Black Archives: Episode II. Jazz without a Black body politic

Absence

In torrid August, 1954, I was under the blue skies of the Midi, just a few hours from the Spanish frontier. To my right stretched the flat, green fields of southern France; to my left lay a sweep of sand beyond which the Mediterranean heaved and sparkled. I was alone. I had no commitments. Seated in my car, I held the steering wheel in my hands. I wanted to go to Spain, but something was holding me back. The only thing that stood between me and a Spain that beckoned as much as it repelled was a state of mind. God knows, totalitarian governments and ways of life were no mystery to me. I had been born under an absolutistic racist regime in Mississippi; I had lived and worked for twelve years under the political dictatorship of the Communist party of the United States; and I had spent a year of my life under the police terror Perón in Buenos Aires. So why avoid the reality of life under Franco? What was I scared of?11.Richard Wright, Espana Pagana, Madrid: Tratados de Testimonio Collection, 1989. First published in English as Pagan Spain, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957. 

This is how ‘Black Archives: Episode I. Radical Internationalism and Pan-Africanism in the context of the Spanish Civil War’ ends.22.Tania Safura Adam, ‘Black Archives: Episode I. Radical Internationalism and Pan-Africanism in the context of the Spanish Civil War’, L’Internationale Online, 5 February 2025, internationaleonline.org.  It is also how Pagan Spain (1957), the book Richard Wright wrote after his visits to Spain, begins. Throughout the book, Wright observes and depicts a country that is complex in ways both Catholic and pagan, and comes to understand that the fear that ran through him at the border was not unwarranted, particularly in light of the difficulties he had to face because of the colour of his skin. For centuries, Spaniards and Europeans had been exploring, exoticizing, appropriating and interpreting ‘otherness’. Perhaps it was the ostracism and fear of Blackness that had prevailed ever since that made Wright uneasy, as ignorant as he was then of the degree of repulsion that existed under the fascist regime in a country described as ‘primitive, but lovely’ by his friend Gertrude Stein.33.See Safura Adam, ‘Black Archives: Episode I’.  This ignorance could only be addressed by getting right into the belly of the beast.

At this point, Wright was not only confronted with a physical frontier, but with other boundaries as subtle and imperceptible as the ‘colour line’, for his onward journey was as white as the country of Spain itself. He makes no mention of encountering Black people, or ‘morenos’, as they were called at the time, which suggests that this was not a part of his Spanish experience. However, the African American view of Spain was not homogeneous. Langston Hughes, another great figure in Black literature who arrived in Spain some years earlier, chronicles a very different experience:

Negroes were not strange to Spain, nor did they attract an undue amount of attention. In the cities no one turned round to look twice. Most Spaniards had seen colored faces, and many were quite dark themselves. … And in both Valencia and Madrid I saw pure-blooded Negroes from the colonies in Africa, as well as many Cubans who had migrated to Spain. … I found, shortly after my arrival, that one of the most popular variety stars in Madrid was Negro Aquilino, a Cuban, who played both jazz and flamenco on the saxophone.44.Langston Hughes, Yo viajo por un mundo encantado, Buenos Aires: Compañía General Fabril Editora, 1959, p. 359.

Hughes’s relative idealization – and apparent lack of exoticization – of the Black presence he observed in Spain was mediated by his experience as an African American in the United States. This does not mean that forms of oppression did not exist: In his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois introduced the concept of the ‘color line’ to describe the experience of African Americans in a society that excludes them and sees them as ‘other’. This metaphorical line, though invisible, marks a fundamental difference between those who are considered ‘white’ and those who are ‘Black’, and determines the opportunities, rights and social relations of each group.55.See W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Co., 1903.  Likewise, every Black person travelling through or living in Spain in recent centuries will have experienced a sense of difference and exclusion engendered by racial stereotypes and discrimination, though few have had the chance to tell their stories. Being Black in social spaces where certain deeply rooted imaginaries about Blackness have taken hold inevitably affects any life experience. Juan Latino and Sor Chicaba are among those to have taken the floor to critique and condemn the treatment they received in Spain during the early modern period.66.See España Negra, ‘Black Spain: Journey towards Blackness in time and space’, research project, 2022–24, radioafricamagazine.com. However, it was not until last century that reflections on racism began to be seen in artistic creations. This was a privilege attained only by those few who raised their voices with no little self-consciousness and trepidation, which could be related to the absence of any form of Black social or political body to represent them. In any case, the bewilderment produced by the Black experience in Spain was felt across the social scale, from everyday people to celebrities. Examples include Kid Tunero, Elsie Bayron, Jack Johnson, La Perla Negra, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Nicolás Guillén, Antonio Machín, Benny Carter, Harry Fleming, Negro Aquilino and Joséphine Baker, among many others.

From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century there were Black communities in Spain, in places such as Andalusia, the Canary Islands, Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona.77.An estimated two million enslaved people lived in Spain between 1450 and 1750, the majority of whom were Black. Of these, those who were female were more sought after: they were used for sexual service, performed domestic work and their children were born enslaved. Ownership of enslaved people was a mark of status for the masters and was widespread, especially in urban centres. See España Negra, ‘Black Spain: Journey towards Blackness in time and space’. These were formed by enslaved people, mostly Africans, who were not considered – not legally recognized as – people, but their presence did leave an indelible mark on the cultural landscape, nonetheless.

It was in this period of early modernity that the foundations of Spain’s relationship with Blackness were laid, anchored in racist and denigrating stereotypes. Certain external biological characteristics came to be symbols of a social condition, and the word esclavo/esclava (slave) began to be replaced with negro/negra (black). From then on, any individual with a dark complexion was likely to be regarded as an enslaved person: that is, as an impoverished, infantilized person unable to cope with the world and with a corresponding need for permanent tutelage.88.Ibid.

This imaginary of Blackness was portrayed and reinforced through music, theatre and literature.99.Baltasar Fra Molinero, La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro, Madrid: Siglo XXI Editores, 1998. As Francisco Zamora Loboch states in Cómo ser negro y no morir en Aravaca. Manual de recetas contra el racismo (How to be Black and not die in Aravaca: Recipes against Racism, 1994):

From a racist point of view, the Spanish Golden Age was a harsh, intolerant era, rough as the kiss of the ring to the windpipe. Some writers are virulently racist, others the opposite. Cervantes and Quevedo captained both extremes.1010.Benita Sampedro, ‘Cómo ser negro y no morir en Aravaca: La historia del racismo en España’, Radio Africa, 2023, radioafricamagazine.com.

The Black population was drastically reduced by various causes from the seventeenth century until the 1970s, when a period of Black immigration, mainly from Africa, began in Spain. There was a small exception to this in the interwar period in Barcelona’s Barrio Chino, then known as Little Harlem because of the concentration of Black musicians and boxers.1111.See Jordi Pujol Baulenas, Jazz en Barcelona (1920-1965), Palermo: Almendra Music, 2005. The newspapers of the time went so far as to describe a ‘Black invasion’ coinciding with the jazz phenomenon, even saying Blackness was in fashion.1212.J.M. Lladó i Figueres, ‘El Harlem barceloní’, Diari Última Hora, 1 July 1936. The exceptional nature of this claim is reflected in Kid Tunero, el caballero del ring (2016), in which, because he ‘felt he owed it to him’, journalist and researcher Xavier Montanyà delves into history to investigate and describe the life of this Cuban boxer in Barcelona:

In Carrer Nou de la Rambla, Barcelona’s Harlem, Cubans were king. It could be said that they had spontaneously formed a tumultuous community that brought together Blacks of various origins: Puerto Rico, Martinique, Senegal, Alabama, Georgia and, the poorest of all, the natives of Equatorial Guinea, the Spanish colony in Black Africa. The natives of Fernando Poo and Rio Muni were the most destitute of the community. They could be seen in Chinatown picking up cigarette butts and other rubbish from the ground, or acting as street announcers for African safari films.1313.Xavier Montanyà, Kid tunero, el caballero del ring, Logroño: Pepitas de calabaza, 2016, p. 76.

Despite a highly inconspicuous Black presence, for centuries in Spain, racism can be seen to have taken shape in the form of ideologies, portrayals and stereotypes rooted in the modern idea of the enslaved Black man.1414.See Yolanda Aixelà-Cabré, ‘Denuncia colonial, expulsión exprés (1934)’, in Afro-Iberia (1850-1975): Enfoques teóricos y huellas africanas y magrebíes en la península ibérica, Barcelona: Bellalettras Edicions, 2023, pp. 91–108, researchgate.net. Later, in contemporary times, the notions of African and Black otherness became interwoven with hispanotropicalism,1515.A term adapted by Susan Martin-Márquez from Gilberto Freyre’s vision of the ‘lusotropical’ to describe the assertion, per Spanish colonial rhetoric, of a supposed brotherhood and cultural convergence with the colonized peoples – a trend which denied the true effects of colonization. See Susan Martin-Márquez, Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008; and Aixelà-Cabré, ‘Denuncia colonial, expulsión exprés (1934)’. with its depiction of Black ‘savages’ who needed civilizing and acculturating, whereas their creations were to be appropriated and their exotic character put on display.1616.See Aixelà-Cabré, ‘Denuncia colonial, expulsión exprés (1934)’.

The centuries-long absence of emancipated Black communities has had serious consequences, leading to a level of defencelessness against Iberian white narratives. Thus, when a circular was sent to radio stations in 1943 to ban jazz as a degenerate form of art, ‘a stultifying and animalistic music, something far removed from our robust racial characteristics’, it was met with no response.1717.Manuel Recio, ‘¿Por qué combatimos la música negra? El jazz en el franquismo: paradojas y contradicciones’, Ximo Tebar [blog], 30 April 2014, ximotebar.wordpress.com. This is paradigmatic of the relationship then of Blackness with this territory, which gave little room for agency and demanded an absolute compliance with violent acts.

Racial imaginaries have changed little over time, becoming a spiral that perpetuates oppression and relegates the lives of Black people to the margins. The English sociologist Stephen Small, on visiting Madrid in 2010, describes the territory’s relationship with Blackness:

The only Black people I saw, literally, on the streets of Madrid were Black women prostitutes, Black men begging, Black men cleaning the streets, those were the only Black people I saw. And I was like, ‘What is going on here?’1818.Tania Adam, ‘España no es un buen lugar para ser negro’, CTXT, 21 August 2019, ctxt.es.

Up to the second half of the last century, there were no documented efforts by Black people to really unite and confront this disregard and the adversities they all faced, including slavery, colonialism and racism.1919.Hakim Adi, ‘El futuro es de los pueblos’, Jacobin, 30 May 2023, jacobinlat.com. Only in a few specific moments, in the interwar period, for example, can we see cultural activities such as jazz and boxing providing fleeting spaces of visibility and solidarity.

Jazz

Moving on from literature, the reception of jazz in Spain reveals new layers of whitewashing and cultural appropriation. In the summer of 1937, seventeen years before Richard Wright arrived in Spain, Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes crossed the same border. They were war correspondents aboard a crowded train on their way to a country at war. The scene was quite different from that which Wright encountered: although there was a war on, jazz was still alive in Spain, with Barcelona at the epicentre. One of the first jazz associations in Europe, the Barcelona Hot Club had been founded two years earlier in 1935. Inspired by the Paris Hot Club, it aimed to raise the profile of jazz as an art form. The Hot Club created a world peopled by critics, collectors, composers, musicians, fans, record companies, publishers, radio stations and film companies. Everything operated under principles of racial exclusion and cultural hierarchy: the Hot Club’s obsession with differentiating and preserving ‘artistic’ and ‘authentic’ jazz from popular jazz in no way signified protecting or respecting Black people, and the legacy of that world persists to this day. Thus, for example, in 1935 the critic Juan Aragonés argued that Black creativity was linked to its infantilism:

And what are the Blacks, if not what connoisseurs have said over and again from time immemorial: big children. Everything, everything, in their art offers this unmistakable sincerity, this purity of expression that we esteem so highly in true popular art, which is also an art for grown ups.2020.Iván Iglesias, ‘El jazz a finales de la Segunda República española: El Hot Club de Barcelona (1935-1936)’, Jazz-hitz, vol. 3, 2020, pp. 11–34, jazz-hitz.musikene.eus.

The first concert organized in Barcelona took place in 1936, with a performance by Benny Carter and the Hot Club quintet from France. Guillén and Hughes, like the Black population of Barcelona, were probably oblivious to the existence of the Hot Club, its concerts and its obsession with enjoying ‘real hot music’ as an art form.

In fact, while sitting on Barcelona’s main avenue La Rambla the day after their arrival, Hughes was recognized by a young Black Puerto Rican who worked as an interpreter. He took them to dance in a small club. From Hughes’s description, the place seems to have been the Olympia, one of the spots frequented by Kid Tunero.

The Cuban boxers frequented, daily, with tropical parsimony, three key places. In the morning they went to the Cuban consulate to pick up correspondence. … At aperitif or coffee time, they all went to Carrer Nou de la Rambla, to the Eden or to the adjacent horchatería (tiger nut milk) cellar bar. In the late afternoon, after spending some more time training at the club, they would sit at the tables outside the Teatre Circ Olympia, at Ronda Sant Pau 27.2121.Xavier Montanyá, Kid Tunero, el caballero del ring, La Rioja: Pepitas de Calabaza, 2016.

The nightlife spots, however marginal, gave people the chance to meet up. Along with the Olympia, the Eden became a meeting place for the city’s Black population. Musicians, pugilists, artists and dancers of North American, Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican origin, as well as from some Black African countries (Guineans, Senegalese and others) met there.2222.See Miquel Barcelonauta, ‘BAR EDÉN. Nou de la Rambla 12 (1930-1950s)’, Barcelofilia, 18 January 2016, barcelofilia.blogspot.com. These bars and clubs were likely spaces of solidarity and exchange, where all the different variants of jazz, but above all hot jazz, were played. The atmosphere would, in all probability, have been very different from the Hot Club, which, while appealing to questions of art, authenticity and genre, stripped jazz of its Black roots and any kind of sociocultural philosophy, reducing it to a depoliticized plaything for the avant-garde.

The dysfunctional relationship created here between jazz and Blackness was a strange mixture of fear, indifference, paternalism and appropriation of its forms of creativity, as chronicled by the ways Spanish culture approached jazz in the early twentieth century. Jazz arrived in Spain from the United States after the First World War, via Paris and London. First to land were its popular, avant-garde variants: foxtrot, hot jazz, one-step, shimmy, swing jazz, Charleston, black bottom and blues.2323.‘El jazz en España: Los felices años 20’, Me encanta el Swing, 28 March 2021, meencantaelswing.wordpress.com. These styles took off, especially in Madrid and Barcelona; they then developed, evolved, and were discarded in a cycle of consumption marked by an absence of any notable Black presence.

In the context of the 1929 Universal Exhibition, Barcelona became known as the New Orleans of the Mediterranean.2424.Manuel Recio, ‘La «Nueva Orleans» del Mediterráneo’, Jot Down, September 2013, jotdown.es. Throughout the 1920s, Black musicians arrived from the American continent to perform solo or with their bands in nightclubs; Black orchestras that fed the dance fever, such as Los Chocolats Jakson, Harry Fleming’s, Sam Wooding and his Jazz-Band Orchestra (featured in Chocolat Kiddies, above) and Johnny and his Jazz Band, brought in an era of fascination with Black music. Their musicality and energy set off a storm in a country divided between conservative and progressive forces, where a desire for modernity clashed with traditional ideas about morality, collective identity and femininity.2525.See Laurence E. Prescott and Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego, Black USA and Spain: Shared Memories in the 20th Century, London: Routledge, 2021.

The dissonance here exemplifies how the response to jazz in Spain was loaded with contradictions. Jazz was celebrated for its vibrancy, but at the same time it reinforced racial stereotypes – and yet again it also played its part in women’s emancipation. Joséphine Baker’s tour of Spain illustrates the ambivalence between fascination and rejection that jazz produced, considered by some parts of society to be an obscene form of music with pronounced sexual elements. A large part of the country, unable to put aside their racial prejudices, projected a view onto jazz that was steeped in exoticism.2626.See Montserrat Esporrín Pons, ‘Espectacles de música popular a Barcelona (1881-1936)’, Sonograma, 29 June 2016, sonograma.org.

Despite a continued increase in visits by African-American musicians, a deeper understanding of the cultural and political roots of jazz didn’t take hold. Jazz music in Spain is still whitened to this day, estranged from the oral traditions of the cultural environments in which Black music has a specific relationship with the body.2727.See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993. As the Martinican novelist and essayist Édouard Glissant put it:

The aesthetic form of our cultures must be rooted in oral traditions and jazz, as an expressive form associated with contemporary negritude, represents a subculture and a musical counter-power formed by specific aesthetic components that are connected to Black emancipation.2828.Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, University Press of Virginia, 1989, p. 11; translation as cited in Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 74.

Or, as writer and poet LeRoi Jones states:

Jazz is still the music of Negro people, a symbol of Negro cultures that has offered an enhanced way of communication which reaches beyond the power of the spoken or written word, and, with its improvisation and ability to convey emotion, has become a means of expressing the struggle for freedom.2929.LeRoi Jones, Black Music: Free jazz y conciencia negra 1959-1967, Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, 2013. 

I would also stress that it has been a means of conveying and expressing the ideas of Pan-Africanism; it connects music with the struggle for racial equality and social justice.

The philosophy of Black music outlined by Glissant and Jones is very different from that of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who in 1929 appeared in a dinner jacket and in blackface at the Palacio de la Prensa to present Alan Crosland’s film The Jazz Singer (1927). He gave an ambiguous fifteen-minute speech laced with humour that veered between an apology for jazz and racism towards Black people:

There is no need to study the chocolate in their dark soul to get into jazz, since the final reason for it is enough; its notes syncopate the emulation of modern life and it is the shot in the arm that pulls us out of the biliousness of the hustle and rush. It seems that it is causing the European to come around to the sincerity of the negros. As such, those same rhythms may serve him, too.3030.Later published in La Gazeta Literaria, this speech was also included as a chapter titled ‘Jazzbandismo’ in Gómez de la Serna’s 1931 work Ismos.

His words show how the European reception of jazz would overlook the cultural, social and political aspect of the people who were creating it. No documented public steps were taken against such reinforcements of racist imaginaries, whether through presentations like that of Gómez de la Serna, comments in the press, or songs such as the popular ‘Madre, cómprame un negro’ by La Yankee, which would later be covered by La Goyita, La Niña de los Peines, Celia Gámez and, finally, Marujita Díaz:

Eradication

A year before the inauguration of the Hot Club, in November 1934, Música Viva, the first magazine specifically about jazz in Spain, was published.3131.Música Viva and later Jazz Magazine were Hot Club publications. In August of the same year, a student from Equatorial Guinea, José María Bakele, published an article in the Heraldo de Madrid newspaper entitled ‘El horror de la civilización en el continente negro’ (The Horror of Civilization on the Dark Continent),3232.See Aixelà-Cabré, ‘Denuncia colonial, expulsión exprés (1934)’.  criticizing the colonial regime. Despite declaring himself ‘a Spanish subject of the negro race, born in this country’, three months later he received notification of his expulsion from Spanish territory, as an ‘undesirable indigenous person’. His reality, like that of many Black people living in Spain, was absolutely alien to the Spanish ‘jazz milieu’, a world that lived with its back to Spanish Blackness. It wasn’t until some years later that Pilar Morales, and later still Guillem d’Efak, a native of ‘this country’, would become the first Black artists to join the Catalan jazz elite.

Thus, jazz, blues and, to a lesser extent, negro spiritual and gospel music became cult music for the Spanish avant-garde, those belonging to the bourgeoisie and the middle classes. They selected and appropriated the sounds suited to their ideologies, just as in the colonies it was members of white society, i.e., colonists, who validated Black sounds according to their tastes. In a way, this is what LeRoi Jones denounced in his 2013 essay ‘Jazz and the White Critic’, where he wrote that most of the critics were (as they still are) middle-class individuals with privileged cultural backgrounds, and that white musicians had taken over positions that rightfully belonged to Black musicians.

The first serious white jazz musicians sought not only to understand the phenomenon of Negro music, but also to appropriate it as a means of expression which they themselves might utilize. The success of this ‘appropriation’ signalled the existence of an American music, where before there was a Negro music. But the white jazz musician had an advantage the white critic seldom had.3333.LeRoi Jones, Black Music.

The same was true in Spain throughout the 1920s and 1930s, because, although jazz music came from, and was initially popular with, the working classes, even then the jazz scene effectively ‘belonged’ to the upper middle classes – those who could collect, travel and hire great musicians. The musical panorama of Spanish jazz was so white that the forms of appropriation of the Black sound were like those that had taken place in the United States, the difference being that in the US there was a Black collective body as well as different forms of Black resistance. Also, there, Pan-Africanism played a significant role.

In Spain, the political context caused jazz to shift from being a popular genre to avant-garde. More than a few critics and politicians raised their voices to denounce jazz as a racial threat, a form of music whose rhythms perverted the youth. As a result of this the music was banned in Spain, as in other fascist countries such as Germany and Italy. Hitler saw it as degenerate music to be eradicated, and in 1935 the Nazi Minister of Propaganda banned the broadcasting of Judeo-Negro-American music; in 1938, Mussolini’s racial laws did the same in Italy.3434.See Recio, ‘¿Por qué combatimos la música negra?’. Francoism followed their approach of using culture and music as a way of reconstructing identity. However, jazz remained popular; swing in particular was a panacea for young people during those hard years.3535.In 1940s Spain, jazz was still working class. It was later that the form came to carry high levels of social distinction and artistic value. In the early 1940s, the Francoist government began a media offensive against jazz, which it considered to be against its national values.3636.Iván Iglesias, ‘(Re)construyendo la identidad musical española: El jazz y el discurso cultural del franquismo durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial’, Historia Actual Online, no. 23, Autumn 2010, historia-actual.org. These values defended the Catholic religion as the central pillar of the race, inherent to the Spanish nation. Thus, jazz music was associated with Blackness and with paganism – the antithesis of Spanish music. On 25 June 1943, the National Propaganda Delegation issued a communiqué entitled ‘Porque combatimos la música negra’ (Why we are combatting Black music), with mandatory orders prohibiting all radio stations in the country from broadcasting jazz. The ban remained in force for ten years.

Modern jazz and its derivatives are an abusive preference, not justified even as a pleasant pastime … however much they may deny the art and insist on learning to ‘go native’ to the beat of these exotic black dances, the product of the American jungles. … Spain is an eminently musical people, energetic and clean in its collective feelings, and it must not allow itself to be won over, even temporarily, by the disconcerted hubbub of jazz without any artistic justification.3737.Recio, ‘¿Por qué combatimos la música negra?’.

In the eyes of the regime, the music was ‘primitive, immoral, wild and effeminate, sung and danced around the bonfire by people with frizzy hair and red lips on a very black mask’.3838.Ibid. For this reason, they also exercised control over periodicals and entertainment through its government agencies.

Neither this racist offensive nor the prohibition managed to put an end to jazz. However, it was increasingly stifled until all that remained was an elitist redoubt. This meant that there was hardly any scene by the 1950s, and jazz musicians wanting to forge a career had to leave the country. This was the case with Pilar Morales and Tete Montoliu, who emigrated first to Berlin and then Copenhagen in a bid to make a living from their music.3939.Rosa Marquetti Torres, Triunfar era la opción. 20 mujeres afrocubanas en la música del siglo, self-published, 2023.

During the post-war period, jazz underwent a process of homogenization that persists today. The seeds of a modern-day cultural panorama opposed to difference and variety – a situation actively perpetuated by the media – were sown during those days. It was a time obsessed by the moral revolution, a time of prohibition and the exaltation of the symbols of a unique, superior, Spanish race. This was promoted by the regime through its ordinances, its numerous pedagogical materials, and its films such as Raza (1941), a film based on a novel written by Jaime de Andrade, the pen name of Francisco Franco. This persistence in the creation of a white musicality that scorned Black sounds even reached Equatorial Guinea. Equatoguinean writer and musician Francisco Zamora shares what was heard on Guinean radio in the 1950s:

At home we listened to a bit of everything, Spanish music, but above all Congolese music. Spanish music, because that’s what was played at prime time. For example, the pasodobles [laughs]. It was full-blown colonisation. And the colonist played the music he liked to listen to. That doesn’t mean that there were no spaces dedicated to African music.4040.Francisco Zamora in Tania Safura Adam, Voces negras: Una historia oral de las músicas populares africanas, Barcelona: Malpaso, 2024; see also Doctor Peligro, ‘El delirio ultra: neonazis negros, falangistas “morenos”’, Agente Provocador, agenteprovocador.es.

A country fascinated by race, one which operated under xenophobic, religious and patriotic insignia, is what Richard Wright encountered on crossing the Spanish border. After that journey, he argued in Pagan Spain that this genre of ‘paganism’ was the country’s driving force. However, he almost completely failed to perceive the racial project behind it – a project which limited the freedom of Black people and rendered any social confrontation or collective Pan-Africanist struggle impossible. Besides being dispersed, the Black collective body was either depleted or in some cases clinging to survival by participating in the colonizing project – the Black section of the Falangists, the ‘flechas morenos’, and the Guinean wing of the Spanish neo-Nazis being the most radical examples.

However, the majority of the Black population lived in a situation of alienation and censorship, and the struggles and emancipatory projects within Blackness were relegated to the personal, domestic sphere, often limited to individual struggles for dignity and survival. Jazz, its dances, music and lyrics burst onto the scene like sparks of freedom – and then were whitewashed, stripped of their political dimension and turned into entertainment for white consumption. But every note, every gesture of resistance, everybody that would not just disappear left traces that resist this erasure. Taking note of these signs left behind is not just an exercise in recollection: it is about opening up space for a history that is still being written, a history in which the Black voice in Spain no longer remains on the sidelines or in the shadows.