We are all the people of the Vega Baja now

Abstract

Immediate Struggles: People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain By Susanna Narotzky and Gavin Smith (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 2006,250 pp) For a while in modern European history, urban worker protest milieus had almost by definition been dependent on the involvement of two special types of worker intellectuals. The first was the journeyman printer; the second the artisan in the shoemakers' trade. The latter was commemorated by Hobsbawm and Scott as the (1984). Political shoemakers were a particular nineteenth century breed of urban artisans, with much independent control over their means of production, a proclivity for reading and conversation, and a peculiar air of radical republicanism that shaped a working-class urban public sphere of cafes, bistros, reading societies, underground circulations, and associations. That air sprang from their reading habit and their autonomy, but also from their gradual loss of control over the conditions of their trade and life. Throughout the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, entrepreneurs all over advanced Europe were shifting shoe production out of the older urban centers into emergent rural agglomerations unaffected by political regulations or working class organization. The manufactur? ing agglomerations that emerged?Northampton in the UK, Pirmasens in Germany, the Langstraat in the Netherlands?surely were places with surprisingly bristling popular cultures, but within them the fight for the public sphere of the political shoemakers had given way to bread-and-butter unionism, defensive fights over gender and the exploitation of mothers and daughters, and the desire of core workers, often unionists or shop stewards, to escape downward pressures and become entrepreneurs themselves (Kalb 1997). From the 1950s onwards, these northwestern centers were themselves dismantled in another round of relocations