Nacho Cano’s Malinche: 10-hour days and 300 euros for dancers

The real cost of being Nacho Cano’s intern: 300 euros and 10 hours a day

What is the price of sleeping in a room with four strangers, eating the same 10-euro menu daily, and earning 20 euros in weekend tips? The answer from the investigation is 300 euros a month, later 500, plus extras. In return: ten hours of daily rehearsal, Monday to Saturday, for a show like Malinche. And, according to police checks, without the paperwork allowing them to be there. The issue is not just a low salary. It is an entire cultural production model, and someone ends up paying the bill.

How much did Malinche’s dancers really earn?

The numbers on the table are simple and allow little interpretation. 10-euro daily menu at the same restaurant, paid for. Shared room with four or five people in a city hostel. 300 euros a month, later rising to 500. And 20 euros in tips on weekends. If anyone wanted more, the door was open to work at the Canalla bar after the show.

Added up, some calculate over 900 euros monthly in benefits and cash, with accommodation and one meal covered in Madrid. The calculation is not unreasonable if summed: about 300 for food a month, 500 in pay, eighty in tips. This is where the case becomes uncomfortable, because it forces comparison with what an average Spanish intern earns, who has no room or menu or anything. And they are thanked on top of that.

The problem was not the salary, it was the permit

Here lies the legal core, not the sarracena one. According to published proceedings, the dancers lacked both a study visa and an employment contract. An immigration lawyer summarized it plainly: they should not have started the internship without authorization. She added a detail often overlooked: this stay authorization for studies is requested by the individual, not the company.

There is an added factor tightening the screws. Since January 2024, all interns must contribute to the Social Security system. If they were not registered, and could not be without legal residence, an administrative offense appears on one side and the shadow of exploitation crime on the other. The timeline did not help: the application took six months to resolve, from December to May, with a subsequent appeal. While it was being resolved, the show continued.

The complaint that brought focus

The narrative that peine the case, according to publications, states that individuals entered the country without a student visa and were instructed to pose as tourists. If true, the irregularity does not start with the payroll: it starts at the border. There are testimonies describing the backroom of the production, with shifts extending until dawn and an exit from the project that, in one specific case, ended with two days literally on the street.

Is it exploitation or training?

This is the discussion running through the entire case. One part of the analysis argues that rehearsing ten hours is not working ten hours: if you work, the employer profits at your cost; if you rehearse, you cost them money. With this logic, earning little to train with good teachers and end up on a professional stage is a bargain, not a condemnation. It is the same argument used for vocational training internships and camps.

The counterargument is not weak. This learning became the labor force for a product sold as a commercial spectacle. And the theory of a teacher exploiting a student in exchange for knowledge has a vague but real limit. El Bulli appears in the conversation as the canonical example: queues to enter, symbolic or no remuneration, a golden resume upon exit. No one disputes that much was learned there. The debate is whether that makes any condition acceptable.

What the case says about the Spanish labor market

There is something more uncomfortable than the specific figures: the benchmark for comparison. In Spain, unpaid internships are the standard entry point into half a dozen sectors, and the average university intern earns amounts that do not cover renting a room in Madrid, let alone eating daily. Against that mirror, the Malinche package seems almost generous.

That is precisely the problem. That the comparison with local precarity comes out favorable says nothing good about local precarity. What changes the axis is the administrative irregularity: if work is done poorly paid and without authorization or registration, the conversation shifts from how little is too little to what constitutes a crime.

Closing. Ultimately, the case has an undeniable pedagogical virtue: it has half the country discussing how much it costs to train a dancer. No one has asked how much it costs for someone to pay their social security contributions.