class politics at a pressing moment in which class boundaries are being eroded by artistic/creative capitalism and the neoliberal transformation of the Spanish territory. Cádiz’s carnival remains trapped, having to voice the many (occasionally employed, often underpaid) while promoting the paradigms (shared by, transferred from, creative imperatives and neoliberal capitalism) of originality and market competition that benefit only a few. It is as ironic for us as it would have been for Bakhtin that carnival can mobilise the irreverent subversion of the “lower bodily stratum” while singing the rat-race-like hymns of boundless flexibility and adaptability.

This contradiction has become more accentuated in the last two decades, as a result of the media attention (originally radio, then TV, and nowadays social media) that Cádiz carnival has received. This expanded discursive field has practical repercussions for the city, with an increasing number of bars and restaurants hiring the most acclaimed carnival groups to attract customers. Carnival musicians are also redefining their role, attempting to balance fidelity to popular and local demands while curating their own individual and collective image online and offline. The fact that a few of the most popular leaders of carnival groups have achieved notable public presence, touring in Andalusian and Spanish locations during the summer and regularly participating in social and cultural events that fall outside the traditional domain of carnival music, is seen by some with ambivalence and distrust. Yet nothing of this is new, as Ramos Santana’s emphasis on a “kidnapped” festivity (2002) handily recalls. Cádiz is commonly acknowledged as a creative hotspot (Sacaluga Rodríguez 2015, 7). Yet it is quite common to hear that “nadie come del carnaval” [nobody makes a living out of carnival]. At a moment when carnival creativity and humorous resourcefulness are celebrated and mobilised as the city’s main touristic asset and source of differentiation and individualisation, carnival musicians cannot position themselves as part of a creative class. The increasing visibility of the festivity in Cádiz reveals that they are subjected to the rearticulations of “high and low” affecting other cultural creators in the Spanish context.

Recently, many carnival groups have problematised the negative consequences of the reification of carnival as an omnipresent, all-encompassing symbol of creativity determining the originality and the likability of Cádiz for tourist and capitalist cultural consumption. This piece posits carnival side by side with work strikes, in particular the 2021 mobilisation of shipyard workers against generic precariousness and the destruction and/or privatisation of industrial jobs, which achieved high visibility in national media. Crucially, the same strike was depicted by right-wing media and political forces as a violent and uncontrollable outburst resulting from the idleness and the incapacity of the popular working classes for keeping pace with capitalist economies. In the copla, the group does not side with shipyard workers nor it sings in solidarity with them. Instead, the increasing visibility of carnival sonics is presented as part of the problem, as one of the main reasons why such distorted image can be projected in the first place.

The piece, El Sur sumiso [the submissive South] by Los Sumisos, a carnival group lead by Antonio Martínez Ares,¹³ is structured around inversion and proximity. Each strophe of three verses alternately begins with “por dentro” [from within] or “por fuera” [from outside], thus referring to a single reality perceived quite differently when looked at a distance. For example, whilst the first verses refer to a popular incident in the Christmas parade organised in 2022, the continuation brings the workers of astilleros right into the acoustic register. The strike, however, is not glorified, but rather inserted into a blurred, malleable account of derregularised economy.

Table

Por dentro ya construyen barricadas,	Inside barricades are already been built
huele a goma quemada	It smells like burnt tyres
de mi gente de astilleros	From my people of the shipyard
Por fuera esos locos del levante	Outside these crazy people of the easterly wind
viendo los juegos del hambre	Watching the hunger games
de otro crucerito más	Of another cruise

Here, the tradition of protest linked to the specific space of the city’s dock is placed side by side the image of a happy populace that contents itself with singing its miseries and competing against each other while attempting to profit from the scraps of cruise economies and massive tourism in the Mediterranean. The copla does, however, not romanticise workers strikes; it does not simply criticises mass tourism either. Social conflict is presented as an internal force that puts carnival singing into tension. The por dentro and por fuera can therefore be interpreted as both an allusion to a stereotyping gaze projected upon the South of Iberia by the more industrialised (and supposedly more industrious) North, and as a direct acknowledgment of the contested field that carnival sonics represent in neoliberal times. This final option is masterfully expressed in the copla’s final verses, where the onslaught against industrial labour and the proletarian city and carnival singing are presented as part of a similar process of deregulation, one, however, where unexpected alliances can emerge:

Table

Por dentro la bahía ardiendo entera	Inside the entire bay burning up
a ver si España se entera	Let’s see if Spain understands
que aquí se vive de esto	That here we make a living out of this
Por fuera sol y playita	Outside sun and sunny beaches
Por dentro “¡No pasarán!”	Inside “¡No pasarán!” [they shall not past!]^14

It is worth remembering here that most performers do not make a living out of carnival music. This final strophe reveals that carnival musicians are crossed by a twofold discourse, a twofold interest, and that conditions their capacity for informal placemaking (as we observe if we compare the working space of the dockyard with the reference to beaches oriented towards cruise and mass tourism), but also situates them at the centre of the socioeconomic transformation of Cádiz and activist fronts. Carnival musicians are presented here not as passive victims of “creative economies;” rather, the fragment above rearticulates the shifting relationship between “high” and “low,” problematising the politics of labour at play in carnival.

El Sur sumiso actively engages with pressing socioeconomic issues, including gentrification, mass tourism, unemployment and systemic precariousness. The inclusion of explicit references to recent protests make emphasis on the active role that carnival plays in mobilising citizens and raising awareness. At the same time, however, the copla also acknowledges the limitations of carnivalesque subversion by pointing at carnival itself as part of the problem. Ultimately, El Sur sumiso points at the capacity of carnival coplas for politicising local social concerns whilst countering simplistic views that depict Cádiz as either a forgotten city where nothing happens or a hotspot of social unrest.

Conclusions. Frequencies of informal placemaking and the carnivalisation of urban experience

The examples examined in this article demonstrate that carnival remains an ambivalent source of urban transformation: if it has the capacity to register and alter the informal urban environment, it can also be mobilised as a top-down force. The relationship between these two elements (bottom-up informal creativity and top-down urban planning) is far from straightforward. In fact, carnival music challenges binary oppositions between formal and informal placemaking into question.

The previous sections made emphasis on the fact that carnival should be understood spatially and not just temporally. Critical readings of carnival have emphasised the temporal logic of this festivity, driven by its origin as part of the Catholic attempt to organise (and overcome) Pagan views of the world by controlling and overfilling the calendar with religious events (see Caro Baroja 1979). Those who see carnival as a safety valve astutely mobilised by those in power and those who recognise in carnival a source of revolutionary energy have something in common: they privilege the “when,” the temporal politics of the carnivalesque, over the “where.” Yet carnival can also be seen as a driving force in processes of spatial and urban reconfiguration. The censorship and control of “the masses” in carnival times often led to urban politics of confinement and securitisation that has historically impacted the urban tissue in ways that go beyond the narrow timeframe of carnival. Likewise, carnival subversion, and more specifically the creation of an acoustic space of emergence, have been central to the articulation of spaces of freedom and collective mobilisation. Carnival history is urban history and vice versa. What follows from here is that the analysis of carnival is indissolubly linked to the analysis of authoritarian and democratic forces. The recognition of carnival as a valuable cultural source, as heritage, entails important consequences for any consideration of the urban: for such recognition often anticipates a subtle but decisive movement of neoliberal spatial reorganisation that threatens the very conditions of possibility of democratic urban life. Carnival sonics, in short, do not just represent particular spaces of celebration, containment and contest. Rather, they condition “who belongs where” in original, unique ways.

These elements are precisely what differentiate carnival from cultural activism. Research on the latter (Deutsche 1996; Duncombe 2002; Garrido Castellano 2021; Kester 2011; Kwon 2004; Miles 1997) has emphasised the importance of creative interventions for the materialisation of more democratic and liveable urban spaces. Carnival music implies occupying the street, making space for collective decision making and establishing a public (and playful) space of negotiation. Carnival is recurrent, taking place every year, but this does not mean that it can feel urgent and be used to achieve sociopolitical change, as the example of the puntos violetas mentioned in the introduction demonstrates.

Carnival is simultaneously controlled (by the city council, but also by the tourism economy) and uncontrollable, the result of popular mobilisation. The fact that carnival “repeats itself” should not be seen as a limiting factor of its transformative capacity. In the context of the Spanish State, carnival (and especially Cádiz’s) has played an active role in challenging neoconservative politics and making sure that regular citizens keep access to public spaces.

Carnival can act as a platform for informal placemaking in at least three different ways: informal and temporal restrictions established in carnival times often lead to more permanent processes of securitisation and surveillance; informal transgression and occupations of the street generate a counter archive and an alternative psychogeography; finally, carnival creativity can also be consolidated through formal and informal public interventions, which in turn signify and reshape the urban texture (see Da Matta 1997). In all three elements, the distance between the formal and the informal is thin, and binary oppositions would hardly capture the fluidity and back-and-forth character of carnival-led practices of placemaking.

Carnival coplas address public space as a “common resource” (Van Oostrum 2022). Once the idea of carnival as a space-time of containment and regulated transgression is challenged, it becomes clear how carnival sonics work in a similar way to DIY cultural and activist interventions (see Enigbokan 2016) that problematise spatial politics, making space for alternative social alliances, revealing the hidden mass of unrecognised labour existing behind (while making possible) processes of urban cultural rebranding and tourism consumption. In carnival sonics, the proximity between urban struggles and social struggles is continuously negotiated and problematized.

The acoustic register explored in this article is but a minuscule part of a vibrant process of cultural creativity that involves thousands of passionate and informal creators producing hundreds of new coplas every year. Carnival in Cádiz cuts across social classes and goes far beyond the time for transgression taking place before Lent in the Catholic calendar. Importantly, its impact is long-lasting and cannot be reduced to the weeks in February when the festivity takes place: carnival coplas are sung all year long; they are remembered and remixed in future years; they shape conversations within and beyond Cádiz; finally, through the transnational dissemination of the festivity, they have become a central part of a shared cultural tradition.

When framed and understood from this perspective, Cádiz carnival urges us to pose important questions regarding popular participation and cultural activism in the configuration of urban spaces. While carnival music is commonly associated with a tradition of resorting to music to “deal with political topics,” this case shows that carnival music redefine the political through a complex engagement with the urban experience. Taking the form of a critical exploration of urban mobility; through a bottom-up engagement with the politics of placemaking deriving from the monumentalisation of carnival culture; by an examination of creative resilience by the city’s popular social substratum; or as a critical positioning in relation to the spatial logic of neoliberal creative economies: Cádiz carnival music emerges as a vibrant laboratory actively taking part in the redefinition of public life in turbulent times.

The focus on the sonic dimension of carnival allows us to explore subtler yet nevertheless powerful, strategies of making sense of the spatial dimension of creative agency. Carnival lyrics are collectively composed and performed. These pieces are always performed in key streets of Cádiz, where the division between (amateur) carnival musicians and audiences often blur. The affirmative dimension of many of these lyrics, where the working classes are celebrated as valid sources of cultural creativity, is scaled up through street performances. As a result, the spatial connotations of many lyrics (which make direct reference to individuals from popular neighbourhoods, to specific parts of Cádiz, to the living conditions and the urban experience of popular social classes) acquire an expanded dimension, as the lived performance of the copla generates a space of negotiation between musicians, public space and audience.

Street carnival performances in Cádiz activate participative strategies to problematise the boundary between “music” and “noise” and narrow the gap between sonic production and consumption. In these performances, participation is not encouraged. Rather, carnival groups achieve to communicate with urban audiences spontaneously, through the quality of the music and the respectability deriving from the trajectory of specific groups. These elements condition the audience’s attitude: as there are no physical boundaries or stage separating the singers from the crowds, the organisation of a shared acoustic space is left open and dependent on the audience’s aesthetic appreciation and good will to join the music aloud and “get closer” to the singing group. In recordings of street performances, it is common to find voices “asking for silence” and trying to ensure that nobody interferes with the act of singing and playing. This act, however, is anarchic and often adapts to audience responses. Appreciation is also shown by demanding the most popular lyrics from previous years, which are often sung aloud. It is worth remembering here that most performers do not make a living out of carnival music. Through street performances, therefore, an alternative sense of aesthetic appreciation is translated into the streets, turning the socio-political criticism that often characterises carnival lyrics into a material source of spatial mobilisation and collective affirmation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This article was produced in the context of the IRC Laureate Consolidator Project “Assessing the Contemporary Art Novel in Spanish and Portuguese: Cultural Labour, Personal Identification and the Materialisation of Alternative Art Worlds (ARTFICTIONS)” [IRCLA/2022/3890] funded by the Irish Research Council.

Notes

1. In Spanish, the term copla also refers to a popular composition quite common in flamenco music. Although sharing some characteristics with the genre, carnival coplas from Cádiz are a unique and distinct creative manifestation. Carnival coplas include a set of sub-genres, among them pasodobles, tangos and cuplés. These are performed by a diversity of carnival groups that often fall into four main categories: coros, chirigotas, comparsas and cuartetos. For a detailed description of the characteristics of each category, see Páramo (2017).

2. In truth, a type is more than a character and a costume and refers to the specific place of speech that carnival groups choose each year. The type conditions what is said and how the music is understood and received.

3. Carnival, in any event, poses interesting challenges to current debates on urban soundscapes, as carnivalesque practices often involve informal occupations of the public space. Furthermore, these practices become platforms for negotiating the politics of respectability and the spaces in between sound and noise in the urban context. For a detailed engagement with Cádiz street carnival as an urban soundscape, see Guerrero Quintero and Al Jende Medina (2012).

4. Mintz (1997, xv) thus characterises Cádiz as “the theatre of carnival song.”

5. Asef Bayat. Street politics are often analysed from the point of view of the written and spoken word. More is needed to understand how sonic emergence, as well as the politics of sound and noise, are central to public life.

6. A spatial analysis of the ways in which this happens is yet to be done; such endeavour, however, falls outside the scope of this article, which centres on popular music as a tool for collective mobilisation and sociopolitical debate.

7. As a native Andalusian, the author of this article is familiar with carnivalesque creativity, having participated in the festivity since a very early age. In the context of this article, this background is brought together with two long-term visits to Cádiz taking place in the first six months of 2023.

8. All the coplas examined in this article are presented here as the author’s free translation. The original in Spanish has been transcribed as literally as possible, respecting Andalusian phonetics and avoiding “sic” and corrections.

9. The link between the popular classes and animal forces can be found already in Bakhtin’s examination of the grotesque “lower bodily stratum” in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. See also Stallybrass and White (1986).

10. The example of the Casas Viejas revolt, a three days-long popular and anarchist mobilisation that was violently repressed in 1933, comes to mind here. See Mintz (2004).

11. Despite the process of financial deregularisation and the increasing weight of touristic and third-sector based economies, workers and trade unions, especially these linked to the port and shipyard, are still a central socio-political agent in the context of Cádiz.

12. This point is expressed at its best by Stallybrass and White (1986), who expand on the ambivalent positioning of the bourgeoisie in relation to carnival through the simultaneous mistrust and appropriation of the popular festive. See also Wills (1989).

13. Antonio Martínez Ares is one of the most well-known carnival musicians from Cádiz as well as one of the few authors that has a successful professional career outside the town.

14. “¡No pasarán!” was one of the most powerful slogans of the resistance against Francoism and fascism used during the Spanish Civil War.