Cotton, hot sun, and "gitanos" in southern Spain - (part 1 of 2)

The mid-afternoon sun was high in the sky, and she guessed that the temperature was well above 45° (our 100°).  Her straw hat at least protected her face, but she longed to lie in the shade next to a cool stream.

She could hear her oldest brother in the row next to hers, as he sang.  He was a lot farther up his row.  He worked fast.

She wore work gloves because otherwise, the cotton bowls scratched her hands, but the gloves made her pick the cotton more slowly and made her hands sweat.  Her parents, in the two rows on the other side, and the other adults didn't use gloves because they needed to get the harvest in.  If they didn´t, they'd lose their job.

Half the field away, there was another group of 12 working on their rows.  With the two groups working from sun up to sun down,  the cotton should all be harvested in 3-4 days.  If nothing went wrong.

Last year, she's put her hands in a bees´ nest and even though she ran fast, she got a lot of stings.  That really slowed things down.  She had to stop work for the next few days and her mother took off the first afternoon, to tend to her.

She didn't understand why no one in the other group ever sang.  In her group, all of them family, there was always someone singing...singing to  help pass the time and forget about the aching backs and sore hands while they worked;  the young men from the men's and boy's cortijo (sleeping shed) singing at night to their girlfriends in her cortijo;  the old women and men getting together outside at night after work, singing the old songs just for the sheer pleasure of listening them.

When she asked her mom why no one in the other group sang, all her mother would say is that "We are gitanos (Spanish Gypsies).  They are not."

She wished the field were smaller, but she knew that when they finished with this cotton, the neighboring estate owner would want them to work there.  And after all the cotton was gone, it would be nearly time for the olives.  Then the grapes.  The adults started in mid-spring, pruning the grapes.  The fava beans came next, and everyone worked on those.  Then, the garbanzos, cotton, olives, and the grape harvest.   The grape harvest was the big one, the really important one.  Without the grapes, they might not have enough to make it through the year.

A field of fava beans in Andalucia, southern Spain.

She knew that because her mom and dad told her when she complained about how hard it was to spend months and months harvesting crops.  They told her she needed to get used to it, because when she was 14 or 15, if she wasn´t already married and probably even if she was, she would have to work harder, like the other adults.

In the winter, when there was no work in the fields, they lived in town.  Her dad told her the town was called Jerez de la Frontera, and that it was part of a big country called Spain.  He told her that there were other countries in the world, but they didn´t matter because they were far away.

Her two oldest uncles didn´t live in town, though.  They lived in little shacks made of tin out by the river.  She liked to go visit them sometimes but was glad she didn´t live in a shack.  In her family´s rooms, when it rained, the water didn´t leak in and in the winter, the cold air didn´t come in around the cracks.

Even though in her family´s rooms, they had to bring water up from the well in the courtyard to have something to drink and for her mom to wash up.  In the summer, one corner of the courtyard smelled really bad because that was where the outhouse was.  She didn´t much like going to the outhouse in the summer, it was so stinky, but you had to get used to it.

[We'll conclude this with part 2, which we'll publish on Nov. 1, 2014.]
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We are working on a documentary about flamenco and its connection to the gitano community.  Go HERE to see the web site and a trailer, and HERE to sign up for our newsletter so you can keep up with the progress on our work.