Passion and desire. Songs, bodies, and resilience in Andalusian folklore is a journey into the ways
in which Andalusian popular culture has been —and continues to be— a space for expression and resistance for dissidents.
Combining art history, poetic sensitivity, academic research, and sentimental memory,
Roy del Postigo unravels the echoes of a tradition that, beyond mistaken and self-serving interpretations,
has been a refuge and altar for those who have lived on the margins.
The figure of Isabel Pantoja, a tonadillera by the grace, duende, and spirit of Andalusia, whose musical career
runs parallel to the last five decades of Spain’s history, becomes a starting point and beacon.
The voice of the singer of «Marinero de luces» or «Se me enamora el alma» calls, in many of her songs,
to those who identify with whispers, stigmatization, criticism, and misunderstanding.
Pin-cushion maricones on the chests of virginal divas, ladies of their tasks who are at their wits’ end from enduring so much,
sapphic Rocío friends, trans-Maribelas, transvestites from La Nogalera, and a whole host of dissident figures from the South
accompany Isabel on her pilgrimage of songs turned paths of liberation.
But the story neither begins nor ends with her: Southern folklore was already weaving —and continues weaving— a ruffled skirt made
with longings and subversive gestures in the skin of artists like Lola Flores, Marifé de Triana,
Diana Navarro, María Peláe, or Pastora Soler. Musical references that have been and will be inspiration
for drag performers like La Esmeralda de Sevilla, Satin Greco, or Jota Carajota.
With great doses of learning and an art that takes away the sentío, Roy del Postigo offers a work in which the South
is not just a postcard landscape, but a political, creative, and spiritual power guided by the Andalusian Dolorosas,
folkloric and subaltern.
A book that is, at the same time, an essay, an altar of coplas, and a love letter to those who turned art into freedom.
Because in these songs identity is embroidered with sequins and paraded in procession.
