A book a day: Rafael Jurado Arroyo: Rails and suitcases

Idioma original: español
Year of publication: 2024
Valuation: recommendable

Another review whose assessment must be explained and nuanced. It is impossible not to recommend a book like this for what it represents in itself, its intention alone, which is praiseworthy and universal: to reflect, through an extensive text, supported by a rich archive of images, how the phenomenon of Andalusian emigration (in this case, centered on the province of Córdoba) to various European countries occurred during three decades of the last century.

The word used to describe the phenomenon is already somewhat ambivalent. Not necessarily biased, but this massive displacement could accept different definitions, since for many of the emigrants it represented a challenge, an adventure, in any case a situation that brought with it a certain uncertainty, although, due to the unquestionable reality that in many cases it brought about the separation of families, terms like misfortune o tragedy They might sound excessive, but they are not lacking in some element when it comes to looking at the situation objectively as a whole. Although it must be understood, the book has brand new logos of official institutions on its cover, we are in 2024 with Andalusia in the hands of a conservative government. I do not know if this implies a certain degree of self-censorship, because the text is prone to detailed descriptions, to statistical data supported by figures, but there is no analytical emphasis on the causes of this migratory process, especially those that could have some kind of political motivation, since in that initial decade, the fifties, there were still ideological purification processes, Francoism had two long decades left and Andalusia was considered a breeding ground for the left.

Having made this reflection, which would have mutated the assessment into “cautious” or “prudent”, this literary and graphic study of the images that the emigrants, or their relatives, provided to the author, is invaluable and very valuable even after half a century. People who have dared to move to other countries, to learn other languages, to undergo immersion in other societies – those of Western Europe, Switzerland, France, Germany (then Federal) – for whom one can only feel admiration, both for their effort and sacrifice and for the enormous dignity that emerges from these photos, from the most conventional to those in which they seem to boast of their achievements, whether these were modest or not. For this same reason, for the unquestionable admiration that such daring, individual and collective, deserves, I think I would have appreciated something more than an enumeration of data and the result of a somewhat lukewarm informative study. An analysis that avoided the superficial description of images that speak for themselves. Just to put the issue into context, it’s July 8, 2024 and some people still want us to believe that people are moving from their places of origin on a whim.