The spirit of Sol lives on as wrecking ball hangs over Gypsy shantytown

La Merche saw on TV how a wave of people, disgusted with the system, had taken over the Puerta del Sol. On another channel she saw how men and women who seemed to know it all were sneering that these were just a lot of hippies who were stirring up trouble. All the same, she was moved by the ideals that led these young people to come out on the streets in a movement christened with the date it began: May 15.

After seeing this, the activist Mercedes Jiménez, known as "La Merche," asked the inhabitants of the shantytown settlement of Puerta de Hierro, whose houses are gradually being demolished by the City of Madrid, to join the movement, pack their bags and go to Sol. She believed that those who oppress the outraged youth, depriving them of a future, are the same people who oppress the shantytown dwellers, depriving them of a present.

La Merche asked, but in vain. The Gypsies of Puerta de Hierro believed they would only encounter rejection in the micro-city that had risen in Madrid's central square, in a protest action that was being broadcast worldwide. She yielded. But she showed up one day in one of the Sol assemblies, told of the shanty dwellers' problems (rats, rubble and wrecking machines), and the next day a group of protestors found that what she had said was true.

Two months later, by one of the exit ramps of the Madrid-A Coruña freeway, a sign announced: "May 15 Puerta de Hierro." The ideals of some and the needs of others have merged. Some 30 (at one point, 60) of the indignados who had gathered in Madrid from all parts of Spain in July, and had later been dislodged from the central square by the police, settled in the shantytown to help the 53 families who live there. The latter consider themselves legal owners of the land, having been there since 1963, contrary to the view of City Hall, which has demolished much of the settlement and plans to demolish the rest before year's end. Coexistence between one group and the other is good.

"They are wonderful people, we're glad these March 11 people have come... I mean May 15," says one man at the door of his house. The houses' walls are decorated with black-and-white life-size photos of the occupants, as if to tell the machine operators that they are wrecking walls that shelter real people.

The perfectly lubricated system that made the Puerta del Sol function smoothly seems to have shifted to Puerta de Hierro. At midday the 15-M activists make a meal in a kitchen built between demolished houses. With pallets they have built a shelter for winter, a shower area and a playground for children. Young people living in tents have helped to clear the lots left by the demolition of some 50 shanties, a task that has taken them weeks.

"They are the important ones here. The whole story is about them; we are just an anecdote," says Norma, 31. "They have wrecked their houses, and where one family used to live now there are three or four, living in very bad conditions," she adds. Norma is the settlement's nurse, and about six times a day she gives first aid for cuts or bites. Scampering here and there are rats, dogs and one pig. She stops talking because a wardrobe has fallen on a girl's foot, painfully crushing a toenail. Before attending to her she remarks: "I'm not going to leave here until these people's rights are recognized, and this becomes a neighborhood to live in."

The city considers that these families, descendants of the first inhabitants who arrived in the 1960s, are unauthorized occupants of a green zone in the Moncloa-Aravaca district, bordering on a sewage treatment plant. According to an official report, the inhabitants mostly earn a living by junk collecting, and all the children go to school. So far 13 families have been rehoused in rental flats, and another 16 will have a right to this once their houses are demolished.

This is precisely what La Merche and the 15-M protestors are trying to prevent. Consulting the property registers, they claim that the families should be allowed to stay on the land. And once this struggle is over, which may last years, where will all the twentyish indignados go, having been embarked on their Utopian enterprise in one form or another since May? "I don't know, and it doesn't matter. What is certain is that the movement will go on, because it's inside us," says Paula, a Valencian of 20. Then she turns and sits at the table of a Gypsy family who are about to carve a chicken.