from Dissent magazine:
Hope Lives in Puerta del SolBrandon Storm - May 27, 2011 12:08 pm
¡Madrid será la tumba del neoliberalismo! Madrid will be the tomb of neoliberalism! Arriving at the city center from my university in the suburbs of Spain’s capital, this bold declaration—hand-written on a large banner in Puerta del Sol, the geographic center of Spain and busiest plaza in Madrid—was my first exposure to the massive popular demonstrations, or asambleas populares as their participants call them, that sprung up across Spain in the days leading up to municipal elections on Sunday, May 22.
Like most new political developments, this initially provoked only cynicism in me. I had heard similarly audacious statements from larger groups of people in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles—and the political scene back home seemed as dire and depressing as ever.
Yet sitting on the hot concrete in Sol on election Sunday, I couldn’t help but be infected with a strange and uncharacteristic sense of hope and determination. This really was unlike anything I’d seen in the United States. Although the asamblea had been billed by most of the media as a youth protest—and there certainly wasn’t any shortage of hip students and makeshift banners with strident, leftist mottos—it really did feel, more than anything else, like an impromptu community. Plenty of irate, if well-put-together, older Spanish women with umbrellas to block out the sun had joined the young men donning newspapers folded into makeshift sun hats at the center of plaza. There, a young woman with a microphone and several people translating into sign language conducted the assembly with a precision and openness more characteristic of a board meeting or diversity workshop than a popular demonstration.
A strong sense of solidarity and decorum also separated the asamblea from demonstrations I had attended in the United States. In the cramped and hot space, good Samaritans with spray bottles had placed themselves strategically throughout the crowd to spray mist in the air around their compañeros; an intricate form of mass sign language seemed to have taken hold, replacing raucous applause with the surprisingly satisfying gesture of tens of thousands of jazz hands being raised into the air and shaken vigorously; shouts of “¡Agua, agua!” came not from vendors taking advantage of the huge crowds (such as the people hawking rainbow flags at the National Equality March in Washington, D.C. in 2009) but from people walking around, apparently of their own initiative, to make sure nobody was dehydrated in the dry air of late May. .............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=463
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