In the bathroom of a humble building in the Seville neighborhood of Tres Mil Viviendas, in Polígono Sur, a young gypsy looks at himself in the mirror. He is holding a notebook with a photo of himself, bare-chested, stuck to one of the covers. Things are going well for him. He has appeared in a video by Omar Montes, He has been interviewed in newspapers and on television. At the last April Fair, people who would have previously passed him by stopped him to take photos with him. But despite the bad reputation of Las Tres Mil, where they say even the police avoid entering, he has bought his own house there, on a ground floor, he has tidied up the façade with grey cladding, he has put up some street lamps next to the entrance door and a couple of rubbish bins, because there are none in the area.
If social media is the writing of our time, Manuel, which premiered in December as tiktoker, He is a very popular writer. On the sidewalk outside his house he records many of the videos that have made him, at 25 years old, the voice of a gypsy community often reduced to the problems that plague the neighborhood where he lives: unemployment, drugs, poverty, fights, school dropouts… His recordings have hundreds of thousands of followers. His secret? Using the tools of fiction to show life where others only see a ghetto into which they enter like someone on a safari.
With irony, which is a sophisticated form of intelligence, and humor, which is an Andalusian form of humor, his videos function as stories. The characters are relatives whom he has renamed the Clan of the Black Ankles. Imitating the diction of Glòria Serra in his program Research teamManuel parodies the prejudices and stereotypes that present the neighborhood as a kind of Wild West inhabited by drug addicts, illiterates and criminals. The parody undoes the existing, stigmatizing narrative and opens the way to a different narrative. He replaces humiliating or victimizing stories with others in which the protagonists feel at ease. Manuel’s gaze, like that of every artist, renews the world. Theirs. Everyone’s.
His relatives appear with the names he invents: Gypsy of Reasons, The Blood Sausage, the Body of Bottles, the Body of Debris, the Smell of the Dead, Aunt Knives, Paint Slut, Shit-Toned Ankles, Uncle Chicken and his wife The Hen… They have all entered into the game and call each other that, even though those are not their real names or nicknames. They laugh at themselves, but they laugh even more at those who believe that what they see is true. They seem to say: you are making fun of us; we take your mockery to the extreme until it turns against you. The women place the pot on the fire and seriously explain how to cook stiff rat with nits. Because in the world created by Manuel, rice is called nits; chicken, stiff rat or fresh dog; white beans, silkworms; potatoes, kidney stones; Garlic is the hooves of the Gypsy of Reasons; the tomato is an artery in a liquid state and water always comes from rusty pipes.
Laughter is the gateway to social denunciation. Being a gypsy in the Tres Mil also means loss, pain, tragedy. It means not having any political, economic or social power. It means marginalization. Manuel compares this situation to the myth of Plato’s cave. He got his high school diploma with difficulty, worked, traveled and returned. The most important thing he has achieved is not fame, but appropriating the stories about his community that are told by those who do not belong to it. Telling them from within. Telling them better. He practices the philosophy of the absurd. He calls the young people who spend the day on the street “future engineers.” He compares those who walk on the flooded sidewalks when it rains to Jesus on the water. He does a general culture survey and when asked who is the king of Spain, a young woman answers Sánchez; another says that the coldest place on Earth is the mountains and that the longest river in the world is the Tinto River. And when he adds that he cannot read or write, the laughter freezes on his face. So the poor state of the sewers or the garbage in the streets or ignorance no longer weigh as an accusation against the neighbors, but against the Administration, which has ignored the needs of the neighborhood for decades.
Manuel’s voice breaks a narrative constructed by those in power who impose their own protagonists. In front of his bathroom mirror, he opens his diary and reads a page he wrote in 2020: “I hope there are changes with my people and thus create a different generation. I know that day will come, even if I don’t see it.” His videos, so close to oral tradition, draw a future that many young people in the neighborhood do not know how to reach: claim their voice to tell their story, take the reins, create their own mythology.
