By Isabel Rodríguez and Jorge Lebrero (La Molinera)
We see Social Centers as extremely vibrant realities because literally hundreds of people pass by every week to do their things. The principal thing is to understand that in Social Centers like La Molinera, activity, responsibility and administration is all collective, everything is collective, so when people come, they organize themselves from the grassroots; they create entities and get involved in them, and that’s when they start to feel like a part of the project. Our objective is to get close to the people in the neighborhoods so that they have contact with politics and so that they internalize certain things. I believe that, for example, regarding youth, many people right now only dedicate themselves to drinking around town, or making themselves completely disconnected from reality, and by putting on certain workshops like a movie showing, we believe that we can give them political responsibility, not putting on a conventional movie but one that will really make that click happen, make that impulse in your mind so that you start questioning things. We believe that praxis is when you’re really learning. In this path, we’re kind of going to weave networks around this space and its neighbors, so that this will become a meeting point for activism, for saying, well, here we’re going to do projects with people who already know what activism is, and are going to create something for the common good, the kind of place where people are brought together in a way they wouldn’t be if we hadn’t created it…
We always bring up the example that we don’t want to be a civic center, with all due respect to civic centers. I say that because the Social Center isn’t a place where people go as users or clients or benefactors of something but rather a space where we say, “you’ve proposed that we host a breadmaking workshop,” for example, “so get involved with that. Let’s find a space, let’s get the material we need, let’s see how we can make this possible, etc.” What we want is for people to come, get involved, know us, and take on responsibility for their own proposal and we can carry it forward together and learn together what they have to teach, and how we can support them in this. It’s about reclaiming what it really means to create a social network in which all people contribute…
I understand that as they’re thought of, civic centers are a bunch of services, but here we don’t want to offer services. We believe that that’s not just a semantic issue, it’s a fundamental one. It’s clear that there should be a network of civic centers and other types of institutions that offer and satisfy the common needs of the neighbors on a more sterile level, but it’s also true that we’re lacking critical spaces to generate a social model in which people get involved, participate, and become protagonists of change and transformation…
There’s this fairly solid movement of occupied social centers throughout the state, and yes, there is a certain amount of coordination among them. I, for example, was just in Vitoria last week and they have a Gaztetxe, or social center, that’s been around for 30 years and we were able to talk to one of the people who’s worked there and they said that they want to host a meeting of social centers to share experiences and so on. Of course, each of the social centers is its own world and it responds to the specific needs of its town, and it owes a lot to the people who started the project. So, I think our philosophy, like that of other centers, is to learn everything that we can, find our own rhythm, and meet the needs and particular context of Valladolid.
