The Orange Proletariat: Social Relations in the Pais Valenciano, 1860-1939

Abstract

This dissertation examines the formation of an agro-industrial working class within the citrus industry of Valencia, Spain. In a region that was historically defined by intensive agricultural production for market, the citrus industry in Valencia became the dominant economic sector in the decades prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Its workers, straddling the agricultural and the industrial, the rural and the urban, entered into a socio-economic relationship with the rural bourgeoisie in charge of the industry. This relationship was administered through the formation of jurados mixtos (mixed commissions), associations, and citrus cooperatives that directed the harvest, worked out export contracts, began irrigation projects, and organized labor. World War I produced a crisis within the industry due to the collapse of export markets and the lack of available shipping. Workers and small farmers suffered the brunt of the effects, and as a result, their relationships with the bourgeoisie began to break down. By the declaration of the Second Republic in 1931, workers and farmers had become far more politicized and dissatisfied. As landowners and commercial agents fled Valencia after the outbreak of war in 1936, workers and smallholders banded together in collectives, based on the established tradition of cooperation, to preserve the harvest and direct orange exports, the profits of which were increasingly important in the face of prolonged conflict.I rely heavily on documentary evidence from local journals and newspapers, political organizations, contemporary photographs, and local associations. Utilizing gender and labor theory and theories from cultural studies, I show the process of proletarianization through an examination of the labor culture within Valencia in order to complicate our categories of agricultural and industrial work and how the people of Valencia created a regional identity based on orange production.