The “indignant” pilgrim: Cultural narratives of crisis and renewal in the 15M movement in Spain

ABSTRACT

On Saturday July 23, 2011, Guillermo, a young student from Lleida (Catalonia, Spain), who had been camping out since the beginning of the 15M movement, arrived in Madrid after walking over 450 kilometers, in one of the six columns that had crossed the Iberian Peninsula during the previous weeks. The “Popular Indignant March” had been conceived as an original way of rounding off the occupations of hundreds of squares throughout Spain, their objective being Puerta del Sol in Madrid, the first square to be occupied. On the way, which was from the urban periphery toward the center, passing by the rural Spanish plateau, the population's claims and complaints were to be gathered and taken to the agora of the participatory democracy. The experience of having groups of people walking from different origins with a common destination evokes the classical anthropological experience of the religious pilgrimage. Spain's best example is the Camino de Santiago, which has attracted thousands of pilgrims from all over Europe since the Middle Ages. When we ask Guillermo about this parallelism, he denies any spiritual content, although his account of Camino de Sol is like the fulfillment of a civic promise, the ritualization of a festive and revindicative appropriation of the territory, the colonization of a terra incognita that they had taken over two months before, on 15M, when the hashtag #spanishrevolution became a trending topic within the social networks. The article relates this experience to the narratives of the 15M movement and to the situation of young people in Spain in times of crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• 15M
• crisis
• Indignados
• pilgrimage
• social movements
• youth

Acknowledgments

This research was presented to the CRIC quick-off conference (Newcastle, UK, June 2015). I am grateful to Teresa López for the translation from the original Spanish text, and to Jorge Catalá and Patricia Oliart for their comments to the first version of the article.

Funding

This article is part of the research project named CRIC – Cultural Narratives of Crisis and Renewal, European Union (H2020-MSCA-RISE-2014–645666). It is also indebted to the project GENIND – An Indignant Generation? Space, Power, and Culture in the Youth Movements of 2011, Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (CSO2012–34415).

Notes

1. We have analyzed more in detail the narratives of the 15M movement in the context of the crisis in Feixa et al. 1–12; Soler, Planas, and Feixa 62–78; Fernández-Planells, Figueras, and Feixa 1287–308.

2. Congressman Llamazares delivered a selection of the notebooks to Congress during the session of July 27, 2011. It is inevitable to compare this with the cahiers de doléances from the 1789 French Revolution that congressmen collected throughout France and took to the Constitutional Assembly, in which the bad government and perversion of feudalism were denounced. Although for Guillermo, the most direct comparison was with Che Guevara's Diarios de Motocicleta, notebooks of complaints from further away in geographical terms, but nearer in generational terms.

3. The interview was conducted with the Brazilian youth researcher Maurício Perondi, with whom I wrote a first Spanish version of this narrative (Feixa and Nofre, #GeneraciónIndignada).

4. The complete translation of this narrative, and its Spanish original version, is available at the website of CRIC: www.culturalnarratives.co.uk.

5. The march was supposed to reach Madrid on Saturday, July 23, 2011; therefore, they left from the different camps a few weeks earlier. According to the Zaragoza Column Road Map (the so-called Route N-II, named after the road it followed), the march left on Thursday, July 7, and for 16 days they walked through the roads of Aragon and Castile (see Table 1).

6. According to the Route Blog, the assembly took place on Wednesday, July 6: “Today Wednesday at 19:00 there is an assembly in the neighborhood of La Almozara, in the Plaza de las Alcahuetas. After the assembly, around 21:00, there will be a gathering at La Almozara park, next to Aljafería, where the participants and sympathisers will spend the night. At 07:00 on Thursday, the march towards Madrid will start” (6 July 2011 07:21), <http://marchapopularindignada.wordpress.com/ruta-noroeste-2/ruta-zaragoza>.

7. The route blog is full of messages of support like the following: “I can provide food, first aid material, a place to sleep, a shower, etc. Please, if there is anything you need, just ask” (message from 19 July 2011), <http://marchapopularindignada.wordpress.com/ruta-noroeste-2/ruta-zaragoza>.

8. Literally: “dogflute,” it would be equivalent to the expression “left-wing tramps” (TN).

9. According to the Popular Indignant March webpage, there were six main columns: Northwestern (Galicia and Asturias), Northern (Euskadi, Nafarroa, Rioja), Northeastern (Barcelona), Eastern (Valencia), Southern (Andalucía), and an Extremaduran column, along with several sub-routes (such as the column from the Canaries, from the Southeast (Málaga), Murcia and Zaragoza or the N-II road).

10. Another example of Route chronotope evoked by Guillermo is The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Che Guevara, the journey of another lucid and crazy revolutionary throughout South America.

11. The academic literature about the “Camino de Santiago” is very extensive. We will cite only a beautiful anthropological reflection published precisely the same year of the 15M (Prat 495–529).

12. See the reader Utopías del renacimiento (VVAA), with a useful introduction by Imaz

13. In his youthful essay “Metaphysik der Jugend,” written during his university years in 1914, Walter Benjamin expressed the capacity of youth to prefigurate new trends in social and cultural renewal.

14. A suggestive analysis of the same period, based on Walter Benjamin's work, can be found in Mourenza.