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Jesús Santos (1981–2025) was a trade union leader, councillor and deputy mayor in the southern Madrid town of Alcorcón, where he is remembered for his warmth, jovial spirit and unwavering social, antifascist and antiracist commitment.

Neighbourhood Life as Experience, Reference and Meeting Ground

Jesús and I were the same age and both from Alcorcón, so our memories were alike not only because of the generation we belonged to, but because they unfolded against the very same backdrop. That creates a bond. As did the kind of ‘retrotopia’ that connected us with a past from which we stripped the ugly moments away, leaving only the lovely ones. A past in which, as much as we kept the harsher and even the violent episodes in mind, we believed we had won wars. Some of those, we now know, were little more than battles—perhaps just little skirmishes with a happy ending.

We must have crossed paths a thousand times, but I think we actually met because I was writing a column in El País called Barrionalismos. In it, I wrote about those aspects of daily life we tend not to notice. The ones that happen in such small doses, and that are becoming ever more exceptional in this capitalistic and individualistic setting of ours. I mean things like supporting local commerce, befriending your neighbours, stopping for a chat in the lobby, being told at 40 how much you’ve grown, and simply enjoying parks at a time of crazed, tree-felling policies. Even things like laughing at those who ask us, guys and gals from the outskirts, how we make it daily into Madrid—as if it weren’t obvious that we travel by donkey.

Photo_ Coral Pceb_ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 [ Alcorcón 2024 ]

I suppose Jesús was struck by the idea of telling lovely stories about the lovely people who live in places that are lovely too, however much the media and popular discourse, imbued with “centro-centrism”, insist otherwise. That’s what usually happens when you’re insulted, belittled or ignored day after day: either you internalise it and fade into invisibility, or you stick your chest out and elevate what has always been cast as the opposite of “good” proper and beautiful. Jesús never hid his roots—quite the opposite. He was so truly from here that he used to say our Alcorcón, the very epitome of the peripheral neighbourhood experience, ran through his very veins. He was so southern-Madrileño that he revelled in our way of speaking, in our trashy “choni” neologisms. Far removed from the “high Spanish”—a typical idiom from Equatorial Guinea for those speaking in a language only they themselves understand—Jesús spoke so that people could grasp him, without stopping to quote thousands of references, millions of thinkers and their trillions of theories, though he knew them all perfectly well. The core of his message was the people, the tangible things, and the streets he walked every day. He moved through them as though he owned the place, stopping at every turn for anyone who hailed him—always on first-name terms, of course, since they gave his closeness and interest for granted—whether to be asked something, congratulated, demanded of, or even scolded.

The Pride of a Maligned Periphery

I once had the chance to attend one of his rallies and witness it with my own eyes. It was in the Parque de la Ribota, packed to the rafters. Jesús was still a member of Podemos [1][1] Podemos was the leading party of the Spanish left in the second half of the 2010s. In 2015, the movement managed to channel public discontent with Europe’s austericide and the old two-party system, rising from nothing to become the third political force nationwide, with a strong foothold in towns and regions. Although it strengthened its results in the repeat election the following year, from then on it suffered severe internal and external wear, which manifested in the gradual fragmentation and erosion of its brand in town halls and regional parliaments, giving way to municipalist lists and independent figures such as Jesús Santos. then, and alongside him came the party heavyweights, drawing in a crowd of onlookers, sympathisers and potential voters. In a category all of their own—wonderful and endearing—were what you might have called the “JesúsSanters”: a mix of fans, devotees, admirers, friends and people who had known him since he was a kid, who had seen him grow from boy to man. From the punk who went to the gigs at the Valderas training school, to the tie-less politician with a ponytail. They weren’t all necessarily Podemos supporters, though most probably leaned left. Above all, they were there for Jesús. That evening, the crowd was roaring his name, and when his turn arrived, everyone fell silent. The emotion was palpable. He stepped calmly up to the microphone, and as he began to speak, the words tripped over each other—so much to say, and so eager. It was as if his mouth had filled with plans and dreams that simply wouldn’t fit. As if they were jostling and lining up to break through, each one fighting to be the first out.

Or maybe—and perhaps I’m talking more about myself than about him—he was nervous because for people like us it’s hard to picture ourselves in certain places. And if we do manage to reach them, even if just to brush them with our fingertips, we’ll always feel inadequate. Impostor syndrome, they call it. So, when we arrive at positions that for some are nothing more than a starting point, we feel small or out of place, as if walking a tightrope under dozens—or hundreds, or thousands, depending on the role—of eyes fixed not so much on catching us if we stumble, but on not missing the moment we do.

But there were no stumbles. Quite the opposite.

—Come on, Jesús!—someone shouted. And hundreds of voices joined in. They were cheering him on, him and everything he stood for. As though it were the harmless revenge of those who had never been listened to, even when they had a voice and plenty to say.

That encouragement must have done the trick, because far from getting flustered, he reacted with utter ease. He started laughing, and then, true to his form, propelled himself into a speech that seemed to come from deep within. What stuck with me were two words: love and Alcorcón. After that, I stopped hearing his voice, drowned out by the applause, the cheers and the pride of a maligned periphery bursting out into the open, from people aged anything between 0 and 99. I don’t even remember what he said, but I do remember the lovely atmosphere, how he actually was a prophet in his own land, how there wasn’t a seat to spare, how emotions ran high, hairs stood on end, and how the shouts of praise interrupted him every minute, making him bashfully smile.

Jesús never faked his character or his manners, not even that day. He wasn’t posh or pretentious, nor someone who had never set foot in the outskirts but made a whole deal of pretending otherwise. He was one of us, a local Joe who had spent years working for the municipal services company that, among other things, takes care of cleaning our town. The guy-next-door who moved on to become the binding force of a political left that, in time, fell apart. Or rather, shattered into a thousand pieces. But that came later. That day, Jesús didn’t need to rummage through his hard drive for anecdotes to prove where he came from—because he had never left.

Community Memory and Listening

What fascinated me most about him, beyond that shared neighbourhoodist spirit, was his fierce defence of our town, and his remembrance and learning from its struggles. For Jesús, keeping his roots and his place close to his heart, and walking Alcorcón often, made him aware of his strengths, his weaknesses and his own shortcomings—but also of everything we had inherited.

In Alcorcón, the jumble of locals and migrants from all over the country and the wider world spared us from fighting a thousand battles. Many of them had already put their bodies on the line. Emilita R. Montesinos, a local role model for us all, always recalled how, when she and her husband moved into the home they had built brick by brick, it still lacked a floor and a bathroom. With no glass on the windows, they boarded them up with sacks os sand. And they were not the only ones. The Madrid periphery is slowly forgetting it now, but before the conquest of services like the metro or hospitals, migrants from the rural exodus joined forces to build and legalise their houses, working tirelessly to secure even the most basic conditions, such as sewers or electricity. On the outskirts, every rung climbed is a bequest from those who had to demand, to bare their teeth and even their fists.

That’s why, when I decided to reclaim our shared Black memory together with the Afro-centred cultural space Espacio Afro [2],[2] Espacio Afro is a benchmark Cultural Centre, for the encounter of Black, African, and Afro-descendant culture in Madrid and all of Spain. You can learn about their projects and find further information in: https://www.conciencia-afro.com/conciencia-afro/espacio-afro I also reached out to Jesús. I needed to make eternal the name of Augusto Ndombele Domingos, “Jimmy”, a boy from Leganés murdered at just 16, also at the hands of a neo-Nazi. Even though 2022 marked two decades since that terrible event, it still felt raw to me. It was something like what I experienced when Lucrecia Pérez was killed in ’92, only this time I was older: I had the awareness, almost the certainty, that I was in danger simply for being Black, and that not even minors like Augusto, or like my own brother, would be spared. Not even in Alcorcón, the only place I had always thought of as my motherland, my safe space. Barely a week after his murder, the bouncer at a local nightclub refused me entry because, in his words, Black people caused trouble. The bitter irony was that Jimmy’s killer was not Black at all, but a white nightclub bouncer.

Years earlier, his father had taken the difficult decision to leave Angola for fear that the war ravaging the country might claim one of his children, his wife, or himself. But it was a Nazi who killed Jimmy in Alcorcón. The family did not set foot in the neighbourhood again until twenty years later, on the anniversary of his death—thanks to Jesús, who listened to us. He helped what was left of that diminished family, broken by loss, to give new meaning to the place where it had all happened. Right in front of the spot where he was killed, we unveiled a plaque with the name of the son and brother stolen from them by racist violence. Since then, it has been known as Augusto Ndombele Domingos Park.

Photo_ Coral Pceb_ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 [ Alcorcón 2024 ]

Conclusions: Recognising Ourselves to Win Back Closeness

It’s been only five years since then, yet it feels like centuries. Jesús is gone, and, save for a few honourable exceptions, so too is his pragmatic, streetwise way of doing politics. How I miss you, Jesús—for who you were, for what you stood for, and for what you did. I feel that something great and beautiful vanished when you left. It died with you. Today, I see our neighbourhoods as uglier, sadder places.

The perspectives for our climate and societies look bleak. Everywhere the left persists in splintering, the far right floods our neighbourhoods, criminalising anyone with a different faith or just a darker skin tone. Political aberrations, misogynist streamers, show-offs, fraudsters, proud tax evaders and neoliberal scum gain ground and strut about unchecked. Humble origins are forgotten or glossed over, and when they are exalted, it’s only to twist the past, weave tales of insecurity and poison coexistence. As though we hadn’t all already seen muggings, parks littered with syringes or thefts long before migrant neighbours arrived. As though those who face the same hardships—or worse—deserve harsher blame than those who plant their seeds.

Collective hope falters. And yet, even as we choke on this social panic over a youth we see as demobilised, disengaged from politics, if not first in line to climb aboard the train of reactionary populism, we rarely display the intellectual honesty to ask ourselves who sowed what we now reap. The crisis of credibility in our democracy is far from just a youth problem, and yet the truth is it hurts the most in what it has broken between generations—who live not only in the same neighbourhoods, but under the same roofs. Those poisoning us are many, and their methods are more, but from people like Jesús I learned that what divides us is always less than what they try to make us believe. The wider failure of politics is, as always, intersectional. It mirrors that neglect so defining for peripheral experience. Some more than others have been left behind by the promise of progress, on a broken social ladder jammed with job insecurity, economic inequality, racism, structural violence and impossible paths to independence. Disaffection is no accident. The message of those who treat our institutions like a game of musical chairs, unsurprisingly, keeps failing just as badly—or worse—than their diagnosis.

What was lost with Jesús Santos is a life beyond compare, from the personal to the political—a microcosm of an intuition and a vocation rooted in Alcorcón that will always bear his name. And yet, what Jesús Santos filled until it overflowed, what has returned in his absence, is a void that once made us feel as orphaned as we do today—as much as it hurts more this time around. A void of trust in politics, which, in the end, comes down to closeness, to the reassuring warmth of presence, something that can infect us with the hope of possibility. To call blindly for younger leadership, or to believe that appealing to the youth is just a matter of slang and a good knack for TikToks, is to insist on swapping the mask on the same monster. No hall of mirrors can fill the shoes of what we lack. Hatred, for its part, can destroy many things, many lives, but it can never prevail, however much it wants to. The far right is a machine that, without knowing it, aspires only to break itself. It consumes, judges and persecutes; it promises identities even as it hollows them out, community even as it pits us against one another, and security even as it dismantles social institutions day by day.

What we face goes beyond an unbearable crisis in youth housing, social justice, or labour dignity. Even more than a crisis of political answers, we face a crisis of recognition. That is where this abyss begins. We have failed, yes, in recognising the chains we have forced young people to drag, but also in recognising ourselves in others. We will have to throw our weight behind those who truly set out to fill this void till it overflows. This will come from our neighbourhoods—or it will not be at all. Against a digital dystopia that walls us off inside our screens, what we need is recognition, and self-recognition, honest and rooted in the streets, between our bodies and the bodies that care for us. Against an abyss of xenophobia and intergenerational resentment, riddled with scapegoats, we need to recognise ourselves and each other in what we love and in what hurts us. To recognise ourselves and each other in the radical universality running through even the most ordinary and particular of our experiences. Lovely places, lovely atmospheres, lovely people.

Love and Alcorcón. Because for anyone who truly dares to fill that void, to make it overflow, like Jesús did, they both exist everywhere.

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