Andalusians

Andalusians

Andaluces (Spanish)
Flag of Andalusia
Total population
10,000,000–11,000,000 [1]
Regions with significant populations
Andalusia 8,379,248 (2017) [2]
Diaspora
Spain (other communities)
Catalonia	754,174 (2006) [3]
Madrid	285,164 (2006) [3]
Valencia	218,440 (2006) [3]
Balearic Islands	71,940 (1991) [4]
Euskadi	46,441 (1991) [4]
Murcia	36,278 (1991) [4]
Navarre	32,177 (1991) [4]
La Rioja (Spain)	29,167 (1991) [4]
Rest of Spain	162,333 (1991) [4]
Other countries
Brazil	93,775 (2006) [3] 8,000,000 (Includes those of mixed ancestry)
France	31,516 (2006) [3]
Cuba	23,185 (2006) [3]
Rest of the world	50,000 [5]
Languages
Andalusian Spanish
Religion
Catholic Christianity [6] (see religion)
Related ethnic groups
Spaniards (Castilians, Canary Islanders, Extremadurans), Catalans, Hispanics, Galicians

Part of a series on the
Spanish people
Rojigualda (historical Spanish flag)
Regional groups
Andalusians Aragonese Asturians (including Vaqueiros de Alzada ) Balearics Basques Canary Islanders (incl. Isleños ) Cantabrians Castilians Catalans Criollos Extremadurans Galicians Leonese Valencians Other groups Berbers Erromintxela Gitanos Mercheros Maghrebis Occitans Sephardim (including Iberian Jews and Xuetes)
Significant Spanish diaspora
Andorra Argentina Belgium Brazil Chile Colombia Cuba Dominican Republic France Germany Italy Mexico Netherlands Peru Philippines Puerto Rico Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom United States Uruguay Venezuela
Languages Spanish (AKA Castilian) Basque Catalan Galician Other languages Aragonese Astur-Leonese Caló Catalan Sign Erromintxela Extremaduran Fala Judaeo-Spanish Occitan (AKA Aranese) Portuguese Spanish Sign Valencian Sign
Category  • Spainportal
v t e

The Andalusians (Spanish : andaluces) are the people of Andalusia, an autonomous community in southern Spain. Andalusia's statute of autonomy defines Andalusians as the Spanish citizens who reside in any of the municipalities of Andalusia, as well as those Spaniards who reside abroad and had their last Spanish residence in Andalusia, and their descendants. ^[7] Since reform in 2007, the Andalusian statute of autonomy identifies the territory as a historic nationality in the preamble. The Spanish Language Academy recognizes Andalusian Spanish as a set of diverse dialects. Andalusian nationalism is the belief that Andalusians are a nation separate from other ethnicities within Spain.

Contents

• History and culture
• Genetics
• Geographical location and population
• Migration rationale
• See also
• References

History and culture

In Antiquity, Andalusian people used to trade with Phoenicians and Jews some thousand years before Christ, and they were called as Tarshish or Tartessos in the Old Testament and Greek texts. ^[8] The genesis of modern Andalusian culture can be traced to the incorporation of the Moors territory to the Crown of Castile during the Middle Ages at the end of the Reconquista. It also coincides with the arrival of the Gitanos in the mid 15th century who also contributed to the culture of modern Andalusia and the expels of non-converted Muslims and Jews in 1492, and finally with the forced expulsion of all moriscos of Spain between 1609 and 1613. Subsequently the region was influential in the development of the Columbian exchange and global trade where Seville and Cadiz took a fundamental part. ^[9] In fact, Blas Infante, the creator of Andalusian nationalism, drew heavily from the Regenerationism movement in Spain after the loss of Spain's last territories in the Caribbean and Asia in the Spanish–American War conflict.^{[ citation needed ]}

There is a binomial denomination of Andalusia as High and Low, where High refers to the territory in the Baetic system and Low to the valley of the Guadalquivir river (that descends from the Baetic system to the Atlantic Ocean). The autonomous community institutions are in a good part in Low Andalusia (Seville). When that has been seen as a source of centrism there have been groups formed to make the problems visible. ^[10] An example was the lack of a Spanish high speed train to Granada. The service has since launched, starting in 2019. ^[11]

The Andalusians have a rich traditional culture which includes Flamenco style of music and dance developed in Andalusia and the Americas in the 19th and 20th centuries. Another example of traditional culture is the Holy Week ("Semana Santa"), shared with other Hispanic countries in America or the Philippines (see Holy Week in Spain, Holy Week observances and Holy Week in the Philippines). Spanish Catholic religion constitute a traditional vehicle of Andalusian cultural cohesion ^[12] and the levels of participation seems to be independent of political preferences and orthodoxy. ^[13] All the different regions of Andalusia have developed their own distinctive customs, but all share a connectedness to Catholicism as developed during baroque Spain society. ^[14]

Genetics

Genetic tests show a strong presence of Y-DNA J-M172 (Levant) and E-M81 in Andalusian Men, with E-M81 (North Africa) being most commonly found in the Province of Huelva and J-M172 being most common in the Province of Granada. ^[15]

Geographical location and population

Andalusian people live mainly in Spain's eight southernmost provinces: Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Huelva, Jaén, Málaga, and Sevilla, which all are part of the region and modern Autonomous Community of Andalucía. In January 2006 the total population of this region stood at 7,849,799; Andalucía is the most populous region of Spain. ^[16] In comparison with the rest of Spain, Andalusia population growth has been slower and it continues to be sparsely populated in some rural areas (averaging just 84 inh. per km²). Since 1960, the region's share of total population has declined, despite birth rates being about 40 percent higher than the Spanish average during past decades ^[17] (currently it is only 13% higher. ^[16] ) Between 1951 and 1975, over 1.7 million Andalusian people emigrated out of the region to other areas of Spain. ^[4] This figure was approximately a 24% of the population of Andalusia as a whole, mostly hitting the countryside areas. The main recipients of this migration were Catalonia (989,256 people of Andalusian origin in 1975), Madrid (330,479) and Valencia (217,636), and to a lesser level, the Basque Country and Balearics.

During 1962 to 1974, around 700,000 people — almost all of them male — moved abroad for economic reasons, mainly originating from the provinces of Granada, Jaén and Córdoba. Their preferred destinations were France, Germany and Switzerland, followed by the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Belgium. There are no official recorded figures for previous decades. ^[18]

In South America in the last twenty years of 19th century, over 150,000 Andalusians emigrated to the Americas as a result of crop failures caused by the Phylloxera plague. ^[19] Many Andalusian peasants moved to Brazil to work in the coffee plantations, mainly in rural areas of São Paulo State. There are currently around 16 million people of Spanish descent in Brazil. Half of these are of Andalusian origin, around 8 million.

Spanish immigrants to Hawai'i who were solicited to work in the sugar industry, arrived in October 1898, numbering 7,735 men, women and children by 1913. Most of them came from Andalusia, home of Don Marin. However, unlike other plantation immigrant groups, the Spanish moved on, and by 1930 only 1,219 remained, including a scant eight children born in Hawai'i. Most Spanish people left for the promising fields of California to make higher wages and live among relatives and friends who had settled in greater numbers there.

Additionally, Andalusians formed the major component of Spanish immigration to certain parts of Spain's American and Asian empire and the largest group to participate in the colonisation of the Canary Islands. Principally, Andalusians and their descendants predominate in the Canary Islands (Spain), Mexico, the Caribbean islands (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Cuba), and the circum-Caribbean area (Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and in Venezuela). They were also predominant in the Rio de la Plata region of Argentina and Uruguay and in the coastal areas of Chile, Peru, and Ecuador.

Migration rationale

Some descriptions of the south of Spain highlights the landownership system, in the past often formed by large estates called latifundios , as a relevant force in shaping the region and migratory past dynamics. ^[17] These wide expanses of land have their origins in landowning patterns that stretch back to Roman times; in grants of land made to the nobility, to the military orders, and to the church during the Reconquest ( Reconquista ) as well as in laws of the nineteenth century by which church and common lands were sold in large tracts to the urban middle class. ^[17] The workers of this land, called jornaleros (peasants without land), were themselves landless. ^[17]

This economic and cultural system produced a distinctive perspective, involving class consciousness and class conflicts as well as significant emigration. ^[17] In contrast to the much smaller farm towns and villages of northern Spain, where the land was worked by its owners, class distinctions in the agro-towns of Andalusia stood out. ^[17] The families of the landless farmers lived at, or near, the poverty level, and their relations with the landed gentry were marked by conflict at times. ^[17] Conditions were often improved by the opportunities to migrate to other parts of Spain, or to other countries in Western Europe. ^[17] Some of this migration was seasonal; in 1982, for example, 80,000 farmers, mostly Andalusians, migrated to France for the wine harvest. ^[17] Part of the migration consisted of entire families who intended to remain in their new home for longer periods or perhaps forever. ^[17]

Economic growth and social mobility, although dispersed and not homogeneous in the region, fundamentally started in the 1960s, increased in the 1970s and were intensified by the development of agroindustrial, tourism, and services sectors during democracy in the 1980s. Since 1990 Andalusia and other regions followed a dynamic convergence process and has moved closer in development to the most advanced regions in Europe; more and more it comes closer to overcome the average of European living standards. This has caused that some provinces areas are, in the last decades, net immigration recipients ^[20] as well.

See also

• Andalusian cuisine
• Andalusian nationalism
• Andalusian language movement
• List of Andalusians
• Medieval Arabic female poets#Andalus Period (711–1492 CE)
• Music of Andalusia
• Nationalities in Spain
• Spanish people

Related Research Articles

Andalusia is the southernmost autonomous community in Peninsular Spain, located in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, in southwestern Europe. It is the most populous and the second-largest autonomous community in the country. It is officially recognised as a historical nationality and a national reality. The territory is divided into eight provinces: Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Huelva, Jaén, Málaga, and Seville. Its capital city is Seville, while the seat of the its High Court of Justice is the city of Granada.

The Andalusian dialects of Spanish are spoken in Andalusia, Ceuta, Melilla, and Gibraltar. They include perhaps the most distinct of the southern variants of peninsular Spanish, differing in many respects from northern varieties in a number of phonological, morphological and lexical features. Many of these are innovations which, spreading from Andalusia, failed to reach the higher strata of Toledo and Madrid speech and become part of the Peninsular norm of standard Spanish. Andalusian Spanish has historically been stigmatized at a national level, though this appears to have changed in recent decades, and there is evidence that the speech of Seville or the norma sevillana enjoys high prestige within Western Andalusia.

Andalusian cuisine is the regional cuisine of Andalusia, Spain. Notable dishes include gazpacho, fried fish, the jamones of Jabugo, Valle de los Pedroches and Trevélez, and the wines of Jerez, particularly sherry. Culinary influences come from the historic Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions of the region. The oldest known cookbook of Andalusian cuisine, Kitab al tabij fi-l-Maghrib wa-l-Andalus fi `asr al-Muwahhidin, li-mu'allif mayhul, dates from the 13th century.

Andalusian nationalism is the nationalism that asserts that Andalusians are a nation and promotes the cultural unity of Andalusians. In the past it was considered to be represented primarily by the Andalusian Party, however, the party disbanded in 2015. In 2021, the left-wing Andalusian nationalist party Adelante Andalucía was formed, obtaining representation in the 2022 regional election.

The Emblem of Andalusia is the official symbol of Andalusia, an autonomous community of Spain. It bears the Pillars of Hercules, the ancient name given to the promontories that flank the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar. Although often referred to as a coat of arms, it is technically an emblem as it was not designed to conform to traditional heraldic rules.

The Platform for Eastern Andalusia is a Spanish organization with regionalist character, set up juridically as an association, created from a civic initiative in the provinces of Jaén, Granada and Almería, with the objective of forming an autonomous community including these three provinces as Eastern Andalusia.

Laderas del Genil is a Spanish geographical indication for Vino de la Tierra wines located in the autonomous region of Andalusia. Vino de la Tierra is one step below the mainstream Denominación de Origen indication on the Spanish wine quality ladder.

The Statute of Autonomy of Andalusia is a law hierarchically located under the 1978 Constitution of Spain, and over any legislation passed by the Andalusian Autonomous Government. During the Spanish transition to democracy, Andalusia was the one region of Spain to take its path to autonomy under what was called the "vía rápida" allowed for by Article 151 of the 1978 Constitution. That article was set out for regions like Andalusia that had been prevented by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War from adopting a statute of autonomy during the period of the Second Spanish Republic. Following this procedure, Andalusia was constituted as an autonomous community February 28, 1980. The regional holiday of the Andalusia Day commemorates that date. The statute was approved the following year by the Spanish national government.

The title of Hijo Predilecto de Andalucía or in the case of a female recipient Hija Predilecta de Andalucía is an honorific title granted annually on August 10 according to decree 156/1983 of the Andalusian Autonomous Government, recognizing exceptional merit or distinction in relation to the Andalusian region, through scientific, social or political actions or works that have redounded to the benefit of Andalusia. It is the highest distinction of the autonomous community of Andalusia.

The 2000 Andalusian regional election was held on Sunday, 12 March 2000, to elect the 6th Parliament of the autonomous community of Andalusia. All 109 seats in the Parliament were up for election. The election was held simultaneously with the 2000 Spanish general election.

The 1996 Andalusian regional election was held on Sunday, 3 March 1996, to elect the 5th Parliament of the autonomous community of Andalusia. All 109 seats in the Parliament were up for election. The election was held simultaneously with the 1996 Spanish general election.

The 1994 Andalusian regional election was held on Sunday, 12 June 1994, to elect the 4th Parliament of the autonomous community of Andalusia. All 109 seats in the Parliament were up for election. The election was held simultaneously with the 1994 European Parliament election.

The 1982 Andalusian regional election was held on Sunday, 23 May 1982, to elect the 1st Parliament of the autonomous community of Andalusia. All 109 seats in the Parliament were up for election.

The 2022 Andalusian regional election was held on Sunday, 19 June 2022, to elect the 12th Parliament of the autonomous community of Andalusia. All 109 seats in the Parliament were up for election.

A referendum on the initiative of the Andalusian autonomy process was held in Andalusia on Thursday, 28 February 1980. Voters were asked whether they ratified a proposed initiative for the provinces of Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Huelva, Jaén, Málaga and Seville to organize themselves into an autonomous community of Spain throughout the legal procedure outlined in Article 151 of the Spanish Constitution of 1978.

The first government of Susana Díaz was formed on 10 September 2013 following the latter's election as President of Andalusia by the Parliament of Andalusia on 5 September and her swearing-in on 7 September, as a result of the resignation of the former president, José Antonio Griñán, over the erosion of the ERE scandal, a large slush fund corruption scandal involving former leading figures of the regional PSOE's branch, including former development minister Magdalena Álvarez, with former Andalusian president Manuel Chaves and himself being accused of knowing and concealing such a plot. It succeeded the second Griñán government and was the Government of Andalusia from 10 September 2013 to 18 June 2015, a total of 646 days, or 1 year, 9 months and 8 days.

Por Andalucía is an Andalusian-based electoral alliance formed by Podemos, United Left/The Greens–Assembly for Andalusia (IULV–CA), Equo, Green Alliance (AV), Más País and Andalusian People's Initiative (IdPA) to contest the 2022 Andalusian regional election. The alliance was launched after over two months of negotiations between the parties to the left of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party of Andalusia (PSOE–A), in an attempt to form a joint list that avoided wasted votes; however, both the new Adelante Andalucía party of Teresa Rodríguez, as well as the Andalusian Andalucía por Sí (AxSí)—which had been a founding member of the Andaluces Levantaos alliance between Más País, IdPA and itself—rejected joining in.

The second government of Juanma Moreno was formed on 26 July 2022, following the latter's election as President of the Regional Government of Andalusia by the Parliament of Andalusia on 21 July and his swearing-in on 23 July, as a result of the People's Party (PP) emerging as the largest parliamentary force at the 2022 Andalusian regional election with an absolute majority of seats. It succeeded the first Moreno government and has been the incumbent Regional Government of Andalusia since 26 July 2022, a total of 866 days, or 2 years, 4 months and 12 days.

The geostrategic position of Andalusia, at the southernmost tip of Europe, between Europe and Africa and between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, has made it a hub for various civilizations since the Metal Ages. Its wealth of minerals and fertile land, combined with its large surface area, attracted settlers from the Phoenicians to the Greeks, who influenced the development of early cultures like Los Millares, El Argar, and Tartessos. These early Andalusian societies played a vital role in the region’s transition from prehistory to protohistory.

References