Street Names and Political Regimes in an Andalusian Town

Abstract

The installation of each of the three socially transformative regimes of twentieth-century Spain (the Second Republic, the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco, and the restoration of democracy following his death) has been marked by sweeping changes in the street names of the Andalusian town of Almonte. This paper considers how the content of these toponymic changes reflects the goals, tactics, ideology, and ethos of each successive regime as it stipulated a new relationship between the inhabitants and those who govern them; the Second Republic used street names to advance its educational agenda, the dictatorship deployed toponyms to threaten the townspeople, and the socialist democracy fashioned a crafty symbolic compromise aimed at ending the onomastic cycle of victors and vanquished. (Onomastics, street names, political regimes, social identities, Andalusia) Dramatic, transformative personal or social events are commonly marked by a change of name (Afford 1988: 157-59). Personal and collective conversions are clearly announced when Saul becomes Paul, when Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe, when Petrograd becomes Leningrad and then returns to Petrograd. The assumption of new names not only signals a significant change in social direction for individual or collectivity, it also reveals much about the nature of the agency of that change. This article describes and interprets three wholesale transformations of street names in the Andalusian town of Almonte. These toponymic substitutions have accompanied each of the three major political upheavals of twentieth-century Spain: the brief establishment of the Second Republic in 1931, its fall to the lengthy dictatorship of General Francisco Franco beginning in 1936, and the revival of democracy following his death in 1975 (Carr 1982). Each new Spanish regime etched selected elements of its political and ideological agenda on the walls of the town in the form of street name plaques affixed to every public intersection of Almonte. The toponymic reworkings imposed by this community's succession of political leaders reflect the goals, tactics, and, indeed, the ethos of each new national government. Each regime in its choice of names not only eliminates toponymic references to political foes but also stipulates a particular kind of relationship between the townspeople and those who govern them, and reveals its distinctive mix of local, regional, and national orientations. In short, during this century local politicians have used the medium of street names as part of a national discourse about leadership and the principles guiding a new political order.(2) After first placing our work in the wider context of anthropological onomastics, we will describe how the major political transformations of modern Spain have affected the governance of Almonte. Then we will describe the methods we employed in acquiring and classifying our corpus of toponyms before turning to a description and interpretation of the three sweeping changes of street nomenclature which the town experienced in 1931, 1937, and 1981, as each new political regime sought to displace the public symbols of its predecessors. ANTHROPOLOGICAL ONOMASTICS AND THE POLITICS OF STREET NAMES Anthropological onomastics, as opposed to its geographical and historical counterparts, has tended to emphasize the study of personal, rather than place nomenclature systems, producing rich and subtle analyses of some variety. Anthropologists have argued, for example, that some personal naming customs directly reflect social structure and in fact contribute importantly to the cultural reproduction of the social system (e.g., Lindstrom 1985; Lea 1992). On the other hand, naming systems may also serve as mechanisms of social compensation for structural imbalances, thus inverting rather than mirroring important social principles (e. …