Alba Díaz Geada: «It’s necessary to know the history of our rural world to tackle the present problems of our society»

Ultimately, History is a crossroads—a universe of universes with lessons and choices. Penetrating and delving into all this knowledge shows us what we are. Our successes and our mistakes. Also, therefore, what can we be?

Talking to Alba Díaz Geada is a kind of gift to understand that journey. The whole process. Her curriculum vitae is impressive. She earned her Ph.D. in History and the National Award for Excellence in Academic Performance in 2008; she is currently a Ramón y Cajal researcher in the Campus Terra Department of History at the University of Santiago de Compostela.

Her teaching and research work today focuses on understanding the profound transformation experienced by a community like Galicia over the last century, especially in rural environments. Understanding change and its consequences is a lesson that should be remembered.

Talking about all this with Alba while walking along the Miño, one of her passions, would be a gift for anyone. Undoubtedly, the best way to start the year.

-You graduated in History from the University of Santiago de Compostela in 2008 and won the First National Prize for Excellence in Academic Performance. How did your vocation for History come about?

-At the time, I evaluated different possibilities. Many options for study, especially in the Arts and Humanities, were good choices. History teaches that there is never a single path, nor is it written in advance, even if people often need to remember or try to erase the paths that were not and could have been.

-In your doctoral thesis, you focused on the economic, social, and cultural changes suffered by the Galician countryside during Franco's regime and the transition. In broad terms, what were the main transformations, and how did they influence the world we know today?

-It isn't easy to summarise the transformations in Galician rural society, as in many other agricultural societies during those decades. They were so profound that, at the time, they were being studied as "the death of the peasantry." Underneath this felt civilizational extinction, the intensification of capitalist relations of production in the heart of rural communities was taking place, with all this implied. This advance took different forms in each social formation.

Galicia involved a series of interrelated changes, such as the transformation and growing dependence on the production model, the expulsion of a large part of the population that worked on the land, and essential social and cultural changes.

Of course, it was a transformation that definitively conditions our present. That is why it is crucial to study it, to characterize current problems, and to think of proposals to tackle them from a necessary historical knowledge of them.

-Your academic and research career is remarkable: you spent time at prestigious centers such as Exeter, Lyon, and Yale. What made you venture abroad, and why did you return to your origins?

-At the University of Exeter, I was doing a pre-doctoral stay while researching my PhD thesis. In the case of the universities of Lyon and Yale, it was a post-doctoral stay that I could do thanks to a three-year grant from the Galician government, of which the first two years had to be spent outside the country, and the third year back in Galicia. When we have the chance, most of the workers in the country choose to stay here.

-What did you learn during your international experience? What do you consider the strong points and, simultaneously, the pending tasks of the Spanish research scene compared to those of the countries where you were?

-Each university system I got to know had particular and different characteristics. However, what is very clear is the need to care for, promote and protect the public university.

In any of its phases, formal education should be a right and a duty for all, not a few privileges. Privatizing the university implies, among other things, that only a few can access it, and, of those few, most must mortgage their lives to receive that education. A university of the few will only defend, consequently, the interests of its owners.

-Today, you combine teaching and research at Campus Terra with a Ramón y Cajal contract. What did it mean for you to get a contract that distinguishes the best talents in the research system abroad?

-Those of us who work in teaching and research have participated throughout our careers in multiple calls for grants and competitions for positions to continue to carry out this work.

It's essential to support and maintain a public contracting system that allows teaching and research to be carried out at the service of those who support it. Having the possibility to carry out any work of a public nature should also be an exercise of responsibility.

-Your current research focuses on community, conflict and social change in 20th century rural Galicia. What conclusions have you reached, or what progress have you made so far?

-As we mentioned in a previous question, the transformation experienced by many contemporary peasant societies was a complex and profound historical process. The research we are currently carrying out attempts to continue its study based on three interrelated axes: the commons, inequalities and revolts in the Galician countryside in the 20th century.

It is necessary to update the debate on the notion of community and to reconstruct its History to understand its forms of economic, cultural, and political organization and how specific historical communities interacted with different modernizing projects. Also, to investigate the collective struggles articulated to confront the consequences of the deepening of capitalist social relations mentioned above. And, in close interrelation, to study the different inequalities those rural communities underwent in the change process.

In the Faculty of Humanities, we organize regular open seminars to share our research progress. In this same Faculty of Humanities, and within the framework of Campus Terra, new researchers who are making significant contributions to this line of work on the History of our rural world are being trained.
So much so that several researchers have joined this line of work, obtaining pre-doctoral grants to develop their doctoral theses within the framework of this line of work on studying the History of the rural world. In addition, young researchers have been initiated in this line of work thanks to the Campus Terra research initiation grants.

-You also wrote a research report on trade unionism in rural Galicia during the late Francoist period and the transition. What was its fundamental importance?

-Peasant trade union organizations in rural Galicia, particularly those linked to left-wing nationalism, played an essential role in the collective mobilization of the last years of the dictatorship and the years of political regime change. They collaborated very actively with many peasant struggles against exploitation.

There were mobilizations against the establishment of polluting industries, the appropriation of resources, industrial pollution, and unfair taxation, to name but a few. During that period, these concrete struggles were also about solidarity. It was not about fighting against an injustice suffered by the neighbors of a specific parish but about fighting for the country's social and political transformation to build a genuinely egalitarian and democratic society.

-In Galicia, it's often said that it is, and always has been, the women in charge of the houses. What role did women play?

-This question has been dealt with both by historiography and the social sciences in Galicia, as with the previous questions. The answer is both easy and short, but it is clear that women played a very active role in the struggles we have just mentioned.

Nor is there any doubt, on the other hand, about the historical validity of a system of patriarchal oppression that should continue to be studied, precisely how it was readapted to the intensification of capitalist social relations throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

-How do you see the future of the Galician countryside, which is currently facing the problem of depopulation?

-Thinking historically is crucial to understanding our present. We are talking about all of this at Campus Terra, which was created precisely to advance knowledge of the areas linked to land use's economic, social and environmental sustainability.

Being aware of the History that links people to their environment is critical to understanding the possibilities and problems of a rural world facing the consequences of previous historical processes.
The objectives of Campus Terra and the work carried out in its faculties and different fields of knowledge align with the concerns shared by national and international public institutions, which are trying to promote public policies to address issues such as the abovementioned depopulation.

These and other current concerns are the result of a long historical process. It is, therefore, necessary to know the History of our rural world to address the present problems of our society, which result from the disarticulation and resistance of those past communities.