GOOD FRIDAY, SAETAS, AND COMPLEXITY

Good Friday dawned quiet and cloudy.

I do not even know if the gulls cried out to welcome the morn—I was sleeping. But the city is as silent as a church before people even think of being there.

Today is one of those great holidays and one of the most observed in Spain in the inevitable pairing of religion and state.

Nonetheless, yesterday, I was reminded Spain has a long history of opposition to the Church and its role in people’s lives.

At the checkout counter in Mercadona, the Spanish supermarket chain, I sleepily asked the young man with a scruffy beard what he was going to eat today, what his family’s tradition was for Good Friday.

This is, after all, a day when Catholics and many other Christians are told not to consume meat, in honor of Jesus’ death. Even in my elementary school on the border in Texas we were served fish sticks or some such on this day, rather than the ordinary meat.

Carlos, the friendly guy at the counter, looked at me a bit perplexed, his brow folded: like why are you asking me this.

He said, “ pues lo que se dé.” whatever is served.

Though he answered by telling me he did not have control over the family’s meals, he also was saying—without meaning to—that the religious issues did not rise to consciousness. They were not so important.

So, I mentioned the issues of good Friday.

He responded “I am not religious”.

Carlos is far from alone in this. There is historical war in the heart of this holiday. It speaks, “While it is nice to have a day off, do not assume everyone is Catholic or religious.”

Last night, while hobbling home from a meeting, I went down a street between bands performing on the parallel streets while processing with their holy images.

They were loud. The sounds bounced of the walls. They resounded in a cacophony around me as I grimaced with a bit of pain from my damaged knee.

Alicante was the last capital of the Republic and, as a result, has many families of leftist heritage who inherited an anti-Church and anti-religion politics, often now simply custom.

To make sense of this, it helps to know the Church historically was an important prop of Spain’s right wing and its landed elites, against industrial and farmworkers. Even after decades of dictatorship, and even not speaking of the heritage to family members in order to survive in a very conservative and repressive society, the rejection of religion and the church continues.

With the collapse of Franco’s dictatorship and the passage to a constitutional monarchy, the Church became one of the least respected and most questioned of institutions, given its support for repression and strong demands for support of authority—especially that of the Church—as well as its shielding pederasts within its ranks.

In large numbers, Spaniards rejected it.

Still, it is institutionalized. Despite Spain’s becoming a lay country, meaning one with a kind of separation between Church and State, just not the American one, you see its important role in housing the cofradías y hermandades, the fraternities and brotherhoods, one of the major organization parts of the city’s society. They are housed within the Church and also receive sanction from the Municipality.

As an example of this complex and tortured relationship, we can look at the neighborhood of Santa Cruz, perhaps the oldest in Alicante. It is up on the hill, just beneath the Castle.

I write oldest because that is what is commonly said, but I note the old fisherman’s neighborhood (which was outside the city’s walls), Raval Roig, though now a city neighborhood, has been settled for at least as long, probably, but is seldom spoken of in the hallowed fashion of the old town. The separation between fisher folk and townsmen is an old one and, despite everyone living in a large city, still finds ways of distinguishing people.

During the years of the Republic, or as is commonly said, during the “troubles”, meaning the civil war and more, Santa Cruz’ sacred images were burned.

These seems more than a connection between people and Church, or people and the divine (they are not necessarily the same), they are also what we can call the sacrae, the sacred objects that symbolize a group and serve as a focus and guarantee for social life. Their sacredness comes from that as much as anything inherently religious. Life organizes itself around them and through them.

After the beginning of the dictatorship, around the time the railroad workers and immigrants of San Blas were developing a fraternity to perform the more secular Moros and Cristianos, the people of Santa Cruz in 1945 re-organized their Hermandad, their Brotherhood (the re- is important as they insist on their history and legitimacy) and to commission a new sacrae, a new image of Jesus) which they obtained in 1946.

Their image comes from Sevilla, both an old center of Moorish Spain and of Christianity (Arabic and Spanish) following the reconquest in 1492.

I find it intriguing that along with the image from Andalucía they may have brought the saeta, a vocal form that they are proud of.

This seems a tension in that the saeta on the surface is flamenco and Andalusian, rather than Alicantino. It is a different style from the devotional as well as folkloric song styles of Alicante, I gather.

However, for Santa Cruz, their saeta is described as descending from short devotional poems that were sung among the Franciscans to motivate devotion and a kind of religious “trance”. That is their word and I understand it—following Victor Turner—as being drawn into something greater than the self in which your individual existence is no longer important and in which there is a feeling of that greater-than-self that takes over.

At the same time, scholars write about how during the time the people of Santa Cruz reformed their Brotherhood and, hence, their procession and devotion, the saeta was becoming “flamencoized”.

I think this means that it began to take on Flamenco stylings and ornamentations.

In addition the classical saeta of the martinete took on what is called a seguiriya, a more freeform and heavily ornamented outpouring of sound.

Together, the saeta now has two kinds of passion: that of the religious poemlets, the text and the passion of collective effort to lift the thrones, carry them, and to parade alongside them sung as a martinete in the saeta, as well as the seguiriya, in the voice of a solitary singer from a balcony above. Together, as saeta, they interrupt the bands and punctuate the procession.

“The…saeta can induce a state close to trance, both in the saetero, the singer, as well as in the public. The absence of accompaniment, the expectant silence of the crowd, and the religious context create an atmosphere of intense spiritual concentration.” (flamencología dot org / saeta translation, mine.)

Finally, I want to reflect on the melismatic quality of the saeta.

A melisma is when a melody is ornamented with multiple notes. This is normal in much of flamenco as also in much of Arabic music. While creating energy, drama, and interest, it delays the singer’s arrival on the next note such that in sequence melismas become one of the main characteristics of the song. When attached to words, they can both enhance the meaning and draw away from it, creating, as a result, an important part of the art.

Melismas are improvised rather than formalized (memorized) or written.

The call of a saeta tends to be a quejío, a complaint, a cry of anguish or pain. Notably this is not necessarily some specific pain, such as a cut hand, but tends to be more the anxiety, anguish, and failed hopes of human existence.

In the religious saeta, it is a cry to the universe and to the divine saying: “I am here, I am human, I feel. Hear my voice, my feeling." It is just a cry, but can also become, as the melisma grows, a plea for recognition and perhaps succor. especially as it moves into a text, a short poem that is prolonged by repetitions of melismas delaying the end of a sound or the movement from one part of a word to another, and especially from one part of a sentence to the other. They artistically slow down the text, enhancing its feeling and power.

One person sings alone, but as people give in to it, the voice becomes the feeling, not the rational thought, per se, of everyone as they live a tension, a tentative separation—like a hand feeling around in the dark, between sound and meaning. They have to wait, expectantly, for the meaning to establish itself and become clear.

The melismas of saeta also connote a bridge between Hispanic Christianity, especially of the more sedate mid and upper classes, and more Arabic, working class, and gypsy religiosity and sentiments. As a result, they have become a major symbol of Andalusía, the place of origin of the carved Jesus.

They do not just have religious meaning and purpose, they also exalt the neighborhood. Like the costaleros, the bearers of the images, the saeteros tend to inherit their position across generations and, as a result, have a deep connection to the neighborhood. While doing this, they give the neighborhood an identity as of local Arabic Christian roots—specifically— after all, they live on the old Arabic town which they continue. Their churches are on top of its mosques. They also code it as working class, like the Andalusian gypsies.

The emotion is strong, and the Hermandad insists on that role both for the saeta and for identifying their procession and their neighborhood.

While I do not know this, I would not be surprised to find people who participate less from a strong religious, theological sense than from a desire to belong, to maintain themselves as part of the neighborhood.

Rejecting the religious can have the effect of also rejecting the neighborhood and your family as a result, I suspect.

In any case, this Good Friday is a peaceful time to relax away from work, at the same time it is crossed by numerous lines of tension as we have seen.

Examples of saetas are found in the first comment if you wish to hear them.

PHOTO CREDIT: Hermandad de la Santa Cruz

Originally published April 3, 2026 on my account on Facebook