The goal of this panel is to reflect on discourses and representations of work, working practices, and working actors in ninetieth and twentieth century Galician culture. The panel’s approach to the concept of work seeks to question established economic, social, and political understandings of these terms in Galician culture as well as deep-rooted nationalist imaginaries built on the idea of farm work, fishing, and migrant labor.

It does so by introducing and putting into dialogue critical perspectives (such as human-animal studies, Marxism, and postcolonial theory) that interrogate: what productive and reproductive work is; what counts as valuable work; and in which ways working practices have contributed and contribute to processes of world-making, social and cultural (in)visibility, and socio-environmental destruction/upholding in Galician culture.

This panel understands, thus, work in wider terms than most scholarship on Galician culture displays. It sees work as something that can be productive, reproductive, and destructive; as something that can be valued and un-valued, visible and invisible; and as something that can be performed by humans and non-human animal actors.

Diego Espiña’s presentation, focuses on the case of 1700 young Galicians who ended up as slaves in the sugar cane fields of mid-ninetieth Cuba as well as in a recent historical novel that recreates this episode. The trauma associated to the economic exile, as well as the symbolic identification of Galicia as a “slave land” in the context of the Iberian Peninsula, has a long history in the Galician national imaginary from the 19th century. Despite the prominent symbolic place that migrations have in contemporary Galicia, the experience in America as a promised land to leave behind the misery of the motherland continue to be dominated by a edulcorated historical memory that pervades critical views of the Spanish colonial past. Espiña’s presentation provides a necessary critique to the official portray that contemporary Galicia and its institutions have created around the transatlantic migratory experience of Galician workers.

Ana Luengo’s presentation focuses on the film Elisa y Marcela, a recent Netflix production that recreates the true historical experience of two Galician women who managed to circumvent the law and get married in 1901 by the Catholic Church. While the film is set in late-19^th and early-20^th century rural and working-class contexts in which Galician was the main language of communication, Galician language is absent from the screen. Even the distinctive accent and intonation of the Spanish spoken in Galicia is absent. Luengo’s presentation looks at this absence as a strategy to create a socially and culturally sanitized space through which an important episode of Iberia’s queer historical memory is detached from the rural/working class milieu where it developed.

José María Rodríguez García’s presentation, focus on the work of Manuel María (1930-2004), one of the most canonical Galician poets of the second half of the 20^th-century. Building upon insights and categories first introduced by Marx and in Engels, he analyzes the changing depictions of both agricultural chores and mores rustici found in the poetry of Manuel María. It will explain how the poet’s shifting representations of labor practices were the outcome of his gradual prise de conscience as he severed ties to the surviving Catholic conservative writers from previous generations. Having first-hand experience in the practical and legal aspects of agriculture, Manuel María soon stripped his poetry of its quasi-bucolic emphasis on the Galician rustics’ simple quiet life. In so doing, he implicitly adhered to what is now called the “cultural” turn in political economy: the contrasting analysis of economic and sociological descriptions of a community’s living conditions against the backdrop of the ideological discourses produced concurrently by historians, artists, and literati.

Daniel Ares-López’s presentation explores the cultural dimension of the contemporary destruction of marine ecosystems by means of destructive industrial fishing techniques. It explores the idea of fishing/fish work in the Anthropocene from a multispecies perspective. It views human extraction of fish not as the harvesting of a “food product” from the oceans, but as the extraction and appropriation of oceanic animals’ reproductive work and its transformation into capital. Nonhuman reproductive work, and even the elementary fact that fish are animal communities with the basic right to reproduce themselves, are largely absent from cultural representations of human-ocean relations in Galician culture. Galician fishermen have been celebrated as romantic figures who valiantly fight the forces of nature to make a living, Galicia’s modern industrial fishing fleet has been hailed for its technological innovation and productivity, and Galician fish-based cuisine is a source of local pride and a tourist attraction.