The juxtaposed notions of landlessness and voice, which bring us here today, challenge the imagined tangibility attached to all expression. Most of us are familiar with notions of space, place and land or field and can even extend our abstractions to contestations of the same. Landlessness, however, presents us with a void in search of nomination, an awareness of the horizon that marks out the known as that which benefits from representation and the unknown as that which lacks any kind of representation. Recent post-structuralist critiques of representation point to the ‘polyphony’ of ethnographic fieldwork and to the many voices that contribute to the construction of apparently holistic notions or concepts. Similarly, much cultural theory revolves around the concept of deterritorialization as a key aspect of late modernity. Accompanying the modern drive to demarcate, label and define are the modern realities of displacement and migrancy. Places and people, once understood in terms of essence and continuity, are now perceived through the shifting contingencies of perspective and history. At the same time, it is important to not lose sight of the fact that major divergences in power exist between deterritorialization as a cultural feature of late modernity and landlessness as dispossession. The theorization of landlessness is surely connected to this increasing fluidity of the modern condition, yet the voices of the landless have surely echoed in many ways and on many occasions throughout history. To what extent and in what ways, then, do the landless or the dispossessed contribute to the construction of discourses and practices of power? By what means can the inflections of the dispossessed be discerned in and amongst the narratives and articulations that surround ‘us’, the landed, the voiced? An intrinsic paradox is thrown up by the imagination of landless voices: how and from where do these voices emerge, through what shared discourses do they speak and by what means do ‘we’ interpret ‘them’? The voice, despite its evanescence, its echoes and its silences, rises forth from a source, which is at once its location or origin. Like other representations, then, it comes with definition and boundary. Landlessness, however, evokes a fluidity that cannot be grasped unless it be solidified somehow through representation and hence rendered substantial. To talk about landlessness is in many ways to talk from the sharply differentiated and divided edges of the ‘landed’, i.e., to talk from diverse positions vis-à-vis that which is devoid of location. This attempt to consider landless voices leads me then, inevitably, to probe the links between land and voice, whereby the apparent solidity and stability of the one contrasts so clearly with the fleeting mobility and spontaneity of the other.

This paper sets out to explore landless voices via a study of the early development of the cante minero, or miners’ song, a type of flamenco that originated in the mid-nineteenth century around the mining villages of south-eastern Spain, in the vicinity of Almería and Murcia. My aim is to examine questions of mobility, exchange and representation by problematizing the miners’ song in terms of its origins and subsequent dislocations, whereby it has for over a century now been part of the larger scheme of deep song or cante jondo, in other words, ‘dark’ flamenco which presents numerous variations in the east-west stretch of southern Spain from Cádiz to Murcia. Within the repertoire of flamenco and its accompanying mythology, it is fair to say that the cante minero starkly underlines the existential and material uncertainties of the miner, whose life, paradoxically, is most at risk precisely when he steps into the depths of the earth. The link with land, in the cante minero, is double-edged - at once deadly and necessary for survival. Furthermore, unlike the notion of rooted community evoked by traditional peasant life-styles, mining underlines the modern, industrialized drive to move on and seek ‘a better life’ elsewhere. In this sense, both in the act of mining itself and in its socio-cultural consequences, man’s relation with land is one of rupture for the sake of capital, and not the more conventionally imagined sense of rooting. In the imaginary of flamenco apasionados, therefore, the cante minero accentuates the psychodrama attached to deep song, rendering it all the more unfathomable and mysterious. In his seminal text on flamenco, Flamenco: Deep Song (1994), the anthropologist Timothy Mitchell underlines the appropriation of popular voices by flamencologists as early as the nineteenth century. He provides numerous examples of how they steered deep song along structured routes of commercial viability by enhancing the mythical aura of dramatic despair, stating that this often allowed the song to trigger a sense of catharsis amongst audience and performers alike within the closely confined, traditional and ritualistic cultural contexts of Andalusia. Hence also the purist inclination amongst flamencologists to associate the cante minero with gitanos, usually considered to be on the road, although the miners of southeastern Spain were by no means all gypsies. The purist drive to essentialize flamenco and preserve myths of duende is visible in terms of the cante minero via association with death, danger, loss and insecurity. Nevertheless, because the cante minero, now long removed from its precarious origins, memorializes in a factual way the chronicles of everyday dangers faced in the process of mining, it also provides scholars and enthusiasts with an array of minute details related to mining. Furthermore, as many of the lyrics will indicate, the tales that are sung often tell of loss and flight or ruin. If the norm amongst flamencologists is to be given weight, then all indications are that the cante minero belongs indeed, not to the owners of the mines or even to those ‘successful’ in the mining venture, but to those who lost out on their stakes. Hence, the categorization of this kind of music as cante jondo or deep song.

Given that the miners, whose lives were given over to the expansion of capitalist production, are thus the central protagonists of the cante minero, it is not surprising to find numerous references to the hardships suffered. Physically and symbolically, mining involves struggle with the environment for the sake of economic gain. Rather than living in or connecting to the landscape, mining demands the exploitation of specific sites in order to extract resources for the construction of power and capital. In many ways, then, mining leads not to an engagement with land but rather with a combative interaction, followed by disengagement and departure. The modern dispersal of rooted communities is witnessed through the lives of miners, who often abandoned the peasant life for the greater economic gains to be had from industrialization. The song emerges as a result of the experiences and hardships of mining as well as of the migration triggered from neighbouring agricultural areas by the fast growth of the mining industry. In her seminal book, Cante flamenco, cante minero (1993), Génesis García Gómez traces the early history of this type of song, differentiating it from other forms of flamenco through the emphasis placed on its narrative content linked to the mines, as opposed to links with folklore or poetic romanticism. Place names, such as Linares, Cartagena, Almería, etc., mining experiences, the mention of dangers and temporal instability are core aspects of the range of established lyrics. The song vocalizes, witnesses and chronicles the popular realities of mining and is, in this sense, different from other forms of flamenco which attempt to express what is marginal to urban societies. Mining had existed in Spain from Roman times onwards, but following the loss of the colonies in the nineteenth century, it became the focus of renewed national interest as a means of regaining economic splendour. García Gómez states that in the nineteenth century, mining was the most dynamic sector of the nation, with lead and zinc being exported from the mountains of south-eastern Spain. Considerable labour migration took place from the 1850s onwards with the increasing discovery of resource sites. In the 1860s, over three million tons of lead were produced in Spain and transported to the lead markets in London. The mining industry flourished from that time onwards until the 1920s, when it abruptly fell into ruin. The rise of the mining industry brought with it a flurry of hope, as many spurned the chance of daily wages in favour of exploring the environment for new possibilities, often to their own disappointment. A scrutiny of the many cantes mineros reveals the rise and fall of mining in the area over a period of seventy or more years, charting both its excitements and its despairs and the accompanying emotional vicissitudes. While numerous documents chronicle details of the mining industry, the cante minero, many of whose lyrics have not changed since the nineteenth century, remains as one of the very few ways to gain insight into the daily lives of the miners.

The disruptions and excitements of mining prospects are not hard to imagine. Many preferred to claim their own sites rather than work for larger companies. In so doing, they often went into financial ruin or, worse still, paid for the venture with their lives, given the financial constraints imposed by their circumstances and the cost of purchasing adequate tools. The  rough and precarious conditions of a hired miner’s life are hard to overlook: under contract from companies which sought to safeguard their interests, miners were often required to bring their own tools, paid just enough to cover their needs and feed their donkeys, dig their own tunnels and were restricted by limits on how deep they could dig. Regulations were brought in to ensure that miners did not have unrestricted access to resources and prices were set unilaterally by the proprietors. Furthermore, new labour was frequently contracted in order to ensure that personal deals were not struck up between miners and site managers. Lingering feudal traditions and social hierarchies mixed with the profit-based capitalist ventures of modernity to create systems of inequality, leaving the masses of the miners in states of dispossession. Constant references to the mines in the lyrics of the songs do not detract from the fact that, as can well be imagined, the miners did not sing whilst working in the mines but rather in the near-by bars and taverns. Drawing on a large variety of local folk traditions as well as on already existing flamenco patterns from western and central Andalusia, such as the malagueña, mine workers gradually elaborated the cante minero. Like other forms of flamenco, the cante minero developed within a popular drinking culture, where alcohol helped to fuel improvisation. Furthermore, there is much evidence that, even when the mining industry had reached its heights, the majority of miners suffered untold hardships and the bars were often places of meeting and relaxation after work. They were also places where the patrón or proprietor would often lay down a few coins for a song. Flamencologists often state that the cante de las minas is at its most ‘authentic’ when sung in a hoarse voice - small wonder, as Mitchell states, when one considers the combined effects of dust and pollution inhaled as a matter of course by those men and boys, often as young as eight years old, who descended into the mines on a daily basis. According to Don Manuel Navarro, Director of the annual International Festival of the Cante de las Minas, oral histories of miners which have survived three or more generations in the area of La Unión in Murcia confirm that many miners slept in the same clothes they used for work, often living in caves in mountains without easy access to water and other facilities. In 1877, the level of illiteracy in south eastern Spain was at 90%. Prostitution, according to many sources, was not infrequent among the female relatives of miners as a means of supplementing income. The tavern and the cante minero are both closely implicated here. The notion of exchange is thus central to the cante minero, as indeed it is to much of flamenco. The song was at one and the same time a complaint, an expression of hardship and a commodity for sale. Perhaps loosened by alcohol, the lyrics of many songs also underline a sense of protest at the conditions endured. The following are a few examples: (See Mitchell (1994: 67-68) for more details of these and other songs.)

Miner, why do you work
If the product is not for you?
The jewels are for the proprietor
Mourning for your family
and a coffin for you.

Yet another song states the following:

Up the mountain, down the mountain,
I walk to and from work,
when I think of what I earn,
on my heels I turn.

The following lines specify in no uncertain terms the blending of lung disease with emotional anguish:

I don’t know if it’s the lead
or the sorrow that I have,
here inside I feel a knot
that leaves me without breath
and kills me little by little.

Unlike other forms of deep song which evoke death or tragedy as destined or inevitable, the sufferings narrated in the cantes de las minas are unmistakably linked to proletariat concerns. Conditions of employment, inequalities in pay, hazards at work and the death of colleagues, as opposed to relatives such as the mother, are central to many of the lyrics. Present here is the issue of fair material exchange and representation, with the song acting as a forum for airing dissatisfactions and complaints in an industrialized environment where trade unions would not be formalized until the 1870s. In this context, it is important to bear in mind that numerous workers’ organizations did take shape in the area from that time onwards in order to tackle the many pressing needs of miners. The lives of miners in the early twentieth century was thus little better in terms of rights and quality than those of slaves in earlier centuries. The political agency of the song cannot, thus, be underestimated. Clearly, the close references to working conditions, especially the question of salary, the detailed descriptions of misery and the constant threat of physical dangers posed by the mines echo those matters foregrounded by future workers’ associations.

The endurance of the cante minero despite the demise of the mining industry owes itself largely to the efforts of one enterprising individual. Antonio Grau Mora, better known in flamenco annals as El Rojo El Alpargatero, was born in Alicante into a family of sandal makers. He went on business to Almería in 1873, met a local woman and settled there for a while. Over the next four years, Rojo El Alpargatero developed a reputation as a singer of the cante de las minas, a skill developed since his arrival in Almería. Combining business with art, Rojo went on to live in other Andalusian cities, such as Málaga, taking the cante minero with him and introducing it to the numerous cafés cantantes or alcohol-soaked singing venues that were already in existence in southern Spain. In La Unión, in the province of Murcia, Rojo set up his own café cantante where he performed, thus establishing La Unión as the bedrock of the cante minero. There is much to substantiate the possibility that Rojo El Alpargatero was the first main mobilizer of the cante de las minas, marking thereby its disengagement from a direct relationship with mining and its subsequent dissemination across the now-well-established flamenco world, its appropriation by flamencologists such as the famous Antonio Mairena as one of the key palos or types within the flamenco repertoire and marking also its marketing potential as a commodity of exchange. Rojo was thus largely responsible for extending and perpetuating the notions of exchange and mobility attached to these musical representations of miners’ lives. He, more than others, was also responsible for the fact that the cante minero endures in the popular southern Spanish imaginary as a touchstone of the past century and as a key reminder of a way of life now gone by. The above-mentioned Festival of the Cante de las Minas which takes place every August in La Unión is proof that the miners’ song now pertains to flamenco performers, agents, aficionados and critics rather than to those whose lives it narrated.

Nevertheless, and despite this knowledge, the question pursues the listener as to how to make out the miners’ voices in present-day cantes mineros. What follows are two very different voices from recent times singing the cante minero. The first song was sung by José Serrano in 1998, when he was completing a 22 year sentence in the prison of Córdoba for having assisted in homicide when he was twenty or so years old.  For Serrano, the practice of song was part of the prison rehabilitation programme. The winner on one occasion of the national Penitentiary Flamenco competition, he was taken to studios accompanied by prison officials for the recording of this CD.

PLAY TARANTO - JOSÉ SERRANO – CD 2 ~Gritos de libertad

The next cante minero was sung by Carmen Linares, a leading female vocalist of flamenco, best-known for her skill with this kind of flamenco. As her surname indicates, she is from the former mining town of Linares, whereby the cante minero is considered to be her ‘native’ song. This is an excerpt from Carlos Saura’s film Flamenco (1995), a profile of leading figures in the flamenco world.

PLAY CARMEN LINARES - VIDEO FLAMENCO (SAURA, 1995)

It is hard for the novice or even for hardened flamenco apasionados to make categorical statements about what inflections these voices carry. Evident here is the mobility of the song, now long removed from its origins in the popular experiences of mining. Both Serrano, enclosed in the modern institution of prison and Linares, filmed by the acclaimed director Carlos Saura, provide faint representations of miners’ claims and dissatisfactions.  Amongst today’s best-known exponents of the cante de las minas are the well-established singers Linares and Enrique Morente, both of whom are widely traveled and international in their profile as singers. The question arises, then, as to what extent the cante de las minas can be said to represent the otherwise silenced history of these miners. The mobility of the song, as also its viability as a commodity of exchange, clearly raises questions as regards the accuracy of representation. Over a hundred and fifty years since the emergence of the cante de las minas as a genre of deep song, the legacy of the mines has been layered over with material concerns of a different kind, namely those of commercialization and material exchange. The representation of the miners’ lives through the song is thus arguably somewhat ‘other’ to that which it purports to represent. On the one hand, in the course of its travels over the last one hundred and twenty years or more, the song has shifted irrevocably from mining village to concert hall and recording studio. On the other, it mobilizes and re-presents the memory of mining, hence providing traces of on obscured political agency.

It cannot be denied that to listen out for the voices of those long-dead miners that echo in the lyrics of today’s cante minero is also to engage with on-going issues of exploitation, oppression and dispossession. In this sense, by disregarding any temporal boundaries between past and present, by allowing the past to gain new meaning in the present and hence to shed light on the latter, those on the margins of late capitalism can find a voice that perhaps matches their own concerns. The song projects, in many ways and in a more explicit form than other kinds of deep song, the concerns of the dispossessed, excluded from social gain by a system of exploitation that leveled and ransacked land and people in the capitalist quest for success. Both despite and because of the dissemination and commercialization of the miners’ song, set in motion by El Rojo El Alpargatero, the cante minero heard today both centralizes and ‘otherizes’ the voices of the economically underprivileged. To some extent, it could be argued that the appropriation of the song by market-led forces, its practice by largely  middle-class performers in middle-class venues alters its message and meaning. Equally, it could be said that only through such narratives as the songs provide can historical contexts, and hence historical ‘locations’, be constructed for the voices of today’s dispossessed.

Martin Stokes, in his book Ethnicity, Identity, Music (1997), connects voice with location. Music, he states, constructs locations for shared identities, allowing at the same time for connections to be made across space and time. Similarly, George Lipsitz, in his Dangerous Crossroads (1994), links popular music with what he refers to as the ‘poetics of place’.  In the context of the landless, then, music is of particular relevance as a potential mobilizer of change because it allows for an imagined ‘location’ that is at once stabilizing and transferable. Thus for Lipsitz as well as for Stokes, popular music opens up inroads between aggrieved or marginalized voices and the mainstream. In this sense, music, through the appeal of tempo and rhythm, becomes a vehicle for social change. The voices of the past, removed from their traditional locations and contexts, can be redeployed to serve immediate purposes. Writing on the music of ethnic minorities in the West, Iain Chambers (1994) suggests that by drawing First World and Third into a common time, the pulse of popular music can construct unexpected consequences. He suggests that the music of minority groups disturbs or weakens identification with the hegemonic power structures and with monolithic market forces. The result, he states, is a complex and asymmetrical structuring of fields of power, whereby popular music becomes charged with political agency.

In this context of mobility and exchange, it is no doubt important to note that the impact of any cultural or political representation of any kind of alterity must also depend on its reception. In an article entitled ‘Who Says Who Says?’, Brent Henze examines the role of ‘others’ in the politics of the oppressed. He states that

One outcome of [those] approaches to participating in the politics of the oppressed is that our ways of thinking about oppression must be modified. Rather than treat oppression as a binary force either oppressive or unoppressive to ourselves (and, if unoppressive, also unrelated to ourselves), we must see it as complex and relational, linking us to others and at the same time making us responsible for how we participate in the matrices of power that sustain oppression. [Moya and Hames-García (ed.): 2000: 149]

Underlying Henze’s statement is the dichotomy of Self and Other, stupifying and even violent when viewed as a binary, releasing when viewed as relation, although such relation is one borne out of difference.  In particular, Henze calls for a reflexivity in notions of self, whereby boundaries of self are also bridges of contact. In this sense, while the cante minero as cultural representation is in today’s contexts ‘other’ to those it originated from and also ‘other’ to the majority of those who hear it now, it is the very awareness of such otherness that allows these landless voices from the past to be heard. Indeed, such awareness becomes the sole means by which space can be made for those without location, and hence an agency be constructed for those who share the anxieties borne in the music. The need for roots, evoked by Simone Weil in her treatise of the same title, forces us to represent our ‘selves’ as lodged in discourse and history if we are to act as political agents. Equally, Weil states, justice ensues from regarding others as a different perspective on the world, requiring an openness to the distinctive voices of otherness. Imaginations of self and other in this light of openness render the voices of the landless as audible as our own. The ambivalence of the song in current contexts of late capitalism and relentless marketing undermines neither its potential to release voices from the past nor the on-going need to refigure the past in order to make sense of the present. What it also does is to highlight the extent to which the exploitation or dispossession of ‘others’ is viewed not in a binary light, whereby ‘we’, the ‘landed’, are not touched by what is voiced by ‘them’, ‘the landless’, but rather in terms of relation and connection. What ensues is not the question of whether or not we can hear the voices of those long-dead miners or of whether the song really did help to remedy their situation; rather, the issue at hand is the question of how we receive that imagined song and to what contexts and in what ways we pass it on. In terms of the cante de las minas, its representations of a particular people at a particular time, its migrant course and multiple applications, then, what matters is not arriving at concrete answers to questions of audibility and comprehension, but merely the willingness to give cultural memory meaning in the present, in other words, to listen and to act.

References

I. Chambers, 1994, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, London: Routledge

G. García Gómez, 1993, Cante flamenco, cante minero, Barcelona: Anthropos

G. Lipsitz, 1994, Dangerous Crossroads, London: Verso

T. Mitchell, 1994, Flamenco: Deep Song, London: Yale University Press

P.M.L. Moya and M.R. Hames-García (ed.), 2000, Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, California: University of California Press

M. Stokes, 1997, Ethnicity, Identity, Music, Oxford: Berg

Interview with Don Manuel Navarro, Director of the annual International Festival of the Cante de las Minas, La Unión, Murcia

J. Serrano and A. Agujetas, 2 Gritos de libertad, CD, 2000

C. Linares, excerpt from video of Flamenco (Saura, 1995)

Biographical note

Parvati Nair is a lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She writes on ethnicity and migration in Spain, especially in the context of music, film and photography. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Configuring Community: Theories, Narratives and Practices of Community Identities in Contemporary Spain (forthcoming, MHRA) and co-editor together with Steve Marsh of Gender and Spanish Cinema (forthcoming, Berg).

She can be contacted at: p.nair@qmul.ac.uk