For many, the term "palace" identifies a majestic and large-scale infrastructure, a historical, political, and monarchical symbol of a specific city, country, or culture. The palace would be the radiating center where economic, social, and court activity would be concentrated. In this article, I will not talk about that type of palace, but about others that are less grandiose and that most of the time do not appear in tourist guides or in media and political agendas. I am talking about the "palaces of the people."
For the American sociologist Eric Klinenberg, the "palaces of the people" are social infrastructures where people can meet, live together, and establish community ties. Unlike mere material or physical engineering infrastructures, these social infrastructures are linked to the common environments where people generate bonds and affections, and where we build a community. A public library, educational centers, squares, parks, sports clubs, or neighborhood associations can be considered "palaces of the people."
If we explore to identify what the "palaces of the people" of Arrecife might be, we could find that there are fewer and fewer, but they exist. In a series of articles, I will develop what I understand to be the "palaces of the people" that we still maintain in our capital, true jewels that we must care for and value. Today I will focus on the Sociocultural Centers.
Our teleclubs were created in the Franco era to meet the needs of the rural areas of the island, whose residents needed a common space for leisure and culture and in an attempt to disinhibit themselves from the hard working days they suffered. In many cases, the teleclubs were the only spaces that had television, generating a true public attraction among card games, songs, and traditional food. These had been built with the hands of the residents themselves, which gave a greater identifying value to any other public space since they were considered a property of everyone and for everyone. A common property.
Over the years and into democracy, the teleclubs evolved into the current Sociocultural Centers. Much more sophisticated and equipped, these infrastructures were provided with catering spaces under a rental system where neighborhood associations, which maintain ownership together with the City Councils, raffle off the operation of the bar to a third party while the profits generated are invested in cultural activities, leisure, and resources for the center and for the town. We have all experienced a baptism or communion in a teleclub with its large halls and stages.
We would say, then, that the Sociocultural Centers were the great cultural jewel of Lanzarote society. If you arrived at any town on the island, you knew that the activity, public conversation, and food were in the teleclub and you only had to find it. This represents a true social infrastructure. I would dare to say that there has been no other public and popular infrastructure that has done as much for the construction of Lanzarote's identity as the Sociocultural Centers.
In each neighborhood of Arrecife we have a Sociocultural Center. I myself spent my childhood linked to the Maneje Sociocultural Center doing playback, participating in extracurricular activities or in neighborhood festivals. Also, together with my friends, we visited the different neighborhoods of Arrecife connecting the Sociocultural Centers of Argana, San Francisco Javier, Valterra or Altavista. Each of these "palaces of the people" was our refuge in the rains or in the heat, our playroom, our library, our sports court or our cultural guide since over the years neighbors from other nationalities were incorporated who made us travel from the neighborhood to other countries and cultures.
Today, unfortunately, the Sociocultural Centers have lost their light. And not because in most cases their windows and doors remain closed, but because there is no town that inhabits them. Every day we see less activity inside because every day we see fewer people in their surroundings, in the street, in the parks or on the courts. The community affective ties that built the Arrecife town have been replaced by an individualism or familiarism that is concentrated in private homes, in private cars, or in spontaneous round trips that do not require interaction with each other, but rather mass concentration that what it generates is a feeling of wanting to escape.
I have the perception that this progressive loss of Arrecife's identity has a lot to do with the loss of common urban and public spaces that invite us to meet, to live together, to enjoy. They are expelling us from the city making us believe that it is a space exclusively for individual enjoyment while the collective is in the Reducto concerts or in the macro festivals. No. The collective space must be in its entirety the same city, the urban that is inhabited and must be in every corner of Arrecife, both on the maritime avenue and on Tajaraste, Iguazú or Cáceres streets.
Public spaces, social infrastructures or "palaces of the people" that reconnect us with each other. That generate community trust and that allow us to recover our strength as a people. A strength that we once had to claim the limits of our island; that we had to say that public corruption had no place in our city; to demand better health and education services.
In short, recovering the Sociocultural Centers of the neighborhoods is recovering not only public buildings, but the Arrecife identity and the street. Let's recover our own palaces to recover Arrecife.