I do not know if Cristina Almeida or Manuela Carmena, two of the real protagonists on whom the TVE series is inspired The lawyers, They will say out loud this popular expression that has gone viral in countless memes on the networks: “I am literal.” I also don’t know to what extent they identify with their television characters. But this exclamation summarizes in a simple but forceful way one of the basic principles in the construction of any idea of “us” or “ours”: empathy and identification with the people around us.
And who are ours? Ours are people with whom we share our luck and some type of collective memory; that is not unique nor does it deny the diversity of individual memories or experiences, but rather relates them within a broader story, where the contributions of others give meaning to our own contributions. Hence the recurring “that could be me.” This collective memory is continually constructed and reconstructed with a multitude of elements, both material and immaterial: from historical events and figures to symbols and places, including cinematographic, musical or literary products.
Series, movies, video clips and even commercial advertisements are an essential part of that inventory that each generation reviews, or should review, to know how it got there and what its place in the world is. The moving image has been, and still is, a fundamental resource, not only to create fictions, but also to reconstruct realities and identify with their real protagonists.
But the series at hand, The lawyersis not designed (or should not be) so that Cristina Almeida, Manuela Carmena or Francisca Bale Sauquillo, another of the protagonists, feel fully identified with their characters. Far from it to accurately reproduce real events in our recent history. Without artistic licenses there is no cinema or television. The series is designed to connect, to reach, to be seen by people who are temporarily very far from those events and who, despite this, feel close to them. And that closeness can only be achieved by identifying with the four labor lawyers—the three mentioned and the one who already disappeared in 2015, Lola González—. Identifying with some labor lawyers in the last years of Franco’s regime, most of them with cards from the Communist Party of Spain and all linked to Workers’ Commissions, is possible thanks to the credible work of the four main actresses. Credible in the eyes, not only of an audience that retains memories of the events recounted (such as the massacre of the Atocha labor lawyers in 1977), but also (and above all) of a millennial audience or those from Generation Z, with which we must break the temporal and emotional distance between 2024 and 1964.
Obviously, it is not possible to establish any comparison between the historical framework and the current political context and the final years of the dictatorship. But always, in all historical contexts, there have been young people, with their desire to have fun, with their parents’ incomprehension for the way of life they lead, with their capacity to be outraged at what they consider unfair and with their desire that today start everything. For this reason, enjoying well-known faces from the small or big screen among the youngest audiences, developing credible interpretations (beyond the fact that they are inspired by real events), backed by solid scripts that do not fall into either the rally slogan or the banality of entertainment for entertainment’s sake, helps many people generationally distant from those women to see them, first of all, as young women not so different from many spectators; and, secondly, as what they have always been, but we frequently forget or relativize too much: heroines in the fight for freedoms.
Historians have analyzed and studied profusely how democracy was the result of a relentless political struggle against the Franco dictatorship. A struggle where the labor movement, with labor conflict that was triggered and progressively politicized in the seventies, was the spearhead of the anti-Franco opposition in its task of wearing down and eroding the Franco regime until making its continuity unviable. This struggle had enormous costs, as evidenced by the thousands of workers first detained and tortured by the police, and then prosecuted and convicted by the Public Order Court (the special court in charge of repressing crimes considered political between 1963 and 1977) by the mere fact of participating in a strike. But all struggles need their heroes and heroines. Heroes and heroines with whom we identify. Like the lawyers who defended many of those workers precisely before the Public Order Court. Maybe not to say “it’s just me literally”, but to make many of their ideas, hopes and defeats, but also victories our own. Because of the heroes and heroines, in addition to sacrifice, we also ask for victories. And these lawyers had them.
