A Public Nuisance

This chapter documents the early presence of organilleros in the streets of Spanish cities from the 1860s on and analyzes their impact on Madrid’s society during the ensuing decades. Considered an exotic amusement during the 1860s, organilleros came to be seen as sources of “noise” and social disorder soon after. Although the information available on organilleros makes it hard to describe their social background accurately, it is likely that some of them were rural immigrants who took up organ grinding intermittently when other sources of income failed. Their impact on the public sphere raised awareness about the effects of sound and prompted legal measures that could be considered as the first attempts to spread an “aural” hygiene in Madrid. For this reason, organilleros played a key role in the modernization of this city.

The Rise of Flamenquismo in Madrid, 1888–1898

This chapter analyzes the impact on the population of the expansion of nightlife in Madrid from the 1880s on. More particularly, it studies public fears raised by alcoholism and flamenco that led to this music being identified with social disorder and immorality. The Fuencarral Street murder (1888), in which a flamenco aficionado was involved, shocked the public and triggered a campaign against flamenco and the culture associated with it, known as flamenquismo. Behind this campaign, however, was fear and hatred of rural immigrants from Andalusia, who transformed Madrid’s culture and elicited the opposition of the population most affected by the rise of hunger and deprivation in Madrid. At the turn of the twentieth century, this situation led to flamenquismo being used as a catchword to designate any social problems affecting Spain in the wake of the 1898 desastre.

A eucalyptus in the moon: folk astronomy among European colonists in northern Santa Fe province, Argentina

In this paper, we present a study about cultural astronomy among European colonists who settled in the northern area of the Argentinean province of Santa Fe, which is part of the southern Chaco. These colonists arrived among waves of immigration occurring in Argentina in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Ethnographic field research among these rural immigrants and their descendants revealed that a set of asterisms were distributed according to the origins of the different European communities and also according to their uses in agriculture, animal husbandry and meteorology.