conditions of landless peasants in southern Spain.
Despite generally miserable
conditions, medieval custom had granted them certain privileges that enabled them to eke
out a living. Over the course of the 19
th
century, however, as vast tracts of land held by
the Church and nobility were confiscated by successive liberal governments and sold in
public auctions, nearly all of the region’s communal property was liquidated.
enclosures of private property and the sale of church and municipal land combined to
create a truly proletarianized peasantry. After 1870, landless day laborers (more
commonly known as jornaleros) began to organize politically, and anarchist currents
increasingly gained popularity. Questioning the legitimacy of the original consolidation
of land in the desamortización and arguing that unemployment and poverty that
characterized the lives of the jornaleros was due to the uneven allocation of land, they
demanded a reparto, or a division of the latifundia.
It was only in the Second Republic (1931-36) that the issue of agrarian
unemployment and poverty in the south was addressed with any coherence, however.
The progressives, radicals, and socialists who made up the multiparty San Sebastian
coalition that declared Spain’s Second Republic in 1930 all agreed that some sort of
agrarian reform was absolutely necessary in order to pre-empt further agrarian unrest. In
a governmental declaration of 1931, the provisional government passed a series of
decrees about land reform. These laws were never actually applied, however, because of
the inexperience of a highly factionalized left government and, after 1933, by the
obstacles presented by the government of the right that took power.
With the end of the Spanish Civil War, the installation of the Franquiste regime
marked a return to labor-repressive agriculture in southern Spain and the disappearance
of the Agrarian Social Question from public view. One of the first acts undertaken by the
9
Convention