Santi Vaquero lived for many years in a neighborhood whose streets were made of mud. His home was a house of barely 40 square meters in which lived a whole family and him as a guest, “all crowded together”, as he tells us over the phone. It was during the years of the dictatorship (and also during the last throes) in a neighborhood forgotten by the administration and beaten by the authorities. We are talking about the low houses of Palomeras, in Vallecas, those neighborhoods that were demolished in the early 80s and whose cultural and political life was a hornet’s nest of ideas, ideological battles and raised fists.
Now, a free exhibition with Vaquero’ s photographs (those he took with his Nikon FM) shows the life of the low houses, the youth parties, the daily life of the neighborhood… and the arrival of the bulldozers and the wrecking balls. The exhibition, which has already visited the Quinta del Sordo, the Ateneo Republicano de Vallecas, the Centro Cultural Paco Rabal de Palomeras Bajas or the Centro Cultural Federico García Lorca de Rivas Vaciamadrid, returns to the place where it was born: the Centro de Creación Contemporánea Quinta del Sordo (CCCQS).
On this occasion, the exhibition Casas Bajas is accompanied by the texts of the collective La Liminal, which is working on a project for the Memory of the neighborhood struggles in Madrid. You can visit it until May 30, 2025 in the following schedule: Monday to Friday from 10 am to 8 pm; Saturdays from 10 am to 2 pm. Special hours on December 24 and 31 (from 10 am to 1 pm). It will be closed on January 25, 1 and 6.
Life in the low houses
Santi Vaquero was not Santi Vaquero in the low houses: he was “Pedales”. Nobody knew his real name back then. It was a way of protecting himself: “If a comrade was caught by the police, no matter how much they asked, they wouldn’t be able to tell my name because they didn’t know it! Those were times when meetings of more than three people in a bar were forbidden and any conversation between young people could be a reason to end up in jail.
Vaquero came to Madrid from his village in Toledo (La Puebla de Almoradiel) to work. While he was loading and unloading for large warehouses in Torrejón (and participated in the occasional protest), someone noticed him, his combative spirit, and told him: “You have to come to the low houses and I’ll introduce you”. Thus, he ended up living with the family of this friend and participating in all the youth life that moved in the neighborhood: “Vallecas was in the mid-70s in an incipient moment of creation of neighborhood associations, youth …”.
When we ask him about the atmosphere, between the tension of surveillance, raids and constant interrogations, he answers: “I didn’t go to live in Madrid; I went to live in Vallecas. Vallecas was something else. In addition to that combative spirit there was solidarity, empathy, affection. What one had belonged to everyone. I remember those years with a lot of affection and love. He says this about a place where there were no sanitary facilities, the mud flooded everything and living conditions were rather precarious. And in spite of everything:“I would go back to live there, I’ll tell you that. The coexistence was unbelievable.
But it is not a speech that romanticizes the precariousness of the place at that time. Impossible to do so with images like the one that continues these lines: “There was a lot of cultural movement among young people and a counterculture atmosphere was generated: exhibitions, talks… this helped a lot at a time when the horse was riding strong and wild“.
He refers to the great heroin epidemic, which hit hard in the underworld and that lost generation that disappeared from the map because of it. “In different youth boards we would meet to talk about it, people would come to raise awareness, to debate, to highlight the problem. Drugs were an easy way to divide people and for us it was important to fight it. We met in the sacristies of churches and then, when we could, in associations such as Hijos del Agobio or Gayo Vallecano.”
The obvious problems of the neighborhood were solved from the neighborhood, with the tools generated by the neighbors and young people themselves. There was no other way. “My friend Juanjo used to say that Vallecas had no culture but it had a conscience. And how right he was, we had street culture, we defended ourselves to the death and we had a lot of class consciousness because nobody paid attention to us, nobody helped us, nobody remembered…. And it is a very Vallecas identity that still exists”.
Vaquero refers to Juanjo García Espartero, one of the founders of Hijos del Agobio. Also, promoter of the Batalla Naval de Vallecas and founder of the mythical Sala Hebe in 1979. After his death, a park was dedicated to him in Puente de Vallecas. Espartero and Vaquero were very close companions at a time when friendship was the key to survival. Vaquero says: “The priests of Vallecas were hard-working, they worked as bricklayers for eight hours and then went to mass…. They opened the doors of their sacristies so that we could meet to prepare actions”. This was the case, for example, in the sacristy of the St. Charles Borromeo Pastoral Center.
Summer cinemas (such as the Manchego cinema) also served as a space for the exchange of ideas: “we didn’t go there to watch movies, I don’t remember any… they were about shootings and Romans, but we went there to talk to each other and to be able to talk about our things”.
Later, when Spain began to open up to the world, slowly and little by little, it was the turn of associations such as the aforementioned Hijos del Agobio. There, personalities who today continue to be part of the political and cultural conversation, appeared to address young people and propose solutions. This is the case of Enrique Jiménez Larrea, Paquita Sauquillo or Juan Margallo, who created his own theater group in the Gayo Vallecano. And so many others.
It is curious because in the few weeks that the project has been on Instagram, you can glimpse comments from people who identify their grandmothers, their mothers…. These former neighbors of the low houses, talk about Mr. Basilio’s haberdashery, Benito’s bodega…. Everything had its own name?“Everything had its own name, everything was very personal, on a one-to-one basis. That was the low houses. It makes me very excited and very happy that so many people see each other or recognize their relatives in the photos… it will be exciting to meet again in the exhibition,” he says.
The end of the low houses; the beginning of the exhibition.
In 1984, Santi Vaquero was living again in his village in Toledo. He received a call from Juanjo:“Pedales, please come to Vallecas, they are going to demolish the houses and you have to take photos here”. Without hesitation, he took a train and spent the night, one last night, in the low houses. They made a hole in the wall, to see the television from the outside, from the street,“we also made a chasca with boards and spent the night with his mother and siblings. There is a photo that I don’t think we are going to make public, of grandmother Carmen, leaning on the wall of her house, with a look…. Those pictures hurt.
In spite of everything, Vaquero comments that the older people in the neighborhood left the low houses with joy: they went to an apartment with heating, comforts, with several rooms… it was the promise of a better life: “they exchanged the mud for the corridors of the buildings”, says Vaquero. The young people did not take it so well and shouted about a deception, that deception of land speculation that is still going on.
Vaquero speaks with this exhibition about a Vallecas that no longer exists, but that was the beginning of a whole movement and a spirit that belongs only to this neighborhood. The exhibition now continues its journey after passing through Vallecas, of course: “Vallecas is still fighting. It continues to fight. It is innate. From those consciences, these struggles,” concludes Santi Vaquero.