Cristóbal and palm

Cristóbal Gómez was born in 1930 in Cerro Mulera, near Ubrique, in the Sierra de Cádiz (Spain). He currently lives with his daughter, Isabel, in the old part of Ubrique. When Cristóbal was a child his family lived in a hut in the mountains. «In those days lots of people lived in the countryside» he says. Families had animals and did «whatever there was»: cork, charcoal, reaping, or harvesting and selling wild vegetables such as asparagus and tagarnina or little thistles (Scolymus hispanicus). In July 1936 when Cristóbal was 6 years old, Franco’s troops occupied Ubrique. He remembers the Falangists [members of the Falange, Spanish fascist party] when they passed through Cerro Mulera singing their anthem Cara al Sol. «As my parents saw they were killing a lot of people we lived in hiding for a few months», he explains.

Cristóbal’s family had to move on several occasions. When they reached a new place, they would build a hut with stones and heather or broom or other plants or occupied an abandoned hut. Cristóbal calls small round dwellings chozos and longer, rectangular ones chozas. He has known one-roomed and two-roomed huts: one was used for cooking and the other for sleeping. As a young man, when he worked seasonally making charcoal ovens, he would build himself a hut with just sticks and branches: it was cone-shaped and called a morisco.

Cristóbal did not go to school. He learned to read and write and the «four [arithmetic] rules» when he was 12 from an old man who taught moving around from ranch to ranch in the mountains. He had no qualifications an no salary from the administration and was known as a country schoolmaster. Those families who could paid him some money, and he was always given food and lodging in the ranch where he arrived at night. Cristóbal’s father chose this teacher because he knew he didn´t hit his pupils as others did.

From a very early age Cristóbal wove long cords of tonisa and empleita (plait) —rope and strip of braided palm leaves, respectively— and his father used this material to make farming implements for working in the fields and with de cattle. Wild palms, palms, or dwarf palms (Chamaerops humilis) grow naturally in these Mediterranean mountains amongst gall oaks, cork oaks, wild olives and carob trees. Cristóbal shares his experiences while he shows me how to work palm leaves. When he was 8 they gave him the job of looking after a pig in the countryside; shouldering this huge responsibility, the child made a sling of tonisa to throw stones at the pig if it wandered off up the mountain. This was the first object he made with dwarf palm leaves, and he advanced his learning process by asking his father and one of his brothers. As the need arose, Cristóbal learnt to make implements, baskets, capachas peteneras (petenera sacks), capachas de mandaos (errand sacks), saddlebags, mats, blowers…

Aged 93, Cristóbal tends a vegetable plot he has rented a few kilometers away on foot. In the evenings he works with palm leaves. He still makes his own utensils: «I make them because I can», he explains. He doesn’t sell his work, he gives it to people, as he thinks that it is priceless. «The teacher doesn´t talk about his expertise, that’s for the pupil to judge», he suggests when I thank him for his good teaching.

Cristóbal rips or separates the leaves of the selected cojollos (shoots) one by one. Then he checks each one and if it is too wide, he sticks his fingernail in and rips out the middle: «They need to be even». When he makes the plait he is careful that the straight edge of each bit of leaf he adds faces outwards: this way he adjusts the width of the plait so that it is easier to sew with the tonisa and more resistant. «We must make sure the palm doesn’t suffer», he reminds me, because if damaged or tensed too much the result may be jeopardized. Cristóbal uses all the vegetable fiber: the narrower leaves are used for making miniatures, and from the waste he also weaves plaits.

While I struggle from the start, Cristóbal’s gnarled, rude fingers quickly shape the fibrous and flexible palm leaves. Memories sprout as the object takes its prodigious shape: a bunch of palm leaves has become a blower, noble object long-lasting and useful for human life.

Cristóbal Gómez shows his works and gives some details about the palm work. (Video made in Ubrique, Cádiz, by Juan Manuel Román in June 2023).

Beatriz Díaz Martínez graduated in Biology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) and specialises in Environmental Biology. She works as a freelance writer and researcher. She has wide experience in researching Oral Memory through interactive group workshops and in-depth life stories, specialising in daily life and survival mechanisms.

Among her works we highlight: the audiovisual archive of life stories in the Basque Country Herri Memoria (2014-2016), carried out with Elkasko Association for Historical Research and funded by the Basque Gobernment; her independent research Vida cotidiana en las chozas and en las chabolas (Daily life in huts and shucks, 2013-2018) and Maestros de Campo y Escuelas Particulares. Enseñanza no formal durante los siglos XIX y XX (Itinerant field teachers and little private schools: non-formal education in the19th and 20th centuries) (2012-2023), both in Tarifa (Cádiz); and her work on oral memory with Editorial Tréveris on the Worker town of Los Hurones reservoir in Sierra de Cádiz (2022-2023). Her latest books are Sumario 301 contra Milagros Ruiz López y trece más (Summary proceedings 301 against Milagros Ruiz López and thirteen others), Las manos siempre mojadas (Hands always wet) and Juntar las letras. La Alfabetización en el campo; del afán de saber a la autogestión (Link de letters together. Literacy in the countryside: from the desire for knowledge to self-management).

On the Virtual Museum of Human Ecology you can find the following by Beatriz Díaz: Walls of stone and roof of bulrushes, Urbanisation Ecology and Stone oven: nutritional autonomy and communal living, the work of the month Women as guarantors of life in shacks in La Línea, Cádiz and the temporary exhibition Gibraltar and La Línea: a cross-border community in oral memory.