In its almost 300 pages and 120 photographs, La costura de las artes marítimas shows the labor organization of the Spanish manufacturing production of thread, ropes and marine netting. Villajoyosa has provided them to merchant ships and fishing boats since ancient times. The richness of this ethnography is due to the fact that the productive organization remained guild-based until the sixties of the twentieth century, due to the scarce industrialization, the weak and unstable liberalism and the subsequent autarchy of the Dictatorship.
It has been documented in detail the manufacturing work, the oral and staggered transmission of the trade (master-officer-apprentice), the presence of a strong female domestic system, which derives from a gender division of labour, and the standardisation of child labour. Finally, the social changes of the 1960s, with the basic female labour demands for the recognition of the trade of redera and the achievement of retirement through the Central Nacional Sindical, show a historical example of the social force in the opening of the Spanish autarchy during the developmentalist stage.
The author, Ana Baldó, has a degree in History from the University of Alicante, a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Miguel Hernández University of Elche and a Master's degree in Cultural Heritage Management and Research from the University of the Balearic Islands.
The relationship between the MMB and Vilamuseu has been close for many years. Both museums are a benchmark in social responsibility in Spain, and in 2018 the MMB hosted the 5th International Congress on Education and Accessibility in Museums and Heritage, to whose Standing Committee the director of Vilamuseu belongs. The two museums also collaborate in different research projects. Thus, since 2022 Vilamuseu joined the MMB's oral and documentary ethnographic research project "Veus de la Mar", and both museums study together the heritage related to the Compañía Transatlántica Española. A large part of the company's archives are kept by the MMB, and many vileros worked for the company in a wide variety of positions. Cristóbal Morales became captain of one of the largest and most important ships of the time and of the company, the steamship Reina Victoria Eugenia. The publication of this book is a further step in this fruitful cooperation.
The presentation will be made by the author, together with the Councillor for Historical Heritage, Rosa Llorca; the director of the MMB, Enric García, and the museum's curator and head of publications, Inma González; and the director of Vilamuseu, Antonio Espinosa.