When a hat is also a memory, a story of an unlikely friendship, and a political/ historical statement? This odd looking hat brings back fond memories of my childhood. But it also has a dark past and a warning for our future.
As a child I moved often in connection with my father’s career in the US Navy. One assignment my family particularly loved was at the US Navy base outside the small town of Rota in southern Spain. We lived there in the 1960s when Spain was still under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
I was 13 years old and in 8th grade when we moved there. We lived off base in a rented Spanish house in this tiny Andalusian seaside fishing village. Spain, at that time, was starting to modernize its society near the end of Franco’s 35 year dictatorship. Nonetheless, Andalucia was still desperately poor. I remember well the constant burro trains moving sand from the beach to be shoveled into the concrete for the construction of the apartment building across the street. Today in Spain the burro is forgotten as a quaint oddity.
Here is where the hat comes in. Rota and its beaches were a haven for smugglers bringing in cigarettes and liquor from nearby Morocco. As a result, we had a large contingent of the Spanish national police aka the Civil Guard – in Spanish Guardia Civil- patrolling the beaches. My brother and I frequented these beaches and randomly started a friendship with a middle age guardsman named Manuel. I have forgotten his last name so I will refer to him by the Spanish honorific Don Manuel.
Don Manuel wanted to learn English and I was struggling with Spanish. While Don Manuel walked his patrol up and down the beach, my brother and I walked with him and slowly began to communicate. After two years it was time for my father to transfer again. When Don Manuel learned we were leaving, in an act of great generosity, he gifted to us his formal uniform hat.
The Guardia has been known since its founding for its unique hat – a form of the tricorne hat popular at the time of the American Revolution. The Guardia was established to bring law and order to the rather lawless rural Spain of the 19th century. It did this job well but also established a reputation of being the brutal enforcers of the Spanish aristocracy on the helpless peasants. This reputation only worsened after the vicious Civil War of 1936-39 and the total political oppression that followed.
But my brother and I were largely unaware of that dark past and simply were entranced by kindly Don Manuel and his funny hat. Following the death of Franco in 1975, Spain modernized, became a democracy, developed economically and rejoined Europe from its former pariah status. The Guardia modernized as well and now is among Spain’s most respected institutions know for professional policing and beloved for providing national security from terrorism.
So here comes the political/ historical statement. Every time I hear “Support the Blue,” I think of the Guardia Civil. Kindly Don Manuel, I am sure was also thought of by some as Manuel the Devil, as he likely beat, and possibly tortured, the opponents of the Franco dictatorship.
A police force is only as good, or as bad, as the political leadership it serves. Yes, I support the Blue as long as it serves the values I believe in – responsible exercise of freedom and protection of our democracy. But when political leadership turns its purpose to repression, then it can sink to the level of the Gestapo, KGB and other forces of political repression. It’s up to us to demand the police force we deserve.
Kevin Milas
