A moving past: immigrants and emotions in Franco’s Bilbao

Recently awarded a prize in Spanish competitions, Marcel Barrena’s film El 47 (2024) has once again put the spotlight on the internal migrations that took place in Franco’s Spain. Beyond opinions about its artistic merits, we should highlight the intense emotional charge the film links to the migratory process, underlining the proud self-affirmation of the protagonists in the face of shameful material conditions.

There is nothing new about the cinema presenting human mobility during Franco’s regime with great sensitivity; it is enough to remember the heartbreaking story portrayed in José Antonio Nieves Conde’s film Surcos (1951). In addition to being a basic narrative resource to represent —or, if you prefer, embody— the migrants, feelings are also a central part of their life experience and the evaluation they themselves make of reality. It is therefore surprising that in many academic works, affective subjectivity is either relegated to identity and socioeconomic analysis or presented as pathology in jargon more suited to clinical psychology. In this sense, as the cited films seem to suggest, mid-20^th-century Spain constitutes a privileged setting for studying the role played by the emotional factor in the perception which host societies have of migrants, and also in the experiences of the migrants themselves.

Since the beginning of the 1940s, as is well-known, the poverty and hunger of the post-war afflicted the rural areas of Extremadura and Andalucía, but also those of Galicia and the two Castillas, forcing many families into an uncertain exodus towards the urban and industrialised areas of the country. From then on, and increasingly so, in the 50s and 60s the large cities in Spain —mainly Madrid and Barcelona— took in thousands of countrymen who had fled the poverty of the countryside. Given the lack of affordable housing solutions for the newcomers, shantytowns and marginal neighbourhoods sprang up which questioned the apparent prosperity of the host cities and also the hopeful search for happiness which had motivated the migrations. In the middle of the twentieth century, Franco’s regime set about demolishing the shacks and building flats to control what the then Minister for housing, José Luis Arrese from Bilbao, described as «anarchic immigration» which, as it attacked the «sacred enclosure of the home», was generating a «moral» problem.

As well as Madrid and Barcelona, Bilbao was another city which saw its urban and social structure change rapidly due to the influx of migrants from nearby regions —Cantabria, Castilla y León, and Galicia— but also from more distant ones —Extremadura and Andalucía. Between 1940 and 1970 the capital of Biscay’s population doubled, which led to widespread subletting and the appearance of many shantytowns. Thus, in the mid-1950s, Masustegi sprang up on the side of Mount Carmelo, where a large group of migrants settled, mostly Galicians. The ramshackle migrant housing also occupied much more central parts of the city, like the Campa de los Ingleses, near which the iconic Guggenheim Museum now stands. Estimates at the time said that in 1961, over 26,000 people lived in around 5,000 sub-standard dwellings in 26 locations of Bilbao.

This growing social problem soon hit the pages of the local papers which, following Christian doctrine, called for the intervention of the authorities by describing the housing situation of the newcomers as «a sad reality» which brought pangs to your «heart […] and should shame everyone». In the early 1960s, given such pressure, Franco’s regime set about building 500 homes in the shanty area of Uretamendi and several blocks of flats in Otxarkoaga, an organised new township on the outskirts of Bilbao. The dictator’s propaganda apparatus, which even commissioned cinema director Jordi Grau to make a documentary about the housing project, also used feelings to present Franco as the «driving force» behind measures to try to help thousands escape from «their sad suffering» and feel «the joys of a healthy home». This sentimental rhetoric was used to justify the forced evictions to the new housing, whose location and characteristics foreboded that their inhabitants would remain marginalised.

Nevertheless, during the last years of Franco and the first years of democracy, the material conditions of the migrants improved progressively thanks to, among other things, the actions of the Catholic Church and especially the demands of neighbourhood associations. Despite this, the new Bilbainos continued to face exclusion and tales in which they appeared as mal-adapted creatures who spoilt the civilising happiness of the city. The drug dealing and juvenile delinquency which affected majority immigrant neighbourhoods in the 1980s also contributed to this bad reputation. Even so, several testimonies suggest that overcoming penury enabled them to forget the shame many had previously felt as a way of adapting to a stigmatising environment. With time, sadness and embarrassment gave way to a strong feeling of pride in their humble and outsider origins which, as well as being identity elements meriting social recognition, were also proof of their efforts to integrate into the host society.

Thus, feelings were not just present in public narratives about those who arrived in Bilbao during Franco’s regime, but also in their own experiences during those years and their eventual adaptation to their surroundings. In the end, as the case of Bilbao shows, the centrality of this emotional dimension for the migrants in that bleak Spain has turned their life stories into a moving past.

Luis G. Martínez del Campo is a researcher in Contemporary History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Sspain). Currently he is enjoying a Ramón y Cajal 2021 grant under the title Contemporary International History / Language and Diplomacy. The Cultural Dimension of Twentieth-Century International Relations, RYC2021-034985-I, Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Fondos Next-Generation-EU.

Further reading:

López Simón, I. 2016. «Otxarkoaga, un caso de poblado dirigido en Bilbao. De la chabola a la marginalización urbana en el desarrollismo franquista», Historia Contemporánea, 52: 309-345.

Martínez del Campo, LG. 2023.  «Ciudadanos melancólicos. Narrativas emocionales sobre la inmigración en el Bilbao franquista», Investigaciones Históricas. Época Moderna y Contemporánea, 43: 209-235.