This is the first time Madrid has avoided the center at Christmas, so I’ll respect the rule and head to the outskirts, about six and a half kilometers from Puerta del Sol. It might not seem like much, but there are many worlds between downtown and Orcasitas. And if today, in the midst of globalization, these differences exist, even less in the sixties, when window shopping competitions were organized on Fuencarral Street for Christmas and in the area belonging to the Usera district there was no electricity, no water, no paved streets… There was mud, a lot of mud.
Mud is one of the most repeated words in newspaper articles, in the stories of neighbors and in the images of these lands which, in the fifties and sixties, began to be populated by those who arrived from a much more distant periphery and which began to empty. The rural exodus is taking hold on the outskirts of large cities; Their promised land was clay, and from there they began to mold everything. They built the city, their neighborhood, at the same time as they built their new life and became aware of their rights and obligations as citizens and claimed them. They demanded basic public services to survive, came together to gain strength and thus neighborhood associations were born. The one from Orcasitas was born in September 1970, we hear a very young Félix López-Rey say in Toni Calabuig’s documentary The city is ours (1975).
Orcasitas was not a unique case, neither in Madrid nor in the country, but it was one of the most recognized. The one in the Torre Baró district of Barcelona was not either, even if it stood out last year thanks to The 47th. Manuel Vital and López-Rey were never alone, they could not have achieved what they achieved. The Orcasitas Neighborhood Association has been active for 55 years, with a lot of history and documentation behind it. Material that preserves the memory and achievements of neighbors, citizens, the population of a country, which is written on the periphery of the centers of power. Thus, the Historical Archives of Social Movements (an agency of the Ministry of Culture) recently integrated the archives of the Orcasitas neighborhood movement into their collections. And it is behind other similar income from FRAVM (Regional Federation of Neighborhood Associations of Madrid).
What does this integration mean? That these archives dedicated to civil documentation, generated by citizens and not by institutions, will ensure the future of the heterogeneous memory of Orcasitas, materialized by reports, invoices, photographs, posters, fanzines, CDs, slides, press clippings… The oldest document dates from 1961, it is already heritage, just like those which are over 40 years old. Everything will be accessible when the cleaning, conservation, classification and recording tasks required by each object are completed. The neighborhood movements were already historic, that of Orcasitas is very recognized; In addition, it is now institutionalized and everyone can consult it.
The role of archives as protectors of the past so that it reaches the future safely is fundamental, thanks to them we have the evidence of history. If we kept this census carried out in Judea at the time of Emperor Augustus and for which this couple from Nazareth, Mary and Joseph, had to go to Bethlehem to register, another rooster would crow.
Not the rooster, but the chicken that the grandmother of a girl from Orcasitas, from a village in Alcarreño, sang every Christmas in the late fifties. This young girl is now 71 years old and no longer lives there. His memory of his childhood in the neighborhood is hazy, but he remembers how the bird he was supposed to pick up arrived on the bus. It was inside a basket covered with sewn cloth, it carried grain for the chicken to eat during the journey. The end, you can already imagine: a tasty delicacy raised in the open air among fields of wheat and other cereals for a day like today more than 60 years ago. Now it would be paid at a high price, so it was the Christmas meal for those who could not afford to buy the turkeys from the turkey farmers who came to Orcasitas.
This memory, this oral history that I am writing today, is also part of the Spanish documentary heritage.
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