The Stereotype Of The Good Palmero

THE STEREOTYPE OF THE GOOD PALMERO To speak of criminality in La Palma – in the Canary Islands – was almost heresy at the time of our study. Few things were more unanimous at that time, among local, peninsular and foreign writers, than the portrait of a peaceful island society, with simple and relaxed customs. At the beginning of the 1860s, Benigno Carballo, from Llan, spoke of the scarcity of crimes – "rarely murders" – in the Canary Islands compared to other Spanish provinces and of the peasant preference for the long stick rather than the knife; 5 an opinion subscribed to by Busto y Blanco and Pérez de Aguiar from A Coruña.6 On La Palma, in particular, the virtues of its peasantry were celebrated by their own – e.g., the "praise of the peasant" by Fernández Cabrera7 – and by strangers such as the travellers Herman Christ8 and Olivia Stone. The latter had already found the prison of Santa Cruz de La Palma very informal in October 1883; It was as if the various men and women who occupied it were "playing at being prisoners", since escape was not a problem as soon as they set their minds to it. Nor were the local authorities at all concerned, perhaps, he believed, because of the prison nature of the small island itself or because there was "very little crime, mostly robbery and theft".9 Even the island's press prided itself on the fact that, on occasion, the capital's prison remained empty for weeks.10 Some objective data confirm this: in 1861, the district of Santa Cruz de La Palma dealt with far fewer criminal cases not only than Santa Cruz de Tenerife, but even than Arrecife de Lanzarote; 11 In addition, only ten cases of completed homicide, plus another three in the degree of attempted homicide, are provided by the register of convicts of the Court of First Instance of Santa Cruz de La Palma between 1849 and 1931. (It should be borne in mind that since 1913 there has been a second Court of First Instance on the island with headquarters in Los Llanos; and with respect to the one in question, that infanticides, or unpunished homicides at the hands of the Guardia Civil12 or because in some cases there is no evidence to catch the murderer, nor those committed in the final years of the 1920s, which have not yet been tried and therefore not recorded; and that severe cases of ill-treatment of women by their husbands do not go beyond a simple misdemeanour at best).13 The sum (10 + 3) represents only 1.66% of the overall count of registered crimes (see Table 1). We are, therefore, faced with an extremely rare type of crime on an island of 30 to 53 thousand inhabitants in the extreme years of the limited period. So much so that the murder was an impressive event among the people of La Palma, sometimes turning the perpetrator into a legendary and fearsome celebrity, and at other times, especially if it was a murder peppered with sensual passion, into a popular spectacle in the form of a printed romance sold by the blind. The enormous echo of such crimes in the island's press is also proof of the fascination aroused. Only in this way can it be understood that the newspaper La Lucha, in 1926, recorded in its section of "palm tree anniversaries" the anniversary of a crime of passion that occurred in Breña Alta... in 1844.14 There is no doubt, then, about the strength of the stereotype of the "good palmero" (an imitation of the Roussonian ideal of the "good savage", naturally peaceful and without malice). However, this idyllic vision of the island's popular classes, especially the peasant, thus recreated by the ruling class, hides another, more complex reality that reveals, as J. Fontana points out, "the repressive documentation of the courts": that of a peasant criminalized by the penal laws of the liberal state, which, in their defense of private property, They condemn certain peasant practices, such as those related to the traditional use of forests and pastures, considering them as criminal acts of ignorant individuals, but maintaining the homogeneous vision of the healthy, happy and virtuous "eternal peasant". For a certain historiographical current, however, they would be forms of resistance and social protest of the peasantry against the disappearance of the old agrarian world, which would respond to the latent social tensions on "the capitalist road to progress", opposing it with "a different social project".15 Thus, the criminal statistics offered by the Court of First Instance of Santa Cruz de La Palma between 1849 and 1931 (table 1), It reveals the predominance of crimes against private property (47% of those convicted of theft and robbery, but it should be borne in mind that behind some of the 20% of those convicted of "injuries" often lay the attack on the property of others as the driving force). The social background of the convicts is also significant: 47 per cent are "farm workers" and "day labourers", compared to "farmers" (5 per cent) and "landowners" (4 per cent); or against urban artisans (14%) and women of "their home" (10%, which does not include all female trades such as charcoal burners, woodcutters, maids, etc.). If we only consider the number of convicts registered in the first two decades, in which the so-called "forest crime" (unlicensed wood cutting, damage, fire, etc.) appears as a differentiated type, added to the figures for theft and robbery, they add up to 67% of the convicts.17 In contrast to the old regimental legal system, which emphasized crimes against sexual morality and therefore prosecuted a high percentage of women, Leaving crimes against property in the background,18 in the bourgeois liberalism the protagonism of the poor peasantry is evident, as well as the social root of most of the crimes charged, an expression of a profoundly unequal and unjust socio-economic system, in the face of which, also in the case of La Palma, one could speak of forms of peasant resistance. if not as a conscious political struggle, then as a deaf disorganized social protest (it also includes resistance to the payment of contributions, the avoidance of military service, disobedience of municipal ordinances, etc.),19 which, although it did not endanger the established order, unleashed its repressive reaction. But, in addition, in the first volume of the Registry of Convicts (1849-1869) the harshness of the penal code of 1848, under the repressive regime of Narváez, is observed, in the fact that it brought together only in two decades a greater number of convicts than in the following sixty years under the code of 1870, more generous in the consideration of criminal matters in accordance with the spirit of the Democratic Six-Year Term.20 Having established this general panorama of the predominant insular crime, We begin to assess the role played in the commission of certain types of crime in La Palma by emigration to Cuba, an almost exclusive destination for the people of La Palma overseas. We insist once again on the veracity of the explanatory model according to which Cuba acted as an escape valve for social tensions on La Palma, as well as a benign softener for the island's criminality. The continuous influx of capital from the Antilles, the important commercial transactions between the two islands and the gradual access to small property in the land, especially during the peak period of migration from 1880 to 1920, were mitigating factors of "social delinquency"; For this reason, it increased during the Cuban war at the end of the century, in the opinion of those who previously held the stereotype of the "good palmero", as will be seen later. But there is the other side of the coin, the nuance that gives greater complexity to the commonplace of Antillean benignity, if you will, the exceptional that confirms the rule and that we will try to point out in the following pages. We have tried to distinguish between what is the direct or indirect influence of emigration to Cuba on the island's criminality, and what is a mere circumstantial relationship due to the fact that at that time there were few people from La Palma without a personal or close experience with emigration.21 We understand, for example, that the homicide committed in Mazo during a welcome party for the unexpected return of an Indian in August 1913, perpetrated by the host of the church and brother of the newcomer in the person of one of the guests, because the victim took some liberties with the matador's wife, has only an accidental connection with the migratory phenomenon.22 So also, two years earlier, in the murder of the forestry employee León Felipe Fernández, He was a fearless republican and anti-clerical, at the hands of a mentally disturbed man named Pedro Calero Batista, a religious fanatic who claimed to be guided by a Light that ordered him to shed the blood of a "servant of the devil", and who took him as a veguero in San Juan y Martínez, Viñales and Cabaiguán for years to enter an insane asylum in Havana before his return to La Palma, We do not see as a determining factor what he declared with mystical exaltation to a journalist in the prison of the capital of La Palma: "Cuba was oppressed and by shedding the blood of its enemies it became independent and free. Thus I, by smiting man, have made peace with my conscience and with my Creator."