Passion and Desire: Songs, Bodies, and Resilience in Andalusian Folklore It is a journey into the ways in which Andalusian popular culture has been—and continues to be—a space of expression and resistance for dissidents. Combining art history, poetic sensibility, academic research, and sentimental memory, Roy del Postigo It unravels the echoes of a tradition that, beyond erroneous and interested interpretations, has been a refuge and altar for those who have inhabited the margins.
The figure of Isabel Pantoja, a singer with the grace, the spirit and the angel of Andalusia, whose musical career runs parallel to the last five decades of Spanish history, is transformed by the author into a starting point and beacon. The voice of the singer of Sailor of Lights either "My soul falls in love" In many of its songs, it appeals to those who identify with gossip, finger-pointing, criticism, and misunderstanding.
Ladybugs of pins on breasts of virginal divas, ladies of their works who are you attack from enduring so much, my Sapphic friends from Rociera, trans-Maribelas, transvestites from La Nogalera and a whole host of dissident figures from the South accompany Isabel on her pilgrimage of songs turned into paths of liberation.
But the story neither begins nor ends with her: the folklore of the South already wove—and continues to weave—a bata de cola made with subversive desires and gestures in the skin of artists such as Lola Flores, Marifé de Triana, Diana Navarro, Maria Peláe either Pastora Soler. Musical references that have been and will be an inspiration for transformists like The Emerald of Seville, Satin Greco either Jota Carajota.
With large doses of erudition and an art that takes away the felt, Roy del Postigo offers a work where the South is not just a postcard landscape, but a political, creative and spiritual power guided by the Andalusian Dolorosas, folkloric and subaltern.
A book that is, at the same time, an essay, an altar of verses, and a love letter to those who transformed art into freedom. Because in these songs, identity is embroidered with sequins and paraded in procession.
