Oral History - Entry 2

Some basic definitions:

   Immigration: To enter and settle in a country or region to which one is not native.

   Emigration: To leave one country or region to settle in another. We are going to use this word in reference to the Spanish citizens who joined other countries.

   Francoist (Franco Regime), the period between 1939 and 1975, when Spain was under the authoritarian dictatorship of Francisco Franco


Period and Background:

   We will delve into the1960s and 1970s. These years are within the Francoist period, so we must take into account the consequences it involves: the isolation from the rest of the world influences society, the Spanish economy changes, the Regime ideas for solving it, etc.

   First of all, as a consequence of this isolation and the previous war, there was an increment of the poverty. The destruction of part of the industrial sector because of the war, and the failure for developing it due to the isolation caused a decrease in the number of possible works. Simultaneously, imported machinery reduced jobs, especially in the primary sector. These facts produced than so much people become unemployment, so they had to look for other ways of having incomes.

   Society was also changing: from 1955 Spain started to emerge from isolation, so there was a real possibility moving to other European countries to improve life chances.

   Other countries’ population was growing old, so they needed cheap labor and Spain, due to the conditions, was a great place for looking for it.

   The regime pacted with other countries in order to give people the chance to work there, provided that they came back. This way, Spain would get incomes from other countries, would import their technology easier, and would be sustainable.

   There is a webpage which explain (in Spanish) in a really good way some of the causes, consequences, opinions and the different destinies of the international Spanish emigration. If you want to find some more information, we recommend you to analyze it.

   http://sauce.pntic.mec.es/jotero/Emigra3/emigra3p.htm

Emigration To Belgium In The 1960s And 1970s

Oral History Project

Topic:

The topic chosen is Emigration to Belgium. This topic can be interesting because we can find out why people decided to go to other countries to live and work, how they manage with their new situations and why they decided coming back to Spain after a period of time or to stay at the new country.
The period of time in which we'll focus is during the 1960s and 1970s. During those years a considerable amount of people left the country looking for more life chances. 

Interviewee:

Our primary sources for this project are Felisa Torres and Manuel Cotán, Cristina's grandparents. They where born in Olivares in 1943 and Bellavista in 1939, two towns in Seville. We have chosen them because during the Post War period in Spain they decided to emigrate from Seville, where they lived, to Brussels, in Belgium. The main reason for which Felisa and Manuel decided to leave Spain was because they wanted to improve their lives chances.  

They are qualified narrators because they can talk about their experiences before emigrating, when taking the decision of going out of the country, during the emigration to another country and their feelings during the period they lived outside of their origin country far away from their families.

First group of Spanish workers leaving to Belgium in 1957.