“You can always get by here”: Crisis, land and livelihood in the periphery of Europe’s periphery

Situated in the southern fringes of Catalonia (northeastern Spain), Terra Alta is a poor agricultural region that has steadily been losing population since the 1920s, and that can rightly be considered a periphery within Europe’s periphery. Indeed, it was even peripheral to the construction boom that underpinned the Spanish “economic miracle” of the period 1995-2007.  When, at the end of the boom, most of the Terraltencs who had tried to take advantage of it by working in nearby areas caught up in the boom lost their jobs, they reverted to the livelihood patterns that have been dominant in Terra Alta since the 1970s. These are based on a combination of income sources, organized on a household basis and typically including generally informal, temporary agricultural and construction jobs, government benefits, small retail businesses, part-time feminized service jobs, and temporary work on a nearby nuclear power plant, often critically supplemented by the income and resources generated through the cultivation of each household’s land (very few households are landless).

While Terraltencs do not live from their land, they live through it.  Land is the central element that allows the articulation of a series of relationships and mechanisms that, often expressed in the language of kinship and friendship, have a wealth redistribution effect.  In times of economic crisis, surplus earnings of those who continue to have access to external sources of income are reinvested in the land, and work tends to be redistributed to those who are otherwise unemployed. Thus, when asked about the current crisis, Terraltencs usually respond that, despite the hardships they have to go through, “you can always get by here, you are never fully jobless”. While land mediates access to material resources, it also plays a crucial role in how Terraltencs make sense of their lives and of the crisis, providing a sense of historical continuity. In the paper I will present these livelihood and meaning-making strategies, and I will reflect on their broader political significance and implications.