THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES

COMPANION TO TWENTIETH AND

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SPAIN

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Spain charts the
key ideas, practices and imaginings that characterize Spain’s cultural, historical, social and political
history in the contemporary period.
The volume brings together internationally acknowledged scholars from around the globe and
from diverse disciplines, from cinema and sociology to sociolinguistics, politics and history, as well
as various other cultural studies approaches. It offers an integrated multi-disciplinary volume that
provides a more complete and nuanced multi-perspective assessment of modern and contemporary
Spanish culture, with a special emphasis on recent decades. This interdisciplinary and thematically
organized Companion includes essays on literature and art, history, politics, religion, economics,
linguistics and visual culture and covers an extensive period of time, with a focus on key events. The
volume explores cutting-edge areas and engages with current debates, controversies and questions in
the field of Hispanic studies.
Offering a nuanced, multi-disciplinary assessment of modern and contemporary Spanish culture
through a dichotomic organizing principle, The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Twentieth
and Twenty-First Century Spain is an expansive resource which will be of interest to students and
scholars of Hispanic studies, and those with a particular interest in Spanish history, politics and culture.

Eduardo Ledesma is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University
of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (USA). He received his PhD in Romance languages and literatures from
Harvard University in 2012 and his BS in civil engineering from UIUC in 1995. He is the author of
Radical Poetry: Aesthetics, Politics, Technology and the Ibero-American Avant-Gardes (1900–2015)
(2016), supported by a Fulbright Research Grant to Spain. His second book is titled Expanding
Cinemas: Experimental Filmmaking Across the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic Since 1960 (2024). His latest
book project, Blind Cinema, which studies films by blind filmmakers, has been awarded an NEH
Fellowship.

Luisa Elena Delgado was Professor Emerita of Spanish, Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and
Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (USA). Among her many
publications we might highlight La nación singular: Fantasías de la normalidad democrática Española
(2014), finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Spain in the category of essay. She also co-edited
(with Pura Fernández and Jo Labanyi) Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History (2016).
In addition, she co-edited with Jo Labanyi Modern Literatures in Spain (2023), co-authored with
Helena Buffery, Kirsty Hooper and Mari José Olaziregi.
 ROUTLEDGE COMPANIONS TO HISPANIC AND LATIN
AMERICAN STUDIES
Series Editors: Javier Muñoz-Basols, University of Oxford,
and Pablo Valdivia, University of Groningen.

Routledge Companions to Hispanic and Latin American Studies are state-of-the-art surveys
of the key areas within Hispanic and Latin American Studies, providing accessible yet
thorough assessments of key problems, themes, and recent developments in research.

THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES COMPANION TO EARLY MODERN

SPANISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Edited by Rodrigo Cacho Casal and Caroline Egan

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST

CENTURY LATIN AMERICAN LITERARY AND CULTURAL FORMS
Edited by Guillermina De Ferrari and Mariano Siskind

THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES COMPANION TO

NINETEENTH-CENTURY LATIN AMERICA
Edited by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Graciela Montaldo

THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES COMPANION TO TWENTIETH AND

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SPAIN
Ideas, Practices, Imaginings
Edited by Eduardo Ledesma and Luisa Elena Delgado

MODERNIDADES IBÉRICAS/THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES COMPANION

TO IBERIAN MODERNITIES
Luis Martín-Estudillo and Antonio Sáez Delgado, Eds.

For more information about this series please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-

Companions-to-Hispanic-and-Latin-American-Studies/book-series/RCHLAS
THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC
STUDIES COMPANION TO
TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-
FIRST CENTURY SPAIN
Ideas, Practices, Imaginings

Edited by Eduardo Ledesma and Luisa Elena Delgado

SERIES EDITORS

JAVIER MUÑOZ-BASOLS AND PABLO VALDIVIA

SPANISH LIST ADVISOR

JAVIER MUÑOZ-BASOLS
 Designed cover image: FilippoBacci/Getty Images
First published 2025
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 CONTENTS

List of Figures xi
List of Tables xiii
List of Contributors xiv
Acknowledgmentsxxvii
In Memoriam: A Tribute to Elena Delgado (1962–2024) xxviii
Introduction: A New Look at Twentieth and Twenty-First Century
Spanish Social, Political and Cultural History xxxi

PART 1
Spaces and Environments 1

1 Cultural Geographies in Spain: Landscape, Place and Space 3

Susan Larson

2 Urban Landscapes and the Construction of the Commons:

Barcelona’s Superblocks and Urban Voids 17
Sara Bartumeus Ferré

3 Rural Spain: Social Landscapes at the Beginning of the Twenty-

First Century 33
Luis Camarero, Jesús Oliva and Rosario Sampedro

4 Citizens, Squatters, Homeowners and Tenants: Housing Activism

and the Structures of Democratization and Capitalism in Spain 49
Miguel A. Martínez

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 Contents

5 The Cultural Ecology of Tourism: Life-Capital Conflict in

Post-2008 Spain 63
Luis I. Prádanos

6 Information Bytes: From Bullfighting to COVID-Fighting: How to

Live on Planet Earth 77
Kata Beilin

PART 2
Histories and Narratives 91

7 Narrating Conflict: The Politics of Historical Memory in Spain 93

Sebastiaan Faber

8 Representing Loss: Ghosts, Ruins, and Other Traces 106

Jo Labanyi

9 Buscando al Abuelo (Searching for Grandpa): Unearthing the Lost

Bodies and Missing Histories of the Spanish Civil War 116
Dacia Viejo-Rose and Layla Renshaw

10 Posing the Question: Robert Capa and Gerda Taro in Three Shots
From the Spanish Civil War 131
Michael Iarocci

11 The Periódicos Murales of the Spanish Civil War: Recycled

Imprints, Contested Conventions and Shared Histories 142
Jordana Mendelson

12 Transitions, Restorations, Exiles: Assessing the Legacies of the

Expelled Second Republic 155
Mari Paz Balibrea

13 Terrorism and Peacebuilding Narratives in Spain 168

Ioannis Tellidis

14 “Evolution Without Revolution”: Narratives of Rupture and

Reconciliation in Spanish and Portuguese Democratization 180
Manuel Loff

vi
 Contents

15 Acoustic Conflict and the Spanish Far Right During the Transition
to Democracy 195
Tom Whittaker

PART 3
Governments and Institutions 207

16 The Contested Nation(s), 1900–2023 209

Xosé M. Núñez Seixas

17 Independence as a Political Strategy: A Party Competition

Approach to Secessionism in Catalonia and the Basque Country 221
Gemma Sala

18 Patriarchy, Power, and Women’s Independence: The

Transformation of Marriage and Families in Spain, 1976–2020 234
María José González

19 The Catholic Church and Other Institutional Religions: The Long

Road From Catholic Monoconfesionalism to Democratic Religious
Pluralism248
Natalia Núñez Bargueño

20 Schools, Scientific Institutions, and the Spanish “Brain Drain”

(1833–2023)261
Jaume Claret

21 Regulatory Policies and Institutions of Contemporary

Spanish Language 274
María Florencia Rizzo

22 Prison Abolition in Spain: The Weight of History, the Debate, and

the Future 285
Aurélie Vialette

23 Sporting Institutions: The Structures of Spanish Sport Across the

Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries 297
Andrew McFarland

24 Football and Politics in Modern Spain: FC Barcelona and Real

Madrid in Historical Context 310
Alejandro Quiroga

vii
 Contents

PART 4
Bodies and Identities 323

25 Franco’s Instituto de Estudios Africanos: Spanish Colonial Science,

and Local African Responses 325
Benita Sampedro Vizcaya

26 Boats, Bodies, and Borders: Migration, Dispossession, and Patera

Literature in Spain 342
N. Michelle Murray

27 Racial Others in Spain: The Articulation of Shifting Identities in the

Works of Amazigh/Berber-Catalan Writer Saïd El Kadaoui Moussaoui 355
Cristián H. Ricci

28 Women in the Streets: 8M Feminist Protests in Spain 366

Eva Anduiza and Sabina Monza

29 Colonial Genderings: Fluid Identities in the Maghreb 380

Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo

30 Unraveling Time: Queer Future and Trans Entanglement in Veneno393

Dean Allbritton

31 Motionless: Disability and Snow White in Narratives of the Crisis 403

Emily DiFilippo

32 A Civil Death: Homeownership, Migration, and the (Un)Making of

Urban Subjects 414
Sophie L. Gonick

PART 5
Communities and Collectivities 425

33 Early 20th-Century Popular Mobilization and Labor Movements in

Spain: From the Restoration to the Second Republic 427
Pamela Radcliff

34 Chinese Contributions to Spanish Culture: An Overview 438

Joaquín Beltrán Antolín and Amelia Sáiz López
Translated by Linda Grabner

viii
 Contents

35 Muslims and Jews in Contemporary Spain: Returns, Legacies,

Belongings451
Daniela Flesler

36 Made by Punk, Makers of Punk: Spanish Women in the

Transition Space 462
Nuria Triana Toribio

37 Narrating Class in Twentieth-Century Spanish Literature: From

Class in Itself to Class for Itself474
David Becerra Mayor

38 Social Responses to Material Inequality in Spain (2008–2022) 487

Steven L. Torres

39 Broken Promises: Precarity and Affect in Contemporary Spanish

Poetry after 2011 499
Carlos Varón González

PART 6
Aesthetics and Technologies 511

40 The Atmospherics of Modernity: Flight in the Literary and Popular

Imagination in Spain, 1920–1936 513
Juli Highfill

41 Auditory Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: Stereophonic

Soundscapes of Modernity, From Print Media to Radio 529
Tania Gentic

42 Landscape as Event: Geometrics and Geopoetics in Contemporary

Spanish Cinema 543
Steven Marsh

43 Intimate Worlds, Public Battles: Gender, Agency, and Autonomy in

Contemporary Spanish Cinema 557
Sarah Thomas

44 Algorithms, the Earth, and the Spanish State: The Politics of

Making Digital Art 571
Alex Saum-Pascual

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 Contents

45 Performance in Contemporary Times: Processes, Communities, and

Audience586
David Rodríguez-Solás

46 The Aesthetics of Ephemera: Migrant Subjects and the Unleashing

of Place in the Photography of Óscar Parasiego 599
Parvati Nair

PART 7
Connections and Fractures 611

47 Apocalyptic Visions of the Crisis: The Imaginary of the Flood in

Contemporary Spanish Culture 613
Natalia Castro Picón

48 Ties That Bind: Madrid’s 2011 Protest Camp as a Transversal

Community625
Julia Ramírez-Blanco

49 Iberian Multilingualism, Gender, and Translation as Collaboration 634

Leslie J. Harkema

50 Spain and the Shifting Limits of “Europe” 646

Luis Martín-Estudillo

51 Between Raquel Meller and Rosalía: Popular Spanish Music,

(Trans)National and Local Narratives 656
Julio Arce
Translated by Linda Grabner

52 Music’s Mirrors: Identity, Tradition, and Modernity in Spanish

Popular Music 669
Héctor Fouce and Fernán del Val
Translated by Linda Grabner

53 From the Mediterranean Diet to Gastronationalism: Cultural

Studies and Spanish Foodways 681
Rebecca Ingram

54 Iberia and the Americas: Hispanism and Its (Dis)Encounters 695

Diana Arbaiza

Index 708
x
 FIGURES

3.1 Proportion of Population Employed in Agriculture (Annual Average). 36

3.2 Balance of Rural Migration 1961–2020. 37
3.3 Percentage of Population Aged 25–44 by Municipality Size, 2020. 38
3.4 Percentage of Population with University Studies by Municipality Size. 38
3.5 Migratory Balance in Rural Areas According to Country of Birth (1988–2020). 42
3.6 Proportion of Resident Foreigners in Rural Areas. Evolution 2001–2018. 43
4.1 Banner “Stop Speculation: Occupation!” in a Squatted Social Center of
Barcelona (2012). 54
4.2 Eviction Blockade by PAH Members in Madrid (2019). 57
4.3 Public Event Organized by the Madrid Tenants’ Union (2019). 59
4.4 Changing Structural Contexts and Housing Movements’ Responses in
Spain (1950s–2020s). 60
5.1 “Próximamente el mundo” (“Arriving Soon: The World”) by Miguel Brieva. 70
5.2 Summer 2016 Cover for Tot Inclòs (All Inclusive). 72
6.1 “Extinction Rebellion bloquea la entrada del Ministerio de Agricultura
para exigir la protección a la biodiversidad.” 78
6.2 Activists at the International Day of Animal Rights, Plaza Sol, Madrid,
December 10, 2011. 79
6.3 Activists of Fundación Ecuanimal and WSPA – International in Bilbao. 80
9.1 Wall Commemorating the Site Where People Were Summarily Killed by
Firing Squad, Almudena Cemetery, Madrid, August 2011. 125
10.1 Republican Militiawoman, Training on the Beach Outside Barcelona. 132
10.2 Crowds Running for Shelter When the Air-Raid Alarm Sounded,
Bilbao, Spain. 135
10.3 Death of a Loyalist Militiaman. 138
11.1 E. Fornet, “Cultura Popular trae a Valencia los periódicos murales de
Madrid” (“Cultura Popular Brings to Valencia the Wall Newspapers of
Madrid”). 143
11.2 “Concurso de Periódicos Murales” (“Wall Newspaper Contest”). 145
11.3 J. O. Martínez, “El periódico mural.” 147

xi
 Figures

11.4 Francisco Carreño, “Qué es y cómo se hace un periódico mural?” 150

17.1 Results of Regional Parliamentary Elections in Catalonia 1980–2021
(% of Votes). 228
17.2 Results of Regional Parliamentary Elections in Basque Country
1980–2020 (% of Votes). 229
18.1 Women’s Mean Age at First Marriage and First Child, and Proportion of
Women in Higher Education (Age Group 25–29): Spain, 1976–2020. 237
18.2 Women’s Living Arrangements (Age Group 35–45): Spain, 1976–2020. 238
18.3 Employment Rates (Aged Group 25–45) by Gender and Civil Status:
Spain, 1976–2020. 240
18.4 Employment Rates of Partnered Women and Men Aged 25–45 Years
by Number of Children (Childless, 1 Child, 2 Children, and 3 or More
Children): Spain, 1976–2020. 241
18.5 Distribution of Couples by Earnings Structure (Age Group 30–45): Spain,
1999–2020. 242
25.1 Map of the Island of Fernando Poo, Misioneros Hijos del Inmaculado
Corazón de María. 329
25.2 and 25.3 Beato and Villarino. Capacidad mental del negro (105, 107). 333
25.4 Map of Continental Spanish Guinea, Misioneros Hijos del Inmaculado
Corazón de María. 336
25.5 R. Ibarrola, “Aportación al estudio del nivel mental de los indígenas de
Guinea” (27). 337
28.1 Effect of Different Characteristics on the Likelihood of Turning Out in
the 8M Protests (2018, 2019, 2020). 374
40.1 Abstract Aerial View of Countryside. 514
40.2 Aerial View of the Puerta del Sol. 514
40.3 “The Land of Spain Viewed from the Sky,” Estampa, Revista Gráfica y
Literaria de la Actualidad, 24 April 1928. 515
40.4 “A beautiful sea of clouds surrounds the peak of the colossus.” 516
40.5 The Graf Zeppelin Flying Above the Seville Cathedral, 24 April 1929. 520
44.1 Amazon, Three Screenshots at Different Stages. 574
44.2 DEFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREST in Motion, Screenshot. 577
44.3 Word Market’s Landing Page, Screenshot. 579
45.1 Audience Has Breakfast at the End of Madrugá at Matadero Madrid. 594
45.2 Performers Play with the Floats in God Has a Vagina. 595
46.1 “Lily.” 602
46.2 “Iván.” 602

xii
 TABLES

3.1 The Generations of Minors of Foreign Origin by Nationality and Size of

Municipality. 44
28.1 Official Estimated Participation in the 8M Marches (2016–2020) in Some
Spanish Cities. 372
28.A1 Logistic Regression Models for Participation in the 8M Protests. 378

xiii
 CONTRIBUTORS

Dean Allbritton is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Colby College (USA). His research
examines linkages between sex, sickness and health in contemporary Spanish visual culture
and adult media. His monograph, Feeling Sick: The Early Years of AIDS in Spain, explores
the early histories of HIV/AIDS in Spain through visual culture and ephemera of the time
and was published by Liverpool University Press in early 2023. He has published articles
in Porn Studies, the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies,
Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Hispanic Research Journal, among others.

Eva Anduiza is Professor of Political Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

(Spain), where she is also ICREA Academia fellow. She founded and directed the research
group on Democracy, Elections and Citizenship, and she has been a fellow at the Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her main areas of
research deal with different aspects of citizens’ involvement in politics in advanced democ-
racies, including the causes and consequences of political protest and political attitudes,
with an emphasis on how individuals’ attitudes towards gender equality and feminism
change over time.

Diana Arbaiza is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Antwerp (Belgium).

She specializes in Spanish culture from the 19th century to the present, with a focus on
Spanish colonialism, the intersections it generated between cultural and economic fields
and its legacies in metropolitan culture. She is the author of The Spirit of Hispanism: Com-
merce, Culture and Identity Across the Atlantic, 1875–1936 (2020) and co-editor of Con el
franquismo en el retrovisor: las representaciones culturales de la dictadura en la democra-
cia, 1975–2018 (2020). She has also co-edited a special issue on the colonial visual archive
on Equatorial Guinea and is currently working on Spanish discourses surrounding colonial-
ism in Africa.

Julio Arce is a Professor of Popular Music and was Head of the Department of Musicol-
ogy at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) from 2017 until 2024. His main
area of research is the interaction between music and media. He has conducted pioneering

xiv
 Contributors

academic approaches on several topics, especially on music and broadcasting in Spain. He

has also performed ground-breaking research on music in silent cinema, the relationships
between popular genres and media and music and musician exchanges between Spain and
Latin America.

Mari Paz Balibrea is Professor of Spanish Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of Lon-
don (UK). She has published extensively on the legacies of Spanish Republican exile. She is
the author of Tiempo de exilio. Una mirada crítica a la modernidad española desde el pen-
samiento republicano en el exilio (2007), is the coordinator of Líneas de fuga. Hacia otra
historiografía cultural del exilio republicano español (2017) and co-edited with Antolín
Sánchez Cuervo and Frank Lough a special issue of the journal History of European Ideas
entitled María Zambrano Amongst the Philosophers (2018). In addition, she has published
numerous articles on the work of exile intellectuals and artists such as Max Aub, Eduardo
Nicol, María Zambrano, Rosa Chacel, Roberto Gerhard and Josep Solanes.

Sara Bartumeus Ferré is a Professor of architecture at the University of Illinois

Urbana-Champaign (USA). An architect and landscape architect with a degree from the
Polytechnic University of Catalonia, she has taught there and served on various commit-
tees for the City of Barcelona and the Catalan Architects Association. She co-organized
seven International Biennials of Landscape Architecture, co-edited their volumes, and
founded Renau Bartumeus, which has received national and international awards. Her
transdisciplinary research, rooted in the Urbanism Laboratory of Barcelona, explores
collective-public space through urban morphology, ecology, social claims and collective
memory. Her methodology for mapping urban heritage earned her team the 2021 Euro-
pean Award for Architectural Heritage Intervention (Planning) for the Nova Esquerra de
l’Eixample Urban Landscape Study (2019).

David Becerra Mayor is Assistant Professor of Spanish Literature at Universidad Autónoma

de Madrid (Spain). He is the author of La novela de la no-ideología (2013), La Guerra Civil
como moda literaria (2015) and Después del acontecimiento (2021).

Kata Beilin is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University
of Wisconsin, Madison (USA). She specializes in environmental humanities, with a focus
on the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. She is the author of In Search of Alterna-
tive Biopolitics in Contemporary Spain: Anti-Bullfighting, Animality, and the Environment
(2017). Recently, she co-directed the award-winning documentary Maya Land: Listening to
the Bees (2022) with Avi Weinstein. Her current project, The Return of the Maya Moment:
In Defense of Yucatan Forests, explores Maya cultural resistance.

Joaquín Beltrán Antolín is an Associate Professor of the Department of Translation, Inter-

preting and East Asian Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (Spain). An
anthropologist specializing in international migration, he studies identity, economy, poli-
tics, education, health, religion, cultural production and ethnic diversity in the Chinese
diaspora and China. His works include Los ocho inmortales cruzan el mar. Chinos en
Extremo Occidente (2003), Representaciones de China en las Américas y la Península Ibé-
rica (co-edited with Amelia Sáiz and Francisco Haro, 2016) and China en el arte y la pro-
ducción cultural contemporánea global (co-edited with Laia Manonelles, 2024).

xv
 Contributors

Luis Camarero is a Professor at National University of Distance Education (Madrid, Spain).

He has conducted several research projects on the demographic and socioeconomic trans-
formations of southern European rural areas. He is the author of many books and articles
focusing on social sustainability in rural areas and on the new social inequalities related
both to gender issues and mobility.

Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo is Associate Professor of Spanish at Oakland University (USA). He

is the author of Memories of the Maghreb (2012) and has published articles on the His-
panophone literature of the Maghreb and Maghrebian diasporic literature in Spain in the
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Romance Notes and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos,
among others.

Natalia Castro Picón is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University (USA). Her research
focuses on Iberian culture and literature and its intersection with capitalism, grass-roots
movements, feminism, religion and politics of language. Currently, she is exploring the
apocalyptic imaginaries of the inter-crisis period (2008–2023). In parallel, she is working
on a project examining collective spaces of poetic writing, reading and performance as sites
of resistance against the neoliberal appropriation of language and discourse.

Jaume Claret is Associate Professor of Modern History at the Arts and Humanities Studies of
the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona (Spain) and Director of its master’s degree in
Contemporary World History. His research focuses on Spanish and Catalan political, cultural
and intellectual history. Among his publications El atroz desmoche (2006), La construcción
del catalanismo (2014), Breve historia de las Brigadas Internacionales (2016 & 2022), Ganar
la guerra, perder la paz (2019) and El regionalismo bien entendido (2021) stand out. His
current research focuses on regional and nationalist movements during Francoism and the
democratic transition, as he is a principal investigator of a funded project on these issues.

Luisa Elena Delgado was Professor Emerita of Spanish, Criticism and Interpretive Theory
and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (USA).
Among her many publications we might highlight La nación singular: Fantasías de la nor-
malidad democrática Española (2014), finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Spain
in the category of essay. She also co-edited (with Pura Fernandez and Jo Labanyi) Engag-
ing the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History (2016). In addition, she co-edited with
Jo Labanyi Modern Literatures in Spain (2023), co-authored with Helena Buffery, Kirsty
Hooper and Mari José Olaziregi.

Emily DiFilippo is Associate Professor of Spanish at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa

(USA). Her research on disability in contemporary Spain has appeared in the Bulletin of
Contemporary Hispanic Studies and in the 2019 edited volume Consequential Art: Comics
Culture in Contemporary Spain. Her current research examines how the memoir genre in
21st-century Spain questions notions of national belonging by highlighting the experiences
of marginalized individuals and communities. Dr. DiFilippo also holds an MFA in creative
writing and engages with the craft and pedagogy of memoir.

Sebastiaan Faber is Professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College (USA). He is the author
of Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939–1975 (2002),

xvi
 Contributors

Anglo-American Hispanists and the Spanish Civil War: Hispanophilia, Commitment, and
Discipline (2008), Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography
(2018) and Exhuming Franco: Spain’s Second Transition (2021). Faber regularly contrib-
utes to Spanish and US media, including CTXT: Contexto y Acción and The Nation. Born
and raised in the Netherlands, he has been at Oberlin since 1999.

Daniela Flesler is a Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at

Stony Brook University (USA). Her research focuses on contemporary Spain’s negotiations
of cultural identity in relation to its Jewish and Arab heritages and the ways these negotia-
tions affect the lives of Jewish and Muslim populations in Spain today. She has published
the books The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immi-
gration (2008) and The Memory Work of Jewish Spain (2020), co-authored with Adrián
Pérez Melgosa and winner of a National Jewish Book Award. She is co-editor of Revisiting
Jewish Spain in the Modern Era with Tabea A. Linhard and Adrián Pérez Melgosa (2013)
and Genealogies of Sepharad with Michal R. Friedman and Asher Salah (Quest. Issues in
Contemporary Jewish History 18, 2020). She has been the recipient of ACLS and NEH
fellowships.

Héctor Fouce is Professor at the Department of Journalism and New Media at the Univer-
sidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). He is the author of El futuro ya está aquí (2007), a
seminal book in the study of Spanish popular music in the 1980s, and co-editor of Made
in Spain: Studies in Popular Music (2023). He has been visiting scholar at Colorado State
University and Cambridge University.

Tania Gentic is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a
member of the Comparative Literature Program at Georgetown University (USA). She spe-
cializes in the literature and culture of the contemporary Atlantic world, with a focus on
crónica, new media and sound studies. Her publications include The Everyday Atlantic:
Time, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century Iberian and Latin American
Newspaper Chronicle (2013) and the volume, co-edited with Francisco LaRubia-Prado,
Imperialism and the Wider Atlantic: Essays on the Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics of
Transatlantic Cultures (2017). Most recently, she is the author of the monograph Geogra-
phies of the Ear: The Cultural Politics of Sound in Barcelona (2025).

Sophie L. Gonick is an urbanist and Associate Professor in the Department of Social and
Cultural Analysis at New York University (USA). She studies housing, immigration, urban
social movements and radical electoral politics. Her first book, Dispossession and Dissent:
Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid (2021), examines the role of housing
markets and their failures in shaping immigrant urban life in the Spanish capital.

María José González is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social
Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona (Spain). Additionally, she is
a member of the DemoSoc research group and serves as the director of the Equality and
Diversity Unit at UPF. She has conducted research at a number of highly regarded institu-
tions, including the Centre for Demographic Studies (CED) at the Universitat Autònoma de
Barcelona (UAB); the Department of Population Studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte
(COLEF) in Tijuana, Mexico; the Center for US-Mexican Studies (USMEX) at UCSD; and

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the Gender Institute at the LSE in the UK. In 2001, she was awarded her PhD from the
European University Institute (EUI) for a dissertation on women’s professional careers
and family formation in Spain. Her research and teaching activities focus on the inter-
relationship between paid work, domestic and care responsibilities and gender relations
in a variety of European contexts. She currently serves as the principal investigator of a
national research project, which is funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and
the National Research Agency. The project examines the division of paid and unpaid work
between couples across social classes and the impact of children on mothers’ and fathers’
wages. A variety of empirical methods are employed, with a particular focus on techniques
for longitudinal data analysis.

Leslie J. Harkema is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Lan-

guages and Cultures at Baylor University (USA). She earned her PhD in Hispanic language
and literatures from Boston University in 2013. She is the author of Spanish Modernism
and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to La Joven Literatura (2017), and
her articles on various aspects of literary and cultural modernity in the Iberian Peninsula
have appeared in journals such as Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Bulletin of Spanish Studies,
Cuadernos de la Cátedra Miguel de Unamuno, Modern Language Notes, Revista de Estu-
dios Hispánicos, Revista Hispánica Moderna and elsewhere. Professor Harkema’s current
research investigates how the multilingual reality of the Iberian Peninsula shaped transla-
tion practice and attitudes toward translation in Spain during the modern period. She is
editor, with Evelyn Scaramella, of a forthcoming volume on women translators and cultural
mediators in early 20th-century Spain.

Juli Highfill is Professor Emerita of Spanish Literature and Culture in the Department of
Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan (USA). In her research
she focuses on the literary and visual production of the Spanish historic avant-garde, as
well as popular film in the 1920s and 30s. She is the author of Portraits of Excess: Reading
Character in the Modern Spanish Novel (1999) and Modernism and Its Merchandise: The
Spanish Avant-Garde and Material Culture, 1920–1930 (2014). Her current book project
focuses on cinema and spectatorship while tracing the turn from the avant-garde to political
engagement in the 1920s and 30s: Images in Flight: Popular and Political Affect in Spanish
Film (1925–1940).

Michael Iarocci is Professor of Spanish Literature and Culture and Associate Dean of Arts
and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley (USA). He is the author of three
books: Enrique Gil y la genealogía de la lírica moderna (1999), Properties of Modernity:
Romantic Spain, Modern Europe, and the Legacies of Empire (2006) and The Art of Wit-
nessing: Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War (2023). His research focuses broadly on
modern Spanish culture from the 18th century to today, with particular focus on the inter-
sections of history, politics and aesthetics.

Rebecca Ingram is Professor of Spanish at the University of San Diego (USA) and Affili-
ated Faculty in the Program in Food Studies and in the Program in Women’s and Gender
Studies. A specialist in food studies and Iberian studies with a focus on feminist approaches
within these fields, she is author of Women’s Work: How Culinary Cultures Shaped Mod-
ern Spain (2022), winner of a 2023 Gourmand International Award for Spain. Additional

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publications include the monographic issue of Bulletin of Spanish Studies, “Transhispanic

Food Cultural Studies” (2020), co-edited with Lara Anderson; Digestible Governance:
Gastrocracy and Spanish Foodways (2024), with Eugenia Afinoguénova and Lara Ander-
son; and Food Studies en español: Investigación actual en gastronomía y comunicación
(2024), with Yanet Acosta.

Jo Labanyi is Professor Emerita of Spanish at New York University (USA) and a member
of the British Academy. A specialist in modern Spanish cultural history, her monographs
include Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel (2000), the volume on
Spanish Literature in Oxford UP’s Very Short Introduction series (2010) and Spanish Cul-
ture from Romanticism to the Present: Structures of Feeling (2019). Her co-authored Mod-
ern Literatures in Spain, in Polity’s Cultural History of Literature series, was published
in 2023.

Susan Larson is the Charles B. Qualia Endowed Professor of Romance Languages at Texas
Tech University (USA), Editor of the Romance Quarterly and Co-Editor (with Benjamin
Fraser) of the Palgrave Macmillan Hispanic Urban Studies book series. Her work examines
competing discourses of modernity from the vantage point of urban cultural geography in
Spanish culture since 1898.

Eduardo Ledesma is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese

at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (USA). He received his PhD in Romance
languages and literatures from Harvard University in 2012 and his BS in civil engineering
from UIUC in 1995. He is the author of Radical Poetry: Aesthetics, Politics, Technology
and the Ibero-American Avant-Gardes (1900–2015) (SUNY 2016), supported by a Ful-
bright Research Grant to Spain. Expanding Cinemas: Experimental Filmmaking across
the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic since 1960 is published with SUNY (2024). His latest book
project, Blind Cinema, which studies films by blind filmmakers, has been awarded an NEH
Fellowship.

Manuel Loff, PhD in history and civilization (European University Institute, Florence), is
Associate Professor at the Universidade do Porto (Portugal) and Senior Researcher at the
Instituto de História Contemporânea/NOVA-FCSH, Lisbon, Portugal, and at the Centre
d’Estudis sobre Dictadures i Democràcies (CEDID) of the Universitat Autònoma de Barce-
lona, Spain. He has long been conducting research on fascism and neofascism, colonialism
and memory studies. His current work focuses on democratic transitions in the 1970s and
1980s; 21st-century new authoritarianism, extreme-right and neofascism; and the (re)con-
struction of collective memory on authoritarianism, coloniality and political transitions. He
is currently (2024–25) curating a documentary exhibition on Portugal and Spain: 50 Years
of Democracy (Lisbon and Salamanca).

Steven Marsh is Professor of Spanish film and cultural studies at the University of Illinois
Chicago (USA). He is author of the monographs, Spanish Popular Film Under Franco:
Comedy and the Weakening of the State (2006) and Spanish Cinema Against Itself: Cos-
mopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy (2020). The latter has been translated into Cas-
tilian as El cine español contra sí mismo: Cosmopolitísmo, experimentación, militancia
(2022). He is currently writing a new book on the rule of law in the Spanish state in an

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age of crisis. He is a member of the editorial collective of the Journal of Spanish Cultural
Studies.

Miguel A. Martínez is Professor of Housing and Urban Sociology at the IBF (Institute for
Housing and Urban Research), Uppsala University (Sweden). His PhD dissertation (2000)
studied cases and scales of citizen participation in urban matters. He currently studies social
movements and urban phenomena from a sociological perspective. Currently, he investi-
gates housing activism in Spain, Europe and Latin America. Other topics covered by his
research are squatting, urban politics, housing policies, segregation, migration, sustainabil-
ity, labor, social structures and activist-research. His publications have appeared in jour-
nals such as Housing Studies, Antipode, Urban Studies, International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research, International Journal of Housing Policy, Social Movement Studies,
Interface, Partecipazione e Conflitto and Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológi-
cas. He is the author of Squatters in the Capitalist City (2020), editor of Research Hand-
book on Urban Sociology (2024) and The Urban Politics of Squatters’ Movements (2018)
and co-editor of Contested Cities and Urban Activism (2019). Most of his publications are
freely available at: www.miguelangelmartinez.net.

Luis Martín-Estudillo is Professor and Collegiate Scholar at the University of Iowa (USA) and
Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. He is the author of several books
on Spanish cultural history and criticism, including The Rise of Euroskepticism (inaugural
2020 Open Book Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities) and Goya
and the Mystery of Reading (winner of the 2023 Goldberg Prize). He is Executive Editor
of Hispanic Issues and Hispanic Issues Online.

Andrew McFarland is Professor of Modern Spanish History, Faculty Director of the Col-
laborative, Online History degrees across Indiana University and Associate Dean of the
School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indiana University Kokomo (USA). He is the
author of Regeneration Through Sport: Football, Sport, and Cultural Modernization in
Spain, 1890–1920 (2023). He has also published numerous articles on the introduction of
sport and physical education to Spain in the late 19th century and their growth in the 20th
century. These include works on physical regeneration, sport and regional identities, pelota,
Ricardo Zamora and key friendlies in the spring of 1929.

Jordana Mendelson is Associate Professor at New York University (USA). She is the author
of Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture and the Modern Nation, 1929–1939
(2005), co-editor of Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity (2010) and curator
or co-curator of Magazines and War 1936–1939 (Madrid, Reina Sofía Museum, 2007),
Encounters with the 1930s (Madrid, Reina Sofía Museum, 2013) and Miró ADLAN (Bar-
celona, Fundació Miró, 2021). She co-edits the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.

Sabina Monza is a consultant on mobility innovation at the Occitan Agency of Economic

Development (AD’OCC) in France. She holds a PhD in political science and international
relations (2019) from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where she also taught
research methods and political behavior for a few years. She has a background in communi-
cations (London College of Communication, University of Buenos Aires) and research pro-
ject management (University of Toulouse 3). She wrote “Who Is in the Media? Dominant

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Interests in Times of Austerity” (in Austerity: A Journey to an Unknown Territory. Dis-

courses, Economics and Politics by R. Sturm, T. Griebel and T. Winkelmann, 2017) and
“The Visibility of the European Union in Times of Crisis and Austerity” (in Politics &
Policy 44:3, co-author Eva Anduiza).

N. Michelle Murray is Associate Professor of Spanish at Vanderbilt University (USA). Her

research interests are rooted in contemporary Spanish and Global Hispanophone cultural
production and informed by intersectional fields of gender and sexuality studies, critical
theory and critical race studies. She is the author of Home Away from Home (2018). She is
the co-editor of Unsettling Colonialism (2019). She has co-edited special issues of Romance
Notes (The Rosalía Effect, 2023) and Hispania (The United Nations International Decade
for People of African Descent: Reflections, Challenges, and Future Directions, 2024).

Parvati Nair is Professor of Hispanic, Cultural and Migration Studies at Queen Mary
University of London (UK). Her research interests lie at the nexus of cultural studies
and migration studies, with a special focus on visual representations and ethnography
of migration and displacement. She has also spent several years at the United Nations,
working on international migration policy. She is the author of Configuring Commu-
nity: Theories, Practices and Narratives of Community Identities in Contemporary
Spain (2004), Rumbo al norte: inmigración y movimientos culturales entre el Magreb y
España (2006) and A Different Light: The Photography of Sebastião Salgado (2011). She
is the co-editor of Gender and Spanish Cinema (2004), Hispanic and Lusophone Women
Filmmakers (2013) and Migration Across Boundaries (2015). She is the Principal Editor
of the refereed journal Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture. Her most recent
book is Displacement, Environments, and Photo-Politics in the Mediterranean: Migrant
Sea (2024).

Natalia Núñez Bargueño is a research fellow at the Facultad de Humanidades of the Uni-
versidad de Castilla la Mancha (Spain), Vice President of the Asociación Española de His-
toria Religiosa Contemporánea (AEHRC) and Director of the Feliciano Montero Seminar
of Religious History. In her work she explores innovative aspects of the study of contem-
porary Catholicism, transnational and cultural history and gender studies. She is the author
of a monographic book (Fe, modernidad y política: los congresos eucarísticos internacion-
ales, 2024) and has co-edited a book (Beyond National Catholicisms: Transnational Net-
works of Hispanic Catholicisms, 2021). In 2023 she obtained a Marie Skłodowska-Curie
fellowship for the project TheoFem, “Lay Women: International Experts and Theologi-
ans avant-la-lettre. Legacies and Entangled Histories (1945–1962)”, which she will begin
in September 2024 at KU Leuven’s Faculties of Arts (Modernity and Society 1800–2000
(MoSa), as well as theology and religious studies.

Xosé M. Núñez Seixas obtained his PhD at EUI Florence and is Professor of Modern His-
tory at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain); between 2012 and 2017 he also
taught at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. He has published widely on the
comparative history of national and minority movements, nation-building and territorial
identities, as well as on overseas migration, the cultural history of war and violence and
the memory of dictatorship and war. Among his latest books are: Sites of the Dictators.
Memories of Authoritarian Europe, 1945–2020 (2021), The Spanish Blue Division on the

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Eastern Front, 1941–1945: War, Occupation, Memory (2022) and Beyond Folklore? The
Franco Regime and Ethnoterritorial Diversity in Spain, 1930–1975 (2024).

Jesús Oliva is Professor of Sociology at the Public University of Navarra (Spain). His research
topics focus on mobilities, rural sociology and planning. Recent publications include
“Thinking in Rural Gap: Mobility and Social Inequalities” (together with Camarero, 2019),
“Mobility, Accessibility and Social Justice” (together with Camarero, in Scott et al, Rout-
ledge Companion to Rural Planning, 2019) and “The Immobilities of Non-Automobile
Residents of Rural Spain” (together with L. Camarero and J. del Pino, 2023).

Luis (Iñaki) Prádanos is Professor of contemporary Hispanic cultural studies at Miami

University (USA). He is the author of Postgrowth Imaginaries. New Ecologies and Coun-
terhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain (2018) and the editor of A Companion to Spanish
Environmental Cultural Studies (2023). His research and teaching interests include envi-
ronmental humanities, political ecology of technology, critical energy and infrastructure
studies and regenerative design.

Alejandro Quiroga holds a PhD in government from the London School of Economics. He
is Professor of Spanish History at Newcastle University (UK) and Beatriz Galindo Distin-
guished Researcher at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). His research focuses
on 20th- and 21st-century nationalisms and national identities in Spain. He is the author
of Los orígenes del Nacionalcatolicismo (2006); Making Spaniards. Primo de Rivera and
the Nationalization of the Masses (1923–1930) (2007); The Reinvention of Spain. Nation
and Identity Since Democracy (2007), with Sebastian Balfour; and Football and National
Identities in Spain. The Strange Death of Don Quixote (2013). His latest book is Miguel
Primo de Rivera. Dictadura, populismo y nación (2022).

Pamela Radcliff has been a Professor in the Department of History at the University of
California, San Diego (USA), since 1990. She received her BA from Scripps College (1979)
and her PhD from Columbia University (1990). She is the author of several books and
numerous articles on popular mobilization, gender and women’s politics and civil society in
20th-century Spain. She has published three single-authored books: From Mobilization to
Civil War: The Politics of Polarization in the Spanish City of Gijon (1996), Making Demo-
cratic Citizens in Spain: Civil Society and the Popular Origins of the Transition, 1960–1978
(2011) and History of Modern Spain, 1808–Present (2017; Spanish edition, 2018). She is
currently researching the history of municipalist discourse in Spanish political culture.

Julia Ramírez-Blanco is a senior researcher (Ramón y Cajal contract) at the Universidad

Complutense de Madrid (Spain). Her interdisciplinary work connects art history, uto-
pian studies and activist movements. She is the author of various monographs – Artis-
tic Utopias of Revolt (2018), 15M. El tiempo de las plazas (2021), Amigos, disfraces y
comunas (2022) and La ciudad del Sol, Le mouvement 15M entre formes et performances
(2023) – and editor of various books and journal issues. She has conducted research stays
in New York, Nantes, Amiens and Princeton. Together with Lise Lérichomme and Sally
Bonn, Ramírez-Blanco co-led the research project and exhibition Grande Révolution
Domèstique-Guise on feminist utopias, which took place in the Familistère of Guise. She
has been a committee member of the Utopian Studies Society and belongs to the Center for

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 Contributors

Artistic Activism’s Research Collab. She curated the 15M materials for the recent reorgani-
zation of the permanent collection of the Reina Sofia Museum (2021), where she is part
of the faculty of Connective Tissues, the museum’s program in critical museology, artistic
research practices and cultural studies.

Layla Renshaw is an Associate Professor in forensic science at Kingston University (UK),

where she teaches forensic archaeology and anthropology. Her research focuses on
post-conflict investigations and the relationship between human remains, material culture
and traumatic memory. Layla has carried out fieldwork at multiple sites in Spain and is
the author of Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil
War (2011). She has also participated in the recovery of World War II military casual-
ties in Europe, and her current research focuses on World War I sites in France. Layla is
Co-Investigator on the UKRI-funded project “Ecologies of Violence: Heritage and Conflict
in More-Than-Human Worlds” and Co-Convenor of the Cambridge-based research net-
work “Military Surplus: Toxicity, Industry and War.”

Cristián H. Ricci is Professor of Iberian and North African literatures at the University of
California, Merced (USA). Some of his monographs include ¡Hay moros en la costa! Lit-
eratura marroquí fronteriza en castellano y catalán (2014), New Voices of Muslim North
African Migrants in Europe (2019) and Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas
in Spain, Portugal and Latin America (2022). He is the co-director of the academic journal
Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World.

M. Florencia Rizzo is a researcher in language policy at the National Council for Scientific
and Technical Research (CONICET), in Argentina. She is a professor of discourse analysis
and semiology at the National University of San Martín (UNSAM), where she also coor-
dinates an advanced language and society studies program. Her research interests cover
Spanish-language policy since the late 20th century to the present from a glottopolitical
perspective, regulatory actions of institutional agents and language ideologies in the press
and digital media.

David Rodríguez-Solás is Professor of Spanish at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst

(USA). He is the author of two books, Teatros Nacionales Republicanos: la Segunda
República y el teatro clásico español (2014) and Performing the Transition to Democracy:
Theater and Performance in 1970s Spain (2024). In addition, he has edited and co-edited
volumes on contemporary Spanish theater and performance.

Amelia Sáiz López is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at the Universidad Autónoma
de Barcelona (Spain) and Co-Principal Investigator of the Inter-Asia Research Group. She
has researched the Chinese presence in Spain for more than twenty years, with a special
focus on Chinese women. This interest connects with her study of Chinese society from a
gender perspective. Author of Utopía y género. Mujeres chinas en el siglo XX (2001), she
has also co-edited Representaciones de China en las Américas y la Península Ibérica (2016)
and Narrativas de “lo chino” en las Américas y la Península Ibérica (2020).

Gemma Sala is Associate Professor of Political Science at Grinnell College (USA). She spe-
cializes on questions regarding nationalism, constitutional politics and intergovernmental

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relations. Her research explores the ways in which institutional frameworks and electoral
dynamics shape the strategies of governments, political parties and social movements in
divided societies. She has published a number of articles in journals such as Publius: The
Journal of Federalism, Economies and Oxford Research Encyclopedia. She is currently
working on a book project comparing referendums of independence and secessionist move-
ments in Europe.

Benita Sampedro Vizcaya is Professor of Spanish Colonial Studies at Hofstra University

(USA). Her research engages with Spanish colonial pasts and presents, archives and legacies
in Africa and in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is invested in revisiting colonial links
within and beyond the frame of the multiple Spanish imperial Atlantic and global networks
and has written on colonial medicine, colonial carceral systems, colonial archives, bor-
ders and mobility and the ruins of late colonial modernity. Her recent publications include
several journal articles: “Gender, Colonialism and the Archive: A Spanish Female Doctor
Among a Fang Community in 1940s Río Muni” (2024), “Islands of the Global Hispano-
phone: Islands of Empire” (2023) and “Houseboys: Domestic Labour Practices in Spanish
Settlers’ Homes in Colonial West Africa” (2022) and the book chapters “Raquel Ilombe del
Pozo Epita: producción literaria y activismo cultural en la España franquista y postfran-
quista” (2024) and “The houseboys of Fernando Poo: Domestic Service in Spanish Colo-
nial Africa (2024). She coedited a special issue of Periphērica: Journal of Social, Cultural,
and Literary History entitled “Conversations with Hispanophone Africa and the Maghrib”
(2025) and a special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies entitled “Entering
the Global Hispanophone” (2019). Her book monograph Racismo científico y prácticas
biopolíticas: el proyecto colonial español en África como laboratorio de experimentación
bajo el franquismo is forthcoming with Ediciones Bellaterra, and her new book, Caribbean
Deportee Narratives and African Presidios: Carceral Systems of the Late Spanish Empire,
is currently under contract with the University of Florida Press.

Rosario Sampedro is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Valladolid

(Spain). Her research is primarily on rural sociology and gender issues, focusing on the
different dimensions of mobility as a key factor of current rural societies. Lately, her work
has focused on analyzing the settlement of foreign immigrants in rural areas in Spain and
its relation with the social sustainability and economic development of rural communities.

Alex Saum-Pascual is a (digital) poet and associate professor of contemporary Spanish

literature and new media at the University of California, Berkeley (USA). She is the author
of #Postweb! Crear con la máquina y en la red (2018) and numerous articles, special issues
and book chapters on digital art and literature in the Spanish-speaking world, featured
in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Revista de Estu-
dios Hispánicos, the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies and Digital Humanities
Quarterly, among others. Her digital poetry has been exhibited in galleries and art festivals
internationally and has been studied in specialized monographs and anthologies, such as
the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 4.

Ioannis Tellidis is Professor of International Relations at Kyung Hee University (South

Korea). His current research examines the use of information and communication tech-
nologies (ICTs) for peacebuilding.

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 Contributors

Sarah Thomas is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at Brown University (USA),

where she works on contemporary Iberian cultural studies, with a focus on cinema and
visual culture. Her research is especially concerned with the representation of gender, sub-
jectivity, temporality and space. Her first book, Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and
Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition, was published in 2019 by the University of Toronto
Press and in Spanish translation as Infancia y cine en la larga Transición española in 2024
by Cátedra. She is currently working on a second book project on representations of female
subjectivity in contemporary Iberian cinema.

Steven L. Torres is Professor of Spanish at the University of Nebraska Omaha (USA). He is

a co-founder of ALCESXXI and the chief editor and co-founder of Revista de ALCESXXI:
Journal of Contemporary Spanish Literature and Film. Much of his research focuses on
metacultural discourse and the complex relation between culture and politics. He has pub-
lished work on academic activism, community engagement, the 15M movement and its
ramifications and environmental humanities, as well as Spanish film, literature and culture.
He is the author of Discurso metacultural en España: Miguel de Unamuno (2008) and the
co-editor of Spain After the Indignados/15M Movement: The 99% Speaks Out (co-edited
with Óscar Pereira-Zazo, 2019).

Nuria Triana Toribio is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kent (UK). She
researches national cinemas, popular genres, film festivals, contemporary Hispanic film
cultures and popular music. Her latest monograph is Spanish Film Cultures (2016). She is
co-investigator on an interdisciplinary and international research AHRC project entitled
“Invisibles e insumisas/Invisíveis e insubmissas: Leading Women in Portuguese and Spanish
Cinema and Television, 1970–1980”.

Fernán del Val is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology I in the Universidad
Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in Spain. He has published various articles and
books on music, politics, media and youth in Spain. He has been a visiting researcher at
Newcastle University, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Universidad de Barcelona.

Carlos Varón González is an Associate Professor in Hispanic studies at the University of

California, Riverside (USA). He has published a book on poetry and post-foundational
political theory entitled La retirada del poema: Literatura hispánica e imaginación política
moderna (2020), as well as articles on Spanish and Latin American literature, popular culture
and political philosophy. With Daniel García Donoso and Antonio Córdoba, he co-edited
“Head and Tails of the Monarch: Representing Kings and Queens in Post-Francoist Ibe-
rian Cultures” (Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2024). His current research project, concern-
ing affective practices in Spain from the War of Independence to the present, is tentatively
entitled “I Feel Your Pain: The Politics of Metaemotions.”

Aurélie Vialette is an Associate Professor at Yale University in the Department of Spanish

and Portuguese (USA). Her research areas are working-class culture, popular music, social
movements, gender studies, prison reform, slavery networks and disability studies. She has
published Intellectual Philanthropy: The Seduction of the Masses (2018), recipient of the
2019 North American Catalan Society book award; Dissonances of Modernity: Music,
Text, and Performance in Modern Spain (co-edited with Irene Gómez-Catellanos) in 2021;

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and The Legacies of Slavery in Modern Iberia (co-edited with Akiko Tsuchiya), forthcom-
ing 2025. She is working on a book manuscript on penal colonies in the southern Philip-
pines titled The Trial Run: Gender, Disability and Penal Colonies in the Philippines in the
19th Century, to be published at Cornell UP. She is the director of www.clave.cat, a digital
humanities project on music and politics. She is preparing a special issue on disability stud-
ies and Iberian studies for Hispanic Review. Vialette has recently been invited professor at
the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France.

Dacia Viejo-Rose is Associate Professor in Heritage and the Politics of the Past in the
Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge (UK) and Director of the Cam-
bridge Heritage Research Centre. Her books include Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Her-
itage and Memory after Civil War (2013) and the coedited volumes War and Cultural
Heritage (2015) and Memorials in the Aftermath of War (2019). She has also published on
cultural violence, the role of memory in heritage and international humanitarian interven-
tions in the post-conflict reconstruction of heritage. She is currently working on legacies of
violence and on how perceptions of uncertainty inform the construction of heritage.

Tom Whittaker is a Reader in film and Spanish cultural studies at the University of War-
wick (UK). He is the author of The Spanish Quinqui Film: Delinquency, Sound, Sensa-
tion (2020) and The Films of Elías Querejeta: A Producer of Landscapes (2011), as well as
co-editor of Performance and Spanish Film (2016) and Locating the Voice in Film: Critical
Practices and Global Approaches (2017). He is the co-editor of the Screen Arts issue for
the Hispanic Research Journal.

xxvi
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My most sincere gratitude to all my colleagues who contributed to this volume for their
patience over the last difficult years; we made this happen collectively. My thanks also to
Tassia Watson, our editor at Routledge, and the series editors, Javier Muñoz-Basols and
Pablo Valdivia, for their lengthy wait in the completion of this project. To Brad Epps, previ-
ous series editor, for suggesting I take on this rewarding project in the first place and for his
counsel in the initial planning stages. I also thank all the individuals and institutions that
generously granted permission to reproduce images found herein. I am equally grateful to
Linda Grabner for her excellent translation of three of the chapters and to Kristina Pittman
for her generous help in editing one of the chapters. Similarly, my thanks to Jo Labanyi for
her guidance and comments on the introduction and her steadfast support for this project,
so needed especially after Elena Delgado’s passing. Finally, of course, thank you, Elena, for
giving so much to this volume and for your guidance.

xxvii
 IN MEMORIAM: A TRIBUTE TO
ELENA DELGADO (1962–2024)

Elena was the perfect co-editor for this Routledge volume, for many reasons. She had a
strong concern with the shape of the discipline of Spanish studies: its limitations and its
potential for new directions. Her scholarship always took a political angle on its objects
of study, showing their relevance to preoccupations of the time and of today. Her interests
were not limited to the Ivory Tower, either. Elena was equally committed to public engage-
ment, to exploring the links between her academic work and public life, through media
interviews and other outreach efforts, and by encouraging community initiatives from her
administrative position at the University of Illinois. And perhaps more vital today, she was
dedicated to studying practices related to democracy and democratic citizenship and to
teach about them in her courses.
From the start of her academic work in the 1990s, she was able to unpack the implica-
tions for gender in everything she read, often going against the grain of existing criticism.
A large part of her published work was devoted to pointing out the blind spots of Spanish
state nationalism and its insensitivity to the substate nationalisms of Catalonia, Galicia, and
the Basque Country. This was the topic of her major monograph La nación singular. Las
fantasias de la normalidad democrática española (1996–2011) (Siglo XXI, 2014), which
was a finalist for the Spanish National Essay Prize and productively ruffled many feathers
in Spain. In that work, Elena explored many of the subjects tackled by this volume, astutely
analyzing how neoliberal democracy failed Spain and other European nations, ultimately
leading to the economic and political crises of the 2000s. She was incapable of reading any-
thing – whether a press article or a literary text – without subjecting it to critical scrutiny;
in this respect, she played a major role, acknowledged in Spain, in deflating the consensus
politics of the Spanish transition to democracy. For Elena, dissensus was the only ethically
acceptable intellectual stance. Her insider/outsider view of Spain – born in Venezuela to
Spanish migrant parents, with a university education spanning Spain and the United States
and an academic career in the United States that made her one of the most respected schol-
ars of Spanish culture in the American academy – allowed her to be critical of a country
(Spain) for which she cared deeply. Her cultural critique was written with a passion that
communicated itself to the reader.

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 In Memoriam: A Tribute to Elena Delgado (1962–2024)

Elena’s knowledge of Spanish culture was exceptionally broad, with a particular inter-
est in popular culture; that is, in works that the Spanish reading public actually read or
saw performed, as opposed to canonical texts that reached only elite audiences, or esoteric
experimental work. As she was fond of noting, popular culture has been excluded from the
canon precisely because it is fun – and her analysis of it was fun too. Her definition of the
literary canon as the body of texts found worthy to represent the nation – expressed in her
last book, the co-authored Modern Literatures in Spain published in 2023 in Polity’s Cul-
tural History of Literature series – put its finger on why the literary canon has prioritized
serious works and why, as she points out in the same book, Spain’s top literary prizes have,
until very recently, been awarded to male authors writing in Castilian.
Elena’s commitment to gender studies allowed her to be particularly sensitive to
twenty-first–century Spanish writing – especially by women – at a time when feminist
activism became highly visible in Spain. One of her talents was for anticipating new trends
before they became established, such as the emphasis in recent women’s writing on age-
ing and the ill body. She was also quick to spot the turn to the rural in much current
Spanish literature. In both cases, her interest in these trends was spurred by her view of
creative writing as a barometer of social change, shaping and not just reflecting new ways
of thinking – and new ways of feeling. Much of her recent work was concerned with the
role of the emotions in social life, and particularly in politics, which, as she stressed, is
driven primarily by feelings rather than by rational argument. She was not afraid to voice
the unpopular truth that the political right has been – and is – much more successful
than the political left in appealing to citizens’ fears and desires. Elena’s expertise across
multiple subfields within Iberian cultural studies made her a valuable interlocutor for the
authors in this volume. Not content to narrowly specialize in a single area or period, she
read widely on many subjects, making her aware of the latest directions in literature and
criticism, and able to offer insightful editorial advice to the volume’s contributors. Open
to frank and productive discussion, she was a wonderful team player to work with in
shaping the volume’s vision.
Throughout her career, Elena was also committed to the idea of public education and
the public university. More generally, she was open to the concept of the “public good,” of
the importance of collective values and of the commons. A critical point of collectivity and
collective action, for Elena, entailed finding points in common with others, even those with
whom she disagreed, striking a balance between differing perspectives. This idea of a nego-
tiated understanding of the world extended to her assessment of the myths and fantasies we
weave about identity and nationality, traps that do not allow us to consider with an open
mind our common goals and shared ways of being in the world. Similarly, this volume,
under her co-editorship, has sought to find a measure of balance by providing differing
approaches to and views and understandings of twentieth- and twenty-first–century Spain.
Elena was insistent on the importance of a pluralistic approach to the volume in terms of
its content and its contributors.
The passion and commitment that Elena brought to her scholarly work was matched
by her sociability, constructing broad intellectual networks and mentoring young scholars.
That put her in the perfect position to identify contributors to the present volume that could
cover a wide range of topics. She made a point of including scholars at the start of their aca-
demic career as well as established names. As a result, this book is not a survey of existing
criticism but looks forward to the future. She would have been very proud to see this book

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 In Memoriam: A Tribute to Elena Delgado (1962–2024)

in print and to track its influence on future directions in the study of contemporary Spain.
This volume stands as a significant part of her legacy as a renowned scholar in the field and
will do so for a long time to come.
Jo Labanyi and Eduardo Ledesma

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 INTRODUCTION: A NEW LOOK
AT TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-
FIRST CENTURY SPANISH SOCIAL,
POLITICAL AND CULTURAL
HISTORY

As we write this introduction in the summer of 2022, we are slowly emerging, although
perhaps only temporarily, from a global disaster that has claimed over six million lives
worldwide, one million in the United States and counting and over 100,000 in Spain, not to
mention its destructiveness in every continent, a pandemic which has had devastating effects
in all arenas, social, political and cultural. As scholars living in between multiple cultures
(United States, Spain, Latin America) and languages (Spanish, English, Spanglish, Catalan,
Portuguese) and who are focused on contemporary Iberian literatures and cultures, we have
been profoundly impacted by the COVID-19 news arriving daily describing a tragedy that
has permanently altered the way we research, teach, live and even think about life, com-
munity and citizenship. In Spain, as in most nations, the pandemic exposed both existing
strengths and divisions within society, pitting longstanding challenges against hopes for
a more egalitarian future and a civil society that constantly reimagines its possibilities. In
short, the last few years have been a roller-coaster that took us from the depths of despair
to moments of optimism and back down again and again. These violent shifts became
manifest from the initial March 2020 lockdowns and home confinement, when Spanish
citizens took to their balconies to applaud the quotidian heroism of health care workers
(even as the public health system continued to be undermined and resources diverted to the
private sector) to the evidence of solidarity and tolerance toward necessary but restrictive
health measures during the state of emergency in the first year of the outbreak and to the
traumatic stress of isolation and an increasingly polarized resistance to vaccination and
masking along ideological fault-lines, compounded by the exacerbation of geopolitical and
cultural divisions that have always existed in the country. The pandemic now seemingly in
the rear-view mirror, it is critical to take stock about what, if anything, was learned. The
painful experience has shown us that even during times of great social change, Spain, like
other countries, remains in some ways the same, a nation full of contradictions: A country
that is deeply fractured but can also show solidarity, one in which failures of the central or
local governments and the political class are met with community-based efforts by everyday
citizens, as evidenced by an explosion of creative support networks, webs of neighbor-
hood cooperation and new forms of social activism (both online and in the streets). Just

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 Introduction: A New Look at Spanish History

to mention two paradigmatic examples of this creative popular spirit emerging in recent
decades, we might recall the 2013 impromptu flash mob performance of the Beatles’ “Here
Comes the Sun,” bringing solace and comradeship to people waiting for government assis-
tance at a Madrid unemployment office in the midst of the darkest winter of the economic
crisis and the soul-crushing austerity measures imposed by the European Union (the video
of this performance went viral and demonstrated the power of new media to amplify pop-
ular activism). Or the valiant struggle against unjust home evictions, predatory lending
and housing shortages through non-violent action and civil disobedience by the housing
advocacy movement Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), created in Barcelona
in 2009. The PAH successfully blocked evictions and performed “escraches” (public con-
demnations) against politicians in expressions of solidarity that brought together students,
immigrants, middle-class citizens and other societal actors, demanding justice and fair
housing practices. Similarly, the numerous marches or “mareas ciudadanas” (citizen tides)
that, organized by the collective Marea Ciudadana that was constituted in 2013, took to
the streets demanding changes in education, housing, banking, healthcare and climate pol-
icy, as well as generally supporting democratically guaranteed citizen rights and freedoms.
Broadly speaking, the twenty-first century has foregrounded practices of community
resistance, self-management, and solidarity from below, often facilitated by a well-educated
and highly motivated youth sector but also by coalitions of immigrants, neighbor associa-
tions and other collectives and enhanced by the Internet and rapidly evolving social media
practices. These kinds of emergent, often convergent, phenomena are examined by the
chapters we assembled for this Companion. This was one of our goals as editors, to trace the
most contemporary issues and analyze them considering present factors and past histories,
to build on established scholarship but also project the discipline forward by showcasing
new voices and ideas, indeed, even speculative imaginings – given that the way countries,
communities and cultures are imagined says as much about them as the actual practices that
can be analyzed through data. In that spirit of youthful energy and fresh perspectives, many
of the chapters in our volume deploy innovative theoretical and methodological approaches
to present both what appears on the surface but also hidden phenomena, uncovering the
complexity of Spain’s present situation as determined by historical and social factors but
also by new ways of understanding national, cultural and personal identities and commu-
nities. Many of the chapters look optimistically toward a better future being forged today
by a generation of Spaniards who, cognizant of the past, do not want to repeat the same
mistakes, a generation committed to building a more equitable, diverse and tolerant nation
from the grassroots, even as they encounter forces resistant to change. Moreover, the vol-
ume in general and most of its chapters do not take for granted the meaning of “Spanish
culture” or who is, or is not, Spanish, or for that matter, Catalan, Galician, Basque,
Andalusian and so on. The chapters question such notions of belonging and present a
relational view of national cultural identity, always determined by relationships; historical
processes; and the movement or traffic of bodies, objects and ideas. Throughout this vol-
ume we (as editors) and other contributors use various terms when referring to the region
and cultural history of Spain, including “Spanish,” “Peninsular” and “Iberian.” Similarly,
there are references to the discipline that has as its subject the study of that region, such as
“Iberian studies,” “Peninsular studies” and, far less commonly today, “Hispanism.” These
long-debated terms can be problematic insofar as they often exclude the complex multicul-
tural, multiethnic and multinational characteristics of the region or even remit to ideolo-
gies that promote cultural nationalism and align with a reductively centrist understanding

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 Introduction: A New Look at Spanish History

of the nation-state. None are fully adequate to describe the pluralistic and multilingual
Spain envisioned by this volume, and so we use them with the knowledge that they are
imperfect descriptions of a far richer reality. The term “Iberia” or “Iberian,” for instance,
is meant to include not only Spain but also Portugal, although the latter is often elided by
other studies. While the principal subject of our volume is indeed Spain, we have included
a chapter that focuses on Portugal and others that reference that neighboring nation. Our
notion of “Iberian studies,” therefore, also includes the study of Portugal and its culture.
“Peninsular” is equally problematic, in that it only gains valence when contrasted with
Latin America or other regions associated with the Spanish and Portuguese languages. Of
course, “Spanish” and “Portuguese” are not the only languages that concern us here; we
also recognize the importance of Catalan, Basque, Galician and all other languages and
dialects (as well as those spoken by the country’s immigrant populations and overseas com-
munities) in our encompassing view of Spain. The term “Spanish” itself has been deployed
historically to define a version of the country conflated with a narrowly centralized state
and a (predominantly) Castilian culture, a usage of the term that we reject. Thus, even as
we at times employ these terms (out of necessity, for lack of better replacements), we do
so with their most multicultural and pluralistic definitions in mind and in full awareness of
their potential pitfalls.
In keeping with its title, The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Cen-
tury Spain: Ideas, Practices, Imaginings charts some key ideas, practices and imaginings
that characterize Spain’s cultural, historical, social and political context in the contempo-
rary period, with a special focus on the most recent developments in Spanish cultural his-
tory (i.e., the last twenty years). What we have sought to create is a wide-ranging volume
that is truly transformative and avoids the pitfalls of a one-dimensional, centralist perspec-
tive on Iberia. As scholars residing in the United States and fully embedded in US academic
culture, we are keenly aware of the colonial and center-periphery power dynamics inher-
ent in organizing a volume such as this one, a volume which aspires to represent Spanish
cultural trends globally. As editors, we have spared no effort to be geographically inclusive
and assemble a plurality of scholarly approaches and disciplinary perspectives, gathering
academic voices that hail from throughout the globe. To satisfy our hope for multinational
inclusivity, we sought experts on Spain from across the world, not just from Spain and
the United States but also from the United Kingdom, Sweden, South Korea, Portugal, Bel-
gium, France and Argentina, among other countries. We have worked with professional
translators as needed to make it possible to include the best contributors for every topic,
irrespective of their principal language. Although, given our location as editors within the
anglophone academy, a significant number of contributors hail from the United States,
United Kingdom and Spain, we have assembled a wide representation of institutional affili-
ations (including different types of colleges and universities, government entities and inde-
pendent scholars). This effort at inclusivity is reflected by the types of scholars we selected,
most of whom work transatlantically, transnationally and transdisciplinarily to formulate
a multifaceted view of not one but many Spains. As part of this polyhedric vision we have
commissioned chapters from specialists representing a breadth of disciplines (mainly from
the humanities but also from the arts and the social sciences), including leading interna-
tional experts but also up-and-coming scholars who demonstrate intellectual promise and
offer excitingly innovative research. Similarly, we have made a conscious effort to provide
articles that are oriented, Janus-like, toward both the present and the future but without
ignoring the past, contributing chapters that are organized around a number of critical

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 Introduction: A New Look at Spanish History

topics of timely relevance but which often reverberate with past histories, echoes, traces,
ghosts and ruins of the unforgotten past.
Additionally, we have avoided reliance on an exclusively chronological periodization,
as well as outdated divisions that are based on geographic and geopolitical considerations
that in practice are shifting – we wanted a new organizational model for this volume. We
have also departed from a well-trodden focus on questions of Spain’s modernity, avoiding
a framework that would have been more appropriate for understanding the nineteenth and
early twentieth century but not our contemporary juncture. In that respect, we have chosen
not to focus only on the “routes” towards particular goals (a much desired “modernity,”
for example) or on fixed categories, placing emphasis rather on processes, negotiations
and, at times, dead ends (including an emphasis on detours and non-linear trajectories as
well). This necessarily presents a more complicated view of “Iberia” (including Portugal,
addressed by one of the chapters) as an unfinished geopolitical construct that is constantly
engaged in a process of renegotiation. To this end, we envision that this volume will forge
novel approaches to studying the many cultures of Spain, with our authors addressing the
chosen key topics broadly but also in depth and diachronically across the last 125 years
as well as synchronically. Intensified focus has been placed on moments of special interest
that have generated their own narratives and counter-narratives (the 1898 “Disaster,” the
Second Republic, the Civil War, the millennium, the Transition, the economic crisis, the
COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath and so on), with a “fresh” look at recent decades
and those to come.
This multi-disciplinary and topic-oriented approach is well suited to make sense of a
complicated and ever-changing narrative. Spain today is still a democracy in process of
becoming, since, evidently, democracy is never a closed project but rather an ongoing aspi-
rational one. Spanish democracy, like other democracies, betrays the surface fractures and
limits of democratic pluralism, institutions and certain political attitudes and positions.
At the same time, Spain offers many examples of the people’s resilient will to fight for a
different type of nation, in search of better historical outcomes. Fully, but not seamlessly,
integrated into European society and culture, Spain is still working through and negotiat-
ing the limits of its pluralism (a pluralism steeped in regional conflict) and coming to terms
with linguistic, ethnic and racial difference within its borders. Spain today also exposes
the very ambivalence and blind spots of “European” cultures, as exposed particularly by
contentious immigration issues and disastrous policies. Immigration has been one of many
areas that has pitted Spain against other member states of the European Union. Dramatic
changes in landscape, architecture and urbanism have posed additional challenges and
brought about economic growth and prosperity but have also revealed rifts regarding eco-
nomic and class parity, ecological sustainability, and immigration. Rural Spain has been
emptied and abandoned (“España vacía”), as areas neglected by government investment
and services (hospitals, schools, supermarkets and other basic infrastructure) struggle to
retain the younger generation, who flee to urban centers seeking better opportunities. This
demographic bloodletting has in turn given rise to uninhabitable ghost towns, decaying
rural infrastructure, environmental degradation and a problem of rural sustainability and
agricultural production. It has also more recently produced a keen awareness of environ-
mental issues as well as much-needed debate on the role and representation of the rural in
the political and cultural arenas. The young who migrate to the cities do not always fare
better. Today, Spain’s young generation is highly educated and trained to be at the forefront
of a potentially prosperous nation but still denied access to fair employment and dignified

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 Introduction: A New Look at Spanish History

housing. But just as the Francoist period brought forth resistance – political, social and cul-
tural – today’s generation, in response to the multiple crises affecting the country – economic
(unemployment, salary inequality, pandemic-linked poverty), environmental (the summer
of 2022’s devastating heat wave, forest fires, over-tourism) and social (gender violence,
racial discrimination, ongoing migrant crisis) – has demonstrated the creativity to reimag-
ine the nation otherwise: Through political action, street activism and new forms of media
protest, as exemplified by the May 15, 2011 explosion of popular democracy in Madrid’s
Puerta del Sol and the subsequent nation-wide movement that took to the streets and the
squares, sparking a resurgence of the spirit of collective action. This same generation has
taken to the streets to renew claims for LGBTI equality and to demonstrate an outpour-
ing of support for women’s rights in the Spanish #MeToo movement and against sexual
violence with #YosíteCreo. More recently, in 2022, we have seen doctors, nurses and other
health workers striking throughout Spain, protesting poor working conditions, overwork
and a deteriorating health system prey to cutbacks and political pressures. Unfortunately, in
addition to these democratic and progressive civil society movements, there is also a resur-
gence of an ultra-conservative, far-right movement that finds its ideological impulse in a
neo-imperialist imagining of the (central, cohesive and singular) nation, resurrecting ghosts
from the past that were never properly buried. As rising intolerance is met with government
inefficacy and youth mobilizations, new political fissures seem to eerily echo those from the
past, with the twenty-first century remaining steeped in unresolved struggles over collective
memory, national identity, and the meaning of democracy. This complex and shifting pano-
rama has specific qualities sui generis to Spain but also shares many commonalities with
other nations. It would be worth examining those convergences and divergences in order to
better understand our common goals and struggles or, on the contrary, to determine specific
shortcomings and “blind spots” that may distort our interpretations. An intersection of cul-
tures and simultaneously a colonizer and colonized country, Spain offers a clear example of
how our academic classifications inevitably oversimplify complex and material realities. We
hope that this volume will provide a glimpse into those complexities, as well as introducing
the novel ideas, collective practices and daring imaginings that represent the country’s most
generous hope for the future. The future for “Spain,” however defined, will also be daunt-
ing. Still, if past resilience has taught us anything, it is that Spain, in whatever new form the
nation assumes, will remain a relevant place within Europe and globally.

Why This Volume Now and How It Is Structured

Our readers will find in this volume fifty-four chapters that are independently conceived but
aligned with a specific thematic section. Each of these thematic sections examines a clus-
ter of contemporary concerns central to a variety of disciplines across the humanities and
social sciences, with special emphasis on the last few decades. While there have been several
valuable attempts at handbooks, companions and edited volumes dedicated to the study of
twentieth-century Spain (though few of them incorporate the twenty-first century as well),
the majority tend to offer only a discipline-specific outlook, focusing mostly on literary
studies, on film studies, on politics or history. Rarely has an integrated multi-disciplinary
project of this magnitude been undertaken in order to offer a more complete and nuanced
multi-perspectival assessment of modern and contemporary Spanish culture. That is what
this volume seeks to do while also framing Spanish culture globally to include its lega-
cies, continuations and transatlantic or cross-continental relationships with other countries

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 Introduction: A New Look at Spanish History

and continents, exploring the many routes, links and hyperlinks that connect Spain to the
world-at-large. This international or global perspective on Spain seeks to move away from
the well-worn paths that have placed front and center the geopolitics of the “Peninsula” (a
problematic term that elides more than it includes) to the exclusion of other nations that
have been crucial as recipients and/or originators of Spanish culture, including its clos-
est European neighbors with whom borders and languages are shared: Andorra, Portugal,
France and the UK (through Gibraltar); those African countries with colonial and other his-
torical ties, including Morocco, Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea; all the countries of
Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as others in Asia and the Asian Pacific, foremost
the Philippines; and, naturally, those that have been the recipients of large migrations to or
from Spain, including the United States. The volume’s chapters also include reflections and
topics related to all regions, autonomies and languages from Spain inclusively understood
as a zone or concept tenuously grouping very distinct historical, political and social affilia-
tions that are constantly being reconfigured.
In addition to a desire for the inclusivity of cultures, literatures and languages beyond
the established model of the nation-state or the concept of center-periphery that has organ-
ized most other works, The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century
Spain has bypassed traditional chronological arrangements in favor of the following seven
broad topics: spaces and environments, histories and narratives, governments and institu-
tions, bodies and identities, communities and collectivities, aesthetics and technologies, and
connections and fractures. Although chronology is not a primary organizing principle for
the volume as a whole, we have maintained a chronological order within each of these
ample categories to facilitate the reader’s orientation within the overall volume and provide
some cohesion to what is otherwise a pluralistic text, one that we hope encourages reading
comparatively across disciplines and regions. Each of the major thematic sections contains
from six to nine chapters by experts in the field. In the following paragraphs we provide a
brief general description of some of the subjects and chapters found in each of these broad
thematic sections and suggest some of the continuities and discontinuities that the volume
explores.

Part 1: Spaces and Environments

This section conceptualizes questions of “space” and “environment,” grounding discus-
sions on a variety of interconnected theoretical approaches, including cultural geography,
architecture and urban design, tourism studies, urban studies, archeology, migration and
immigration studies, environmental studies and ecocriticism, posthumanism and animal
studies. This array of humanities and social science work explores the confluence of space,
place and culture, bringing interdisciplinary methodologies to the study of “Spanish” cul-
ture (wherever it may be located). The chapters in this section provide a greater under-
standing of both the “spatial turn” and an emerging interest in the environment in its
intersection with culture, including the study of utopian and dystopian geographies, the
politization of urban spaces in the new millennium, the historical rural migrations to cities
and the subsequent “emptying” of small-town Spain, a problem that has been documented
in the resurgence of the essay on “España vacía” or, for that matter, the new ruralism in the
contemporary novel. Consequently, the section also analyzes the contrasting presence of
the immigrant and the tourist in Spain, the first often exploited, sexualized and vilified, the
second courted and desired. Readers will be taken through the different configurations of

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 Introduction: A New Look at Spanish History

space in Spain in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the imaginary
space of “Empire” and its loss to the contemporary spaces of environmental degradation,
from the painfully concrete and physical lieux de mémoire – battlefields, mass graves, fas-
cist monuments – to the immaterial and virtual spaces of a “digital” Spain.
Susan Larson’s “Cultural Geographies in Spain: Landscape, Place and Space” studies
the development of cultural geography in Spain since its initial days and places it in dia-
logue with its Latin American counterparts, providing a transnational understanding of the
spatial turn. From a macro-perspective to a fine-grained analysis down to the neighbor-
hood block, in “Urban Landscapes and the Construction of the Commons: Barcelona’s
Superblocks and Urban Voids” landscape architect Sara Bartumeus Ferré examines the
concept of the “superblock” to exemplify how urban space is being reimagined from a col-
lective perspective and how architects are finding creative, sustainable and inclusive ways
of designing spaces for people. This chapter is followed by “Rural Spain: Social Landscapes
at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century,” by the scholarly trio Luis Camarero, Jesús
Oliva and Rosario Sampedro. In their chapter, these authors chart the changes in rural
Spain, from an initial period of depopulation to a recent shift that has (partly) reversed the
trend while diversifying rural municipalities with new types of arrivals (immigrants, urban
exiles, etc.). Returning to the city, in “Citizens, Squatters, Homeowners and Tenants: Hous-
ing Activism and the Structures of Democratization and Capitalism in Spain” Miguel A.
Martínez, focusing on the squatter movements (okupas), dives into recent real estate specu-
lation as a motor for urban change and as a spark igniting new grassroots anti-capitalist
activism in the country. Martínez’s topic dovetails with Luis (Iñaki) Prádanos’ piece entitled
“The Cultural Ecology of Tourism: Life-Capital Conflict in Post-2008 Spain,” a thoughtful
examination of how the dominant narrative of tourism as economic growth engine is being
challenged by counterhegemonic cultural movements that are environmentally minded
and opposed to the industry’s destructive effects. In a similar ecocritical vein, Kata Beilin’s
“Information Bytes: From Bullfighting to COVID-Fighting: How to Live on Planet Earth”
closes the section by reflecting on human-animal relations in the wake of the COVID-19
pandemic, moving beyond pleasure-consumption models toward an eco-friendly paradigm.

Part 2: Histories and Narratives

In this second section, the essays address a variety of subjects related to the ways in which
Spain’s darker historical events have been reflected, recorded and memorialized by its cul-
tural production, from wars to support colonialism and their legacies to other major conflicts
in Spain, including the Civil War and its aftermath, revolutions and counter-revolutions,
political violence and terrorism (national and international, state sponsored and carried
out by other actors). The various chapters cast new light on these topics, bringing to bear
both expert voices and novel ideas about the ways the nation’s tragic past continues to
reverberate in the present. Whether analyzing Spain’s politics of remembering or its politics
of forgetting, the chapters address head-on notions of trauma and collective memory, the
recovery and reconstruction of the past, the incomplete work of the Transition to democ-
racy, the cost of displacement and the return of exiles and the debates surrounding what (if
any) restorative justice may be possible in Spain for the victims of the Civil War. Associated
with this topic, other chapters explore concepts related to ghosts, ruins and other types of
spectral returns that result from the incomplete work of healing the nation. Along those
lines, other chapters study the role of democracy and its foils (dictatorship, perhaps even

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 Introduction: A New Look at Spanish History

monarchy) in terms of historical accountability and memory work, as well as the signifi-
cance of this work for the cultural field today. Difficult questions are tackled, including:
Have debates about republicanism, so prevalent in the early twentieth century (and earlier)
returned in kind or in a new, more complex form? How does the memory of dictatorship
and the incomplete transition shape contemporary debates about other potential forms of
self-governance? Has the work of memory affected autonomous regions (and their claims
for autonomy) differently? Following from these questions, the section includes work delv-
ing into language and linguistic policies (including the prohibition and recuperation of
language rights), in regard to culture but also more generally in terms of, for example,
education and identity.
The section opens with Sebastiaan Faber’s “Narrating Conflict: The Politics of Histori-
cal Memory in Spain,” a chapter that examines the pitfalls of historical memory debates
that have been mobilized by both the right (advocating for a return to nationalism) and left
(giving voice to subaltern groups) but in both cases resulting in an inability to think beyond
a reified past and, arguably, impeding the movement toward meaningful change. Next,
Jo Labanyi retakes the memory theme in “Representing Loss: Ghosts, Ruins, and Other
Traces,” a chapter that examines the twenty-first century’s “memory boom” and some
of its notable representations of loss in literature and film. Proceeding in a similar vein,
Dacia Viejo-Rose and Layla Renshaw’s “Buscando al Abuelo (Searching for Grandpa):
Unearthing the Lost Bodies and Missing Histories of the Spanish Civil War” tackles the
memory recovery process through its material traces by focusing on the cultural significance
of mass graves and exhumations. In “Posing the Question: Robert Capa and Gerda Taro
in Three Shots From the Spanish Civil War,” Michael Iarocci taps into the photographic
memory of the war by considering the evidentiary truth of three iconic images by the famed
photojournalist couple Capa-Taro to meditate on what these indexical images may tell us
about the past. From the indelible power of the indexical image to the dynamism of a lost
popular artistic practice, Jordana Mendelson examines a different wartime art form in “The
Periódicos Murales of the Spanish Civil War: Recycled Imprints, Contested Conventions
and Shared Histories.” In her chapter, Mendelson provides a comprehensive analysis of
the political and cultural uses of the now forgotten wall-newspapers. Mari Paz Balibrea’s
“Transitions, Restorations, Exiles: Assessing the Legacies of the Expelled Second Republic”
studies the echoes of republicanism and the republican exiles in contemporary Spain, includ-
ing who can lay claim to their legacy. Another legacy of the dictatorship that seeped into
the democratic period was terrorism, which Ioannis Tellidis deconstructs in “Terrorism and
Peacebuilding Narratives in Spain.” Tellidis studies terrorist and counter-terrorist violence
and the use of anti-terrorist discourses for political purposes even after ETA’s disarmament,
well into our current moment. In the next chapter, Manuel Loff casts a fascinating com-
parative look at two radically distinct transitions to democracy, in Portugal and Spain, in
“ ‘Evolution Without Revolution’: Narratives of Rupture and Reconciliation in Spanish and
Portuguese Democratization.” In this chapter, Loff argues that Spanish democratization
processes were anemic in comparison with the more robust and revolutionary changes that
took place in Portugal’s own transition period. The section closes with a chapter focused on
the auditory dimension of conflict, in Tom Whittaker’s “Acoustic Conflict and the Spanish
Far Right During the Transition to Democracy.” In this chapter, Whittaker analyzes how
noise and sound were deployed to reappropriate urban space and generate acoustic conflict
both during the transition and in today’s far-right resurgence.

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Part 3: Governments and Institutions

As an extension of the previous section, which already began implicitly and explicitly to
touch on the workings of Spanish governments and institutions insofar as these agencies
are often responsible for the construction and manipulation of histories and narratives (and
the construction and destruction of monuments and memories), we continue in Part 3 with
a comprehensive look at several facets of governmentality and institutional structures in
terms of their functioning and their relation to culture and society. Chapters in this section
examine a variety of issues, including questions about the sovereignty of stateless nations
and autonomous regions within Spain and, for that matter, the role of Spain within the
European Union. The question of Basque and Catalan independence is addressed head-on,
studying its political and cultural implications. These are matters of critical relevance in
contemporary Spain, as the so-called “Catalan Crisis” has recently shown, but they can be
traced through the long history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Allied with these
topics, we included work theorizing the emergence and persistence of aggressive forms of
Spanish nationalism and neo-centralism, as well as the resurgence of popular participatory
democratic movements and new political parties such as Podemos and Ciudadanos. Bound
up with these matters, other chapters analyze the role the monarchy has played in Spain
both as a force supporting autocracy in the decades prior to the Civil War and, later, as an
institution that backed democratization and neoliberalization and is now associated with
economic and political corruption. The Catholic Church’s role as a principal actor in Spain
is examined but also contextualized by the rise of other religions. The section studies other
major institutions – including schools, hospitals, prisons, museums and sports organiza-
tions – as well as their presence in the cultural representations of modern and contemporary
Spain. Sports organizations have been particularly important in their nexus with culture
and regarding the various national identities – one need only recall the rivalry between
Barcelona and Real Madrid soccer fans and its origins during the Franco regime or the
preeminence of, and controversy over, bullfighting in the Spanish (and foreign) imaginary.
Finally, no account of major institutions would be complete without examining the meta-
morphosis undergone by the family, from patriarchal, nuclear and extended to fractioned
and alternative (though arguably still significantly patriarchal).
Xosé M. Núñez Seixas inaugurates the section with “The Contested Nation(s),
1900–2023” by examining from a historical perspective both Spain’s unfulfilled nation-state
project as well as its status as an imperfect multinational state, one in which alternative
national identities have not achieved social hegemony within their territories. The next
chapter probes this thorny issue in fine-grained detail by examining specifically the ques-
tion of nationhood in Catalonia and the Basque country, in Gemma Sala’s “Independ-
ence as a Political Strategy: A Party Competition Approach to Secessionism in Catalonia
and the Basque Country.” Shifting from questions of national(ist) independence to those
of gender independence, María José González examines patriarchal institutions and the
radical changes in Spanish society in “Patriarchy, Power and Women’s Independence: The
Transformation of Marriage and Families in Spain, 1976–2020.” Many of this chapter’s
arguments about the underpinnings of those patriarchal networks can be associated with
another conservative institution also in decline, the Church. In “The Catholic Church
and Other Institutional Religions: The Long Road From Catholic Monoconfesionalism
to Democratic Religious Pluralism,” Natalia Núñez Bargueño revisits the role played by

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Catholicism and other major religions in recent Spanish history. Many of the struggles
involving Catholicism have revolved around the critical issue of education: the right to a
secular education eviscerated during Francoism and the Church’s opposition to relinquish-
ing their power in that arena. But secularism in the educational system has not solved all
problems, and Jaume Claret casts a critical look at Spain’s underfunded educational system
and the tide of young talent leaving the country in “Schools, Scientific Institutions, and the
Spanish ‘Brain Drain’ (1833–2023).” Bound up with nation, education and state control
we find language. Since the Spanish language has been a key element in Spanish nationalist
and colonialist policies, María Florencia Rizzo examines changes in Spanish linguistic poli-
cies since the 1990s from a glottopolitical perspective. In her chapter, “Regulatory Policies
and Institutions of Contemporary Spanish Language,” she examines the ways Spain avails
itself of institutions such as the RAE and the Cervantes Institute to promote its linguistic,
social and political agenda abroad. From the binds of language policy to the bondage of
the prison system, Aurélie Vialette queries the history and most recent status of Spanish
prisons and the prison abolition movement in her chapter, “Prison Abolition in Spain: The
Weight of History, the Debate, and the Future.” The last two chapters are complementary:
the first is a broad study of sport in Spain with particular emphasis on the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, the second a specific look at soccer (fútbol) as an institution with
profound political impact. Andrew McFarland’s “Sporting Institutions: The Structures of
Spanish Sport Across the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries” elucidates key aspects
of Spain’s sport institutions with broad historical strokes across multiple sports, followed
by a more detailed look at soccer. Alejandro Quiroga closes the section with a soccer case
study entitled “Football and Politics in Modern Spain: FC Barcelona and Real Madrid in
Historical Context.” The section therefore ends by stressing the importance of physicality,
providing a transition to think critically about the body and about specific bodies and the
identities they enclose.

Part 4: Bodies and Identities

The aim of the “Bodies and Identities” section of the Companion is to relate the abstract
or even institutional concepts developed in the previous sections to specific bodies and
individual identities, to see how these bodies have been affected by the application of dis-
ciplinary mechanisms in repressive conditions, from colonialism to gendered and queer
oppression to ableist and racial discrimination. In that sense, it does not completely step
away from the institutional, but it particularizes and concretizes its effects. Additionally, we
wanted to capture how marginalized subject positions (women, LGBTI, racial and ethnic
others, immigrants, the poor, etc.) have proudly reclaimed their identities, established a
critical consciousness and effected societal change by placing their bodies front and center,
making them visible. In analyzing bodies and identities from an intersectional perspective,
thematic overlaps with the previous and following sections are welcome and expected.
For example, some of the chapters in this section also discuss the institutions that seek to
control those bodies and identities that attempt to evade what was long held as normative
(straight, male, white, abled) in Spain for a great part of the period covered by this volume.
And many of the chapters challenge prevailing histories and narratives already discussed in
Part 2 or delve into questions of border, liminal and colonial “space,” dovetailing with the
first section. As such, some chapters explore the role of government institutions as well as

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the Catholic Church’s complicity with censorship and the repression of sexuality at various
historical junctures. The role of scientific and educational institutions in controlling colo-
nial subjects and non-normative bodies is also examined in this section. Spanish studies has
on the whole remained resistant to postcolonial methodologies and approaches, an issue
indicative of a certain resistance to fully considering the nation’s past; for this reason, our
volume foregrounds issues of coloniality and colonial domination and subordination. Ques-
tions of colonization and decolonization regarding identity are, of course, linked to Catho-
lic missionaries and education in places like Equatorial Guinea. But as former colonies now
supply a steady stream of immigrants, how do they reimagine their “bodily” belonging in
Spain? How have these immigrants constructed their own identity narratives, and how are
they being portrayed in novels, films and other cultural works (exemplified, for instance,
by Belén Gopegui’s novel El padre de Blancanieves)? Along with chapters on immigration,
pateras and borders, the section explores the question of the racial other in Spain, which
now includes multiracial and multiethnic immigrants but also generations of Spaniards
who are not phenotypically “white.” What has happened, culturally and otherwise, to the
representation, as well as the identity claims and rights, of the Romani (Calé) or many other
groups considered both Spanish and immigrant (for example, second- and third-generation
Spanish-Chinese, which one chapter examines)? Along with the study of these contested
and contestatory subject positions, we have included work on the differently abled and their
role in Spanish society and culture – within a country which prides itself on organizations
such as ONCE which advocate for the blind and visually impaired yet remains resistant to
basic accessibility. Some authors study labor issues, such as neoliberal work practices which
expect the body to be at the service of exhausting shifts and almost constant availability,
as well as issues of temporary and low-wage underemployment, all of these demands made
worse by the pandemic and exploitative “work from home” policies. Women’s rights feature
prominently in various chapters in this volume, including in this section, especially in con-
nection with the 8M strikes and feminist mobilizations that spread throughout the country
beginning in 2018. Other chapters consider the LGBTI situation from various perspectives.
Queer cultural icons have had a prominent presence in literature, film, performance and
other cultural expressions since the years of La Movida, and this section addresses concerns
of queer and transgender identity in Spain, a country which legalized same-sex marriage in
2004 (before the USA) and yet, despite a commitment to eliminating prejudice, has a long
way to go in terms of eradicating discrimination, harassment and violence against LGBTI
individuals. Finally, no discussion would be complete without negotiating the complex
issue of the economically dispossessed, the victims of the crisis and its attendant experience
of “civil death.” Several of the chapters also weave in an interest in virtual identity forma-
tion in the 21st century, as new generations of activists reinvent themselves on social media
and other platforms and navigate a path between the material and the electronic self.
Bridging with the previous part’s focus on institutions, the section opens with “Franco’s
Instituto de Estudios Africanos: Spanish Colonial Science, and Local African Responses.”
In this chapter, Benita Sampedro Vizcaya returns to colonial Guinea, to analyze how Fran-
coist scientific institutions in the 1940s and 50s engaged in pseudo-scientific practices to
construct the local population as inferior to the white Spanish colonizer, as well as reveal-
ing the subtle arts of native resistance and sly civility. Moving forward chronologically, we
follow with N. Michelle Murray’s “Boats, Bodies, and Borders: Migration, Dispossession,
and Patera Literature in Spain,” a chapter that investigates representations of pateras in

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contemporary Spanish literature, read as symbols of dispossession. Murray analyzes how

novels narrativize these clandestine water crossings by undocumented migrants, typically
racial “others,” deemed “illegal” by the state. Cristián H. Ricci takes up this postcolonial
discourse by examining the novels of an Amazigh/Berber-Catalan novelist whose literature
centers on the question of racial identity in “Racial Others in Spain: The Articulation of
Shifting Identities in the Works of Amazigh/Berber-Catalan Writer Saïd El Kadaoui Mous-
saoui.” Moving from racial to gender-based identities, Eva Anduiza and Sabina Monza’s
chapter explores the latest wave of feminism in Spain, in “Women in the Streets: 8M Femi-
nist Protests in Spain.” In particular, the authors examine the 2018–19 protests by plac-
ing them in their sociopolitical context (#MeToo, the infamous La Manada case) and by
analyzing the strategies (online and local activism) deployed to rally attendance at the pro-
test marches. The next chapter broaches the intersection of LGBTI and colonial issues,
with Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo’s “Colonial Genderings: Fluid Identities in the Maghreb.”
Campoy-Cubillo argues that translations of the One Thousand and One Nights, and their
reception by Spanish and Latin American writers and intellectuals, have worked as coloni-
alist texts, presenting the Arab world as a passive, colonizable space, even as these transla-
tions also made queer “against the grain” readings possible and allowed for the expression
of marginal(ized) sexualities. Bringing the investigation of LGBTIQ+ issues to our contem-
porary moment, in “Unraveling Time: Queer Future and Trans Entanglement in Veneno,”
Dean Allbritton examines a 2020 television portrait of the famed trans vedette La Veneno,
specifically analyzing the representation of transgender identities onscreen. Emily DiFilippo
turns our attention to the critical but often invisible matter of disabled bodies and their
intersection with economic crisis in recent Spanish narratives. In “Motionless: Disability
and Snow White in Narratives of the Crisis,” DiFilippo demonstrates how the iconic figure
of Snow White has been redeployed in crisis narrative to interrogate hegemonic concepts
of able-bodiedness, nationhood and citizenship. Continuing with the crisis and closing the
section, Sophie L. Gonick’s chapter focuses on the urban body/citizen under a state of crisis,
in “A Civil Death: Homeownership, Migration, and the (Un)Making of Urban Subjects.”
This state of civil death and the desperation that ensued propelled sectors of the dispos-
sessed to mobilize, giving rise to the collective and communal responses that we examine
in detail in the following section. As readers will note, concerns about “home,” accessible
living and affordable and dignified housing are recurring themes in various chapters and
sections, reflecting the gravity of the housing crisis.

Part 5: Communities and Collectivities

In Spain, people, old and young alike, have been taking to the streets in ever-larger num-
bers to protest and demand accountability from politicians on a variety of issues and have
been organizing at the local, neighborhood and national level by using both social media
and street-based tactics (e.g. 15M economic protests and occupations, 8M marches against
gendered violence, Catalan independence rallies, the struggle against home evictions). The
capacity of decentralized communities and collectivities to self-organize and exercise civic
power has burgeoned in Spain in the aftermath of the financial collapse and the failure of
governments and institutions to meet even the most basic needs of the Spanish population.
Naturally, the concept of collective and communal ways of being was not invented in the
twenty-first century, and in many ways the anti-sistema groups organizing and “resisting”

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Late Capitalism that have proliferated in recent decades are tapping into an ethos that
was already present during the anarchist and revolutionary movements of the early twen-
tieth century or in the clandestine labor unions during the Francoist period, as well as in
less radical groups that emerged during the Transition, such as neighborhood associations,
women’s and immigrant rights collectives and so forth. In keeping with presenting a broad
perspective on the development of communities, collectives and communal movements,
this section gathers chapters on a broad set of topics associated with the notions of the
“collective,” “communities” and the “commons.” The roots of this spirit of group solidar-
ity can be traced to early twentieth-century labor movements, which were instrumental
in asserting workers’ rights but were also intertwined with other political (socialist, com-
munist, anarcho-syndicalist, republican), social and cultural actors seeking to forge a more
egalitarian Spain. We also consider in this section recent anti-austerity groups (Indignados,
okupas, etc.), which can be likened to early anarchist collectives, as well as Spanish com-
munities in diaspora, forced to leave by the war, dictatorship or for economic reasons.
Part and parcel of the exile precipitated by the Civil War were the many communities of
Spaniards settling in the global diaspora, another topic explored in this section. Similarly,
there are diasporic communities living within Spain that function very much like collectives
of solidarity, including a significant Chinese-Spanish population and many Latin American
communities, as well as immigrants from Africa and eastern Europe but also other groups
with non-Catholic religious affiliations and long historical roots in the Iberian Peninsula,
such as Muslims and Jews. Other chapters analyze the presence and motivations of urban
subcultures, for instance, the “punkie” movement during La Movida, especially in relation
to women’s participation in this alternative community. Linked to these urban subgroups
is the study of their own cultural production (so called low-culture), such as music and
fashion, graffiti and dance but also the impact they have had on high culture, including on
film and literature. Finally, the section devotes space, again, not only to radical democracy
and social movements and how these collectives operate in the streets but also to how the
spirit of community and the collective have moved online, creating greater possibilities for
mass protest and mass action – often through performative acts, such as the aforemen-
tioned musician flash mob that played “Here Comes the Sun,” the okupa movement or
the women’s marches. At the same time, some chapters consider the reaction by a radical
right populism characterized by the emergence of Vox, a party with a platform that rejects
LGBTI rights, immigration and climate change. Questions of class, material inequality and
precarity are critically examined both in terms of their societal elements and also in cultural
manifestations such as poetry, literature, music and cinema. The picture that emerges from
these chapters is that of an engaged civil society which has taken to the streets to change
the nation, with impassioned participation from every position in the political spectrum.
Pamela Radcliff inaugurates the section with a chapter which looks at labor through
the longue durée of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to establish a picture of
the origins of mass political movements and community labor activism “from below.” In
“Early 20th-Century Popular Mobilization and Labor Movements in Spain: From the Res-
toration to the Second Republic,” Radcliff shows that the Francoist dictatorship marked a
rupture with long standing patterns of popular mobilization and activism, popular activi-
ties that reemerged in the post-dictatorial period. Shifting from labor-based communities to
ethnic ones, Joaquín Beltrán Antolín and Amelia Sáiz López turn to a collective that has not
received sufficient attention, that of Chinese multigenerational communities living in Spain.

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In “Chinese Contributions to Spanish Culture: An Overview,” the authors provide a com-

prehensive look at the Chinese presence in Spain, from various traveling troupes of acrobats
in the 1920s who settled in the country to the growing Chinese-Spanish population that
has established itself in major urban centers since the early 2000s. Beltrán Antolín and Sáiz
López examine both the community formation of these Chinese arrivals but also their pres-
ence in culture and the arts. In “Muslims and Jews in Contemporary Spain: Returns, Lega-
cies, Belongings,” Daniela Flesler casts a glance at religious communities in Spain. More
specifically, she studies Law 12/2015, the law granting Spanish nationality to descend-
ants of Spanish Sephardic Jews, to see how the legal text is overdetermined by myths and
prejudices about both Muslims and Jews. But a sense of community or collectivity does not
rely exclusively on ethnic, religious or gender affiliation; it can also center on musical and
aesthetic preferences. The following chapter brings us to the popularity of the punk move-
ment through its female participants during the transition. In “Made by Punk, Makers of
Punk: Spanish Women in the Transition Space,” Nuria Triana Toribio examines various
twenty-first–century documentary films to show how their nostalgic revisionism ultimately
obscures the transformative role played by women in the early punk movement from the
1970s through the 90s. The next chapter brings the section back to the critical question
of class and class-based collectives, indeed, revisiting Marxian ideas about class struggle.
In “Narrating Class in Twentieth-Century Spanish Literature: From Class in Itself to Class
for Itself,” David Becerra Mayor reflects on how the concept of class has been constituted,
both from within and without class collectives, by tracing its early twentieth-century ori-
gins (1920s and 30s) and its entrenchment in the Francoist mid-century (1950s). Becerra
Mayor then applies his cultural analysis of class to the novel Tea Rooms (1934). Maintain-
ing the focus on class and economic disparity, Steven L. Torres examines grassroots strug-
gles to obtain housing rights, 8M feminist strikes and neighborhood association initiatives,
relating them to the impetus provided by 15M, in a chapter entitled “Social Responses
to Material Inequality in Spain (2008–2022).” As we have seen, class struggle and pre-
carity have a profound repercussion on cultural history and production. Fittingly, Carlos
Varón González closes out this section with a look at the ways inequality and precarity
are reflected in twenty-first–century Spanish poetry in his “Broken Promises: Precarity and
Affect in Contemporary Spanish Poetry after 2011.”

Part 6: Aesthetics and Technologies

After three sections dedicated to the specific identities, bodies and collectives that con-
stitute a complexly pluralistic and therefore inevitably contested nation, and having also
examined its governments and institutions, this section turns to the aesthesis of technology
and to technology itself. That is, the focus is on conceptualizing the relationship between
aesthetics, technology and modernity from the early twentieth-century to today, think-
ing through developments such as the automobile and airplane; media technologies from
print to digital; and audiovisual technologies such as photography, radio and cinema, as
well as the Internet and digital culture. In each case, the technology itself is considered in
relation to its intervention into and import for contemporary culture. For example, con-
temporary theater and performance are considered in relation to new media practices and
online archival possibilities but also as a reflection of street activism (the street informs
art practices, and vice versa). Although the focus of several chapters is on techne (broadly

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understood not as just tools and technology but as making and doing, as creating), the
human and nonhuman animal is not forgotten. In fact, the human becomes a centerpiece
through which to understand the way aesthetics in the twentieth and twenty-first century
reflects the many technological, scientific and industrial changes Spain has experienced.
Chapters cover the association between the avant-garde and innovation, the links between
radio and other communication technologies with propaganda and social change and the
ways science and technology are represented in Spanish cultural production, from popular
to high. Other chapters investigate the connection between politics and radio, film and new
media. The imbrication between the technological and war, so prevalent since at least the
Futurist movement, is also considered. In Spain, the role of the media as the Fourth Estate
has been severely curtailed during much of its recent history. Additionally, recent media
scandals are proof of collusion between major media groups and state actors. The subjects
of analysis here are politics of the media and the media in politics, so critical at a time when
politics itself has become a spectacle for mass consumption, more performance than praxis.
The question of how digital technologies have significantly changed the cultural and social
arenas is taken up, directly and indirectly, by almost every chapter in this section.
The first chapter, Juli Highfill’s “The Atmospherics of Modernity: Flight in the Literary
and Popular Imagination in Spain, 1920–1936,” examines aviation in the early twentieth
century. Aviation, argues Highfill, had a deep impact on the Spanish imaginary and on mass
culture in the early twentieth century. The rhetoric, imagery and affective experience of avi-
ation fostered a new sensorium. Staying in the early twentieth century but shifting from avi-
ation to radio waves, Tania Gentic’s chapter, “Auditory Culture in Early Twentieth-Century
Spain: Stereophonic Soundscapes of Modernity, From Print Media to Radio,” studies how
radio generated an auditory Spanish culture through stereophonic soundscapes, as Span-
iards become riveted to their radios. From soundscapes to landscapes, and from radio to
the cinema, the next chapter, by Steven Marsh, is entitled “Landscape as Event: Geometrics
and Geopoetics in Contemporary Spanish Cinema.” Marsh’s profound reflection on the
medium proposes considering landscape a disruptive force in Spanish cinema, arguably
devoid of national or regional affiliation, with landscape acting as a transformative element
rather than as the setting for the films’ action. From a broad philosophical inquiry into the
fine-grained details of the cinematic medium, we move to a chapter focused on the intersec-
tion of film and gender. Sarah Thomas’ “Intimate Worlds, Public Battles: Gender, Agency,
and Autonomy in Contemporary Spanish Cinema” examines women’s filmmaking in Spain
from both an industry and aesthetic perspective. She argues that films made by women
depict struggles against adversity and toward autonomy in ways that evoke the challenges
faced by the women directors themselves. The next chapter examines Spain’s turn to digi-
tal cultural practices, specifically those engaging with the ongoing environmental crisis. In
“Algorithms, the Earth, and the Spanish State: The Politics of Making Digital Art,” Alex
Saum-Pascual showcases three contemporary artists, Belén Gache, Joana Moll and Eugenio
Tisselli, whose digital art challenges the logic of the algorithm and serves as a critique of
the Capitalocene’s wanton exploitation of our planet. The next piece also associates digi-
tal practices with their material counterparts, in this case in the field of performance. By
focusing on the newest developments in theater and performance as imbricated with street
activism and innovative online archival and distribution practices, David Rodríguez-Solás’
chapter, “Performance in Contemporary Times: Processes, Community, and Audience,”
opens up new avenues for performance studies. The last chapter of the section, “The

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Aesthetics of Ephemera: Migrant Subjects and the Unleashing of Place in the Photography
of Óscar Parasiego,” authored by Parvati Nair, contextualizes contemporary photography
within transmigratory flows by analyzing the work of Óscar Parasiego, a Spanish photog-
rapher residing in the United Kingdom. Nair focuses on Parasiego’s controversial 2016
Diáspora series, where the artist blurs and erases his Spanish immigrant subjects to reflect
on the vulnerability of the immigrant through an aesthetics of ephemera. This reflection on
the invisibility or erasure of the immigrant provides an ideal transition to the next section,
which explores the connections and fractures associated with the fraught idea of Spain and
Spanishness and their global projections.

Part 7: Connections and Fractures

As we have seen, this volume aims to focus both on human subjects and on nonhuman ani-
mals while also considering the place, space and environment that envelops those subjects;
the narratives and histories that construct their bodies and identities; the communities
that envelop or deny the existence of such subjectivities; and the technologies that affect
and intersect with these porous bodies and identities in the twenty-first century. What we
explore in the last section is the concept of disconnection and fracture as it applies not to
individual bodies but to communities and the nation-state, today every bit as porous and
in flux as the individual subject. The history of Spain, like that of all nation-states, has been
written as a teleological narrative leading toward an imaginary (longed for by some and
dreaded by others) moment of plenitude: the realization of political and cultural national
cohesion. Within that contested framework, all political events and artistic practices are
evaluated (retroactively) in relation to that “national factor”: literary histories and histo-
riographies are organized according to the degree of representativity that a certain author
or event has in relation to the dominant national narrative or the ways in which they
chose to resist or challenge that story. Spain’s narrative, however, has always betrayed
the inevitable blind spots of all national imaginaries in a very explicit manner. That is due
to the physical and imagined existence of several territories (in particular Catalonia, the
Basque Country, Galicia and the Canary Islands but also others) demanding recognition
for their own cultural, political and geographical specificity. We also see similar connec-
tions and fractures in the history, legacy and present impact of past colonial rule in Latin
America but also former and remaining territories like Equatorial Guinea, Ceuta, Melilla
and Gibraltar. The return or the uncomfortable role of exiles within the national narra-
tive, the arrival of immigrants from former colonies, the justified demand for reparations
by former colonial subjects (as with Morocco) and the continuing neo-colonial practices
through capitalist penetration (all factors that have appeared in previous sections) are
constant reminders that history is never quite dead. The contested territory of a painful
past and its contentious echoes in the fractured present explain why Spain’s intellectual
history reflects a particular (it has been called “obsessive”) preoccupation with the coun-
try’s identity and cohesion. This section explores key instances of both connections and
disconnections among the different cultures within the state but also with other (trans)
national realities and different approaches to community building associated with the past
and present of the peninsula. It will also examine networks of material and symbolic trade,
and the different routes through which knowledge, political ideas and cultural practices
have travelled to and from Spain.

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In the opening salvo, “Apocalyptic Visions of the Crisis: The Imaginary of the Flood in
Contemporary Spanish Culture,” Natalia Castro Picón studies cultural representations of
water-based disasters (floods, tsunamis) that are used to both bolster reactionary discourses
and promote revolutionary projects within cultural production and as part of various social
and countercultural movements, including the 15M. Focusing on connections rather than
disasters or ruptures, Julia Ramírez-Blanco follows with a chapter that studies the new
forms of horizontal community-building in the 15M mobilizations, in “Ties That Bind:
Madrid’s 2011 Protest Camp as a Transversal Community.” From social cohesion to lin-
guistic (dis)encounters, Leslie J. Harkema writes about the plurilingual condition of Spain
as both a source of linkage and division in her gender-focused chapter, “Iberian Multilin-
gualism, Gender, and Translation as Collaboration.” More specifically, Harkema exposes
how dominant discourses render both the practice of translation and the women who carry
it out as irrelevant and invisible, more so when those translators are from peripheral cul-
tures in Spain (Galicia, Catalonia, the Basque Country, etc.). If national narratives are
fractured within the territory traditionally understood as “Spain,” the concept of belong-
ing is no less disconnected when the nation is situated within the idea of “Europe.” This
precariously fraught relationship is precisely what Luis Martín-Estudillo demonstrates in
“Spain and the Shifting Limits of ‘Europe.’ ” In his chapter, Martín-Estudillo contextualizes
what the notion of “Europe” means for Spain in the aftermath of Brexit and considering the
fraught historical relationship between the continent and the Spanish state. The next two
chapters examine music as a vehicle for establishing links and ruptures within and outside
of Spain, thinking through music as a form of cultural nationalism. In “Between Raquel
Meller and Rosalía: Popular Spanish Music, (Trans)National and Local Narratives,” Julio
Arce examines the links between popular music and concepts of national belonging through
two iconic artists, one from the early twentieth century and the other from our own histori-
cal moment, that have had significant visibility outside of Spain. Arce considers tensions
and fusions between traditional “national” music (cuplé, nova canço, flamenco, etc.) and
the influence of foreign genres (rock, rap, reggaeton, etc.). The next chapter, “Music’s Mir-
rors: Identity, Tradition, and Modernity in Spanish Popular Music,” continues with a broad
analysis of Spanish popular music in the last two centuries, as Héctor Fouce and Fernán
del Val consider traditional music in its conversation with other genres, the conditions for
music production during Francoism and its reawakening during the transition, as well as
the influence of globalization on musical expression today. Rebecca Ingram’s chapter is
a necessary intervention into Spanish food studies, with “From the Mediterranean Diet
to Gastronationalism: Cultural Studies and Spanish Foodways.” In this chapter. Ingram
contrasts two food paradigms, the Mediterranean diet and the gastronationalist, neoliberal
marketing campaign of Gastro Marca España, proving that foodwork as a cultural practice
is mediated by power and competing national and international interests. The final chapter
provides an elegant colophon to the volume by transporting Spain out of itself (away from
navel-gazing) and toward Latin America. In “Iberia and the Americas: Hispanism and Its
(Dis)Encounters,” Diana Arbaiza analyzes the development of Hispanism throughout the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries as “a phenomenon that has structured a history of
(dis)encounters between Iberia and the Americas around questions of cultural hegemony,
economic imperialism and historical revisionism.” Arbaiza traces the concept of Hispani-
dad from its Francoist origins until its resurgence today, arguing that rather than provid-
ing horizontal models of relation between Spain and Latin America as it has claimed, the

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 Introduction: A New Look at Spanish History

concept of “hispanismo” remains a symbol of Spanish colonialism in the Americas, both

an enduring myth of Spanish nationalism and a persistent framework for imperialism (eco-
nomic, cultural, political). With this look at Hispanidad and “hispanismo” broadly, but
also within our discipline, we hope to refashion our own disciplinary perspective toward a
more inclusive and critical way to think of Spanish studies in the twenty-first century, as we
deal with a clear paradigm shift that has taken place not only in the disciplines represented
in this book but in the humanities at large.
Eduardo Ledesma and Luisa Elena Delgado

xlviii
 PART 1

Spaces and Environments

 1
CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES
IN SPAIN
Landscape, Place and Space

Susan Larson

The basis of patriotism is geography.

—(Azorín 512)

The discussion should be about space and not geography.

—(Milton Santos, The Nature of Space 72)

The academic discipline of geography has long been caught up in the work of nation and
empire building. In the late nineteenth century in Spain, farming and trade with the colo-
nies were the most significant components of the Spanish economy (Tortella 42–50; Simp-
son 221–42). The loss of the colonies in 1898, combined with incrementally liberalized
international trade policies, created the conditions necessary for increasing class conflict
in both the city and the countryside (Fusi and Palafox 193–237). Twentieth-century indus-
trialization, centered primarily in the Basque Country and Catalonia, further accentuated
long-standing interregional conflicts and tensions between the country and the city, result-
ing in ever stronger demands for greater regional autonomy (Carr 524–58). The result-
ing “regenerationist” discourses of modernization gave voice to a national and nationalist
geographical project backed by an ideology that simultaneously pushed for socioeconomic
restructuring and cultural revival in ways that were closely connected to ideas about terri-
tory, land and landscape.1
Joaquín Costa (1846–1911) was at the forefront of this “regenerationist” project, as a
politician, historian and economist who frequently explained Spain’s early twentieth-century
socioeconomic crises in geographical terms. Erik Swyngedouw argues that for Costa, “this
focus on a geographical project as the foundation for modernization permitted progres-
sive elites to raise social problems (class struggle, economic decline, mass unemployment)
as important issues without formulating them in class terms” (452). This particular spa-
tial imaginary empowered what had initially been an ill-defined but growing coalition
of reformist socialists, populists, industrialists and enlightened agricultural elites to get
behind a shared, modern vision for Spain’s future that took into account both urban issues

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-2
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

and land reform. This centrist strategy was successful because it simultaneously silenced
anti-progressive traditionalists and blocked anarchists and other revolutionary socialists
from power. The myriad alliances, goals and tactics of the “regenerationists” would evolve
in various directions in subsequent decades, but the geographical basis for liberal moderni-
zation was a consistent guiding principle that provided a working vocabulary and set of
productive metaphors for the articulation of a nation-based discourse that would become
central to Spain’s development until the end of the Franco regime and which carries over
into the present day. Geography and its discourses of power have been employed by every-
one from nineteenth-century liberal “regenerationists” to twentieth-century Fascists, Fran-
coists, post-transición Socialists and contemporary neoliberal politicians.
Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) is known as the father of the modern academic
discipline of geography, and his particular form of “enlightened Romanticism” offered
a radical new way of visualizing and organizing geographical territory. For Humboldt,
landscape had an organic (what he called a “natural”) form that grew out of an essential,
internal structure. He drew on the arts, the sciences and reason but also appealed to human
emotion to mobilize what Nicolás Ortega Cantero calls a “nueva colección de perspectivas
diversas sobre el paisaje” [new set of diverse perspectives on landscape] that in the second
half of the nineteenth century emphasized the aesthetic and the visual (“La invención”
18). The multiple volumes Humboldt published between 1828 and 1849, after his Latin
American expedition, were commented upon by three Spanish academics from the Insti-
tuto Libre de Enseñanza [Free Institution of Education]: the geologist José MacPherson
(1839–1902), the botanist Salvador Calderón (1851–1911) and the naturalist Francisco
Quiroga (1853–1894), all of whom early in their careers produced work about landscape
that was notably devoid of human beings (Martínez de Pisón 32). The first truly mod-
ern Spanish geographical manifesto is arguably Francisco Giner de los Ríos’s “Paisaje”
[Landscape], published in La Ilustración Artística in 1886. It is in this short essay that the
philosopher, greatly influenced by Humboldt, began to theorize the study of landscape and
geography as a science instead of relegating it to the status of a primarily aesthetic reflection
(Ortega Cantero “Francisco Giner” 24–25).2 For many of these early Spanish geographers
the essential “landscape of Spain” was equated with the region of Castille in ways that
would institutionalize the study of geography in Spain in ideological and highly centralized
ways for decades to come.
Of these first professional geologists, botanists and naturalists in Spain based at La
Institución Libre de Enseñanza, José MacPherson was the first to explore the idea of land-
scape as a subjective experience.3 It was the founder of the Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid,
Rafael Torres Campos (1853–1904), however, who first began to write about landscape
in such essays as “Un viaje al Pirineo” [A Trip to the Pyrenees] (1889), “Recuerdos de
la montaña” [Mountain Memories] (1895) and “Nota de excursiones” [Note on Excur-
sions] (1895) that associated territory with a sense of modern intellectual, aesthetic values
and national identity (Ortega Cantero 599–501). As Horacio Capel explains, however, in
the first third of the twentieth century in Spain the discipline of geography became more
interested in the human impact on, and perception of, the land. There was undoubtedly
rigorous geographical research being conducted in Spain during this time, but after the
Civil War the discipline would increasingly serve as a pseudo-scientific justification for the
nationalism of the Franco regime (Capel 6–8).4 Much of the work of present-day cultural
geographers focusing on Spain takes into account the close ties that bind the history of
the academic discipline of geography and the body of knowledge that it has produced to

4
 Cultural Geographies in Spain

institutional structures of political power connected to the project of nation-building (Parra

Montserrat).5
Anglo-American cultural geography began to cross-fertilize in earnest with an increas-
ingly interdisciplinary and international set of ideas from cultural studies, philosophy, criti-
cal theory, postcolonial theory and feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, looking for ways
to get beyond the environmental determinism into which geography seemed to fall with
such frequency.6 It became increasingly common during this so-called “cultural turn” for
geo­graphers to talk about landscape as both a socially constructed built form and a sym-
bolic representation. Through these varied interdisciplinary dialogues there runs an essen-
tially materialist, Marxist assumption that, as Don Mitchell puts it, “culture is never a
thing, but it is rather a struggled-over set of social relations, relations shot through with
structures of power, structures of dominance and subordination” (xv). The field of cultural
geography is indebted to the ideas of academics such as David Harvey, Derek Gregory,
Doreen Massey and Denis Cosgrove who, along with many others, pushed at the limits of
the study of landscape, space and place in ways that that worked their way into a variety of
disciplines worldwide. Santa Arias describes her particular experience of this “spatial turn”
from the vantage point of Latin American colonial studies when she writes that

[s]patiality is interdisciplinary by nature and it has impacted other disciplines beyond

history, such as religion, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, education, media stud-
ies, and literature and cultural studies. Critical geographers have provided the tools to
challenge historicist approaches that view space as a given entity, inert and natural-
ized, in order to engage in an interpretative human geography.
(30)

Much work within the field of Spanish cultural studies in recent years has been in dia-
logue with Anglo-American cultural geography and relies on the assumption that culture is
essential to making a space into a place. If, as geographers have argued since the eighteenth
century, space is a measurable, objective physical container, then place is mental, social and
more subjective: created by language, images, ideologies and the patterns of movement that
structure daily life. The concept that space is not a mere container, but an active producer of
social relations, is central to the thinking of urban theorist and philosopher Henri Lefevbre,
for example, who sought to go beyond the structuralist space/place binary by introducing
a way of conceiving of space as both a physical and social landscape whose meaning was
created by everyday practices that operate through a variety of spatial and temporal scales.7
This interdependent relationship between physical, mental and social space has been an
important call to interdisciplinarity in the field of contemporary Spanish cultural criticism
in recent years because it allows for ways of thinking about how language and images shape
and limit the possibilities that make up social life.
To emphasize geographical space is not to neglect time, however. In The Condition
of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1991), for example,
Marxist urban geographer Harvey teases out the concept of “time-space compression” as
a central organizing principle of modernity that is linked to culture.8 In his subsequent and
closely related essay “Between Space and Time,” he further explains that

[n]ew concepts of space and time have been imposed by force through conquest,
imperial expansion or neocolonial domination. . . . Even more interesting problems

5
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

arise when the public sense of time and space is contested from within. Such contesta-
tion in contemporary society in part arises out of individual and subjective resistance
to the authority of the clock and the tyranny of the cadastral map.
(419)

Father Time, Mother Earth: the class, gender, cultural, religious and political differentia-
tion in highly metaphorical and gendered conceptions of time and space frequently become
areas of social conflict over when and where we are supposed to be.9 If Harvey and the
other cultural geographers mentioned in this chapter have made their way into Iberian
studies and the humanities in general, it is because they have offered intertwined concepts
of time and space that require a place-based understanding of the cultural responses and
new forms of representation stemming from the experience of modernity. This shaping of
social space and time through culture is not simply an abstraction, however. As Jo Labanyi
explains in her groundbreaking essay “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The
Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War,” the unfortunate consequences
of working under the liberal assumption that modern progress necessitates a clean break
with the past and that capitalism moves forward in ever-faster cycles of built-in obsoles-
cence presupposes that “any desire to preserve the past is reactionary; in other words, that
conservation is politically conservative” (91). Culture is where one can find a wealth of
varying responses to modernization that stem from the need to express deep attachments to
the past and that contest in no uncertain terms the compulsory obsolescence promoted by
capitalism. Labanyi concludes her essay by describing the present-day uses and meanings
of cultural forms that recall Spain’s past by stating that “[w]hat memory can do is commu-
nicate the importance of the past in the present – that is, reestablish the affiliative link with
the past that capitalist modernization set out to break” (113).
These geographical concepts have opened a number of doors to scholars of twentieth-
and twenty-first–century Iberia interested in how ideology is constructed along spatial
lines. It goes beyond the scope of this chapter to mention all of the significant studies
of Iberian culture that have stemmed from this “spatial turn,” but there are several that
I will use here to point to the different directions that this type of geographical analysis has
taken. Ann Davies’ 2012 Spanish Spaces: Landscape, Space and Place in Contemporary
Spanish Culture, for example, is one ground-breaking book-length study that engages
in active dialogue with the field of cultural geography. Drawing on case studies from
contemporary Spanish film and literature, Davies explores the themes of memory and
forgetting, nationalism and terrorism, crime and detection, gender, tourism and immigra-
tion, investigating what it means to “think of spaces and places in specifically Spanish
terms” (24). Nil Santiáñez’s Topographies of Fascism: Habitus, Space and Writing in
Twentieth-Century Spain (2013) considers essays, speeches, articles, propaganda materi-
als, poems, novels and memoirs as key texts that both represented and created space from
the early 1920s until the late 1950s in Spain. Santiáñez contends that fascism expressed
its views on the state, the nation and society in spatial terms (for example, the state as a
“building,” the nation as an “organic unity” and society as the “people’s community”) at
the same time that fascism was celebrated through its architecture, public spectacles and
military rituals.
One critic whose work on urban culture has been a particularly relevant conduit between
cultural geography and Iberian studies in recent years is Benjamin Fraser, whose Henri
Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience: Reading from the Mobile City (2011) and

6
 Cultural Geographies in Spain

subsequent Toward an Urban Cultural Studies: Henri Lefebvre and the Humanities (2015)
outline what Lefebvre’s thought brings to the study of urban culture in particular:

As Lefebvre makes clear, the conception of space as merely a static container merely
obfuscates the fact that we live space; the approach that characterizes modern urban
planning reduces the city to a flattened, spatial plane instead of emphasizing its liv-
ing character; the traditional analytical approach to knowledge dwells in spatialized
categories and consequentially undervalues temporality and movement; the many
alienations implicated in modern life restrict human social relationships and limit the
possibilities for people in urban contexts to connect with one another; the flattened
images of the city formed by the tourist render improbable the complexity of what are
in reality quite robust living urban realities.
(12)

These ideas about the urban and mobility have found fertile ground in the field because they
bring to light how culture has the power to problematize and question tired discourses that
have firmly established spatial power relations in place.
One key question runs through much thinking about space, place, and culture in Spain
today. If Spanish national identity has been nourished by the ideological frameworks of
landscape that were steeped in environmental determinism starting in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, and continued during the Franco regime and beyond, how do
these ideological frameworks function today, when the idea of the nation as a container
of power holds less authority in our supposedly post-industrial, post-national global age
when our planet is under ecological threat? Maria Kaika and Eric Swyngedouw are two
geographers who argue that our current planetary situation no longer has any place for dis-
cussions of the nation whatsoever and that this in turn demands new twenty-first–century
definitions of territory, the urban and the rural:

If we consider the city as a process of transformed nature, as the metabolic and social
transformation of nature through human labour, the city turns into a ‘hybrid’ of the
natural and the cultural, the environmental and the social. Entering the city posits
the city as a flow, a flux and a movement, and suggests social, material and symbolic
transformations and permutations.
(121)

Joan Ramon Resina also articulates this present-day urban/rural hybrid condition in “The
Modern Rural,” his provocative introductory essay to the 2012 co-edited (with William
R. Viestenz) volume The New Ruralism: An Epistemology of Transformed Space. Citing a
number of concepts coined by Catalan intellectuals (Valentí Almirall, Josep Pla and Joan
Nogué, among others), he explores the implications of the fact that in the second half of
the twentieth century, the disappearance of both the peasantry and the urban proletariat
bring the very relationship between the urban and the rural into question, even while he
considers that today “culture is the strongest gauge for the relation between center and
periphery” (9). At the end of this essay, he asks the following key questions: “What if the
city proved to be an evolutionary dead end? Or if the great migrations were to undergo a
reversal, whereby, as has already occurred in many American cities, brainpower and wealth
migrate to the suburbs whose remoteness from the downtown is often measured by social

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success?” (23). Carlos Taibo, Spanish political theorist and long-time proponent of the
degrowth movement, similarly looks for answers to some of these same questions about
reverse urban to rural migration in the wake of inevitable ecological/economic collapse in
his Iberia Vaciada: Despoblación, decrecimiento, colapso [Emptied Iberia: Depopulation,
Degrowth, Collapse] (2021).10
One of the most important questions in cultural geography that is closely related to this
new urban/rural duality that unsettles previous notions of the nation is how to conceive of
space, place and landscape during the Anthropocene, as we live with the knowledge that
our planet’s resources are being depleted quicker than they can be replaced. Space and time
take on new meaning when the earth itself is an event with a foreseeable end. Bruno Latour
explains in Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime why so many people are
concerned about something that is becoming increasingly common: the search for territory
that we and our children can inhabit. “The very nature of the soil is changing. . . . If the
anguish runs so deep, it is because each of us is beginning to feel the ground slip beneath our
feet. We are discovering that we are all in migration toward territories yet to be rediscovered
and reoccupied” (5). Either we deny the existence of ecological degradation that will make
us all migrants or we “look for a place to land” (5), according to Latour. Coming “down to
earth” and learning new ways to inhabit the planet will demand a radical rethinking of our
current ideas about commonly shared territory. Our ways of thinking about nations and
borders are quickly becoming outdated and making way for a cultural imaginary on a more
planetary spatial scale. In Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic
Culture in Post-2008 Spain, Luis (Iñaki) Prádanos-García puts his finger on the pulse of a
number of counterhegemonic cultural sensibilities that challenge capitalism’s planetary eco-
nomic growth paradigm in Spain. In a similar vein, Samuel Amago begins his 2021 Basura:
Cultures of Waste in Contemporary Spain by explaining that “the last twenty-five years or
so have seen a massive proliferation of waste in Spain, a consequence of the exponential
growth of tourism, rampant urbanism, and an increasingly derelict regulation by state and
local authorities” (4). His book traces the afterlives of things and asks what Spain’s trash
tells us about the country’s modern condition in ecological terms. These kinds of cultural
geography research increasingly place Iberian cultural practices in dialogue with both eco-
nomic and ecological processes that function beyond the national scale.
The creative works of Spanish authors, philosophers, filmmakers, musicians, archi-
tects and artists are of course the most logical and interesting places to listen to the voices
responding to contemporary spatial concerns. Due to lack of space I will only mention
two that stand out for the highly original ways though which they envision new spatial
possibilities. One of the most widely read books in Spain in recent years is Irene Solà’s
2019 award-winning novel Canto jo i la muntanya balla [When I Sing, Mountains Dance],
written in Catalan and as of this writing translated into 22 languages. It is a wildly experi-
mental short novel that combines legends, folklore, popular culture and oral histories from
the Catalan Pyrenees into a reading experience that feels extraordinarily connected to that
specific place yet can be understood as universal. This feeling is achieved through the way
the writing gives narrative voices to clouds, animals and water in addition to a number of
children, women and men who may or may not be alive. Even the earth’s tectonic plates
are personified at one point in the novel and reflect on the passage of time from a state of
consciousness that is completely unaware of human history and the modern nation state.
Another revolutionary and exceptionally creative look at the interwoven human and
non-human experiences of ecologically fragile territories in Spain can be found in Oliver

8
 Cultural Geographies in Spain

Laxe’s 2019 O que arde [Fire Will Come]. This feature film captures the forms of rural life
under threat by the deforestation that results from the importation of non-local forms of
plant life and the rural tourism that threatens to gentrify even the most remote regions of
Galicia. During one moment of the film the camera brings the viewer into the passenger seat
of a truck transporting a cow while the characters, speaking gallego, talk about their deep
connection to Leonard Cohen’s song “Suzanne” as it plays on the vehicle’s tape player.11
The camerawork and combination of diegetic and non-diegetic sound foster a sensation of
deep respect for the shared human and animal experiences of mobility, against the back-
drop of the stunning Galician landscape.
Cultural geography as it has been practiced within Iberian studies has not always fully
accounted for the spatial implications of race in twentieth- and twenty-first–century Spain.
As the largely Anglo-American discipline of cultural geography has been “translated” into
Iberian studies programs in North America and Britain in particular, and for all of the
possibilities the field purportedly offers for careful analyses of the workings of capital,
everyday life, class conflict and the role of culture in shaping how space determines power
relations and cultural differentiation, it has remained overwhelmingly eurocentric. Only
recently has a younger generation of scholars begun to alter the course. N. Michelle Mur-
ray, for example, ends her critical examination of domestic work and migration since the
1980s in Home Away From Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in
Contemporary Spanish Culture by saying that her work is “beginning from the in-between
spaces, from those who are negated or ‘invisible’ in nationalist rhetoric yet vital for the
nation’s quotidian operations” (209). By adjusting the scale of critical analysis and think-
ing about how Spanish culture works not just at the national but at the transnational level,
Murray demonstrates how both racial and ethnic others and working-class people (groups
made up of significant numbers of women) are woven tightly into the fabric of the Spanish
state and the stories the nation tells about itself. Another move toward greater inclusion of
cultural forms created by and about non-European citizens living in the Iberian Peninsula
can also be found in Jeffrey Coleman’s The Necropolitical Theater: Race and Immigration
on the Contemporary Spanish Stage (2020). With this work Coleman begins an important
conversation about race in Spain that pays particular attention to spatial issues when he
explains that his research

was born of a desire to understand what happens once immigration begins and racial
formation takes root in a nation, thereby invoking societal anxiety regarding what is
perceived as an alleged imminent disaster. More precisely, by interrogating the reper-
cussions of the migratory phenomenon and how they ripple into patterns of theatrical
representation, we can reach a deeper understanding of how Spain is imagining and
creating race.
(3)12

Research such as this that draws our attention to issues of integration and assimilation,
racism and xenophobia, globalization and the exploitation of labor on a transnational geo-
graphic scale are critical steps toward loosening the grip of geographical essentialism tied
to nationalist ideologies.
Iberian cultural geography can at times suffer from a lopsided geopolitics of its own.
Since it grew out of a largely Anglo-American set of theoretical assumptions from cultural
geography, twentieth- and twenty-first–century Iberian cultural geography can sometimes

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fall into its own kind of conceptual colonialism. When research methodologies developed
and refined over time in one part of the world are used to analyze the culture of another,
what might be gained or lost? And for whom? Without a deep knowledge of Spanish geog-
raphy and intellectual history, doesn’t a largely British- and US-based cultural geography
run the risk of producing cultural analyses that are off the mark or incomplete? How do we
adapt Anglo-American cultural geography to the particularities of Spanish history, politics
and social life? Have we learned nothing from postcolonial studies? Perhaps the most pro-
ductive way to address these concerns – one expansive area that is ripe for study in the field
of Iberian cultural geography – entails recuperating the many interdisciplinary research
methodologies and innovative concepts of space, place, landscape, power and the culture
of everyday life that come from Spain itself.
Academic specialization frequently stands as an obstacle to interdisciplinary work. One
common criticism of cultural geography is that it has in recent years made a shallow form of
interdisciplinarity fashionable. But one look at the most salient research in Spanish geogra-
phy, social theory, literary and art criticism, history and philosophy from the nineteenth and
first half of the twentieth century, however, brings us back to a time before the disciplines
were formed into narrow realms of institutional authority and expertise. In every sense of
the word, and as I have pointed out earlier in this chapter, there were humanists and social
scientists from every location on the political spectrum in the modern period conducting
the kind of research that could fall under the umbrella of cultural geography today. There
are many such scholars worthy of mention, but certainly Julio Caro Baroja (1914–1995) is
among the most original and prolific. He considered himself an anthropologist, historian,
linguist and political essayist, and he developed a keen interest in Basque history and social
life in particular. Many of his publications simultaneously propose and serve as models for
interdisciplinary research methods that make visible the role of culture, broadly speaking,
in the creation of space with all of its power differentials. Caro Baroja kept his distance
from the Franco regime, a position which severely limited his academic possibilities and
resulted in his having to work during significant periods of his life as an independent scholar
(Greenwood). He conducted groundbreaking work on cultural theory – most notably his
1949 Análisis de la cultura (Etnología, Historia, Folklore) [Cultural Analysis (Ethnology,
History, Folklore)] – during his term as director of the Museo del Pueblo Español in Madrid
between 1942 and 1953, whereupon he left for the United States to conduct ethnographic
work there before returning to Spain in 1954 and publishing on a series of eclectic topics
from nomadism in the Spanish Sahara to a history of the local cultures of witchcraft in
the Basque country. It is true that Caro Baroja’s research on the Sahara would be included
in the broader “Africanist” project undertaken under the auspices of the Madrid-based
Consejo Superior de Investigación Científica (CSIC) [the Scientific Research Council] that
provided academic justification for the notions of empire that were in place during the
Franco regime and as such were very much a product of their time (Estevez). However,
Caro Baroja’s research methodologies and findings deserve another look (with a critical
eye) for what they have to offer in terms of place-based research methodologies that grow
out of a deep understanding of local and regional history and culture.13
One of the foundational texts of cultural geography is the widely read The Country
and the City (1973) by Raymond Williams, where he debunks the notion of rural life as
simple, natural and unadulterated and where he argues that ideas about the country are
inextricably connected to the city, and vice versa. In search of historically grounded lived
experience, Williams presents two of his most durable concepts: “knowable communities”

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(a community that is mediated and can only become truly understood or known through
extended systems of communication) and “structures of feeling” (traces of the lived experi-
ence of a community that are distinct from the more official, institutional and ideological
organization of society).14 For Williams, these traces are often found in the works of poets
and novelists writing about rural spaces, places and landscapes. If one wants to consider
these same issues from within the Iberian Peninsula, however, one should look no further
than to Caro Baroja’s articulation of his own very particular geographic interdisciplinarity
in his similarly titled La ciudad y el campo [The City and the Country] (1966). In the intro-
duction Caro Baroja humbly explains his approach to the topic: “En suma, éste es un libro
de un hombre que, después de creer que iba a ser arqueólogo, antropólogo y otras cosas
más, muy propias de la sociedad moderna, se convenció de que era aprendiz de humanista,
a la antigua, y que en esta vía tenía aún mucho que hacer” (10). [In sum, this is a book by
a man who, after he thought he was going to be an archeologist, anthropologist and some
other things, as often happens in modern society, convinced himself that he was just aspir-
ing to be an old-fashioned sort of humanist, and who following this path still has much to
do]. Despite his disarmingly humble positioning of himself as an amateur in the introduc-
tion, the chapter “La ciudad y el campo o una discusión sobre viejos lugares comúnes” [The
city and the country, or a discussion on old, common places] (1959) consists of a powerful
geographical manifesto. Caro Baroja’s concept of viejos lugares comúnes developed here
disrupts what he describes as the fundamentally flawed and ideologically driven binary
division between the country and the city that has existed since the sixteenth century in
Spain. There are other groundbreaking geographical insights by Caro Baroja that invite us
to rethink the study of everyday life, landscape and the construction of social space with
special attention to minoritized populations. These include his discussion of historia chica
[small history] (adapted from the Swiss historian Herbert Luethy but also most likely in
dialogue with Miguel de Unamuno’s concept of intrahistoria) found in essays such as “La
vida rural en Vera de Bidosa (Navarra)” [Rural Life in Vera de Bidosa (Navarra] (1944)
and “Los vascos” [The Basques] (1944).15 Perhaps Caro Baroja’s most geographically and
spatially focused work can be found in the essays in this volume where he expands on what
he calls formas de localidad [forms of locality] in essays such as “Los pueblos de España”
[Small Town in Spain] (1946); “Razas, pueblos y linajes” [Races, Peoples and Lineages]
(1957); and, in a particularly insightful essay on the concept of home and domestic space,
“Sobre la casa, su ‘estructura’, y sus ‘funciones’ ” [On the House, Its ‘Structure,’ and Its
‘Functions’ ”] (1969). Caro Baroja’s ideas predate Williams’ much better known “knowable
communities” and “structures of feeling” by several years but they have never made their
way into transnational conversations about culture, space and place. Caro Baroja is one of
many twentieth-century Spanish humanists and social scientists who wrote about culture
in spatial terms and his work (largely overlooked today) has a great deal to add to the field
Iberian cultural geography.16
There is most definitely a future for more open, inclusive and postcolonial forms of
Iberian cultural geography and to demonstrate what this might look like; this chapter con-
cludes by invoking the tension inherent in the epigraphs by Azorín (José Martínez Ruiz,
1873–1967) and Milton Santos (1926–2001) with which it began. Azorín’s celebration of a
place-based sense of collective belonging in his fiction and critical essays has long been used
to justify the idea of a homogenous national identity, so it follows that for him “the basis
of patriotism is geography” (512). Azorín’s literature and cultural criticism were essential
ingredients contributing to the institutionalization of what were often termed the “eternal”

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 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

qualities of “Spanish” life that he, like other members of the Generation of 98, connected to
the Castilian landscape, its small towns and rural peasantry. Problematizing the role of the
culture of the Iberian Peninsula in the construction of a national geopolitics such as this is
at the heart of much present-day research in the field of Iberian cultural geography for sure,
but how does one avoid the traps of place-based essentialism that still occur, even when
we are talking about more decentralized or even global, transnational, planetary forms of
culture? The most obvious answer, of course, is to pay closer attention to the wealth of lit-
erature and audiovisual culture of the kind briefly mentioned in this chapter for new visions
and possibilities of understanding the relationships between the human, the non-human
and the environment not as identity-affirming landscapes but as territories that go beyond
nineteenth-century ideas about nation. Another fruitful direction might be found by tak-
ing a cue from the second quotation with which this chapter began: that of Afro-Brazilian
geographer Milton Santos, who asserts that “[t]he discussion [should be] about space and
not geography” (19).17 In “The Active Role of Geography: A Manifesto” Santos and his
colleagues famously advocate for moving beyond the euro-centric, nation-building disci-
pline of geography altogether by putting forward the twin concepts of “used territory” and
“banal space,” proposing that geographic space should be considered

not as synonymous with territory but as used territory; the used territory is both the
result of the historical process and the material and social basis of human actions. . . .
An approach that considers the idea of used territory leads to the idea of banal space,
everyone’s space, the whole space. It is the space of all humankind, regardless of its
differences; the space of all institutions, regardless of their strength; the space of all
companies, regardless of their power.
(952–53, emphasis in the original)

Santos’s thought exposes the colonial roots of the discipline of geography and provides a
research methodology that opens up the study of how space is constructed, allowing for
a consideration of objects (materiality), actions (the working through of power relations
in society) and their mutual conditioning as these dual processes are interwoven with the
movement of history. In this way, the study of the various cultures of the Iberian Peninsula
and the broader Hispanophone world might likewise be undertaken as an inherently inter-
disciplinary, bottom-up inquiry into the process of how space and place are demarcated
through culture and how they shape the rhythms and textures of everyday life.

Notes
1 “Regeneracionismo” [Regenerationism] is a term used to describe a political and cultural move-
ment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that sought to use increasingly scientific,
liberal and modernizing tools to propose remedies for Spain’s decline as a nation after losing
control of the colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam in the Spanish-American
War of 1898. See Harrison and Hoyle (eds.) for an historical, economic and cultural overview of
“regenerationism” within its broader postcolonial context. See Krauel for an insightful explana-
tion of the wide range of emotional responses of Spanish and Catalan intellectuals to the loss of
the nation’s imperial identity.
2 The writing of Francisco Giner de los Ríos, in addition to being influenced by Humboldt, was
frequently in dialogue with the work of Élisée Reclus, whose chapter about Spain in Volume 1 his
1876 Nouvelle Géographie Universelle found a wide readership in the Iberian Peninsula.

12
 Cultural Geographies in Spain

3 The Instituto Libre de Enseñanza (1876–1936), founded by Francisco Giner de los Ríos, Gum-
ersindo Azcarate, Teodoro Sainz Rueda and Nicolás Salmerón and inspired by Krausist philo-
sophical principles, was a private, educational institution that sought to provide a liberal, secular
university education to young men and women and eventually at the primary and secondary
school levels. The politics and pedagogy of the Instituto worked their way into much of Spain’s
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates over cultural and social renewal (see Jiménez
Landi for a thorough and detailed history).
4 The geopolitics of Ricardo Beltrán y Rózpide (1852–1928) and later Amando Melón (1895–1975)
and Eloy Bullón (1879–1957), along with the directors of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Natu-
rales [National Natural Science Museum] in Madrid were responsible for institutionalizing the
discipline and the teaching of geography throughout Spain for much of the Franco regime (Capel
8–13).
5 See Parra Montserrat for an overview of the nationalist symbols, myths and national heroes incor-
porated into primary and secondary school education pedagogy in Spain in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.
6 See Sally Elden (57–64) for an overview of changing notions of the environment and environ-
mental determinism and how they have been used explain geographical differentiation, especially
between races or nations. See Livingston for an examination of the history of environmental
determinism against the background of broader social and intellectual contexts since the fifteenth
century. Don Mitchell places the birth of cultural geography as a sub-discipline in the United
States in the 1920s, in Carl O. Sauer’s groundbreaking 1925 essay “The Morphology of Land-
scape” he argued that “the cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural
group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, and the cultural landscape is the
result” (20). Sauer posited that it was not nature that evolved culture, but rather culture, working
with, on and perhaps increasingly (and unfortunately) against nature, that created the contexts
of life. As Mitchell puts it, “Sauer was especially concerned with the material aspects of culture,
particularly the landscape, which he saw as manifestations of culture’s traffic with nature” (21
emphasis in the original).
7 See Stuart Elden (105–112) for an authoritative and helpful summary of Lefebvre’s discussion
in The Production of Space (“Social Space” 68–168) of the interconnected concepts perceived
space (also termed spatial practice), conceived space (the knowledge of spaces that result from
discourses of power and ideology constructed by professionals such as urban planners, engineers
and architects) and the lived space that is created in everyday life.
8 Harvey’s concept of “time-space compression” describes how global space seemingly shrinks in
our experience and understanding relative to the time it takes to traverse it. Equally as important,
however, Harvey understands the cultural response to this shifting experience of time and space
as “processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to
alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves” (240).
9 See Doreen Massey’s critique of Harvey’s discussion of “space-time compression” in Chapter Six
(“A Global Sense of Place”) of her book Space, Place and Gender (1994), where she explains
that any sense of time speeding up or space spreading out needs to be placed within local social
contexts.
10 The research of Luis Moreno-Caballud has consistently argued for a reconsideration of rural
space and rural culture in Spain during the twentieth century. See his 2015 article “La otra tran-
sición: Culturas rurales, Estado e intelectuales en la encrucijada de la ‘modernización’ franquista
(1957–1973)” [The Other Transition: Rural Cultures, the State and Intellectuals at the Cross-
roads of Francoist “Modernization”] for an overview of what he calls the “desestructuración
de las culturas rurales de superviviencia, coincidente con las masivas migraciones de campo a la
ciudad” [destructuring of the rural cultures of survival that coincided with the massive migrations
from the countryside to the city] during the Franco regime (113).
11 This brief clip can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_dGYnpbTZI.
12 One way of making these discussions of race within Iberian cultural geography more common-
place and theoretically grounded would be for the field to dialogue more closely with Latin Ameri-
can and Latinx cultural geography, where research has historically been more closely connected
to the fields of anthropology, sociology and history.

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 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

13 See “No daban respuesta ni buena ni mala: Franco’s Instituto de Estudios Africanos meets African
Resistance” (the chapter in this volume by Benita Sampedro) on the topic of colonial biopolitics
and control in research about Equatorial Guinea for a detailed explanation of the politics and
ideology of the Franco-era Estudios Africanos research initiative.
14 See Williams’ 1969 article “The Knowable Community in George Eliot’s Novels” for a definition
and model of how to actively engage with the concept of “knowable communities” in close tex-
tual analysis, and Sharma and Tygstrup (1–19) for an introduction to Williams’ concept “struc-
tures of feeling” and its significance to the study of affectivity for fields of cultural analysis such
as media studies, memory studies, gender studies and cultural studies in recent decades.
15 In 1902 Unamuno compiled five essays that he had written and that were published in the
Madrid-based magazine La España Moderna between February and June of 1895 under the title
of “En torno al casticismo.” See the 2005 Cátedra edition of Jean-Claude Rabaté for a thorough
discussion of Unamumo’s political thought and how it informed the national and nationalist
debates of his time.
16 See Hess and Martín for an overview of Caro Baroja’s contributions to social anthropology and
cultural history in Spain.
17 Geographer Milton Santos may be best known for his writing on the concept of the “Global
South.”

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 2
URBAN LANDSCAPES AND
THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE
COMMONS
Barcelona’s Superblocks and Urban Voids

Sara Bartumeus Ferré

Introduction: Towards a Twenty-First–Century Municipalist Urban Lab

Within the Iberian Peninsula’s many cities, Barcelona has proven a highly innovative social
and urban laboratory. Following the May 2015 municipal elections, new political struc-
tures emerged in cities like Madrid and Barcelona and other regional capitals across the
country, including Cádiz, La Coruña, Valencia, and Zaragoza. The root of these politi-
cal changes can be found in the 2011 countrywide protests against government austerity
measures, which resulted in the promotion and implementation of policies that sought to
integrate community and urban ecology with the nature, role, and construction of public
spaces. This chapter specifically examines the case of Barcelona, whose particularly inno-
vative municipal system has turned the city into a laboratory for vital urban experimenta-
tion. Barcelona’s municipal initiatives have not only yielded rich, generative urban spaces,
they have also created a fertile ground for increasingly inclusive design practices, includ-
ing collaboration between municipal administrations, designers, and the communities they
serve. Cooperation between new municipalities, residents, and environmental professionals
has forged urban initiatives that directly respond to contemporary social, environmental,
and economic demands. Through an analysis of various policies and urban projects imple-
mented in Catalonia’s capital, I argue that these nascent municipal institutions and their
vision of urban space illustrate a larger trend and resonate with a global shift affecting how
contemporary urban spaces and environments are produced, managed, and understood
today.
Two Barcelona initiatives, the Superblocks Project and the Urban Voids Plan, illustrate
the shift in the understanding of public space as common space and attempt to create a
new typology for the design of urban places. In many ways, these two initiatives are strik-
ing departures from prior projects that garnered international renown for Barcelona, as
the city became an urban leader in the design of public spaces during the 1980s and 90s.
The new generation of public spaces illustrates a break with established neoliberal systems
and values, and addresses contemporary, challenging economic and environmental urban
paradigms. Current projects, spurred by city governments based on local participatory

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-3
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

action – known as new municipalism – lead towards a different understanding of public

space. These spaces and related practices that break down hierarchies and promote social
equality are identified as the commons. Beyond being collectively used by all sectors of
society, the commons are collectively produced, appropriated, and managed, thus fostering
a sense of community. In turn, the commons create new modes of designing shared envi-
ronments that challenge binary paradigms, such as public and private, built and natural,
individual and collective, designer and user. Barcelona’s projects, policies, and practices
establish hybrid, dynamic, and liminal conditions between spaces and design processes and
between designers and communities, conditions that can be best understood in terms of
thresholds. These two governing theoretical concepts, the commons and the threshold, gen-
erate important after-effects in place-making and city planning. On the one hand, they are
linked to socio-political change through urban movements and their new modes of munici-
pal governance; on the other, they are also linked to new approaches to urban projects and
design of public spaces that emerged from those same socio-political movements. These
new typologies of public space incorporate temporality in their planning and as part of the
final product. They materialize in open-ended, flexible designs that allow change as people
appropriate them through time. In addition, they either spark temporary tactical urbanism
strategies – Superblocks – or they challenge the rigidity of past planning tools that regulated
permanent land use and property ownership – the Voids Plan.

Urban Movements and New Municipalism

May 2011 was a tipping point in Spanish civic life following years of national economic
instability. On the fifteenth of that month, hundreds of thousands of people –activists,
academics, neighborhood associations, and political collectives – occupied Spanish cities’
public spaces, in what became known as the 15M Movement, or “Movimiento de los Indig-
nados” (“Movement of the Indignant Ones”).1 For months, people marched, staged sit-ins,
and set up makeshift camps to express their indignation toward the political establishment’s
corruption, punitive austerity measures, lack of governmental transparency, and massive
evictions – all of which indicated a loss of “real democracy” (Russell 992). When acts of civil
disobedience failed to translate into policy changes, civilians in these so-called “Ciudades
del Cambio” (“Cities of Change”) launched an “institutional assault” (Rubio-Pueyo 6)
against the mainstream political establishment by converting their progressive “street poli-
tics” into “party politics” (Ordóñez, Feenstra and Franks 85).
Street activists and intellectuals built new political entities, including left-wing parties,
that came to be known as “municipalist confluences” (Rubio-Pueyo 2).2 These groups
unveiled political agendas that prioritized people’s rights and well-being over the eco-
nomic development initiatives that had long driven previous municipal activities; they also
demanded an end to the government’s austerity measures and neoliberal urban politics
and critiqued the failed promises of democratic institutions. The new municipal structures
promoted political transparency; gender equity; the inclusion of minorities; and the right
to housing, employment, public education, and health care (Matilla). These groups sought
to bring about social change by reimagining and restructuring institutions from within.
This type of socially inclusive, horizontally oriented, and citizen-based approach to poli-
tics aimed to incorporate the citizen as an active builder of the twofold project of creating
a more environmentally friendly approach to urban development and a more equitable
society.

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 Urban Landscapes and the Construction of the Commons

Political newcomers established overlapping claims with left and Green parties like Inici-
ativa per Catalunya Verds (Initiative for Catalonia Green Party), Equo (now Verdes Equo)
(Equo Green Party), and Esquerra Unida (United Left) and forged political alliances with
them (Janoschka and Mota). They also joined forces with Podemos (We Can), a newly
formed national-level party also born from the 2011 street protests and the 15M urban
movement. These new local political forces or collectives promised disenchanted citizens
an electoral alternative to Spain’s two established parties, the Partido Popular (PP, Popular
Party) and the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers Party),
which had monopolized Spanish democracy for forty years and were largely to blame for
the country’s economic and democratic crises.
The platform Barcelona en Comú (BComú, Barcelona in Common) captured the city
government in the municipal elections and Ada Colau, housing activist and spokeswoman
for PAH, People Affected by the Mortgage Crisis, became Barcelona’s first female mayor.
Eventually, in other Spanish cities, similar collectives evolved from social movements call-
ing for the “Right to the City” (Lefebvre; Harvey). These collectives forged ties with other
grassroots organizations to create political coalitions that sought to redefine what it means
to govern and live in a city. As defined by David Harvey, “the Right to the City” is:

Far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it
is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. It is,
moreover, a collective rather than an individual right since changing the city inevita-
bly depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbaniza-
tion. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is, I want to argue,
one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
(4)

This radical change to locally driven political thought and messaging was behind the crea-
tion of Ahora Madrid (Now Madrid), Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common), Cádiz
Sí Se Puede (Cadiz Yes You Can), and Podemos (We Can) and their subsequent fusion with
existing parties with whom they shared values. Their names are purposeful and illustrate
the urgency of the moment, their communal will and participatory approach to governing,
and a “yes we can” attitude.3
The new urban political structures that emerged in Spain constitute an example of a
recent wave that social scientists and urban theorists from various academic disciplines
have called “new municipalisms” (Russell). The concept of “municipalism” is espoused
primarily by left-wing politicians and social movements to vindicate local rather than state
government as a more appropriate scale of governance necessary to enact change and make
a real impact on people’s lives (Bianchi; Subirats). This system of local governance is related
to an earlier incarnation called libertarian municipalism (Biehl and Bookchin), a movement
based on direct democracy and a bottom-up decision-making system centered around city
assemblies, as opposed to the top-down state-led approach. As Iolanda Bianchi observes,
these anarcho-libertarian ideals are “increasingly used by critical political scientists to seek
to dissolve the political boundary between the local administration and social movements
in the city” (80).
Joan Subirats describes municipalism as “a reformulation of local governance in which
the main decision-making center and welfare producer is no longer the public administra-
tion but is the participatory space that is created between the different left-wing actors

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hinged on the principle of collective co-responsibility, where this becomes a radical and
socially autonomous response to neoliberal policies and global austerity measures” (qtd. in
Bianchi 80). He also elaborates on the benefits of municipality, including proximity to the
citizens, and capacity to address urgent common problems, which lead to a shift toward
more human-centered urban policies and urbanism.
The “new municipalism” movement was revamped in the Fearless Cities summit, coor-
dinated by Barcelona en Comú (BComú) in Barcelona in June of 2017, almost two years
after it won the municipal elections (“Fearless Cities”).4 This was the first global gathering
of 700 participants from municipalist movements from every continent who joined together
to share experiences and strategies. Other local urban entities came together around initia-
tives that adopted the summit’s focus on the progressive ideals of municipalism. Forty-three
Spanish “Cities of Change” wrote a manifesto promoting the new municipalism and cre-
ated the Atlas del Cambio (Atlas for Change), a guide for transformative public policies
and a map of municipalist platforms in Spain (“Ciudades del Cambio”). In the manifesto
its authors proclaim that the municipalist city is a democratic city where citizens decide; a
habitable city that is healthy, sustainable, and that recovers public space and urban eco-
systems for community life; a collaborative city that fosters networking, innovative fabrics,
and a social economy; a caring city, especially in relation to the most disadvantaged; and
a fearless city that stands up for its inhabitants and their rights. The Atlas visualizes and
organizes the evolution of this politics of change in categories such as wealth redistribu-
tion, the right to the city, feminism, the commons, social rights, urban ecology habitat, the
economy, and good governance.

Projects in Search of Fertile Ground for Ecology and the Commons:

Superblocks and BUITS Plan
Barcelona’s innovative urban strategies serve to illustrate the translation of the new munici-
palist theories – and values of the movements that inspired them – into demanding spa-
tial changes, transforming the city’s physical and social common grounds. Today, the city
is a testing ground for urban and “social ecologies” (Reed 46), where bottom-up claims
for the commons and for new city-making practices emerge and converge. New munici-
palisms are transforming the city’s appearance and production of public spaces, stimulat-
ing open-endedness and change in spatial design. Many projects forged and implemented
through participatory processes and inclusive practices testify to the city’s status as a space
of new municipalist experimentation, as a laboratory for change – this is especially the case
in Barcelona.
The recent shift in Barcelona’s urban landscape has been compared to that which
occurred in the 1980s. During Pascual Maragall’s mayoral term, a team of ten young archi-
tects – known as the “golden pencils” – designed hardscape plazas and parks to reclaim
obsolete industrial precincts and undefined spaces under the leadership of the chief architect
Josep Antón Acebillo, the urbanist delegate Oriol Bohigas and the head of urban planning
Joan Busquets. Those projects differ from current ones in that they followed different mod-
els for the making of public space. The earlier model, which aimed at recovering public
spaces, emerged during Spain’s confident post-Franco transition to democracy. This model
was aimed at dignifying the city by distributing facilities and urban centralities equally
across neighborhoods, thereby turning Barcelona into a polycentric city. Those previous
urban interventions that culminated in Barcelona’s transformation for the 1992 Olympic

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Games – the celebrated “Barcelona model” – are being revisited today as we enter a new
era for thinking about public space (Montaner).5
The current trend, on the other hand, responds to residents’ loss of faith in the ability
of traditional institutions to address current multiple crises. Consequently, these same resi-
dents have taken over both the municipal government and the city’s public space, aiming
to forge a more equitable, sustainable, and humanized urban environment. The increas-
ingly less formal design aesthetic of the new generation of public spaces differs from the
formalized design of public space in previous decades. New low-budget and eco-friendly
softscapes (as opposed to the previous hardscapes) are cooperative achievements realized
through urban guerilla tactics put in place by the citizens and their municipalities. In Barce-
lona, recognized internationally for its public space design, such a new aesthetic is contro-
versial among the citizenry; it is as much celebrated as criticized by neighbors and designers,
who either find it superficial and unattractive or view it as an embodiment of an alternative
beauty standard construed upon ecological and community values.
Two projects in particular, the Superblocks and the BUITS Plan (Buits Urbans amb
Implicació Territorial i Social; Vacant Lots with Territorial and Societal Implications), serve
as case studies to demonstrate how contemporary radical urban theories about the right
to the city and urban ecology have had a revolutionary impact on the city’s physical public
space. These cases illustrate that municipalism has had a catalytic effect for community
building and in the activation of a more engaged urban citizenry by prioritizing people’s
voices and citizen’s needs. Even though they differ in their scale, scope, spatial medium, and
implementation tools, both projects address ecological and social emergencies and have had
a significant impact at the human scale.

The Superblocks: Reclaiming Streetscapes From Automobiles

In the early 90s, Barcelona planners began transforming streets into pedestrian zones in
the city’s most densely populated historic areas, with interventions in the neighborhoods
of La Ribera and later, Gràcia, in what became the first generation of Superblocks. Yet
it was not until 2016 when Barcelona’s new municipality implemented the actual Super-
blocks pilot test in the Poblenou district that the model took off in earnest.6 The Super-
blocks model reclaims a city for its neighbors, understanding streets as both ecological and
social infrastructures that need to be filled with greenery and urban life. This project trans-
formed the existing street network of various 400 × 400-meter (approx. 1,300 × 1,300-feet)
blocks – nine blocks in the case of Eixample, Barcelona’s gridded district – by reducing the
street space designated for private vehicles in the interior of these areas in favor of space for
pedestrians. These alterations promote both slower modes of private transportation (such
as bicycles and scooters) and more efficient public transportation, with new lanes for bicy-
cles and faster buses. By transforming mobility in the inner urban grid, these Superblocks
increase the porosity of the city’s dense urban fabric to improve the citizens’ quality of life
and wellbeing through increased greenery, reduced pollution, and greater-quality spaces
for public life.
While serving as Barcelona’s Environmental Technical Director in 1987, the ecologist
Salvador Rueda devised the concept of Superblocks (Superilles, in Catalan). His initial
goal – to reduce noise pollution – grew into a more ambitious plan that re-imagined city
neighborhood life as “urban cells” with more neighborly streets, that is, streets that invite
human exchanges. Rueda later developed this model in his own Barcelona Urban Ecology

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Agency (today the FEUT Foundation), the organization that gave rise to a new generation
of urban spaces called Superblocks that have now been recreated worldwide. Rueda’s vision
for Superblocks is an integral solution to the use of public space, uniting urban planning
with mobility, and limiting the presence of private vehicles in order to return the public
space to the people. The importance of the citizen, or the simple pedestrian, gives meaning
to the revolutionary structure of the superblock: Each grid section has universal accessibil-
ity, there is increased safety due to a 10 km/hr speed limit, and there is the potential to
increase the habitability and comfort of citizens in public spaces (Rueda).
The Superblocks model frees up seventy percent of the surface area previously desig-
nated for cars – driving lanes, parking spaces, and intersections – making way instead for
new ground to be colonized by greenscapes, playgrounds, and benches for people to enjoy
the city. As Rueda explains, this first phase of the Superblocks strategy is functional and is
specifically related to changes in mobility, while the second one is urbanistic and includes
new uses that consider citizen’s rights.

Superilla Poblenou (2016–2018): Tactical Urbanism and Learning About

Participatory Processes
The first phase of the Superblocks initiative can be characterized by a series of informal
spatial interventions in what is known as “Do It Yourself,” or tactical urbanism. Tacti-
cal urbanism is a way of developing neighborhoods using citizen-led approaches that rely
on flexible, short-term, low-cost, and scalable interventions used to catalyze projects that
will later institute long-term change (“Tactical Urbanism Guide”). In 2016, students from
the ETSAB-Barcelona (the School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Catalo-
nia) enacted a tactical urbanism approach to test the Superblocks model in the Poblenou
neighborhood. To inhibit automobile traffic and create more space for pedestrians, stu-
dents reclaimed street space with guerilla tactics, painting bright patterns on the asphalt
pavement and installing temporary large-scale planters and urban furniture made from
low-cost wooden pallets. These temporary installations were controversial at the begin-
ning not only because traffic was obstructed but also because neighbors felt excluded from
the non-scripted process. Ultimately, however, they sparked community-wide interest and
inspired local citizens to participate in the second phase of the project that resulted in the
reclaiming of public space for more permanent playgrounds, picnic and ping-pong tables,
as well as temporary street markets.

Superilla Sant Antoni (2017–2019): Design Authorship and Inclusive

Design Processes
Encouraged by the final success of the first tactical superblock experience, which was
ultimately accepted and celebrated by the Poblenou neighbors, the municipality decided
to expand the experiment further into Sant Antoni, a denser area within the same Eix-
ample neighborhood. Learning from the Poblenou Superblock experience in the Super-
block of Sant Antoni in the Eixample neighborhood, the municipality improved the design
process with authorship approaches that include participation from the neighbors, local
business owners, and social entities from the project’s inception. This diverse group of
stakeholders worked with designers and city officials to contextualize the Superilles model
to suit the needs of its inhabitants and remain attuned to the unique characteristics of the

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neighborhood cityscape, especially its bustling covered market, the Mercat de Sant Antoni.
This inclusive process led to an open design competition in which Leku Studio’s proposal
was selected to carry out Barcelona’s second Superblock (“Leku Studio”). Leku’s proposal
for Sant Antoni advances notions of experimentation, flexibility, and adaptability, which
involve new design tools and processes that allow testing with temporary actions aiming for
a progressive implementation that could also be reversible (Ozuna).
In Madrid, the urbanist Jose Maria Ezquiaga has been in charge of implementing a
Superblock in the city’s historic center through his Proyecto Madrid Centro (proposed with
architect Juan Herreros and ecologist Salvador Rueda), which was launched after a ten-year
hiatus due to stalling on the project (“Ezquiaga Arquitectura”). He contends that the Super-
block initiative has benefits for the community beyond the environmental ones. Ezquiaga
argues that Superblocks help address the social ills of urban loneliness and provide safe
spaces for children and the elderly (Montojo). In cities like Madrid and Barcelona, over-
taken by tourists, Ezquiaga warns that Superblocks must be supported by a new model of
tourism in order to succeed in their goal of giving the city centers back to their local inhab-
itants. The notion of the “15-Minute City,” a concept coined by architect Carlos Moreno,
would protect the Superblock from being overrun by tourists, precisely by focusing on the
neighborhood’s residents. This urban model allows for the average citizen-pedestrian to
carry out their daily activities within a half-kilometer (approx. a quarter-mile) radius from
their home.7 Ezquiaga advises that to achieve this goal there has to be a balance between
small retail and basic services for the neighborhood, “lo que pasa por adaptar la normativa
urbanística sobre usos del suelo, protegiendo los calificados como ‘equipamiento comu-
nitario’ – colegios, polideportivos – de forma que no puedan recalificarse a vivienda o a
otros usos” (“which involves adapting the urban regulations on land use, protecting those
classified as ‘community facilities’ – schools, sports centers – so that they cannot be reclas-
sified for housing or other uses”), thus providing at least equally for residents and tourists
simultaneously (qtd. in Montojo).

Supersizing the Superblock: An Impulse for a Post-Pandemic City

The COVID-19 pandemic and its social distancing requirements have had a paradoxical
stretching and shrinking effect on distances in both urban and personal space and mobil-
ity in a way that expedites the “15-Minute City.” In the first four months of the pandemic
alone, 50 hectares of the Eixample were opened to pedestrians and bikes (to increase indi-
vidual mobility) using tactical urbanism tools and elements previously tested in the Super-
blocks. Barcelonians have noted the pandemic’s positive effect on public space, despite its
otherwise disruptive impact. Reduced car traffic and its subsequent decrease in air and
noise pollution since the shutdowns have made the population more environmentally con-
scious and increasingly committed to preserving the cleaner, greener, and less noisy urban
environments during “sheltering in place.” As in other cities across the globe, Barcelona’s
municipality is taking advantage of this shift in environmental sensitivity to accelerate pre-
viously initiated urban ecology policies that otherwise would have required years to be
implemented, thus re-opening the debate about Barcelona’s future urban model.
On November 11, 2020, the Barcelona’s municipality officially launched the Barcelona
Superblock Plan that will supersize the scale of the existing Superblocks and extend it to
encompass the rest of the Eixample district. Currently, 350,000 vehicles transit through
the Eixample every day, and sixty to eighty percent of its streetscape is occupied by parked

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or circulating cars. The Barcelona Superblock initiative will reduce traffic mobility by
twenty-five percent and transform seventy percent of road space into a green corridor every
three streets, with octagonal plazas at each intersection. This added space will allow for
thirty-three tree-filled hectares of recreation space that will create six and a half hectares of
shade, an increasingly critical natural resource in the face of climate change.
To transform “carscape” into “humanscape,” the Superblocks model gives rise to
re-urbanization projects in the inner blocks’ streetscape; the result is sometimes referred
to as “Supercrossroads” (Supercruilles in Catalan). This reconceptualization from Super-
blocks (planning strategy) to Supercrossroads (urbanization design) is manifested in the
division into green axes and plazas proposed by the design competition the municipality
launched to kick off its ambitious large Superblock strategy. Awarded designs created solu-
tions to address the city’s environmental challenges, minimizing impervious surfaces and
increasing ground porosity, adding greenery, and designing spaces and urban furniture that
are safe for children and the elderly.8
While BComú had three more years to fulfill their second term in office, the city com-
mitted to transform four streets (Consell de Cent and three perpendicular streets, Rocafort,
Comte Borrell, Enric Granados and Girona) into “green axes” and their four intersections
into 2,000-square meter “plazas.” In this way, pedestrian spaces that were acquired using
tactical urbanism interventions during the pandemic, with bright colored patterns painted
on the asphalt and mobile structures blocking car traffic, will be consolidated into perma-
nent urban works.
This is the beginning of a ten-year initiative that will adopt a twenty-first–century city
model over today’s nineteenth-century one.9 However, environmentalist Rueda, who shares
the goals but not the means of this municipal initiative, argues that calming and pacifying
traffic in the streets – even when they intersect – does not have the same impact as closing
a whole block to car mobility. He adds, “no puede ser que cosas que han supuesto un gran
esfuerzo de consenso quede en lo superficial, no van al tuétano. Estamos en emergencia
sanitaria y climática: hay que hacer supermanzanas, no ejes lineales. No tendremos otra
oportunidad” (“It cannot be that things that have involved a great effort of consensus
remain superficial, they do not go to the marrow. We are in a health and climate emer-
gency: we must make superblocks, not linear axes. We won’t get another chance to do so”;
qtd. in Blanchar). With tactical urbanism and the budget of one municipality mandate,
Rueda claims the City could implement sixty-five Superblocks, getting closer to a more
human-centered cityscape (Blanchar).
While Barcelona’s Superblocks and Supercrossings have received much international
acclaim, other vocal critics have deemed them a betrayal of the supposed neutrality of
Cerdà’s Plan – the 1858 grid-based urban expansion that gives shape to Barcelona’s most
iconic Eixample district (Tusquets). When intervening in the Cerdà grid, the challenge of
“difference and repetition” remains (Deleuze). It will be key to examine how these interven-
tions relate to the unique characteristics of their specific context while responding to the
overall identity of the gridded district and beyond. The city’s Urban Landscape Study of
the Nova Esquerra de l’Eixample neighborhood that I led in 2020 tackled these questions,
with the goal of acknowledging diversity in the cityscape. Matters of urban vitality, collec-
tive memory, a sense of belonging, and identity loss are key components that will help build
Barcelona’s new urban landscape identities (Bartumeus et al.).10

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A New Urban Grammar

Superblocks consider urban life before shaping public space; they are incremental and devel-
oped in phases that also show progress in the neighborhood. As such, Superblocks establish
a new urban grammar that addresses contemporary environmental and social challenges
in relation to design questions such as inclusivity, flexibility for people’s appropriation
of public space, and affordability. Their open-endedness allows for adaptable urbaniza-
tion that promotes growth but can be reversed. Urban furniture is mobile, modular, and
aggregative, allowing multiple combinations and dispositions in space. Colorful, graphic
patterns painted on the existing asphalt pavement act as maps directing use and circula-
tion but also as game boards or as guides for a multiple distribution of the urban furniture.
These elements are not only adaptable through time to allow for the people’s participation
in space use, but they are also designed to be sustainable. They incorporate eco-friendly and
affordable materials and low-maintenance vegetation, which results in a new urban land-
scape, different from Barcelona’s former configuration of public space, providing instead a
softscape made of vivid colors, wood, and grass.

The BUITS Plan: Against Vacancy, Community

The Voids Plan (BUITS Plan in the Catalan original) has also greatly impacted how urban
public space is conceived, managed, and used. BUITS, an acronym for Buits Urbans amb
Implicació Territorial i Social, translates into Urban Voids with Social and Territorial Impli-
cations. In Catalan, buits means “voids” or “empty spaces,” making the Voids Plan a tem-
porary urban revitalization strategy that considers vacant lots as sites with great social and
ecological potential.
In Barcelona, many vacant public and private lots have emerged in the city center and
along its periphery as a consequence of successive economic crises. These abandoned spaces
exist in indefinite transience and often end up as de facto dumps in the best-case scenario or,
worse yet, precarious spaces that attract a broad range of unregulated activities. Respond-
ing to citizens’ demands, the BUITS Plan temporarily revitalizes these informal vacancies
and discontinuities in the city’s fabric, using them as productive community-managed
spaces. Thanks to this initiative, some of these barren and often socially problematic lots
have ended up hosting community activities and community gardens. Voids turn into vital
places where the neighbors not only have the opportunity to grow their own food but to
knit new social fabrics.
The BUITS plan transfers agency to the community and frees the municipality from
monopolizing renovation initiatives. Geographers Paula Orduña-Giró and Sébastien Jac-
quot argue:

It is not a question of asking residents what they want, but rather of encouraging resi-
dents to take action themselves. This form of participation practiced and regulated
by the Barcelona city council combines managerial concerns with social and political
objectives and encourages the development of social ties and ‘producing citizens’ who
are more responsible.
(3)

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The Municipality of Barcelona has created a clearly defined protocol to “Activate and
Dynamize an Urban Void.” First, public or non-profit organizations such as neighborhood
associations submit proposals for open competitions that describe the occupation, manage-
ment, and collective use of the space in question. Void projects are temporary and as such,
their structures and installations must be light and easily dismantled upon project comple-
tion. Besides these basic requirements, the proposals must define their goals, strategies,
and proposed activities; identify the site, local needs, social actors, and network impact;
and plan for the spatial adequacy, economic feasibility, specific timeline, and legacy or
continuity of the void over a longer time period. Proposals are evaluated according to
several impact factors: sustainability, cost, environment, creativity, innovation, and social
yield. The temporary activities proposed for the voids must contribute to the public good
via various categories including education, sports and leisure, arts and culture, or environ-
ment and landscaping, while also keeping a community focus. Once approved, the project
lasts one year, with up to three additional annual extensions. A jury composed of city
government and local representatives evaluates proposals in terms of their engagement and
integration with the specific context of the space.11 While priority is given to local entities
and neighborhood associations, organizations from different areas of the city can submit
applications.
Launched in 2012, the BUITS Plan was revamped with the new municipalist govern-
ment’s conception of a “co-city,” engaging the participatory method more deeply in the
site selection, the conceptualization of the space and its actual construction. Similar experi-
ments such as Re-gen Huesca and Esto no es un solar (This is Not an Empty Urban Plot)
in Zaragoza relied on creating more formalized public spaces and were managed solely by
its municipalities (Navarro).12
Each urban void-turned green space in the BUITS Plan plays a unique role in the city’s
urban landscape. In the city center, for example, vacant plots were turned into “pocket
parks” to inject green space and add porosity into the dense urban fabric. At the periphery
of the city, a chain of informal parking lots at the base of the Collserola mountain range
have become a necklace of “transition parks,” creating a peri-urban agricultural park belt
that softens the edge between city and mountain.
Community gardens make up the majority of the BUITS proposals and are intended to
build community, beyond simply supplying food to residents. These gardens benefit neigh-
borhood residents as well as the city as a whole. On the one hand, they save the municipality
money, as they do not require much investment or maintenance. On the other, they involve
“regulated appropriation,” which suggests that they are sustainably managed by neighbors
themselves. In addition, the implementation of community gardens fits well within the city’s
Urban Gardens Network Plan, which promotes urban agricultural activities. Urban gardens
provide outdoor leisure activities and promote environmental values among those who take
care of them. They encourage intergenerational relationships and promote social contact
and outdoor activity to unemployed people in times of crisis (Orduña-Giró and Jacquot).
The socio-ecological benefits of BUITS projects are apparent across the city. In Passatge
Trullas and ConnectHort, both projects in Poblenou, citizens enjoy a permaculture garden
(“Permaculture News”).13 In lIla dels Tres Horts in the Sants neighborhood, community
gardens are cultivated by vulnerable collectives aiming for greater social justice. In Ger-
manetes, in Nova Esquerra de l’Eixample, community gardens are combined with cultural
activities in reclaimed and new facilities. Others, like Bicipark in Sants, create employment
for at-risk youth and promote sustainable social mobility, while those like Bio Built, run by

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professional collectives, open up opportunities for youth to engage in new initiatives such
as bioconstruction.14

Germanetes: The Result of a Neighborhood Vindication Propelled by 15M

After twelve years of requesting that an abandoned block with a semi-demolished convent
be revitalized, the neighbors of the Esquerra de l’Eixample, tired of waiting for Hospital
Clinic (one of the city’s largest public hospitals) to be relocated to that empty location, gath-
ered to propose a self-managed community space for this site intended for neighborhood
use. This initiative was led by the group Recreating Crossings, or Recreant Cruïlles in Cata-
lan.15 This organization grew out of the 15M movement as the “public space task force” of
the Nova Esquerra de l’Eixample Neighborhood Assembly during the occupation of Plaça
Catalunya in 2011.16 When they returned from the protest camp back to the neighborhood,
Recreant Cruïlles counted on the collaboration and support from the AAVVEE Neighbors
Association and other neighborhood entities to occupy and re-appropriate a vacant lot
(“Espai Germanetes”) on a temporary basis as “una oportunitat de reapropiació de l’espai
públic urbà i d’autogestió de forma col·lectiva i no mercantilista” (“an opportunity to reap-
propriate urban public space and self-management in a collective and non-commercialist
way”), an alternative to the current social and urban model of the city (“Recreant Cruïlles.
Que Es Recreant Cruïlles”).
In 2012, after much debate and neighborhood participation, it was decided that the
whole Germanetes block be used to create a community garden, a multipurpose space,
a meeting space, and a public gathering space to host activities promoted by a variety of
organizations. In the same year that Pla BUITS was announced, Recreant Cruïlles presented
a proposal and was awarded the bid to manage the space, which opened in 2014. Today,
as a result of the neighbors’ demands, a kindergarten, a high school, a subsidized housing
building, and a nursing home were finally built in that empty space.
Recreant Cruïlles’ initiatives around Germanetes crossroads, such as the Farmer’s Mar-
ket, which takes place monthly on a section of one of the “green axes” (on Consell de Cent
street) and the overhaul of “the first block courtyard in the Eixample Esquerra as Idel-
fons Cerdà had imagined,” leaves little room for doubt about the influence that Recreant
Cruïlles has had in the recent Supercruïlles Municipalist impulse.

The Neighbors’ Collective Backyard

To transform urban voids into generative sites, the municipality transfers responsibility to
the citizens. The BUITS Plan carries out initial urbanization work with a minimum invest-
ment from the municipality: This involves leveling the plot’s surface and providing access
to water and electricity, when needed. But, from there on, the neighbors take over. Critics
warn of the risk that the municipality will evade their obligations to volunteer citizens in
times of crisis. In addition, they worry that shifting all the responsibilities to the public
without transferring resources could lead to additional inequalities among communities
with different economic capacities (Baiges). As such, critics claim that the municipality
should contribute public resources to fund the activities generated in these spaces. Some
perceive this as a politically expedient strategy for the municipality to control the space
without any expense. Others, instead, wish the municipality would promise more than acti-
vating publicly owned ground by introducing private plots in the BUITS Plan.

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In recent times under austerity policies, when most urban projects have been stalled due
to a lack of funds, the BUITS Plan allows the municipality to nevertheless take advantage of
the momentum to energize vacant lots, by working with new actors – non-profit organiza-
tions and neighbors. It also increases flexibility in urban planning, as previously planned
uses for these spaces can be reconsidered in favor of those temporary ones created by the
community (Orduña-Giró and Jacquot; Baiges). This model also shifts traditional meth-
ods of top-down design. Neighbors fill the former sterile voids with life, turning desolate
plots into collective gardens. They appropriate the space with collective art displaying vivid
colors, domesticating urban space with polyvalent, eco-friendly, hand-made structures and
furniture. For some, these spaces lack design as traditionally defined, but for others they
have the beauty that lies in the improvisational aesthetic of collective design.

Conclusions: Designing the Commons, Public Space as Thresholds

Barcelona’s Superblocks and the BUITS Plan are innovative strategies, promoted by the new
municipalist government, that reimagine and repurpose the city’s common ground. These
projects address the city’s urgent environmental, social, and economic challenges and reflect
a shift in focus – from public space to collective space to the commons – in terms of con-
temporary, global urban demands and actions. Urban movements and new municipalism,
through their participatory policies, have been vehicles for change in times of austerity and
climate emergency. In that context, the new projects illustrate the evolution of public space
from earlier urban models (Muixí 109). Superblocks attempt a contemporary reinterpreta-
tion of the traditional Barcelona boulevards, the “ramblas,” and the plazas, turning streets
into non-traditional collective spaces. They blur the functional limits of the formal, public
space of the street and strive for ecology and social sharing. The BUITS rely on the idea
of informal public space as shared resourcefulness; they are shared thresholds, collectively
designed and managed, thus building the commons. Both the BUITS’ shared backyards and
the Superblocks’ neighborly streets introduce landscape into the city and foster a culture of
sharing. As our future is likely to be urban, these domestic/urban thresholds, by expanding
the limits of the individual and adding affordable suburban qualities of life to dense urban
conditions, can make living collectively more habitable, greener, and more attractive.
The new model of urbanism in these cases is based in part on the urban theories of
commons and thresholds, which have also been taken up by the socio-political municipal-
ist movements described in this chapter. As Stavrides argues, the commons are both the
urban movements themselves – resulting from “societies in movement that are always in
the making” – as well as the means and the products to achieve their claims for the right
to the city (159). The idea of the commons refers also to the set of non-hierarchical prac-
tices and horizontal relationships that generate collective spaces and produce community
(Stavrides). Aiming for radical democracy, the participatory nature of urban movements’
assemblies, political confluences resulting in new municipalism and in the neighbors’ asso-
ciations and cooperatives that co-create these alternative forms of urban spaces, these are
all the commons.
The commons challenge today’s city of enclaves (Stavrides), where exclusive islands of
private space are isolated into commercial areas and gated communities to combat increas-
ing social fear (Bauman). These expanded private spaces negate democratic access to an
ever-diminishing and disconnected public space (Minton). A city of thresholds (Stavrides)
aims to give an alternative to a highly polarized urban scenario in favor of an open city

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(Sennet). This open city speaks to the need for spatial porosity (Ellin), for thresholds that
blur private-public boundaries and individual-communal boundaries and move towards the
collective and beyond to the commons.
Spatial and social change has induced a shift in the design disciplines (including architec-
ture, landscape architecture, and urban planning), promoting, in turn, thresholds in design,
intermediate tools, and roles in the interface between people and places, communities and
environments. New generations of young architects are collaborating in multidisciplinary
teams, no longer described as “firms” or “studios” but rather as “cooperatives.” Unlike
traditional top-down design firms, these cooperatives have become experts in facilitating
the dynamics of community participation. Acting as translators between people’s wishes
and places, the role of designers has expanded to orchestrate and shape spatial change with
social impact in mind.
The urban movements that have led to Barcelona’s participatory local governments were
born in its plazas; by claiming the city’s streets, they evidenced public spaces as the com-
mons. Residents, empowered by the new municipalist administration, have taken an active
role in designing a city for all, and designers responded to these movements by making their
practices and products more inclusive, responsive, and flexible. These combined efforts
have created an intertwining spiral uniting public spaces, practices, and communities. Dec-
ades spent recovering and designing public space as an urban and social transformative tool
have cultivated and catalyzed Barcelonians’ appropriation of their “fearless” city.

Notes
1 All translations are my own.
2 People Affected by the Mortgage Crisis or PAH was a Barcelona-based activist group that emerged
from the 15M movement to enter the political arena. This collective gave a voice to people facing
more than 327,000 evictions due to the more than 695,000 widespread mortgage foreclosures
sparked by the 2008 collapse of the housing bubble (Schultz-Jørgensen).
3 BComú, which at that time was a citizen platform known as Guanyem Barcelona (Let’s Win Back
Barcelona), issued a manifesto to invite all citizens to stand up and win back our cities.
  “Consideran que hay que ‘fortalecer, más que nunca, el tejido social y los espacios de autoor-
ganización. Pero ha llegado la hora, también, de reapropiarnos de las instituciones para ponerlas
al servicio de las mayorías y del bienestar común’, aseguran en el comunicado” (qtd. in Puente
and França) (“They consider it is necessary to strengthen, more than ever, the social fabric and the
spaces for self-organization. However, the time has also come to reappropriate the institutions to
put them at the service of the majority and the common good, they say in the statement”).
4 The term “nuevo municipalismo” (new municipalism) had been informally used by the Spanish
municipalist platforms previously, and it was also used in academic events organized by Laura
Roth and Joan Subirats, two intellectuals close to the work of BComú.
5 The Barcelona Model transformed the city through urban projects of intermediate scale that
placed their emphasis on recovering public space. The model also relied on agreement between
the public administration and the private sector, working together.
6 Other cities in Catalonia followed the example set by Barcelona’s Poblenou district, as would be
the case in other cities throughout the country, like Vitoria-Gasteiz, Ferrol, and Valencia.
7 According to Carlos Moreno (president of the International Human Smart City Forum Commit-
tee), “it is time to move from city planning to urban life planning. This means transforming the
urban space, which is still highly mono-functional, with a central city and its various specialized
areas, into a polycentric city, based on four major components: Proximity, diversity, density and
ubiquity, in order to offer this quality of life within short distances, across the six essential urban
social functions: living, working, supplying, caring, learning and enjoying.”
8 According to City Hall, at least 80% of the street should be shaded by trees in summer, while at
least 20% of ground surface should be permeable and half of this total planted with grass to allow

29
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

the ground to soak up rainwater and improve flood resilience. Priority should be given to creating
safe spaces for children and older people, while all public areas need to be equipped with drinking
fountains (“Superilles. The New Green Hubs and Squares”).
9 “The Plan represents one of the most thorough revamps of a major European city so far this cen-
tury” (O’Sullivan).
10 The Urban Landscape Studies serve as the preamble to Barcelona’s Urban Landscape Chart, which
will map the kaleidoscopic nature of the city’s urban landscape in order to preserve it as a mosaic
of the city’s complex urban fabric and its many identities.
11 The jury is composed of two distinct groups. The first includes members from the various districts
and from different municipal political groups representing the city government. The second group
assembles various citizen representatives, including the Council of Associations, the Federation of
Neighbors Associations, the Catalan Federation of Student’s Mothers and Fathers, and a Federa-
tion of Catalan Third Social Sector entities (a set of private non-profit organizations working for
inclusion and social cohesion, with special attention to the most vulnerable groups in society), as
well as the FAD (Promotion of the Arts and Design).
12 Prior to BUITS, vacant spaces such as “BlocOnze” (ElevenBlock) in Barcelona’s industrial Can
Batlló sector or Madrid’s “Esta Es una Plaza” (This is a Square) project in Campo de Cebada were
managed collectively. “La novedad del Pla Buits fue convertir la excepción en norma y crear un
marco específico que permitiera consolidar estas prácticas” (“The novelty of Pla BUITS was to
turn an exception into the norm, and to create a specific framework that allowed these practices
to be consolidated”; Baiges 309).
13 “Permaculture (the word, coined by Bill Mollison, is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture and
permanent culture). . . . Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material, and
strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its forms” (“Permaculture
News”).
14 For the 2012 BUITS plan competition, nineteen proposals were considered; of those, twelve
non-profit organizations were selected. In 2015, ten additional projects were awarded. A decade
after the inception of the BUITS plan, fourteen void spaces continue to be operative in Barce-
lona. Five of them are in the Eixample, where the Superblocks were initially tested and are still
expanding – also the district with the densest population and the most hardscapes, as well as an
inadequate number of parks and greenscapes.
15 “Som Recreant Cruïlles, i reclamem que els veïns i veïnes siguin part activa en el que fa referèn-
cia a les decisions que es prenguin sobre l’espai públic” (“We are Recreating Crossings, and we
demand that the neighbors be an active part in what refers to the decisions that are made about
the public space”; “Recreant Cruïlles. Espai Germanetes”).
16 The popular assemblies that took place in Plaça Catalunya during 15M precipitated neighbor-
hood assemblies in which citizens could speak about the problems and needs of our society and
strategize different forms of action.

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Blanchart, Clara. “Barcelona, la reconquista táctica del asfalto.” El Pais, 6 Nov. 2020. www.elpais.
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Barcelona Model 1973–2004, edited by Josep Maria Montaner et al., Barcelona City, 2012,
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Montojo, Marta. “Madrid plantea crear una supermanzana para limitar el tráfico como una prueba pil-
oto.” El Pais, 26 Jun. 2020. www.eldiario.es/ballenablanca/365_dias/madrid-plantea-supermanzanas-
limitar-trafico_1_6049347.html. Accessed 1 Jul. 2020.
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 3
RURAL SPAIN
Social Landscapes at the Beginning of the
Twenty-First Century

Luis Camarero, Jesús Oliva and Rosario Sampedro

The Rural World in Spain: One Hundred Years of Social Change

Rural areas in Spain have become diversified and expanded from subsistence farming to
non-agrarian, multi-functional and post-productive economies, giving rise to a “new rural-
ity.” This transformation is the result of global socioeconomic trends, population move-
ments, and changes related to the interconnection between rural and urban areas, which
has had dramatic effects on the rural social structure.
In 1950, as European post-war construction began, Spain was still an agrarian society
with almost half its active population working in the primary sector (agriculture, fishing,
livestock, mining, etc.). In that year the agrarian population exceeded five million indi-
viduals, its historic maximum. Nowadays, it stands at less than 5% of Spain’s population
(Working Population Survey – EPA). Rural areas also reached their highest demographic
densities in the 1950s, with 29 inhabitants per km2, which was the moment when urban
development began to take off. While the population density in rural areas had fallen by
20% to 23 inhabitants per km2 by 2016, urban areas tripled their population density from
139 to 389 inhabitants per km2 during the same period. Urbanization and the decreas-
ing role of agriculture in the economic and social life of rural communities dramatically
reshaped the Spanish territory and transformed its social structure during the second half
of the 20th century. Both phenomena have their origins in the modernization based firstly
on the organization of economies of scale and secondly on the configuration of world
economies.
As a result of these processes, at the start of the 2020s, the general panorama in Spain is
that of a highly unequally distributed territory in terms of population. Most small villages
are undergoing a severe process of decline in demographic and social terms, including age-
ing, masculinization, and loss of human and social capital. In recent years, the expression
“la España vacía” [empty Spain] has become prevalent and reflects the regret and concern
about this shrinking rural world that is experiencing a long-lasting depopulation process.
The expression was taken from a successful journalistic essay published in 2016 and it has
entered the world of politics and media.1 Citizens’ organizations and social movements
with a rural basis have transformed that expression into a new one: “The emptied Spain,”

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-4
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

la España vaciada. They want to stress that the decline of these rural areas is the result of
political neglect. The emptied Spain is nowadays a political slogan used by these organiza-
tions which are seeking to restore first-class citizenship for rural inhabitants. Nevertheless,
underlying this general situation, we can find many new and variegated processes that are
changing the rural scene, including various kinds of population mobility, such as migration,
commuting, and permanent displacements.
Population flows across Spain have intensified since the end of the 20th century, and
these trends have significantly transformed the demographic potentiality and social com-
position of rural societies, as well as the local economies and labor markets. The empty
Spain paradoxically coexists with dynamic and vibrant rural environments that are being
profoundly transformed as the relations between rural and urban territories and popula-
tions become closer. The traditional urban-rural differentiation is dissolving, and, since the
1980s, the postmodern “cultural turn” has redefined the countryside as a good place to live.
As Mormont stated, rurality becomes a semantic category useful to criticize the excesses
of our development model and to articulate new demands for a better quality of life (21).
The resignification of the concept of “rurality” supports new activities and attracts new
residents to small villages. However, it is the economic processes that have attracted a
large foreign population to rural areas in recent years. The presence of people from other
countries has considerably increased during the first decades of the 21st century, as labor
immigration has become one of the most noteworthy trends of this new rurality. The sheer
volume is remarkable, and their impact on the capacity of rural communities to survive
in the long term is notable. Rural villages, in decline or otherwise, are no longer predomi-
nantly agrarian communities, and many face the challenge of becoming increasingly cosmo-
politan communities. As Woods states in his article “Precarious Rural Cosmopolitanism,”
a new “rural cosmopolitanism” is arising because rural communities are becoming more
and more ethnically and culturally diverse. As a property of rural communities, “rural
cosmopolitanism” is defined as “the collective practice of openness towards difference and
diversity, hospitality towards others and conviviality” (Woods 166). Although the 2008
economic recession stopped the ongoing trends toward repopulation, diversity remains
among the most remarkable characteristics of the new Spanish rurality.

The Big Change: From Peasant Societies to a Demographically Dismantled

Modern Rurality
The magnitude and importance of the changes experienced by rural Spain in recent decades
can be better understood from the perspective of the high lack of mobility of Spanish soci-
ety in the mid-20th century. At that time, a significant proportion of the population lived
and worked in the same locality where they were born, and over three quarters of married
couples consisted of residents from the same municipality (an average of 76% for the years
1950–60, National Statistics Institute 134). The prolonged autarky following the Spanish
Civil War (1939–1959) and the archaic productive structure reinforced the country’s isola-
tion and halted the development of urban society.
The importance of mobility to the territorial cohesion of the country was not adequately
considered by Spanish politicians. The Primo de Rivera dictatorship (1923–1930) designed
an ambitious public works plan, which included improving secondary roads, establish-
ing bus routes, and constructing over 5,000 kilometers of new roads. However, as Fer-
rando pointed out, projects such as the National Circuit Special Firm (1926) were meant

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to promote elitist tourism able to attract foreign visitors rather than to guarantee territorial
cohesion within the country (342–343). In Spain, as in other countries, rural policies were
more oriented to the interests of business and to exploiting the rural resources (Woods,
“Rural Geography” 161–169).
A clear example of the social and territorial disconnection of Spanish rural areas with
the rest of the country, not to mention the rest of Europe, is the 1922 visit by King Alfonso
XIII to Las Hurdes (a remote and rural part of Extremadura) at the invitation of the famous
Dr. Marañón. In that region near the Portuguese border, which at that time was only acces-
sible by horse, the king discovered the horrors of rural poverty (Cantero 192). The cir-
cumstances that the doctor described in his public health report were also the subject of
Luís Buñuel’s pseudo-documentary Land Without Bread (1932). While Buñuel exaggerated
several aspects of life in the region, there was enough truth in it to provoke the censorship
of the film on the grounds that it defamed the Spanish people.
Once the republican and progressive Land Reform Law of 1932 was thrown out by the
Franco dictatorship, and the social inequalities that it had tried to address were silenced,
the regime succeeded in freezing rural society into a kind of medieval austerity that lasted
the two decades of the post-war autarky period. This was the society photographed by
Eugene Smith in 1950 for Life magazine for his report “Spanish Village” in which he under-
scored that, “it [rural Spain] lives in ancient poverty and faith.”
The regime’s gradual opening to international tourism and foreign investment (National
City Bank, USA credits), as well as its incorporation into international bodies (IMF, OECD,
GATT) facilitated a supervised economic liberalization (National Plan of Economic Stabi-
lization, 1959). The Development Plans (1963–1975) brought about a modernization that
accelerated Rostow’s stages of economic growth to reach the mass consumption society
stage (Rostow 4–16). The developmentalism (“desarrollismo”) was carried out with some
important social costs and territorial imbalances (Siguán 19–42). During the 20th century,
the government encouraged a development model based on the localized concentration of
resources, energy, labor, knowledge, and consumers. The so-called economies of agglom-
eration allowed a higher speed of capital accumulation by cost reduction due to the prox-
imity and localized concentration of supply (Rodríguez-Pose 6). This new model emerged
forcefully in Spain after the conclusion of the post-war autarky period,2 and it sparked the
intensive migration of the rural population to urban, industrial centers. In the mid-1950s
the borders were opened to Central Europe, and in the 1960s, after the National Plan of
Economic stabilization, the flows of migration were also directed towards the emerging
metropolitan service centers within the country, such as Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao.
The rural exodus and the drastic decline of agrarian activity have combined to cause a
socio-territorial change in Spain. The colossal movement of the population from the coun-
try to the city placed rural prospective demographics at serious risk. In 1950, 11 million
people lived in villages with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants; between 1950 and 1970 more
than 3.7 million people emigrated to the cities, so that one in three rural inhabitants left
the countryside (Camarero, “Del éxodo” 193–196). The generations that moved to the city
became the parents of the Spanish baby boom. The consumer and cultural industries pro-
pelled this very real exodus via an ideology of urban modernity opposed to rural backward-
ness. This change has been interpreted as a necessary modernization. The rural peasant
population constituted a burden for the improvement of agrarian production; the abun-
dance of manual workers undermined opportunities for mechanization and the incorpora-
tion of technology, whereas it was a resource for the growth in urban, industrial economies.

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Rural manual workers were freed up and food production became more economical. Thus,
this process enabled the low salaries that fueled urban growth. However, as Etxezarreta
has highlighted, the modernization of agriculture also led to its incorporation into global
agri-food chains and to the global process of capital accumulation (16–22).
During the second half of the 20th century, a change occurred in agriculture that displaced
its orientation from the direct consumption of food to the production of raw materials for
transformation processes (Abad and Naredo 89). This process not only reduced agrar-
ian activity but also transformed its orientation from family businesses to a salary-based
one relying progressively on foreign manual labor, thereby achieving successful agriculture
without the participation of the local inhabitants (Camarero, “Trabajadores” 184–186).
At the end of the 1970s the process of agricultural decline in rural areas had become evi-
dent, as agricultural employment was below 20% and had fallen by over 40% when com-
pared to the numbers for 1950 (see Figure 3.1). The 1973 oil crisis slowed urban growth
and the rural exodus drastically reduced its intensity (see Figure 3.2). From the mid-1970s
to the late 1980s, during the political transition from dictatorship to democracy, Spain’s
youth bore the brunt of the rural exodus. Rural migrants sought opportunities in education
and access to skilled jobs, feeding a selective migration process both generationally and
in terms of gender. In a clear break with the traditional patriarchy associated with family
agriculture, it was mainly young girls who went to the urban centers to study and work in
the service economy (Sampedro 526–530).
The cumulative impact of the transformations over the last few decades has produced a
panorama of considerable ageing (near a quarter of those who live in towns with fewer than
1,000 inhabitants are aged over 70),3 as well as masculinization in rural areas (Camarero
and Sampedro, “Exploring Female” 190). There is also a heavy dependence on extra-local
labor markets (Camarero and Oliva, “Understanding Rural” 102).4
This rural exodus has been very selective and skewed the country’s generational struc-
ture. Today the base of rural life is constituted by the sons and daughters of those who did
not emigrate during the 1960s. They play the leading role in the economic activity, devote
themselves to bringing up children, care for the high number of elderly people, and with

40%

35%

30%

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

0%
1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 2025

Figure 3.1 Proportion of Population Employed in Agriculture (Annual Average). Progression 1964

to 2021.
Source: Labor Force Survey. Spanish National Statistics Institute. Own elaboration.

36
 Rural Spain

250
Data in Thousands

200

150

100

50

-50

-100

-150

-200
1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020

Figure 3.2 Balance of Rural Migration 1961–2020.

Source: Residential Variation Statistics – Spanish National Statistics Institute. Own elaboration.

very little relief from other generations are also responsible for the cultural dynamization
of rural communities. All the efforts to maintain a thriving local life fall to this “sandwich”
or in-between generation (Camarero et al. 31). It is also a predominantly male generation,
since due to the female over-migration to the cities there are considerably fewer women
than men.
Gender inequalities are also more pronounced in rural areas. There are fewer profes-
sional and job opportunities for rural women, with fewer opportunities for promotion,
as many jobs are seasonal and “irregular” (without a contract). Women’s responsibilities
in caring for the family make it difficult for them to access extra-local labor markets. The
greater population dispersion requires a greater effort in terms of mobility. Moreover, age-
ing means that there is a population in need of care that is provided for mainly by women
within the family, since public care services for the elderly are scarce in rural areas. This
environment means that women face greater difficulties in developing their own career
paths.
The process of urban demographic concentration has led to a social decapitalization
process in rural areas. Not only does youth emigration weaken the reproductive capacity
of the rural population but it also means a loss of the human capital needed for organiz-
ing economic development and social welfare; furthermore, it has a direct effect on social
capital. Social capital defines the capacity of these territories to maintain a culture of civic
organization and cooperation and promote civic structures and social networks. In addi-
tion, it is linked to the capacity to promote projects and the resilience of rurality to resist
the changes in the global order. Areas with a wealth of social capital increase their social
opportunities and the welfare of their populations (Li et al. 136).
Figure 3.3 demonstrates the contraction in terms of the demographic vitality that rural
areas have experienced, and its consequences with regard to the social and human capital

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Figure 3.3 Percentage of Population Aged 25–44 by Municipality Size, 2020.

Source: Continuous Survey of the Population. 2020. Spanish National Statistics Institute. Own elaboration.

Figure 3.4 Percentage of Population with University Studies by Municipality Size. People Aged
25–44. 2020.
Source: Continuous Survey of the Population. 2020. Spanish National Statistics Institute. Own elaboration.

of these regions. As a summary indicator of demographic vitality, a population group aged

25–44 was evaluated; these are the ages in which the reproductive capacity is concentrated,
and the rates of activity and occupation are at their highest level. The relationship between
demographic vitality and population size is evident in the figure. They must be interpreted
as the result of a process of demographic extraction, from low-density areas to large met-
ropolitan centers.
In accordance with the process of demographic extractivism, a concentration of talent
and cultural capital in metropolitan areas can also be observed (see Figure 3.4). There
is a severe territorial imbalance in terms of knowledge that hinders the local economies
from incorporating themselves into the economic flows that define the information society.

38
 Rural Spain

The feedback between emigration, knowledge, and social capital generates vicious circles
of declines in demographics, reproduction, and labor, which in the long term lead to the
“chronification” of precariousness in work and social exclusion (as these problems become,
indeed, chronic).

Towards a New Rurality: Globalization, Mobilities,

and the Cultural Turn (1978–2000)
By the end of the 1970s in Spain, the crisis of the Fordist model, urban malaise, and envi-
ronmental concern, combined with the changes brought about by the political transition
to democracy, resulted in a profound cultural and ideological change. The emerging urban
middle classes created new idyllic representations of a rurality that had little connection to
an actual rurality that they barely knew.
The boost created by joining the European Union in 1986 facilitated urban to rural con-
nections, thanks to the extension and improvement of the highway network. It must also
be understood that the accelerated process of urban development in previous years had
already established a strong capacity for mobility. Spain had 358,000 cars in circulation in
1961, but by 1970 this number had reached over 2.3 million. Coupled with the increase
in car ownership, there was an additional increase in the number of weekly commutes by
“worker-peasants” who combined their local agriculture practice with urban jobs. Moreo-
ver, seasonal family trips to their former hometown became commonplace for those who
had migrated to the city (Moya and Vicente-Mazariegos 97–108).
On the other hand, the nostalgia by first-generation rural emigrants for their abandoned
world, combined with the disenchantment of those who grew up in overcrowded cities,
promoted the resurgence of regional and local identities, rural festivals, and a return to
folk music traditions. This sentiment propelled the emergence of a “second home” market
and a demand for plots of land in the countryside (Gaviria 255; García-Bellido 12–14).
This cultural reorientation (Morin 45–75; Goldman and Dickens 585; Phillips 138–140)
prepared the context for the consolidation of the new economies of “signs and space” (Lash
and Urry 1–13; Jameson 1–20). This concept means that the country landscape, the local
heritage, the natural world, or regional gastronomy become economic resources that are
turned into merchandised goods in a globalized economy (Garrod et al. 118–122; Perkins
245–254; McCarthy 130).
In the last decades of the 20th century, the new productive reorganization that saw
the advantages of certain rural areas, for example, competitive salaries and cheap land,
combined with the experiences of local development (Vázquez 77–78) and post-productive
activities (Cànoves et al. 762–767) to transform local economies. Industrial relocation, resi-
dential dispersion, return migrations, residential tourism by foreigners, and counterurbani-
zation projects all contributed to the diversification of the rural social landscape. During the
mid-1980s a new migration pattern from rural to urban areas began to emerge, leading to
a positive rural migratory balance. This led to a repopulation of the rural environment that
coincided with sharp population losses in absolute terms, due to ageing and diminishing
birth rates. Deaths began to exceed the number of births for those municipalities with under
10,000 inhabitants. Thus, at that time, there were regions that lost population and settled
new residents at the same time. Generally speaking, until the end of the 1990s the new resi-
dents fell into three categories: those who moved back to the villages they came from to live
out their retirement there; big city inhabitants moving to the rural outskirts in their quest to

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find more accessible housing or more attractive environmental conditions; and, to a lesser
extent, those seeking new lifestyles and work projects (Rivera 418–430).
The arrival of the new residents meant a substantial increase in social diversity for rural
areas. On occasion this diversity has triggered conflict and brought about a lack of har-
mony as the processes of gentrification excluded the local population from certain resources
and as locals faced new demands regarding land and local ways of life. Social diversity also
challenged the traditional cultural homogeneity found in rural communities.
In the early 1990s, public concern with rural depopulation and the disappearance of the
rural world grew paradoxically even as, in general terms, the rural environment was being
repopulated, becoming better connected with urban areas, increasing its internal diversity,
and, for the first-time, as policies aimed at halting the economic and demographic deterio-
ration were being carried out by the government.
A key element in the transformation of the rural environment during the 1990s was the
implementation of the European Union’s rural development policies through its LEADER
programs. The LEADER programs were practically the first public initiatives in Spain
designed to halt the process of social and economic deterioration in disadvantaged rural
areas. They did so by, for the first time, using a territorial focus and a bottom-up per-
spective to achieve endogenous and integrated development (Esparcia et al. 97–111). This
involved implementing a development perspective that sought to dynamize local economies
by using local resources and encouraging the involvement of local inhabitants.
In spite of their modest gains in terms of economic investment and employment creation,
these programs contributed to generating cohesion and social capital in rural communities.
There were 52 local action groups (GAL, or “grupos de acción local,” in Spanish) in charge
of managing such projects at a regional level in its first programming period of 1991 to
1993, but this figure had risen to over 200 in the most recent period, from 2014 to 2020.
These groups established stable networks of cooperation within the country (National
Rural Network) and across the European Union.
Rural development policies organized around the LEADER initiative also created the
conditions for the upsurge of new identities and a growing political mobilization of the
rural population. Numerous organizations that defend the rural world and fight against
the threat of depopulation have been set up. For example, the mid-1990s saw the creation
of the Plataforma Rural-Alianzas por un Mundo Rural Vivo (Rural Platform-Alliances for
a Living Rural World), a national platform integrating left-wing organizations and associa-
tions. Plataforma Rural has proved to be indispensable in redefining rural identity. The
group is rather critical of the multifunctionality promoted by European institutions and
programs and defends agrarian activity as being crucial to the vitality of the rural world.
Even as dominant productive agrarian structures are evolving towards formats that are
more industrialized, globalized, and disconnected from the rural countryside, Plataforma
Rural has emphasized concepts such as peasant or family farming, food sovereignty or
agroecology, which have served to more closely connect these social movements with the
urban ecology movements.

From Rural-Urban Hybridization to Cosmopolitan Ruralities (2000–2021)

By the end of the 20th century, the transformation of rural societies was due to the inten-
sification of the flows of merchandise, people and ideas that characterize the information
society, a real “itinerant society” (Vicente-Mazariegos 5–8). Population mobility between

40
 Rural Spain

rural and urban areas is key to understanding the progressive interchangeability of lifestyles
among rural and urban populations. The result is a process of hybridization which is the
product of ever greater internal diversity, the impact of globalization and increased mobil-
ity in social life. This is no longer merely a question of changes in the social composition of
rural areas. The very categories of rural versus urban, global versus local, and permanence
versus mobility are progressively turning into what we might call “decentered categories”
(Camarero and Oliva, “Understanding Rural” 107). They have become unhelpful catego-
ries that no longer reflect social reality.
At the beginning of the 21st century, mobility was a key factor for the rural countryside,
minimizing the effects of rural demographic imbalance and remoteness from the centers of
production and work. In 2001, 48% of the employed rural population residing in munici-
palities with under 10,000 residents commuted daily to a different municipality, a figure
which had grown to 54.7% by 2011. The distances travelled also increased considerably. In
2001, some 5.6% of rural commuters spent over thirty minutes commuting, a figure which
had risen to 24% in 2011. Therefore, the importance of the automobile in rural Spanish
areas has grown significantly. The dependence of rural life upon mobility is clearly demon-
strated by noting that there are 552 automobiles per 1000 inhabitants in those municipali-
ties with under 10,000 inhabitants, which means one car per two inhabitants; this figure
is even higher in smaller municipalities, so that for those municipalities with under 2,000
inhabitants the figure reaches 622. Both figures by far exceed the total motorization for
Spain, which is 480 vehicles per 1000 inhabitants (Directorate General of Traffic).
The beginning of the 21st century in Spain saw new migratory waves of international
workers, decentralization and the intensification of motorization, accompanied by an unu-
sual economic growth. Automobile sales, the number of houses constructed (a real state
housing boom), increases in international tourism and the arrival of foreign immigrants
all exceeded previous records in Spain. More than a fifth of the resident rural population
in municipalities with under 10,000 residents in 2001 came from other larger municipali-
ties, and the presence in rural areas of working-class immigrants from Eastern Europe, the
Maghreb, and Latin America had increased to nearly 10% by 2007. Some municipalities
turned into new melting-pots (Oliva 279–284) that combined labor-centered international
migration and foreign residential tourism (O’Reilly 1–7; Suárez-Navaz 207–239; Gustaf-
son 451–475), as well as residential dispersion caused by Spaniards searching for cheaper
houses and/or better environmental conditions (Oliva and Rivera 51–71). These mobilities
give rise to a new “translocal rurality” (Hedberg and do Carmo 1–9) characteristic of con-
temporary societies. A key element in the new 21st-century rurality is its growing ethnic
and cultural diversity. Since the late 1990s a considerable proportion of the rural repopula-
tion has been due to the significant increase of foreign labor immigration (see Figure 3.5).
The arrival of foreigners reverses the depopulation brought about by the negative rate of
natural increase (RNI) in many rural areas.
The new immigrants are young, employment-age individuals who come from Latin
America, Eastern Europe, and North and sub-Saharan Africa. The first waves of immi-
gration were closely linked to the need for workers in the agrarian enclaves of the inten-
sive fruit and horticulture production regions in the southern and Mediterranean parts
of Spain (Gadea et al. 83). Later, these waves spread towards the peninsula’s rural
interior (see Figure 3.6). Immigration gradually arrived at the less economically dynamic
rural environments which had been much more greatly affected by depopulation. In those
rural regions, immigration represented a vital demographic contribution for the survival of

41
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250
Data in thousands

Total
200
Born in Spain

150

100

50

-50
1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020

Figure 3.5 Migratory Balance in Rural Areas According to Country of Birth (1988–2020).

Source: Survey of Residential Variations, INE. Own elaboration. Municipalities under 10,000 inhabitants.

rural communities and provided the necessary workers for sectors such as agriculture, cattle
ranching, construction, domestic service, and caring for those with special needs.
The 2008 economic crisis had significant effects across the economy and modified the
migratory waves. The entry of immigrant populations came to a halt, whilst at the same
time the processes of immigrant family reunifications did not sufficiently counteract immi-
grant departures. Many immigrants returned to their countries of origin or headed for
urban areas (Camarero and Sampedro, “Despoblación” 75). However, since 2016 we have
observed new signs of migratory recuperation in rural areas, especially with regard to the
settlement of foreign populations (Camarero, “Despoblamiento” 62). This confirms the
trend that the long-term effects of the crisis were coming to an end before the arrival of
the COVID-19 pandemic.
The foreign immigrant population has had a particularly relevant effect on the demog-
raphy of rural areas. Patterns in the 2019 data indicate that, on average, one in ten rural
inhabitants were born abroad, although in numerous municipalities the figure exceeds
20%. If we focus on the 20–39 age group, the figures are even more striking. On average
15% of the rural population was born abroad, with over half coming from such diverse
countries as Romania, Morocco, Colombia, and Ecuador.
The foreign population has significantly contributed to the generational renewal of the
countryside by increasing birth rates, in part also due to the arrival and regrouping of fami-
lies with children. By 2018, some 19.2% of rural births (one in five) were by mothers of
foreign origin. Moreover, we must consider the children that arrive in these rural areas at an
early age. Table 3.1 shows an estimation of the combined effects of births plus immigration
and the reunification of children under 13 years old with their families, in rural areas. All
of these children constitute the group of minors that stay and will constitute the new rural
generations. This estimate allows us to project the incidence of change in the next genera-
tions of rural inhabitants.

42
 Rural Spain

Figure 3.6 Proportion of Resident Foreigners in Rural Areas. Evolution 2001–2018.

Source: Camarero and Sampedro (2019).

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 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

Table 3.1 The Generations of Minors of Foreign Origin by Nationality and Size of Municipality.
Spanish Nationality Not Spanish Mother Born Percentage of
Since Birth National at Birth Abroad Foreign Origin

<500 inhabitants 48,715 6,551 10,079 25.4%

501–1,000 inhabitants 70,353 10,197 8,520 21.0%
1,001–2,000 inhabitants 97,548 7,401 9,499 14.8%
2,001–5,000 inhabitants 276,790 25,160 36,664 18.3%
5,001–10,000 inhabitants 440,780 44,866 52,425 18.1%
>10,000 3,524,581 599,481 681,548 26.7%
Spain 4,458,767 693,656 798,735 25.1%

Source: Continuous Household Survey. Spanish National Statistics Institute. 2019.

For Spain as a whole, we can estimate that 25.1% of the population currently under
13 years of age were foreign-born. Such figures are higher in urban areas, but for rural
areas these numbers become even more impactful, especially for small municipalities. In
villages with under 1,000 inhabitants, between a fifth and a quarter of minors were either
born abroad or to immigrant families. Thus, in the context of the depopulation of rural
areas, there is also a parallel hidden process of sociological renovation. There are fewer
rural inhabitants, but they are increasingly diverse. Rural policies must take into account
that such diversity will increase as the new generations start becoming adults.
As Wood stated in “Precarious Rural Cosmopolitanism,” rural communities are des-
tined to be more cosmopolitan, that is to say, more open to differences and diversity, as
the nation’s cultural and ethnic diversity increases. That is also true for Spanish rurality
more broadly. However, as Woods indicated, rural cosmopolitanism is both an emerging as
well as a precarious phenomenon (“Precarious Rural” 165–167). Many powerful obstacles
stand in the way of foreign immigrants before they are accepted as welcomed neighbors.
The local population tends to perceive them as no more than a labor force, mistrusting for-
eigners and associating integration with cultural assimilation. Recent qualitative research
reveals how the attitudes of the local population and the local communities’ leaders are
still not favorable for true coexistence and intercultural recognition. These attitudes persist
despite the fact that immigrants contribute to containing the rural depopulation and are key
to sustaining strategic economic sectors (Sampedro and Camarero, “Foreign Inmigration”
25–26). The construction of cosmopolitan, welcoming communities is not a spontaneous
process, but one that requires social awareness, political will, civic strategies and human
and material resources (Depner and Teixeira 89). The current rise in xenophobic discourse
encouraged by far-right political parties does not help this situation. Cultural diversity has
enormous potential for creativity and social innovation and can turn out to be key to the
social sustainability of rural areas. But nevertheless, the immigrant population is mostly left
out of public debates and policies as drivers of rural development.

Looking to the Future: The Rural Gap and the Emergence

of a New Political Subject
The aforementioned intense migratory wave from the countryside to the cities in the early
second half of the 20th century, in the latter years of Francoism, culminated the process of

44
 Rural Spain

demographic emptying of rural Spain, and was the origin of the profound demographic and
socio-territorial imbalances affecting the country today.
The impact of the 2008 international financial crisis meant a dramatic challenge for
local economies. The cuts and disinvestments brought about by economic austerity meas-
ures were passed on by the state to local administrations, causing a considerable dete-
rioration in public and private services, for example, the closure of schools, emergency
healthcare services, bank branch offices, small businesses, and so on. Under these circum-
stances, the Spanish rural environment faces great challenges in terms of access to the
welfare state and the situation is aggravated by the diminishing opportunities for equita-
ble economic and cultural development in a society where the rights of citizenship should
extend to all, regardless of the territory where they live. This rural gap appears to be
largely determined by demographic ageing and accessibility conditions. On the one hand,
the considerable ageing of the population also increases the need for certain rural social
services, such as healthcare, personal care, and mobility. It also progressively weakens the
capacity to sustain a social life, such as being able to drive or use information and com-
munication technologies (ICTs). On the other hand, achieving rural hybridization with
wider urban and global processes requires connections and effective mobilities (capacity
for movement and transport), for example, access to high speed internet, non-standard
shared transport, and on-demand transport services, all of which would increase the lure
of living in rural Spain.
Finally, the current wave of political mobilization of the rural population around the
expression “the emptied Spain,” and the inclusion of rural depopulation problems in the
political agenda of various parties and civic organizations, cannot be understood without
taking into account the effects of the 2008 economic crisis.
On March 31, 2019, a massive demonstration took place in Madrid under the slogan
“The revolt of Emptied Spain.” It was promoted by two citizens’ organizations: Teruel
existe [Teruel exists] and ¡Soria Ya! [Soria Now!]. Teruel and Soria are two of the most
rural and depopulated provinces in Spain. Teruel existe participated in the General Elec-
tions held on November 10, 2019, as an electoral platform of voters, managing to win
the elections in that province and sending a deputy to the National Congress. Currently, a
national platform with the name “The Emptied Spain” is actively demanding that the cen-
tral government take political measures from to guarantee “first-class citizenship for rural
inhabitants,” and this civic organization is also promoting this sort of political participa-
tion in both the regional and national elections.
“The empty Spain” has been transformed by the political mobilization of the rural inhab-
itants into “The emptied Spain;” this expression reveals the sentiment of secular abandon
felt by the inhabitants in the rural environment. Perhaps we are witnessing the emergence
of a new political subject – the rural people – that will have a great impact on the future
process of rural change in Spain. At any rate, Spanish society has clearly become aware of
rural-urban territorial inequalities.

Acknowledgments
This chapter is based on early findings from the project “Focus on Rural Gap: Accessibility,
Mobilities and Social Inequalities (RURAL ACCESS)” supported by the Spanish Program of
Research, Development and Innovation. Plan Nacional Español (PID2019–111201RB-I00).

45
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

Notes
1 This is the essay by the journalist Sergio del Molino, titled La España vacía. Viaje por un país que
nunca fue [The Empty Spain. Journey through a Country that Never Was].
2 In fact, one of the effects of the Civil War was the return to increasing agrarian activity rates (Leal
et al. 183).
3 22.6%, according to the register of inhabitants for 2021.
4 Around a third of rural inhabitants go daily to an urban center or another municipality to work.
Population Census 2011.

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 4
CITIZENS, SQUATTERS,
HOMEOWNERS AND TENANTS
Housing Activism and the Structures of
Democratization and Capitalism in Spain

Miguel A. Martínez

Introduction
A social history of housing struggles in Spain could start by looking back to the 1931 rent
strike in Barcelona. This strike unfolded at the beginning of the second democratic repub-
lic during the transition from the former monarchy and at the center of an industrial city
where workers were highly unionized and mobilized. As Ealham noted,

the rent strike was a protest of the unemployed, the unskilled and the underpaid, for
whom issues of material life and consumption loomed large . . . it did not occur in
a vacuum: it was rooted in a multi-faceted web of relations and solidarities derived
from neighbors and kinship and drew on long traditions of community autonomy.
(94)

Following this insight, this chapter acknowledges that housing movements are better under-
stood with a historical perspective, although I choose to only focus on more contemporary
experiences than the aforementioned – since the 1970s to present day. Here I build upon
the perspective that underscores the political and economic contexts shaping mobilizations
and class struggles (Barker et al.; Della Porta; Mayer). I will also expand the notions of
“protest cycles” and “socio-spatial and historical structures” (Martínez, “The Urban Poli-
tics” 6–14) with an empirical overview of housing struggles in a particular country, Spain.
In so doing I intend to respond to the following question: Why did housing struggles take
different forms and trajectories in different historical periods? Hence, in the next sections
I will distinguish four main types of these collective protests over three main periods and
will investigate their features according to major spatio-temporal shifts.

Housing as an Urban Claim in the Path to Democratization (1970s)

The first significant housing movements in Spain over the last half-century can be cen-
trally associated to the tortuous and endless process of democratization. This approach

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-5
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

obliges us to examine key historical precedents. First, the military coup orchestrated and
led by Franco in 1936 against the democratic government of the Republic initiated a war
(1936–1939) and a subsequent highly repressive and bloody dictatorial regime that lasted
until the late 1970s. Following Franco’s death in 1975, the country experienced a great
popular opposition against the francoist political regime and saw the approval of a new
Constitution in 1978, all signs that a slow process of democratization was underway. Yet
many of the military, political and economic elites remained in power once the regime
shifted to a liberal democracy (Rodríguez 273–280). Furthermore, numerous attempts by
workers to gain control over their workplaces and their salaries were eventually tamed with
the imposition of an institutionalized bargaining system (Rodríguez 186–189).
During the first period of the dictatorship, the government implemented an “autar-
chy” policy which lasted until the end of the 1950s. This entailed scarce international
exchanges, although there was a close cooperation with the German and Italian fascist
regimes until their defeat in the Second World War. Afterwards, by 1953, the United States
and its allies supported Franco as a geostrategic shield against the advance of socialist
regimes in Europe and elsewhere. This opened up the country to foreign investments and
a steady economic growth initiated in the 1960s, a period usually designated as “desarrol-
lismo” [developmentalism]. At that time, a crucial policy of the Francoist authorities was
the promotion of homeownership. According to Palomera, “up until the 1960s, practi-
cally half of the housing stock consisted of homes for rent” (221). In particular, the rate of
home ownership shifted from 50% in 1950 to 63.4% in 1970, 73.1% in 1981 and 87%
in 2007 (Palomera 221). Renting as a form of housing tenure was considered an obstacle
for both economic growth and workers’ compliance with the political regime. Hence,
Francoist authorities saw residential property ownership and mortgage indebtedness as a
disciplinary tool against a potentially rebellious working class, with the additional benefit
of home ownership being a way of spreading a conservative ideology across the whole
society. Another consequence of this early neoliberal policy framework was the grow-
ing abandonment and deterioration of rental buildings. Despite enjoying almost no rent
increases until 1985, tenants as a group represented a salient and concentrated pocket of
urban poverty over these decades.
The second socio-spatial feature of this period was the promotion of “social housing,”
which mainly consisted of subsidies to build new houses at capped prices that residents
could profit from in the free market after a determined number of years (Palomera 222).
Many of these housing developments were of poor quality and lacked public transport
and other nearby services (Rodríguez 205–207). Most of the newly built houses for the
working-class fit this model and fostered a powerful construction sector for years to come,
which eventually became one the most specialized spearheads of the Spanish national econ-
omy beside tourism. Furthermore, this pattern of indirect or, in my terms, “temporarily
postponed” privatization of social housing was, nonetheless, continued by all democratic
governments until the 1990s.
The third trait of the housing question was dubbed “chabolismo,” the proliferation of
self-built shacks in often squatted settlements located in the outskirts of the major cities.
These shanty towns lacking basic services and infrastructure hosted a great deal of the
internal migration flows moving out from the countryside and arriving in urban areas. It
is estimated that around 3 million people or 15% of the population within the country
changed their regular place of residence between 1960 and 1975 (Ofer 151). Squatters in
vacant land experienced marginalization and repression and were labeled criminals for

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their unauthorized migration and self-constructing activities (Ofer 155) while also supply-
ing a cheap workforce in the urban and industrial labor markets.
The economic growth of the 1960s met with workers’ organizing in the factories, stu-
dents’ protests and neighborhood associations that sprung up following the 1964 regu-
lation of these forms of citizen groups, which exponentially grew after 1970. Demands
related to salary and working conditions, in addition to the social discontent caused by the
permanent housing shortage, were usually reinforced by a general cry for democratization,
or even by the threat of a socialist revolution. The peak of these struggles occurred in the
late stages of the dictatorial regime, immediately before and after 1975. Such struggles also
matched the world economic crisis that spanned from 1973 onwards (López and Rodríguez
2). The transitional phase as Spain moved toward a democratic regime opened up political
opportunities for all grassroots and labor movements, usually allied with various leftist
political parties, as they organized in order to increase street mobilizations and attain access
to state institutions. As observed by many scholars (Castells 215–216; Pickvance 206; Vil-
lasante et al. 20), urban and housing struggles, in particular, increased during the collapse
of the regime not only because of pressing housing needs but also because this form of
non-institutional claim-making was more tolerated by authorities than opposition by leftist
political parties. Once these parties were legalized and local (municipal) democratic elec-
tions were first held in 1979, activism severely declined. The partial institutionalization of
urban struggles was mainly represented by a transfer of activists to political parties and the
breakup of links between working-class and middle-class professionals (lawyers, architects,
economists, sociologists, etc.) who had supported those struggles. Nonetheless, the material
allocation of resources in formerly deprived areas and the many housing demands that were
met along the way are substantial victories that are worth remembering.
The neighborhood or “Citizen Movement” (Movimiento Ciudadano) was a paradig-
matic and powerful urban movement across most Spanish cities, especially active between
1976 and 1979. Among its many demands the availability and right to housing was fore-
most, but there were many others, ranging from access to better school facilities, the pres-
ervation of parks and the historic city centers, to the improvement of local democracy,
the possibility for self-organized cultural life in the neighborhoods, and increased citizen
participation. The housing question was a central one, but it was rarely isolated from the
others. Dwellers of public housing estates demanded repairs, regular maintenance and
even full reconstruction when needed. Education and health facilities, public transport and
even a water supply were requested by working-class buyers of housing units in privately
developed estates, usually located in the urban periphery. Protests against evictions and
displacement from the decaying parts of city centers were frequent too (Castells 228). The
movement successfully tackled most aspects of urban life and it did so by demanding a full
democratization of urban politics. In this regard, urban democracy meant both a direct
involvement of residents’ associations in policymaking and a fair redistribution of state
resources and welfare services.
Notwithstanding this all-encompassing focus of most neighborhood associations, a key
outstanding achievement was directly related to the housing question: the “remodelación
de barrios” [neighborhood redevelopment] program in Madrid, a massive redevelopment
operation of former shanty town and land-squatted areas as well as dilapidated public
housing estates. By the end of the 1980s roughly 48,000 new apartments were built, and
150,000 people were relocated to these new homes (“rehoused”) across 28 neighborhoods.
Most astonishingly, the activists took control of the resettlement programs, significantly

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co-designed the buildings and the rest of the urban layout, managing to stay in the same
neighborhoods where they dwelled before, and to secure public funding that allowed them
to pay no more than 10% of a households’ income (Villasante et al. 18, 133; Renes 169).
Rural migrants, qualified workers and also some Roma people were the main social compo-
nents of the rehoused population (Renes 156). Following endless negotiations by grassroots
activists and third parties with state and local authorities, the construction finally started in
1979 and brand-new neighborhoods were finished a decade later. This represented a true
challenge for a movement in its declining stages. Therefore, activists focused on “the man-
agement of what had been already conquered” (Renes 165), rather than on street protests
or other contentious actions. However, the economic crisis of the 1970s had a contradic-
tory effect. On the one hand, this enormous urban operation made urban developers and
construction companies unexpected allies to the activists’ demands, since public funding
helped the former to navigate the recession and keep their businesses afloat (Villasante
et al. 65–66). On the other hand, the beneficiaries who were able to privately own these
homes – in accordance with previous models of subsidized homeownership – could afford
the payments, but rising unemployment left these peripheral working-classes in a new state
of marginalization: The younger generation could not move out to live independently from
their parents, while drug trafficking, consumption and drug-associated crimes devastated
social life in these areas during the 1980s (Rodríguez 213–214). In addition, the bureau-
cratic management of local facilities weakened the relevance of the neighborhood associa-
tions in local democracy, which also made them less attractive for younger generations.

Radical Squatting Facing Neoliberal Globalization

(From the 1980s Onwards)
Informal settlements were not fully eradicated and kept growing both in Madrid’s metro-
politan area and in the outskirts of other Spanish cities. However, protests and grassroots
participation around this issue became gradually less frequent, isolated and was therefore
ignored by the authorities. The linkage with previous urban and housing struggles was
lost, and only some NGOs or small religious and activist groups supported these commu-
nities, mostly encompassing Roma people and immigrants from Romania, Morocco, and
elsewhere. Beginning in the 1980s, most land squatting policies entailed forced evictions,
spatial displacement, the criminalization of squatters, and partial and unstable accommo-
dation in social housing (Álvarez 15, Gonick 1233–1236). The ethnic divide, as well as
ingrained institutional racism and poverty, added to the disciplinary effect obtained with
the reproduction of slums and their eventual clearance: These unregulated spaces were seen
as a threat to the whole of society, so that with their eradication, speculation in the formal
housing market and precarious working conditions could remain unchallenged.
Hence, the racialized and poorest factions of the working class seldom continued with
the same housing struggles put in place by the native-born, internal migrants from a decade
before. This lack of continuity was due to the fragmentation of these social categories, par-
ticularly in relation to the most institutionalized neighborhood associations, but, above all,
it reflected the constraining power of state policies and capital during this period which, in
turn, shaped other emerging urban movements.
First of all, the aftereffects of the 1970s economic crisis were manifested in high unem-
ployment rates, especially for women and the younger workforce, as well as in industrial
restructuring taking place from the 1980s until the mid-1990s. Several economic reforms

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worsened the precarity of waged labor. Without expectations to become economically

independent, the younger generations and the poorest among the working classes faced a
persistent shortage of affordable housing. The acuteness of this situation escalated when
Spain joined the European Economic Community (the former designation of the European
Union) in 1986. According to Naredo, this political and economic integration facilitated
a massive surge of speculative flows of capital targeting the real estate sector and causing
an inflationary “bubble” (39, 104–110). Not only did the housing prices soar, but so did
the vacancy rate, especially for new construction and in touristic areas. Not the least prob-
lematic, housing policies did not change their previous inertia: Financial subsidies went to
homeowners and developers instead of increasing the social housing stock and facilitating
access to affordable rents.
The financialization of Spanish real estate has its main roots in this period. By the
mid-1990s, a second speculative bubble began to form and it grew until the 2008 global
financial crisis, when it spectacularly burst. The Spanish industrial restructuring and
decline was effectively hidden under the rug, thanks to reforms that privatized key stra-
tegic state-owned companies, boosted public investment in transport infrastructures, and
promoted mega-events and large urban development operations to keep attracting foreign
capital. Meanwhile, recently privatized Spanish firms also expanded overseas and mainly
took over privatized companies in Latin America, which also contributed toward fostering
internal urban development and redevelopment at unprecedented rates in both Spanish
cities and large tourist areas. Political corruption, mainly due to bribery related to con-
struction permits, also skyrocketed during this period, and exposure on the media and
some court trials (and governmental pardons) rendered corruption more visible than it had
been during the dictatorial period. In addition, the European institutions dictated neoliberal
policies that deregulated finances and other strategic sectors (including land use, energy,
and communications), outsourced public services and prevented public spending and the
maintenance of prior social benefits (such as pensions, unemployment, healthcare, etc.)
(López and Rodríguez 3–5; Martí-Costa and Tomás 2114). The downside of these neolib-
eral policies was seemingly mitigated with extremely low interest rates for loans. However,
the easy access to those loans led to an increasing indebtedness of homeowners, developers
and banks. With a weak industrial basis, economic growth relied on financial speculation,
massive construction and tourism-based businesses. All this placed the economy at risk of
imminent collapse. Despite the illusions of financialized private consumption by house-
holds – with easy financing often added to existing mortgage loans – during the golden
decade of macroeconomic growth (1997–2007), wages were low and some social sectors
faced hardships just to make ends meet – as was the case with the youth sector and the
seven million recently arrived international migrants, as well as non-property owners.
The most prominent reaction to this structural context came from the squatting move-
ment (“movimiento okupa”) that targeted empty premises in consolidated urban neighbor-
hoods rather than in the outskirts. Beyond some pioneering attempts to squat in buildings
during the late 1970s, the squatting movement emerged in full force by the mid-1980s
throughout most of Spain’s medium and large-sized cities. Its original social composition
composed of young people who had scant links to the previous citizen movement. This
new squatter version of a citizen movement has lasted more than three decades since its
inception, and it has widened the scope and diversity of its participants. This duration
is remarkable when compared to both previous and contemporaneous urban movements
of similar characteristics. This is not a surprise if we take into account the extraordinary

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rise of vacancy rates that were due to a long wave of urban speculation fostered by global
real estate investments and neoliberal or “entrepreneurial” governance. The renovation
of specific buildings and the gentrification of inner city and post-industrial areas often led
property developers to manage vacancies as a temporal strategy to yield higher profits in the
future. This circumstance opened spatial niches as opportunities for squatters who articu-
lated political discourses against these processes (see Figure 4.1) but also for those worse-off
households that had been excluded from the prevailing market conditions and which had
no access to social housing. The latter group focused more on their housing needs and their
activities were developed stealthily, because the 1995 criminalization of squatting made the
practice risky if detected. Conversely, although the most radical wing of the movement also
squatted for housing purposes, they became more publicly visible by means of promoting
self-managed squatted social centers (or CSOA, Centros Sociales Okupados y Autoges-
tionados) where countercultural activities, political campaigning, social gathering and the
cultivation of direct democracy took precedence (Martínez, “The Urban Politics” 31–39).
For these activists, both CSOAs and squatting as a form of alternative communal living
were fundamental steps in escalating their opposition to private property and capitalism.
The expansion of this recent form of urban squatting was inspired by and imitated strate-
gies already put in place by the previous urban movement. These included establishing tight
connections with many other social movements, voicing criticism against housing shortages
and real estate speculation, and generally articulating discourses around the concept of a
more democratic and grassroots-driven city. To some extent, Spanish squatters followed
similar autonomist and left-libertarian initiatives also present in other European countries

Figure 4.1 Banner “Stop Speculation: Occupation!” in a Squatted Social Center of Barcelona (2012).
Source: Miguel A. Martínez.

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 Citizens, Squatters, Homeowners and Tenants

such as Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Thus, squatted social centers became meeting
hubs and organizing strongholds for many other social movements, including the most rad-
ical branches of pacifism, feminism, environmentalism, anti-fascism, prisoner solidarity ini-
tiatives and global justice advocacy, although, interestingly, seldom organized labor unions.
These collaborations took place despite the institutionalization of a great deal of these other
social movements in that period – via public-private partnerships and outsourced services,
state sponsorship and collective bargaining (Martí-Costa and Tomás 2114). Compared to
the former citizen movement, the middle-class component of the squatting movement was
less an external support than a regular and active participant. The squatter movement also
counted with a substantial representation of working-class youth, as well as immigrants
and local residents, especially when squats were located in the peripheral neighborhoods or
municipalities in the outskirts of large metropolitan regions.
The okupa movement did not explicitly claim state-run housing policies but it devel-
oped its own housing practice by taking over unused properties without the owners’ con-
sent. This might be seen as insufficient given the limited numbers of squats in a context
of expanded construction, inflation of housing prices and commodification of urban life.
Hence, CSOAs were effective not only in housing some of the activists and individuals in
need who approached them but also by providing autonomous infrastructures that facili-
tated the social reproduction of the working-class, such as low-cost leisure alternatives.
CSOAs also created a milieu of grassroots political activism for thousands of activists,
participants, visitors and sympathizers (Martínez, “The Urban Politics” 37–39). This was
manifested, for example, in campaigns held against mega-events taking place in Barcelona
(the 1992 Olympics and the 2004 Forum of Cultures), but also during the 2003 anti-war
mobilizations, and a renewed smattering of housing protests (V de Vivienda); the same
attitude of resistance was visible during the “territorial defense” initiatives against tour-
istic gentrification and urban development (known as Salvem campaigns) of the mid- and
late-2000s (Díaz 186). The radical stance of this squatting movement also led to a refusal
of its legalization (its absorption into the mainstream political process), with some notable
exceptions, especially in the Basque Country.

Grassroots Responses to Housing Financialization (2010s)

Although the squatting movement kept operating as usual, the 2008 recession brought
about an upsurge of all forms of squatting across the country. The novelty of this wave of
squatting was its broad social spectrum, ranging from new activists joining the 15M upris-
ings in 2011 (sparked by the massive occupations of public squares in May of that year) and
the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) organization born in 2009 to finan-
cially insolvent homeowners, most of them former migrants. In addition to unused and
abandoned buildings acquired for speculative purposes, in the 2010s squatters massively
occupied apartments vacant due to eviction, bank-owned properties and even empty units
in the mismanaged and scarce social housing stock. By 2017, it was estimated that around
90,000 houses were squatted in, involving 300,000 people (BCN Obra Social 6). However,
the new political and economic cycle instigated various other forms of protests for housing
rights beyond the squatter movement.
By 2011 in Spain, the vacancy rate in residential houses reached 14% (3.5 million dwell-
ings) – or 28% (7.1 million dwellings) if we add second and holiday homes, which are
only temporarily occupied, if used at all. The unsustainable construction pace of the past

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decade, with a peak of 900,000 new units built in 2006 alone, was fully halted after 2008.
Conversely, the bankruptcy of construction companies and saving banks and the drastic
collapse of employment to jobless rates above 20% led to the most dramatic wave of home
evictions ever experienced. It is estimated that this amounted to a yearly average of 80,000
evictions between 2009 and 2015 (Martínez, “Bitter wins”), and lower, but still unaccep-
table figures in subsequent years (an average of 30,000 evictions per year between 2016
and 2019, according to the CGPJ). There are no official figures for estimating “housing
exclusion” in Spain, but a study conducted by FEANTSA concluded that 1.7% (around
800,000 people) was subject to “severe housing deprivation,” 5.4% (around 2.5 million
inhabitants) lived in overcrowded households and 5.2% (equivalent to 2.4 million citizens)
were in mortgage or rent arrears by 2016.
The 2008 shock led to more aggressive neoliberal and austerity policies following the
European and International Monetary Fund (IMF) institutions’ forcible rulings. Cuts in pub-
lic services, more reforms of the labor markets and retirement schemes, wage freezes and
reductions and, above all, a full restructuring of the financial sector were among the most
significant imposed changes. Even the Spanish Constitution was modified in 2011, with the
conformity of the two major political parties, in order to prioritize the satisfaction of credi-
tors’ returns in the public expenditures over social needs and welfare. That intervention
notwithstanding, the GDP plummeted to a –4% inter-annual rate in 2009 after a decade
of almost 4% yearly growth (a recovery was only experienced after 2015), which led to a
dangerous, albeit artificially blown up, sovereign debt. Corruption scandals especially in the
construction sector were regularly covered by the media, although hardly ever punished by
the courts. In addition to unemployment, casualization, precariousness and the worsening of
working conditions that devastated economic and social life, there was a subsequent increase
of poverty rates and out-migration flows of qualified workers adding to the country’s woes.
However, capitalists’ profits found a shortcut to preserve business as usual. As López and
Rodríguez argued, “the sovereign-debt crises . . . must be seen as providing an enormous
business opportunity for the big European – German, French and British – banks, the main
holders of the European countries’ sovereign bonds . . . at a time when it was impossible for
financial profits in the private and household sectors to return to their pre-crisis levels” (11).
A striking capitalist development from this period was the hegemonic recourse to adopt-
ing increasingly sophisticated financialization instruments. On the one hand, the bailout of
financial entities consisted on their “bankarization” and “sanitization” (Vives-Miró). The
first term refers to the forced merging of saving banks and their conversion into commer-
cial banks. To achieve their sanitization and get rid of so-called toxic assets (mainly those
real estate properties whose owners defaulted on their mortgages), the state aided banks
with a massive influx of capital – around € 80,000 million. In addition, the state, again
giving way under the pressure of the EU, set up an “asset management company” named
SAREB in order to absorb the non-performing loan portfolios and to repossess housing,
land and other property assets from the bailed out financial companies. SAREB acquired
these assets at above-market values; it tried to sell them out to international investors (vul-
ture funds) at below market prices, and the Spanish state remained the warrantor of all
its losses (Gabarre). Most of the properties managed by the SAREB had been subjected
to primary home evictions. Starting in 2013, the recovery of real estate speculation was
fostered not only by the bargain sales of the SAREB investments to foreign funds, but also
by the privatization of social housing in landmark urban areas such as Madrid and Bar-
celona. The appeal to foreign capital was granted by offering packages of social housing

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units at much lower market prices to global corporate landlords and investment banking
giants such as Blackstone and Goldman Sachs (Gil and Martínez). To reinforce the call, the
central government also deregulated real estate investment trusts (REITs) by granting them
various benefits such as the cancellation of their corporate tax, which was set at a 19%
rate before (García-Lamarca). The confidence of capitalists and their prospects to making
profits were additionally confirmed by the deregulation of the urban rental law. The main
amendment reduced the minimum period of rental contracts to three years, whereas tenants
had enjoyed a slightly more secure five years prior. The combination of the massive transfer
of public resources (as unconditional loans and bargain property-packages) to financial
for-profit companies, the expulsion of impoverished homeowners from their repossessed
homes and tenants due to rapacious rent increases, and the deregulation of REITS and rent-
als had an effective outcome: The recovery of speculation-driven economic growth, or the
emergence of a new housing bubble.
Housing movements in this period were led by the PAH, a group characterized by its
opposition to home repossessions. This organization called for direct action and on-site
blockades of evictions (see Figure 4.2), a form of resistance that became a popular tool in
their protest repertoire during the peak of the movement (2011–2015).
They also initiated legislative changes and lobbied local and regional governments to
back their demands. PAH campaigns included the squatting of bailout, bank-owned prop-
erties, especially if these had been transferred to the SAREB. However, this time around,
squatting was more a protest tactic than a mobilization strategy (Martínez, “Squatters”
147). Squats for housing purposes rarely included public activities such as talks, concerts
or theatre as had been and was still the case in self-managed social centers. The legalization
of housing squats or the relocation of squatters to dwellings with affordable rents was a

Figure 4.2 Eviction Blockade by PAH Members in Madrid (2019).

Source: Miguel A. Martínez.

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priority for the PAH. A powerful argument deployed by the PAH as part of their political
discourse was to claim that the occupied properties actually were a kind of “social hous-
ing,” justified by the fact that the state had bailed out banks with public funds, leaving
impoverished households behind, homeless and indebted for life. Due to non-mandatory,
non-recourse debts, evicted homeowners still had to keep paying their mortgage loans
(Martínez, “Bitter wins” 1599). In this respect, the PAH represented a straightforward,
anti-financialization grassroots organization (Rolnik 275). It defended the victims of an
extremely financialized housing sector, and it opposed the corporate and political drivers
of that very system. Notably, the PAH was also led by women, while migrants and Roma
people also became a substantial constituency of their activism.
The PAH espoused a self-help and mutual-aid approach (as an organization that was
autonomous from political parties) as well as civil disobedience strategies, but combined
these with less contentious negotiations with state institutions and banks. These joint prac-
tices of radicalism and pragmatism made the organization a key representative and ally
of the multiple struggles enacted by the 15M movement (Flesher 181–199). These battles
included workers’ strikes, lawsuits against the main beneficiary of the bailout (the Bankia
bank) and against the privatization of public hospitals, campaigns to reverse the cuts in
public education and health services, occupations of public squares, disclosures of politi-
cal corruption, various feminist initiatives, fomenting independent media, establishing new
squatted social centers and supporting many sorts of cultural groups. All these activities
were articulated critical stances towards the new authoritarian neoliberalism ruled by the
EU and IMF institutions, in collusion with the Spanish government and international capi-
tal. The resistance against home evictions established solidarity practices that lasted even
during the emergence of a second housing financialization in 2013, when the pressure on
homeowners overlapped with and was eventually outnumbered by home renter evictions.
International vulture funds operating as REITs and short-rental platform corporations
such as Airbnb created grievances for all those tenants unable to bear the high rent increases
set in motion by the last wave of housing financialization. The PAH was still busy with its
support for thousands of broken homeowners, but its activist experience paved the way
for the creation of tenants’ unions (see Figure 4.3). The first ones in Madrid and Barcelona
were established in 2017, and others followed suit.
Some PAH, 15M and squatting activists joined the tenants’ unions too as a way to cope
with the challenges posed by the capitalist conjuncture in the mid- and late 2010s, let alone
by the 2020 pandemic. The campaigns against Blackstone, for example, were the most
prominent struggle these unions have undertaken so far. This equity firm became the largest
landlord in Spain by 2017, owning approximately 30,000 housing units, which represent
20% out of its real estate assets worldwide (Doncel, Ruiz). Legal trials, negotiations, alli-
ances with political parties and self-organized resistance against being forced to leave the
dwellings once the rental contracts expired were the main resistance strategies deployed
by these campaigns. In one case (Raval versus Blackstone) activists also launched a street
festival with concerts, talks and workshops over the two-week-long duration of the evic-
tion threat. Activists also involved local and regional authorities in the conflict, calling for
international actions of solidarity, and even publicly shamed the CEO of Blackstone in
Barcelona (Martínez and Gil). Finally, the spokespersons for tenant unions were regularly
present in mass media events and attended numerous hearings with the government in
order to modify the urban rental law and to achieve a general rental regulation, a victory
which was won in Catalonia on September 2020.

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 Citizens, Squatters, Homeowners and Tenants

Figure 4.3 Public Event Organized by the Madrid Tenants’ Union (2019).
Source: Miguel A. Martínez.

Conclusion
The title of this chapter might give a wrong impression: that those sectors carrying out
housing struggles have no agency and that those struggles are exclusively shaped by exter-
nal forces. This would lead to a deterministic explanation of the “long-term temporal-
ity” of social movements (McAdam and Sewell 112). However, I first argued that housing
struggles in Spain have been essential collective and civic actions in promoting democra-
tization and confronting the weaknesses of liberal democracy over the last half a century.
Remarkably, their most prominent expressions have been always associated or colligated
with other social movements as part of a “medium-term temporal” protest wave. It is
within this magma that the genuine and autonomous practices of grassroots democracy
unfolded and were articulated in ways that claimed the rights to welfare, equality and
human dignity – insofar as state authorities fell short in their protection of the popula-
tion. The core of my analysis is that the dominant political and economic actors of each
period studied here set the agenda, generated the grievances and modified, from time to
time, some of the structural parameters that constrained the life of most people, especially
the working-class. Furthermore, in my view “middle-term” temporalities must include the
“alternation of growth and crisis” and the “cross-class coalitions of the victims” of the poli-
cies of each period (Della Porta 7, 40). Hence, housing movements were forced to devise
their protest strategies and campaigns accordingly. Activists needed to interpret both the
long-term and short-term contextual conditions in which they operated and made their

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strategic choices. These choices not only focused on the movement’s aspirations but also
had to take into account hegemonic discourses and policies, economic cycles and, not least,
the social resources available for mobilizing their constituencies.
If structural constraints (shown by the strong top-down arrows in Figure 4.4) cannot
fully determine the outcomes of domination beforehand, this is because acts of resistance
(the dotted bottom-up arrows in the same figure) scrutinize and seize the opportunities to
push forward their claim-making within the cracks in the system that they may identify or
discover while protesting. Against a deterministic interpretation of this approach, Barker
and others suggest that movements’ reactions need to be nuanced by understanding their
relationship with “global power relations,” class and the links with “struggles in different
socio-spatial arenas” (5, 7).
My previous analysis has shown that the constraints from capitalist development and
shifting policies in Spain since the 1960s and 1970s were manifested in cycles of economic
growth and crisis as well as increasing forms of urban neoliberalization and financializa-
tion (Mayer 64–69). Based on the existing literature about the Spanish political economy,
I have identified four structural components (rather than an institutional path-dependency)
along all the cycles, namely: 1) the increasing promotion of homeownership (even through

Figure 4.4 
Changing Structural Contexts and Housing Movements’ Responses in Spain
(1950s–2020s).
Source: Miguel A. Martínez.

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 Citizens, Squatters, Homeowners and Tenants

state-subsidized housing), 2) disinvestment and also privatization of social housing, 3) a

persistent shortage of social housing and 4) an economic specialization in tourism and the
construction sectors to the detriment of other industrial bases. Despite the strong wave of
labor struggles in coalition with urban movements during the 1970s that confronted the
economic crisis and the main social deficits of a rapid urbanization process, the Spanish
working-class did not become so massively mobilized around the housing question again
until the 2008 crisis.
Significantly, the duration of the examined movements was very different. While the first
mobilization peak barely lasted three years (1976–79), which is similar to the 2011–14
protests in another context of economic crisis, the squatting movement covers a longer
period of development over more than three decades and with longer peaks of heated con-
flict (1992–2000, 2006–10, with some variations across cities, but also revived in parallel
to the 15M movement and propelled by it in the following years). The radical squatting
movement filled a vacuum during the decline of previous urban and housing movements,
developed new socio-political infrastructures for many other social movements (such as
self-managed social centers) and kept high level of resistance against real estate specula-
tion, gentrification, precarity and neoliberal policies. This occurred in a period of economic
growth (with the exception of the 1991–3 crisis) that can be characterized as “fictional”
(i.e. financialized, based on increasing indebtedness and power of finances), racialized (with
the addition of roughly seven million cheap migrant laborers into the workforce) and gen-
dered capitalism (due to the subaltern position held by women in the labor market, in
addition to their experience of many other forms of violence). However, radical squatting
proved to be useful for furthering the growth of housing movements that were more prone
to resort to squatting experiences and actions when necessary than movements that pre-
ceded them in the 1970s (albeit some key occupations were not rare at that time either).
Finally, the housing movements of the last decade, mainly initiated in 2011, borrow some
of the well-established modular tactics of protest such as squatting but had to target their
most explicit opponents (banks and vulture funds) by deploying other tactics too and,
above all, by strategically responding to the most urgent challenges – home evictions and
rent increases – inflicted by capitalist corporations onto large sectors of the working class.

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 5
THE CULTURAL ECOLOGY OF
TOURISM
Life-Capital Conflict in Post-2008 Spain

Luis I. Prádanos

Introduction
This chapter studies the relations among tourist practices, discourses, and infrastructures
in post-2008 Spain.1 Most tourist projects involve the development of massive socioec-
ologically disrupting infrastructures that are celebrated as exemplar cases of prosperous
urban futures before and during their development. These projects often result in dysfunc-
tional spaces prone to social and ecological catastrophe. A number of counterhegemonic
cultural manifestations denounce how these tourism-related projects trigger undesirable
urban transformations for many disenfranchised locals. This chapter combines cultural
studies and urban political ecology to show how the dominant frames around tourism in
Spain conceal the many negative consequences set into motion by their infrastructures. By
focusing on the destructive metabolism of tourism, counterhegemonic cultural manifesta-
tions expose and subvert these rhetorical strategies and generate effective counternarratives.
Under critical scrutiny, tourism can be understood and reframed as another capitalist strat-
egy that accelerates social inequality and biological extinction.
The great expansion of global tourism during the last decade has been a preferred capi-
talist strategy to continue accumulation processes after the 2008 financial crisis (Murray,
Yrigoy and Blázquez-Salom). During the last decade, the number of international tourists
has skyrocketed – from 916 million in 2008 to 1,400 in 2018 – and “[s]ince 2012 tourism
trends speeded up as a result of rampant growth in available holiday rental driven by online
platforms” (Valdivielso and Moranta 1877). This drastic expansion of an industry with
obvious links to real estate speculation has helped capitalists to navigate (and massively
profit from) the effects of the 2008 real estate crash by creating a tourism bubble that sud-
denly burst with the emergence of the 2020–21 global pandemic. This disruption is having
dramatic socioeconomic consequences in Spain given its addiction to tourism’s cash-flow
(Spain received almost 84 million tourists in 2019). To rescue the tourist economy, Spain
and other European states have had to bail out tourism-related corporations and pour mas-
sive amounts of public money into private enterprises.
Tourism was already a highly unstable and unsustainable economic sector before the
arrival of the pandemic. Spain’s hyper-dependency on this industry, constituting roughly

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-6
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

13% of its GDP, has diminished the possibility of evolving a more resilient, sustainable,
innovative, just, and diversified economic culture able to navigate the many unfolding crises
and disruptions brought about by the Capitalocene (for which COVID-19 is just a small
component, when compared to the expected impacts from climate change, peak-oil, and
biological impoverishment). As I write (August 2021), the Spanish state not only lacks
a coherent plan for reducing its unsustainable dependency on tourism, but has instead
opened up the country to foreign tourism in the middle of a global pandemic, and some
regions with conservative administrations (e.g., Andalusia and Murcia) are rapidly revers-
ing environmental regulations to facilitate the expansion of tourist infrastructures in eco-
logically sensitive sites. Sadly, these regions are also severely impacted by climate change
in terms of hydric stress and desertification. The aforementioned projects make these issues
even worse.
The dominant narrative that celebrates tourism as an economic and social panacea asso-
ciated with progress and modernization has been an important element within the prefabri-
cated consensus of the Spanish – and global – capitalist elites from Francoist desarrollismo
(developmentalism) to the present. This narrative has been significantly challenged during
the last decade due to a number of factors related to the massive increase of the global tour-
ism sector and the difficulty to hide its omnipresent negative social and ecological impacts.
While global tourism experienced an unprecedented growth in the decade following 2008,
several social movements and community organizations articulated powerful counterhe-
gemonic narratives to challenge the dominant discourse about tourism’s social desirability
and ecological viability. These resistance movements are currently forcing the “quiebra del
consenso social sobre monocultivo turístico” (“the fracture of the social consensus about
tourism monoculture”) in some Spanish regions (Pallicer Mateu and Blázquez Salom 88).
Proliferating critical frames of tourism are destabilizing the dominant imaginary as they are
gaining increased popularity and broad public attention. The turning point was probably
reached during the “2014–2019 period, when the tourism debate shifted to overtourism
and degrowth” (Valdivielso and Moranta 1878).
The worldwide pandemic has added certain nuance to both the hegemonic discourse
about tourism and the struggle to contest it. It has made visible the deadly trap of tourism
dependency in a pandemic context – the choice to either open the country to tourism and
jeopardize public health and environment or maintain restrictions while a key economic
sector diminishes. This conundrum exemplified the life-capital conflict inherent to the dom-
inant economic culture of global capitalism in which the structural addiction to economic
growth clashes with the biophysical limits of planet Earth (Pérez-Orozco).

Spanish Cultural Studies and Tourism

Cultural historians have remarked on the importance of tourism in shaping discourses and
ideologies about Spanish regional and national identities. Dating back to Francoist desar-
rollismo and its use of tourism as a strategy for international legitimization, the Span-
ish state has persistently shaped tourism discourses and infrastructures in tandem with
neoliberal values and the normalization of consumerism (Crumbaugh; Afinoguénova and
Martí-Olivella, Pack). These officially sanctioned changes included a process of cultural
depolitization and the deactivation of radical cultural dissent (Labrador Méndez). Some
consequences are the commodification of leisure time; unsustainable changes in the food
system such as food de-culturation, touristification, industrialization, and an increase in

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meat consumption (Afinoguénova, “Una gastrocracia”); migration flows related to sexual

work and precarious labor (Martí-Olivella); a devaluation of subsistence economies and a
redefinition of “quality of life” (Afinoguénova, “Tourism and Quality of Life”); the deac-
tivation of communal ways of organizing social reproduction; and so on. Spanish cultural
scholars problematize “official triumphant reports of the successes of Spanish tourism by
addressing the intrinsic link between tourism, the organization of economic and cultural
fields of modernity, and Spanish identity” (Afinoguénova and Martí-Olivella xv).
Most cultural scholars studying tourism in Spain have focused on the desarrollismo
as well as the transición periods (Afinoguénova and Martí-Olivella; Crumbaugh; Pack;
Vilarós; Fuentes Vega). Nonetheless, the neoliberal rationality that was infused into Span-
ish culture via the prefabricated tourism consensus during these periods was subsequently
nourished and reinforced – but seldomly debated publicly, let alone challenged – by all
Spanish administrations regardless of their ideological affiliations until the present moment.
There is a clear continuity in the Spanish tourism consensus by elites that can be traced
back from Francoist technocrats and Manuel Fraga’s years as Minister of Information and
Tourism, to the widely celebrated 1992 international macroevents (Seville Expo and Barce-
lona Olympics), to the ongoing promotion of the Marca España (Spain Brand) today. Only
recently, some municipal administrations including Barcelona and Madrid’s have explicitly
targeted overtourism by framing it as an urban problem and implementing specific policies
to limit its proliferation.
Environmental historians have also helped to illuminate the role of Francoism in orches-
trating the development of toxic tourist infrastructures and its unsustainable practices in
land use, waste management, energy regimes, and cultural values. These shifts contributed
to the massive depletion of the Spanish environment. Subsequently, the country carries an
ecological footprint that has grown more than three-fold since 1950, grossly overshooting
its current territorial biocapacity (Carpintero).
These contributions by cultural scholars have inserted a critical angle to tourism studies,
an academic field with a problematic history. At least in Spain, this field of study developed
under the Francoist regime – sponsored by the state – as a tool to manage and promote
tourism, not to question or criticize it (Afinoguénova and Martí-Olivella xx–xxi). Due to its
authoritarian origin, it is crucial to politicize this field if it is going to help us understand the
social, economic, environmental, and cultural nuances related to Spanish tourism. Politi-
cizing tourism studies entails making tourism discourses and practices a broad and public
matter of concern from below rather than a prefabricated consensus from above. Although
there is a long history of activism that challenges the official narratives about tourism, it is
only during the last years that a “tourism degrowth” agenda is gaining significant popular
support (Fletcher et al.).
The aforementioned cultural turn within tourism studies marks one step in the right
direction, as it brought critical attention to the ways in which representations and dis-
courses about Spanish tourism have been significantly transformed by cultural norms as
well as national and regional contested stereotypes and identities, as well as how these same
discourses and representations were often orchestrated by powerful institutions through
a prefabricated consensus that always favors the interest of the political and economic
elite (Crumbaugh; Pack; Vilarós). However, these critical interventions by cultural scholars
tend to ignore or overlook the metabolism of tourism, namely the social and ecological
consequences of the massive flows of materials and energy mobilized by the industry. For
this reason, a convergence of cultural studies and urban political ecology is fundamental

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to understand the complexity of tourism and its key role in promoting the unsustainable
culture of global capitalism and its neoliberal rationality in the Euro-Mediterranean region.
Urban political ecology provides the most sophisticated conceptual tools to politicize
tourism, expose the environmental conflicts it generates, and study the perverse sociospatial
inequalities exacerbated by its urban transformations. An urban environmental cultural
studies approach to tourism can simultaneously assemble several critical angles brought
about by the spatial, environmental, and urban turns in the humanities. As this chapter sug-
gests, this convergence of approaches helps to re-examine the drastic cultural and ecological
changes of the last decades in Spain and the central role played by tourism in shaping them.

The Urban Political Ecology of Tourism

In this section, I will briefly introduce what I consider to be the most relevant critical urban
concepts needed to understand the political ecology of tourism in Spain, including, “the
urban growth machine” as described by critical urban scholars John R. Logan and Harvey
Molotch, as well as Ivan Murray’s work on the connections between Spanish tourism and
the geographies of global capitalism, and the notion of “operational landscapes” developed
by Neil Brenner and his collaborators. These theoretical tools are necessary for analyzing
the changing cultural ecologies of Spain from desarrollismo to the present, as they expose
the role of tourism as a powerful strategy for spurring the urbanization of capital and
accelerating uneven development through interurban competition and the branding and
commodification of cities, regions, and nations (Fletcher “Sustaining”).
In an already classic essay on urban theory, Logan and Molotch explain how cities
have become economic growth machines to serve the accumulation strategies of capitalist
elites at the cost of their residents’ wellbeing (202). Most urban growth projects trans-
fer public wealth from the local communities to global economic elites while exacerbat-
ing existing social, economic, and environmental urban problems or creating new ones
(205). Even the common justification for these projects – the affirmation that they create
jobs – is debunked by Logan and Molotch (196). In most cases, neoliberal urban growth
projects actually destroy reliable careers and substitute them with precarious and unstable
jobs. Until recently, these counterproductive urban growth strategies were rarely debated
publicly or seriously challenged in Spain – except in small activists’ circles – as they were
part of the unquestioned dominant urban growth imaginary ingrained in capitalist and
consumerist societies. Actually, these socioecologically disastrous developments were usu-
ally celebrated in popular discourses because the growth objectives of the economic elites
were artificially equated with civic pride by corporate media (Logan and Molotch 167–68).
This uncritical civic pride was embraced during the 1992 macro-events and persists today
through the Marca España. However, this pro-growth prefabricated consensus and the
tourism consensus attached to it, has been increasingly challenged by counterhegemonic
discourses that emerged after 2008 (Prádanos, Postgrowth).
Although Logan and Molotch do not emphasize tourism specifically, tourist develop-
ments are obviously effective triggers for the urban growth machine as well as accelerators
for inter-urban competition in the context of the ongoing global urbanization of capital.
As such, Logan and Molotch’s critique of urban growth fully applies to tourism, including
the questioning of the assumption that this industry creates jobs and local prosperity. Actu-
ally, when a community becomes overdependent on the monoculture of tourism, it tends to
lose many traditional jobs not serving the tourism sector. In addition, the capital mobilized

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by tourism rarely benefits local communities. Rather, most profits are quickly diverted to
multinational corporations operating from financial havens to avoid regulations and taxes.
Despite this, the host communities often provide, maintain, and pay for the expensive logis-
tic infrastructures needed by the tourist industry.
Ivan Murray’s research has focused extensively on the political ecology of tourism in
the Balearic Islands in particular and Spain in general. His work compellingly shows that
tourist, real estate, and financial capitals are interlinked, and that tourism has become one
of the main motors for global capitalism (Murray and Cañada). Thus, tourism is a crucial
force in promoting neoliberal urbanization and its associated cultural values. “Tourism
sells the uneven development generated by capitalism” and exacerbates the ecological and
inequality crises (Fletcher, “Tours caníbales” 28–30). Murray asserts that there is an inher-
ent link between the production of tourist spaces and the unequal ecological exchanges on
which geographies of colonialism and capitalism always depend (119). He recognizes that
tourism is a material- and energy-intensive activity and societies that depend on it are highly
vulnerable because of their double dependency on flows coming from the exterior, including
energy and materials, and tourists (120). These flows cannot be controlled by local com-
munities and could indeed be abruptly interrupted or discontinued at any time due to a
variety of unpredictable geopolitical, environmental, and economic factors (COVID-19 is a
perfect example). Murray claims that dense tourist spaces are social laboratories in which
the contradictions of capital are intensified as enormous inequalities coincide within the
same space and time (120–21).
Neil Brenner and his collaborators, including Nikos Katsikis, have also developed critical
urban concepts essential to understand the intrinsic relation between the planetary urbaniza-
tion of capital and tourism. This is especially relevant for Spain, as its urban development
is a paradigmatic example of “the unevenly articulated, crisis-prone urbanization pro-
cess” of “tourist infrastructural investment and real estate speculation” that dominates the
Euro-Mediterranean region (Brenner and Katsikis, “Is the Mediterranean Urban?” 454–55).
In “Operational Landscapes. Hinterlands of the Capitalocene,” Brenner and Katsikis
affirm that the urbanization process has a global socioecological metabolism that drasti-
cally transforms not only the spaces where cities are located but all of the biosphere, includ-
ing “supply zones, impact zones, sacrifice zones, logistic corridors” (24). The urbanization
process entails the “operationalization of the entire planet, including terrestrial, subterra-
nean, fluvial, oceanic and atmospheric space, to serve an accelerating, intensifying process
of industrial urban development” (Critique of Urbanization 200). Given that “cities are not
self-propelled” but “supported by diverse metabolic inputs (labor, materials, fuel, water,
food) and engender a range of metabolic byproducts (waste, pollution, carbon), the vast
majority of which are produced within and, eventually, absorbed back into non-city zones,”
Brenner and Katsikis encourage urban scholars to abandon the city-centric approach that
has dominated the field during the last decades and focus instead on the metabolism of
the urban process (“Operational Landscapes” 25). I believe such a framework should be
deployed when analyzing Spanish tourism and the massive hinterlands, coastal areas and
operational landscapes on which it depends. Spanish tourism is an important part of the
socioecological metabolism of global capital in part because it depends on the operation-
alization of the entire Spanish territory (and the entire biosphere) to support its activities
and infrastructures. Furthermore, in a neocolonial turn, some Spanish tourist corporations
that flourished under Francoism subsequently became central players in the development of
tourism in Latin America (Pallicer Mateu and Blázquez Salom 89; Murray 122).

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The working hypothesis I proposed for Spanish urban cultural manifestations in gen-
eral applies to cultural expressions related to tourism in particular: “The less attention to
the inflows and outflows of energy, materials, nutrients, and labor that support the urban
fabric and life depicted in the cultural manifestation, the more subservient it is, consciously
or not, to the perpetuation of the cultural hegemony and its unsustainable growth regime”
(Prádanos, “Energy Humanities” 32). It is indeed difficult to find any hegemonic cultural
expression related to tourism in Spain that recognizes, even marginally, the operational
landscapes on which this activity depends. Mainstream tourism discourses, as most cultural
manifestations attuned to the dominant imaginary, are insensitive and blind to the biophys-
ical reality that makes tourism possible. State and corporate actors frame tourism as if its
infrastructures were magically self-propelled and self-maintained, by completely ignoring
all its sources of nourishment. The darker side of tourism is always overlooked in these
discourses. Many examples of this commonplace uncritical framing can be found every-
where within the TURESPAÑA website in which the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tour-
ism promotes marketing campaigns of Spain as a global tourist destination. Another good
example is a recent video, Spain for Sure, disseminated to encourage international tourism
in Spain after the reopening of its borders in July 2020. The video features several Spanish
celebrities, mostly chefs and athletes, assuring the viewer that Spain is a safe place to visit
while enumerating various unproblematized stereotypes about Spanish culture. Unsurpris-
ingly, the video does not recognize the many social and ecological downsides derived from
overtourism. On the contrary, celebrity athletes Rafael Nadal and Fernando Alonso cheer-
fully state that last year Spain received 84 million tourists, following the dominant simplis-
tic assumption that more is always better. Disturbingly, all these discourses erase the fact
that the average consumption of water and energy, as well as the production of waste, of
the average tourist is much higher (from 3 to 5 times higher) than that of local residents.
Given the fact that Spain is one of the most hydraulically stressed and fossil fuel-dependent
European countries, receiving 84 million water and energy devouring tourists has devastat-
ing consequences.

Critical Infrastructure Studies

To further examine the cultural ecology of tourism infrastructures and metabolic flows,
Spanish cultural studies could also incorporate some insights from critical infrastructure
studies. Any modern infrastructure that is implemented in any territory entails a long-term
material commitment with significant cultural, economic, social, and ecological impacts:
“A building is not an end in itself. A building conditions and transforms the human experi-
ence of reality . . . it frames, structures, articulates, links, separates and unites, enables and
prohibits” (Pallasmaa qtd. in Escobar 39). Given the long-term conditioning of modern
infrastructures, all tourist projects should be publicly debated in a broadly informed discus-
sion by all affected parties to decide their desirability. The debate should include where the
energy to support the proposed infrastructure would come from and where its waste would
go, who would maintain these metabolic flows and how, who would benefit from the newly
configured space and who would be excluded from it or pay for its costs. The critical ques-
tion remains, would a given tourist project support or diminish the conditions of possibility
for urban spaces that are socially desirable and ecologically sound?
Infrastructure forms an ecology with a metabolism and, as such, its functioning depends
on operational landscapes located somewhere else that need to be accounted for. Therefore,

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it is important to resist the infrastructure trap typical of neoliberal tourist projects that
promise jobs and prosperity and only deliver displacements, environmental degradation,
social corrosion, unmanageable waste, municipal debt, and expensive infrastructure that
the local communities will have to pay and maintain for decades. Given the long temporali-
ties associated with tourist macrostructures, future generations will likely be impacted by
their long-term toxicities.
Another critical angle on infrastructure entails the exploration of how different groups
experience the urban transformations generated by tourist overdevelopment. Infrastruc-
tures “enable one set of possibilities while disabling another, equally plausible one” (Martin
x–xi), so it is not enough to discuss the contemporary appropriateness of a given tourist
project, but also what urban futures it will enable if materialized and which ones it will ren-
der impossible. These futuristic critical speculations can reflect multispecies and intergener-
ational concerns. Consider regions like central and southern Spain that suffer from extreme
hydric stress and dependency on imported fossil fuel. Will new tourist developments, such
as the Marina Isla de Valdecañas project in Extremadura, make the region more resilient
to climate change and peak-oil crises? Or will they further the dependency on resources
that will certainly become more difficult and expensive to secure in the near future? If these
issues are considered critically, energy and water devouring tourist developments can no
longer be framed as sources of urban prosperity, but as necrotic infrastructural traps that
will destine several generations of humans and nonhumans to a precarious – even deadly
or unviable – socioecological future. Under these critical framings, tourist infrastructures
are clearly perceived as specific manifestations of the “defuturing effects of modern design”
(Escobar 16).

Making Visible the Cheapening Strategies of Tourism

According to Raj Patel and Jason Moore, capitalism thrives by putting nature to work as
cheaply as possible: “Cheap is a strategy, a practice, a violence that mobilizes all kinds of
work – human and animal, botanical and geological – with as little compensation as pos-
sible” (22). Official tourism discourses and practices exacerbate while concealing these
cheapening strategies regarding nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and life. When
these practices are made visible, neoliberal tourist infrastructures are clearly perceived as
triggers of aberrant urban metabolisms that massively increase inequality and destroy the
web of life.
Currently, tourism developments are increasingly framed as acts of extractivism, as both
tourism and extractivism mobilize the same neocolonial, racist, and patriarchal logics and
their disproportionate metabolisms have comparable destructive consequences. Tourist
macro-developments, like other extractivist sites, create deleterious neocolonial ecologies
because, as Anthony Carrigan points out, “There are many ties between tourism and dis-
aster” (274) and “tourism-related dispossession” is a common practice in many regions
impoverished by colonial and neocolonial asymmetrical power relations (287–288).
Many social movements, critical media outlets, and artistic manifestations are currently
exposing how Spanish tourism could be considered a neocolonial extractivist ecology made
possible by the cheapening strategy described by Patel and Moore. Tourism, like all capi-
talist ecologies, is supported by the “unpaid work of women, nature, and colonies” and,
as such, “worker exploitation is bound together with the appropriation of extrahuman
nature and unpaid work of care” (Patel and Moore 110). The Kellys, a labor movement of

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housekeepers that started a few years ago in several Spanish regions, is currently making
visible the scale of the exploitation of women workers by the tourism industry. In Las que
limpian los hoteles (2015), Ernest Cañada offers a vivid portrait of the intense exploitation
suffered by housekeepers, many of them immigrants. The spatial inequality and uneven
development generated by capitalism is what makes global tourism possible and forces
labor migration. Many times, both processes are highly interdependent. This dialectic of
tourism and immigration is made visible, for instance, in the Barcelona depicted by the film
Biutiful (2010, González Iñárritu). The movie also shows the simultaneous depletion suf-
fered by humans and nonhumans in the dark ecology of one of the most touristified cities
in Europe (Beilin 91–98). Migratory movements and environmental conflict are all exacer-
bated – when not directly triggered – by the operational landscapes of global tourism.
Many recent cultural manifestations expose tourism appropriation and destruction
of extrahuman nature. Crematorio (2007) and En la orilla (2013), two novels by Rafael
Chirbes, could be interpreted as allegories of the socioecologically destructive metabolism
of tourist urban developments in the Spanish Mediterranean coast (Prádanos, “Energy
Humanities” 33). Similarly, a number of political cartoons also expose the aberrant metab-
olisms and operational landscapes of the neoliberal urban development of which tourism is
a part. Brieva produced some of the most impactful vignettes in this regard (see Figure 5.1).
By embracing the frames brought about by urban political ecology, all these counter-
cultural manifestations depict tourism not as a path to urban prosperity, but as a violent

Figure 5.1 “Próximamente el mundo” (“Arriving Soon: The World”) by Miguel Brieva.
Source: Courtesy of Miguel Brieva.

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capitalist strategy to cheapen and deplete everything in order to facilitate capital accumula-
tion. A number of collectives and organizations in the most touristified cities in Spain are
also embracing these frames to demand a de-touristification of their urban spaces. Some
examples include Assemblea de Barris per un Turisme Sostenible (Neighborhood Assembly
for Sustainable Tourism) in Barcelona; Stop Hotel in Lavapiés, Madrid; and Ciutat per a
qui l’habita, no per a qui la visita (The City for its Inhabitants, not for its Visitors) in Palma.
In “the Balearic Islands, one of the most touristified regions on the planet,” discourses
on tourism degrowth have been rapidly emerging and contributing to challenge the domi-
nant imaginary during the past decade (Valdivielso and Moranta 1876). It is in this con-
text that some of the most creative countercultural manifestations regarding tourism have
emerged. The most paradigmatic example is perhaps the publication Tot Inclòs (All Inclu-
sive; 2014–2017), whose main goal is to denounce the enormous harm that tourism causes
to the Balearic Islands. The satirical illustrations appearing in the front cover of its four
issues are all brilliant visualizations of the tourism’s disturbing metabolism (see Figure 5.2).
In this vein, cultural scholar Mercè Picornell compellingly shows how a number of artivists
in Mallorca subvert the typical tourist postcard to expose the negative social and ecological
consequences of tourism on the island. These cultural expressions reveal what the postcards
usually leave off the frame, the destructive metabolism of tourism. These creative subver-
sions include alternative mappings that represent the Balearic Islands featuring not the
stereotypical tourist spots, but pollution sites, air traffic congestion, and other images of an
oversaturated, wounded, and dystopic territory usually absent in the tourist imaginary. In
other words, these artists featured by Picornell are shifting the focus of attention from the
spaces that tourists usually enjoy, to the destructive metabolism and violent operational
landscapes produced by them, from the side of privilege to its neocolonial reverse. It is in
this dark side where the cheapening strategy and uneven geographies of tourism become
obvious.
Eldiario.es and CTXT are examples of Spanish critical and independent media outlets
that have paid significant attention to the downsides of tourism. But the media venue that
has dedicated the most space and depth to the political ecology of tourism is perhaps El
Salto, with an extensive section about tourism that includes, for example, an interview
with Ivan Murray. Its June 2020 issue (no. 38) is especially relevant in this regard, as it fea-
tures several texts explaining many of the negative effects of Spanish tourism monoculture
exposed by the pandemic. Another resource for advancing a political ecology of tourism is
ALBA SUD, a Catalan organization supporting critical research and communication for
social change and focusing on critical tourism, fair work, and the commons. The STOP
TURISTIFICATION campaign by Ecologistas en Acción also includes several critical inter-
ventions to question the official framing of tourism in Spain. In January 2020, coinciding
with the celebration of the 40th edition of FITUR – an international tourism fair based in
Madrid – Ecologistas published a series of articles in which they denounced the superficial
greenwashing of the sector and its inherent unsustainability.
From the perspective of urban political ecology, tourism is only thinkable and feasible
under the dominance of an urban model designed for global capital accumulation (the
planetary urbanization of capital). A different urban model, one that is ecologically viable
and socially desirable, would make tourism obsolete because this activity could not possibly
exist without rampant sociospacial inequalities, asymmetries of power, unchecked colonial
legacies, uneven development, racialized geographies, and sacrificial zones. There is little
room for tourism in an urban model designed for the flourishing, rather than exploitation,

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Figure 5.2 Summer 2016 Cover for Tot Inclòs (All Inclusive).
Source: Courtesy of “Col·lectiu totinclòs” https://totinclos.cat/.

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of all human and nonhuman life. Tourism is often supported by landscapes of violence and
sacrifice zones that are made invisible by the celebratory discourses disseminated by global
elites, tourist lobbies, and other interests’ groups. The predominant metaphors (e.g., tour-
ism as urban revitalization, modernization, and prosperity) coming from these discourses
are ingrained in the dominant imaginary because “people in power get to impose their met-
aphors” (Lakoff and Johnson 157). Given that “metaphor structures how we think – and
even what thoughts are permitted,” even legal reasoning is affected deeply by these domi-
nant tropes (267). The consequence is that the legal system ensures that the right of com-
modified leisure enjoyed by privileged tourists overrides the right to have a functional city
for the social reproduction of all local residents or – projecting out to the global metabolism
of tourism – the right of transnational corporations to increase profits overrides the right of
future generations to inherit a livable planet.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson confirm “the power of metaphors to create a reality
rather than simply to give us a way of conceptualizing a preexisting reality” (144). Thus,
meaningful “cultural change arises from the introduction of new metaphorical concepts
and the loss of old ones” (145). For this reason, it is crucial to study how cultural manifes-
tations represent and narrate tourism. Today, uncritical and celebratory discourses about
tourism, such as the ones embraced by TURESPAÑA and Spain for Sure, are increasingly
difficult to promote and justify. For the celebration of tourism is only possible if we ignore
its toxic metabolism and can only be maintained through a constant dissemination of out-
dated stories and metaphors propagated by misguided, when not negligently inaccurate,
assumptions that completely diminish or hide the social and environmental costs of tour-
ism. An increasing number of counterhegemonic cultural manifestations currently focus,
precisely, on the metabolism and operational landscapes of tourism to not only contest the
dominant narratives, but also create new frames and metaphors. If these critical cultural
manifestations continue to proliferate, they could potentially erode the dominant framing
of the industry and, with it, the overarching dominant imaginary of economic growth.
As such, emerging counternarratives not only refuse to celebrate tourism as an economic
panacea but reframe it as a necrotic growth machine. They do not only reject the assump-
tion that “sustainable” tourism is a benign trigger for urban prosperity, but also depict it as
an uncontrollable monster that rapidly transforms communal spaces into gentrified zones
(Gascón). These frames invite the public to think about tourism not as an innovative indus-
try, but an economic monoculture that plunders the earth and expels local communities.
As these counterhegemonic perspectives strive to displace the dominant ones, more cultural
representations will likely embrace the notion of tourism degrowth as a desirable direction.
The intention of this chapter is neither to enumerate all countercultural manifestations
related to tourism nor to develop a close reading of any particular one, but rather to invite
Spanish cultural scholars to attend to how urban political ecology can help to identify
emerging cultural patterns and changes in the cultural ecologies of tourism.2 As such, this
piece points out the immense potential of developing an urban environmental cultural
approach to Spanish tourism. My hope is that other cultural scholars will build on the
framework I presented here to illuminate specific Spanish cultural texts and media by con-
ducting further research and addressing some of the following questions: how is tourism
framed and by whom? What is erased in tourism discourses? What is enabled and disabled
by tourist infrastructures and for whom? In which ways do metaphors celebrating tourism
deemphasize or hide its capitalist cheapening strategies? How are the unequal distribu-
tion of risks and benefits of tourism narrated and from what point of view? Ideally, the

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convergence of tourism cultural studies and urban political ecology will not only facilitate
the criticism of tourism discourses, but will also encourage the emergence of postgrowth,
ecofeminist, and decolonial urbanisms.

Is Critical Tourism Possible?

According to Sarah Kanouse, “tourism has tremendously critical potential to operate in
a transverse, ‘extradisciplinary’ critical and creative space” if approached in self-reflexive
and performative ways (46). I agree that, as long as tourism remains a dominant part of
the urban process, we should attempt to undermine it from within. But is it at all possible
to perform a critical (postgrowth, non-necrotic, non-exploitative) tourism in Spain and
elsewhere that is delinked from the capitalist strategy of cheapening?
Tourism and the urban growth machine are contemporary articulations of the cheap-
ening accumulation strategy described by Patel and Moore and, as such, frequently gen-
erates hostile and degenerative urban ecologies. A postgrowth, decolonial, ecofeminist
urbanism that simultaneously reduces inequalities and extinction rates would be radically
different from the neoliberal urbanization that has permitted and facilitated the prolifera-
tion of global tourism. Moreover, if – as I believe – global tourism is a manifestation of
petroleum-based modernity, is a post peak-oil global tourism even an option?
Critical tourism, if at all possible, would paradoxically encourage a tourism degrowth:
a dissemination of postgrowth urban imaginaries and a proliferation of cooperative and
multifunctional as well as regenerative public spaces. In other words, a benign tourism will
entail another – radically different – urban model incompatible with capital accumulation,
neocolonial mindsets, and growth-oriented logics: an ecofeminist urbanism that prioritizes
the flourishing of communities and ecosystems and designs spaces that do not depend on
sacrifice zones and related operational landscapes.
The question remains: is it possible at all to have tourism without negative social and
ecological externalities? Is it possible to have tourism with “zero poverty and zero extinc-
tion” that contributes to the recommunalization and reterritorialization transition needed
for achieving a non-colonial future to enable humanity to navigate with dignity the accel-
erating ecological disruptions? (Escobar 200). If, as I suspect, the answer is no, the only
critical tourism will eventually be the one that never existed.

Notes
1 The author wishes to thank Eugenia Afinoguénova for sharing several references on tourism and
Spanish cultural studies that significantly enriched this chapter. Thank you also to Cristina Mar-
tínez Tejero for her comments on an early draft.
2 For an example of a close reading, see Prádanos “Ecología política del turismo.”

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 6
INFORMATION BYTES
From Bullfighting to COVID-Fighting: How to
Live on Planet Earth

Kata Beilin

On November 4, 2020, members of the Extinction Rebellion activist group superglued

themselves to the pavement near the entrance to the Ministry of Agriculture in Madrid.
They were protesting what they believed to be the Spanish government’s insufficient engage-
ment in the struggle against climate change and loss of biodiversity. The activists wore
masks, wrapped themselves up with ropes that resembled plant stalks, and decorated their
bodies with green leaves and flower crowns. They held banners that read “estamos pega-
das” (“we are attached”) on their chests. “Estamos” was written in black letters and “pega-
das” in green, as if the second word had grown out of the first like a plant from the soil (La
Vanguardia). “Estamos pegadas” implied an inseparable connection to the ground and, by
extension, to the planet.
Michael Marder, a Basque philosopher, inspired by the Indignados protest at the Puerta
del Sol in Madrid in 2011, wrote “Resist like a weed!” suggesting that new social move-
ments imitate weeds. The bodies of the activists emerge, spread, and take over urban spaces
as if they were rapidly spreading plants. Their performances and protests aim at stopping
and delaying traffic to force society to reflect. The performance by Extinction Rebellion and
the interspecies comparison coined by Marder provide evidence for a parallel environmen-
tal turn in both activism and critical thought.
This vision of a world in which species are entangled is not by any means the hegemonic
one. But as the renowned Spanish ecologist Jorge Araujo told me in 2011, “el pensami-
ento renovador es siempre minoritario” (“innovative thought is always in the minority”).
Nine years later, climate change has painfully made its presence felt around the world with
a series of catastrophic droughts, fires, and floods. As of June 2024, the COVID pandemic
has killed over seven million people. These events have made environmental destruction
visible, and as a result what used to be a minority perspective has slowly begun to erode
mainstream ideas, which are characterized by belief in human exceptionalism, humanity’s
entitlement to exploit nature, and, connectedly, shop for happiness.
This chapter follows the evolving debate between hegemonic and alternative views about
the environment, animals, and other nonhumans in Spanish cultural history. Extinction
Rebellion’s performance signals the urgent need to realize that we are a part of planetary
life, not exempt from its turbulent changes. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-7
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

Figure 6.1 “Extinction Rebellion bloquea la entrada del Ministerio de Agricultura para exigir la
protección a la biodiversidad.”
Source: Courtesy of Europa Press, Europa Press, 4 Nov. 2020.

significance of our relationship with the environment and pushed forward critical thought
about how to live on Earth. The pandemic has changed the conventional early 21st-century
vision of nature as vulnerable and plagued by species extinction and climate change result-
ing from human activities. This perspective considered humans as somewhat outside of the
circle of the vulnerable. The death of millions from COVID-19 has made us aware that we
are some of the most vulnerable victims of the loss of natural balance on Earth.

Performing the Environment

Extinction Rebellion argued that the pandemic was caused by the loss of biodiversity
reserves, and that deforestation had forced bats out to urban areas, where in turn they
transmitted pathogens like COVID-19 to humans (Europa press). This has indeed been
the prevailing interpretation that various scholars, intellectuals, and members of the media
have assigned to the coronavirus. Afelt et al., Castejón, Ávila Vázquez, Leff, and Wallace
warn that the lack of forest areas where wild animals could hide from contact with humans
will likely lead to the spread of future viruses. In dialogue with these critical thoughts,
“estamos pegadas” implies that all beings on Earth – humans, bats, and viruses – are inter-
connected, and it follows that damage to planetary ecosystems entails harm to animals and
to humans alike.
The Extinction Rebellion movement has spread to seventeen countries, with each local
group undertaking their own initiatives while loosely coordinating with others. In the sum-
mer of 2020 Brazilian protesters carried banners stating that “ecocide is genocide.” In
October 2020, the slogan by protesters at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid was “Oceans are

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Figure 6.2 Activists at the International Day of Animal Rights, Plaza Sol, Madrid, December 10, 2011.
Source: Photo by Kata Beilin.

rising [and] so are we.” The rhetoric of the group suggests that the human condition is
similar to that of other forms of life, not only as victims of destructive exploitation, but also
in the ways they resist it.
In in the winter of 2011, soon after the Indignados had been evicted from the Puerta
del Sol, I observed at the same plaza yet another protest against the human treatment of
nonhuman animals. December 10, International Animal Rights Day, was cold and rainy.
Despite the weather over 400 activists from throughout Spain and abroad gathered in the
plaza, including members of Igualdad Animal (Animal Equality), Pacma, Equanimal, and
other animal rights organizations. They stood two yards from each other, holding dead
animals in their hands. These were animals that had died in factory farms or commercial
laboratories and had been retrieved from waste disposal sites. The intent was to make
Madrid’s passersby reflect on the animals’ deaths. Many activists looked at the animals they
held and cried. None of the dead animals had a name, but they were assigned numbers,
and imaginary stories about their lives were told through the loudspeakers. The real tears

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in activists’ eyes and the dramatic female voice coming from the speakers defamiliarized the
habitual indifference toward the deaths of animals. These animals were mourned as if they
were human children.
The proposed extension of equivalent rights to animals, postulated by numerous ani-
mal rights organizations in Spain, entails a more dramatic cultural shift than is demanded
by many other contemporary social movements. This change, if generalized, would be
completely incompatible with the current economy of slaughterhouses, animal farms, and
agriculture-based deforestation. If we genuinely cried at the deaths of animals, we would
more likely turn our backs at the happiness derived from consummerism and instead
embrace a degrowth of the human economy and work to regrow ecosystems for wild ani-
mals. The extension of an ethics of care to animals would demand significant economic and
political changes. That is why, as I will discuss later, some intellectuals believe that animal
rights movements are a threat to Western civilization.
The same organizations that participated in the 2011 Puerta del Sol pro-animal rights
performance joined other antispeciesist groups to organize a series of protests against bull-
fighting.1 Between 2008 and 2011, in numerous Spanish towns activists grouped together in
public spaces and lay down on the ground forming the shape of a bull, their bodies painted
in black and red. In my book, In Search of an Alternative Biopolitics (2015), I explore the
significance of these performances.
Those humans painted in black filled the healthy skin of the represented bull and those
painted in red marked the wounds and blood of the animal. The resulting illusion of a

Figure 6.3 Activists of Fundación Ecuanimal and WSPA – International in Bilbao.

Source: Courtesy of Fundación Ecuanimal.

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 Information Bytes

bull’s body that is constituted by small human bodies could be read as a figurative repre-
sentation of Spain, which, according to Roman historians, was reminiscent of the shape
of an extended bull’s hide. Here the animal rights activists’ discursive frame most directly
connected to the debate about Spanish national identity. In contrast to Spain’s symbolic
representation in bullfighting, where a Spanish male toreador defines himself in opposition
to the animal, these performances argued for the organic unity of human and animal flesh.
This interconnected flesh thinks symbiotically for the sake of its own survival.

From Bullfighting to COVID Fighting

The performance in Bilbao deconstructs the centuries-long Spanish discourse that is
defined by man’s mastery over nature. In the Eclipse of Reason (1947), Max Horkheimer
writes that reason is corrupted because it was born as an effort to conquer nature. Simi-
larly, over the last two centuries, critics of bullfighting have argued that the antagonis-
tic opposition between man and nature in the national pastime – literally known as la
fiesta nacional – eclipses reason, and that its symbolic power fuels irrational violence. This
violence is likened to the conquest of the Americas and the genocide perpetrated against
indigenous peoples. Eugenio Noel, perhaps the best-known Spanish anti-bullfighting activ-
ist, suggested that the bullfighter is a parody of the conqueror who mistakes temporary
triumph for wisdom (332).
In his 1828 essay “Las corridas de toros” (“The bullfights”) Mariano José de Larra
observes that the intensification of bullfighting corresponded in Spain’s history to the esca-
lation of political violence, and it was often followed by civil war. Noel also connects the
passion surrounding bullfighting with the long history of Spanish wars and deplores the
practice as a limit on reason. “Cuando nos hacemos paladinos de alguna idea, lo primero
que compramos para imponerla es un revolver y los que van a oirnos lo llevan también”
(“When we become convinced of an idea, the first thing we do is to buy a gun, but those
whom we target are similarly armed”; 88). For both authors, bullfighting performs the
eternal return of conquest, war, and cruelty.
The idea of an eternal connection in Spain between (bio)politics and bullfighting has
been present throughout modern times, and reached its climax during Franco’s dictator-
ship. In Luis Martín Santos’ novel Tiempo de silencio (1961), bullfighting is emblematic
of the violence perpetrated by the state against the poor. The novel also depicts killing of
dogs, cats, and mice. In the opening paragraphs, Martín Santos describes work in a genet-
ics laboratory “como si fuera una lidia” (“as if it were bullfighting”; 2). Pharmaceutical
testing necessitates the killing of mice, cats, and dogs with experimental devices that cause
them inmense pain. Martín Santos’ lab should be read as a metaphor for Franco’s regime,
which was responsible for perpetrating similar suffering against humans. The hierarchy and
objectivization that science has established in the realm of life and the structural violence of
the state are mutually connected. Science operates for the benefits of the state and reflects
its politics by choosing which bodies should be sacrificed for the benefit of others. Madrid’s
shantytowns, where the most important protagonists of Tiempo de silencio live, constitute
zones of such sacrifice.
Curiously, bullfighting did not become significantly less popular during Spain’s transi-
tion to democracy. Enrique Tierno Galván, mayor of Madrid in the 1980s, wrote that
bullfighting educated Spanish people socially and politically, developing “a collective act
of faith . . . in the male of the species” (sic, 74). Tierno Galván’s idea that “the bullfighter

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presents himself as a standard bearer of manliness . . . that makes a complete and continu-
ing sense” (75) has been addressed with dark humor in Almódovar’s film Matador (1986),
which features a bullfighter who, after not being able to continue performing due to an
injury, becomes a teacher. The twist comes when he replaces the bulls with his female stu-
dents whom he kills ritualistically, and whose bodies he later burries in his garden. Almo-
dóvar, in spite of this perverse bullfighter’s story, maintained a sympathetic attitude toward
the national pastime. In contrast, several of Almódovar’s fellow artists and intellectual
contemporaries, such as Alaska (the pseudonym of the singer and icon from La Movida,
Olvido Gara), instead followed in Larra and Noel’s footsteps by criticizing bullfights.
Since bullfighting has been described by mainstream media as an essential part of Span-
ish culture, its critics called for wholesale cultural change. In dialogue with the widely
debated book by Susan Okin, Is Multiculturalism Good for Women? (1999), Spanish phi-
losopher Paula Casal argued that multiculturalism is not good for animals, and proposed
that culture should not be a justification for their mistreatment. She pointed out that the
progressive desire to side with the underdog in this debate should literally lead to taking the
side of dogs, bulls, and other mistreated animals. Jorge Riechmann, Jesús Mosterín, Pablo
de Lora, Elvira Lindo, Juan José Millás, Manuel Vincent, Marta Tafalla, Atonio Muñoz
Molina, and other artists and intellectuals have also argued that bullfighting is symbolically
incompatible with the search for a caring humanity and with the goals of establishing sus-
tainable relations with the environment. Philosophers and writers such as Adela Cortina,
Almudena Grandes, Benjamín Prada, Cristina Fernández Cubas, and Fernando Savater
defended instead the human freedom to kill animals, especially in the context of bullfight-
ing, which they deemed to be art. Javier Marías compared the prohibition of bullfighting to
the prohibition against smoking. Echoing Tierno Galván, Savater argued that bullfighting
celebrates man’s relationship with nature, which is the basis for Western civilization. He
therefore considered the animal rights movement to be a serious civilizational threat. This is
when the relation between the lack of care for the “other,” be it human or animal, and the
environmental degradation become clear. For many it also became clear that the civilization
that does not care needs to come to an end.
In July 2010, the Catalonian Parliament banned bullfighting with sixty-six votes in
favor, fifty-five against, and nine abstentions. During the debates in the Parliament, one
of the bullfighting fans complained that the anti-bullfighting movement was so powerful
that it condemned him to a clandestine existence (“Violentos, torturadores, inmorales”).
Savater compared the anti-bullfighting lobby with the Inquisition and writer and bullfight-
ing fan, Cristina Fernández Cubas, confessed “me siento en Barcelona como si perteneci-
era a una secta infernal” (2009) (“I feel in Barcelona as if I were a member of an infernal
sect”). In his 1991 study of bullfighting culture titled Blood Sport, Timothy Mitchell called
anti-bullfighting activists “the Don Quixotes of Spanish culture” (82). He claimed that
they always failed miserably. After the success of the Catalan ban on bullfighting in 2010,
however, Mitchell’s statement was proven incorrect.
Even though the division between bullfighting and antibullfighting Spain did not pre-
cisely correspond to the political division between Francoist and democratic politics (or
right and left), sensitivity to animal pain has become salient to a significant segment of the
Spanish electorate and has brought about important changes. To give one recent example
of this new sensitivity, the former Spanish king Juan Carlos I, was forced to abdicate in
2014 after it became public that he was secretly hunting endangered animals, and was
heavily criticized by Spanish and international media alike. In the international section of

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BBC Mundo, the abdication of the King was commented on as a result of “El Maleficio
del Elefante” (“The Curse of the Elephant”), El económico titled its editorial as “Abdica
un rey como un elefante” (“A king abdicates like an elephant”). Time stated that a dead
elephant was the beginning of the end for Spain’s king. This obsessive connection between
the abdication and the animal’s death made the readers wonder if the unfortunate hunt in
Botswana was, perhaps, more than just a trigger for the king’s loss of popularity and sub-
sequent demise.
Bullfighting performed the national culture of life where some lives need to be sacrificed
for the sake of others. This belief in the need to sacrifice nature has recently been con-
fronted, but also transformed during the coronavirus pandemic. In various media commen-
taries, viruses are portrayed as the wilderness that invades the human realm and which once
again needs to be conquered or defeated. But the environment has also, through the virus,
appeared inside of our bodies. The discourses on COVID-19 diverge along lines similar to
that of bullfighting: caring versus cruelty; a war of man against nature versus a vision of
the planet as a superorganism. In various examples of modern scientific rhetoric, the virus
is seen as an enemy that needs to be vanquished through war. Scientists Botas and Cadenas
wrote in Babelia in September 2020: “la guerra ocurría en la distante China” (“The war
was taking place in distant China”) and “Tras meses de confinamiento, se consiguió ganar
la primera batalla. Pero la guerra no ha hecho más que empezar” (“After months of con-
finement, the first battle was won. But the war has only just begun”).
The Argentinian social scientist Horacio Machado Aráoz expresses an alternative per-
spective, criticizing this framing of global health in terms of war. Machado Aráoz explains
that describing viruses as destructive or aggressive is incorrect because viruses are passive,
completely at the mercy of their environment. In his view, the struggle is not with the virus
but rather with our destructive relationship with life reflected by the use of these hostile
terms. Similarly, Charlotte Birves, writing in the French journal Terrestres, argues that to
speak of “war” or “peace,” of “friends” or “enemies,” is not only an error but also the
foundational violence that renders further consequences in mistaken strategies. Instead,
Brives proposes to think in terms of plurbiose, an environment where relationships between
agents are in constant transformation but binding all into one common destiny. Like Mar-
tín Santos argued in the context of bullfighting, Brives attracts our attention to the signifi-
cance of metaphors for the way phenomena are examined in science, namely COVID-19,
because the use of metaphors shapes different ways of understanding. This understanding,
in turn, informs strategies and policies.
The model in which humanity fights the virus rests on wrong assumptions additionally
because viruses are not alive. A virus is neither an enemy nor an interspecies living partner,
but rather a byte of information. Information flow may be the best framework to think
about the pandemic. When an organism is infected, it binds to the information carried
by the virus and replicates it. Viruses may thus be closer to technology than to life, or, as
Alexis Shotwell suggests, they may constitute “relations” between different forms of life.
Science is not yet able to regulate these relations even if it attempts to do so as it modi-
fies viruses. Could one such modification be responsible for the spread of the coronavirus
among human populations?
Early in the pandemic, La Vanguardia and El País discussed such a possibility in the
context of conspiracy theories, privileging the voice of scientists who cast strong doubts on
the idea that the virus had been scientifically created in a lab. Nonetheless, Ansede’s article
reminded readers that a virus leak from a Chinese laboratory killed 800 people in 2004.

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ABC News spoke to Chinese scientist and whistle blower Yan Li-Men who claimed that
the coronavirus emerged from a Wuhan laboratory, and she later sought political asylum in
the US. The outlet did not take a position with respect to her claims (“La viróloga china”).
The mere possibility that millions of people could have died as a result of a scientific experi-
ment gone awry posits the principle of precaution as one of the most important values for
post-pandemic biosecurity policies. Scientific and information-based technologies are so
powerful in the context of planetary health that the difference between good and bad prac-
tices may amount to life or death. Instead of war-based thinking about the virus, practices
of living with the virus began to be considered in the international press after the summer
of 2021 (Kierksey 2021).

From a Conqueror to a Gardener and Hacker

Edgar Morin defines a crisis as an event that reveals the invisible, and through such a rev-
elation provokes change. Prompted by the multifaceted crisis of the pandemic, the Spanish
media are engaging in a debate about how to live on Earth by bringing the voices of various
European intellectuals into the conversation. These voices attempt to understand the virus
in the context of our economic systems, cultures, and environments. They search for the
origins of our current problems in history, consider future scenarios, and put together a list
of necessary changes to sustain social life on Earth.
The Mexican economist Enrique Leff writes that “el virus es el portador de la pregunta
por la vida” (“the virus carries with it a question about life”; 130) and asserts that in plan-
etary politics, the instinct of life should overcome the instinct of death (131). Leff suggests
that if Camus’ The Plague (La Peste, 1947) was an allegory for Nazism, today’s pandemic
is an allegory for capitalism. He reminds his readers that indigenous people were destroyed
by plagues, but that those plagues were brought by colonization. In other words, there was
a particular relationship between people and the world at the time of the discovery and the
conquest of America that gave rise to the apocalyptic epidemics of the 17th century that
reduced the population of the American continent by 80–90%. In Leff’s analysis, this rela-
tionship, is reflected by the archetype of the conquistador.
The Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar reasons in a similar way: “La pan-
demia . . . nos muestra la posibilidad terapéutica de dejar de comportarnos como conquis-
tadores y empezar a concebirnos y comportarnos como nobles y humildes cultivadores de
la Madre-Tierra” (“The pandemic . . . shows us the therapeutic possibility to stop behaving
like conquistadors and begin behaving like noble and humble gardeners of Mother Earth”;
31–32). In the same vein, Machado Aráoz claims that the pandemic “Ha venido a poner
en cuestión un modelo civilizatorio” (“has put into question our civilization”; n.p.), and he
suggests that in order to recover democracy, we first need to heal the Earth.
Various future scenarios are considered by these theorists. The philosopher Frederic
Neyrat warns against eco-fascism: “The most likely kind of eco-fascism would then be
the one that would try to save the ruling class by eliminating the rest of the population,
if necessary, reduced to the minimum necessary for the technical maintenance of capital-
ist technologies still capable of functioning” (n.p.). In the nightmare of eco-fascism, the
discourse of alliance with the decaying planet becomes an excuse for yet another stage of
politics of triage where, like in Martin Santos’ El tiempo de silencio and in Mayorga’s La
paz perpetua, elites save only themselves. The Argentinian anthropologist Gaston Gordillo
writes: “Any collective attempt to create a future not defined by a planetary ruination, in

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this regard, has to face that the un-doing of imperial and capitalist relations will require
the reinvention of the metropolis as a collective constellation that does not depend for its
existence on the creation of sacrifice zones” (n.p.).
While finding a politics that avoids sacrifice zones has been the macro-challenge, various
“sacrifice zones” take their economies into their own hands to build resilience and resist
the global system of triage on a micro-scale. These local grassroots transformations have
adopted diverse names: alternative or solidarity economies based on local social curren-
cies, time banks, cooperatives (including P2P cooperative networks),2 Towns in Transi-
tion, slow cities, ecovillages, and social enterprises.3 The emergence of these alternatives is
often prompted by the externalities of economic growth: unemployment, homelessness, and
contaminated or destroyed ecosystems. The grassroots projects of these alternative econo-
mies incorporate the unemployed, provide opportunities for the excluded, clean polluted
areas, and restore destroyed habitats. They also attempt to reestablish an organic model of
democracy based on social deliberations where all the stakeholders participate and vote,
and where the interests of the nonhumans are often also considered.
In these local alternative economies, like in Escobar’s writing, the figure of the gardener
replaces the figure of the conquistador and urban gardens begin to form a significant part
of city life. These gardens are spaces where herbicides, pesticides, and artificial fertilizers
are substituted with a mixture of old and new bio-mimetic solutions designed by perma-
culture and agroecology.4 The alternative communities are often conceived as interspecies,
caring not only for the garden plants but also for the denizen animals and wild ecosystems
neighboring urban spaces.
The Spanish writer and internet activist Manuel Casal Lodeiro stresses the significance
of the conception of the human as integrated into nature as an idea that is emerging within
these alternative economies. These movements shape humans who know that they are
eco-dependent and interdependent.5 This brings to mind the performance of Extinction
Rebellion in which humanity grows out from the ground like plants. Inspired by the obser-
vation that rural areas better resist the spread of the coronavirus, Casal Lodeiro proposes
to rethink and recreate the rural cultures of life. He suggests protecting local seeds, biodi-
versity, and forests, while moving away from monocrops. At the same time, however, he
stresses the significance of “teletrabajo con criterios de racionalidad energética en todas
las profesiones que sea factible” (“work online with the criteria of energetic rationality in
all the professions where it is possible”). In the future society, science and technology will
need to weave seamlessly into the eco-social tissues. The gardener of the future will need
to have the technological expertise of a hacker to refocus technologies toward the sustain-
ability of life.
Leopoldo Alas Clarín’s “Adios Cordera!” is possibly one of the most frequently taught
short stories in Spanish literature. Poor peasant children, Rosa and Pinin, love the family’s
only cow as if she were their mother. Yet the train, a symbol of technological advance-
ment, first takes away the cow to the slaughterhouse and some years later, takes Pinin to
the war, to serve as cannon fodder. The parallelism between slaughterhouses and the war,
and between the predicament of animals and humans, is highlighted by the repetition of
the farewell scene in which Rosa says “adios” first to her cow and then to her brother. This
story has contemporary relevance. Its suggestion that technology is often instrumental in
creating zones of sacrifice still holds true. Its vision of the relationship between the city and
the country marked by extraction of life is not outdated. In present scenarios this extraction
takes place through industrialized agriculture, as the countryside turns into a semidesert of

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toxic industrial monocrops, animal farms, and slaughterhouses (and empty of people, the
so-called “España vaciada,” emptied Spain).
Rob Wallace, a global health specialist, points out that many new pathogens are emerg-
ing because animal farms and genetic monocrops destroy forests that constituted the
immunological barrier blocking transmission. The billions of animals bred and slaugh-
tered every year supply bodies that are vulnerable for contagion. In Wallace’s analysis,
COVID-19 alerts us that the planet is turning into a gigantic, uniform, toxic plantation,
a factory of pandemics (8). In discussion with Wallace, Aráos suggests that we need to
“delink from the planetary factory” (n.p.).
Such delinking presents an enormous challenge for the local alternative economies due
to lack of local food sovereignty. In many areas of Spain, agriculture produces largely for
the cities and for export to other European countries, while everyday food is purchased by
farmers in supermarkets. Mainstream culture, including high-brow literature and film, con-
nects happiness with an urban dynamic of life and consumption, which still includes the
consumption of meat (Mari, 2020).

Conclusion: How to Live on Planet Earth

Extinction Rebellion performs our attachment to Earth by comparing humans to plants.
The debate over the COVID-19 pandemic transforms the vision of the environment into
one where earthly materials and information transcend us and multiply in our bodies.
Ethics and politics emerge from both of these frameworks as obligations to care for our
interspecies relationships and thoughtfully administer information flows. Some new social
movements, local alternative economies, networks of planetary cooperation, environmen-
tal activist groups, and individual philosophers believe that the future of life on Earth
depends largely on our getting back to the soil. Various activists also argue that the future
also depends on our ability to repurpose existing technologies so that they serve planetary
well-being, rather than monetary gain and consumption by the elites.
Spain was the country of origin of bullfighters and conquistadors, symbolic figures for
the foundation of the colonial economy of extraction. Spain is now one of the countries in
Europe with the greatest number of alternative economies. Spain has adopted some of the
most transformative ideas and laws regarding the environment. Among these transforma-
tive ideas that have captured the imagination of Spanish intellectuals and institutions are
the concepts of ecological economics, degrowth, and biomimesis, as taught by Joan Mar-
tínez Alier, Jorge Riechmann, and others. Ecological economics introduces a fundamental
change in the economic imagination by placing all human activities inside of a planetary
ecosystem. Riechmann argues that we should reconstruct our economy by imitating nature
and making all our activities compatible with the biosphere.
I titled this chapter “Information Bytes,” to suggest that we have entered the information
age where life and technology have connected, prompting a series of fast transformations
that involve our bodies and minds. The Great Acceleration based on scientific and techno-
logical advancements has connected planetary life through global networks. Separation of
individuals and communities is no longer possible. The COVID-19 pandemic has proven
the difficulty of attempting such a separation. Quarantines are needed to separate bodies,
destroy economies, and take away pleasures. People disobey and reconnect, letting the viral
bytes flow through their bodies again. We are more than ever one planetary superorgan-
ism, as seen in the figure of the bull composed of human bodies in front of the Guggenheim

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Museum, shown in the earlier Figure 6.2. All of that organism’s cells are connected by
pathogens that can either heal or kill. Any damage to the body of the planet will hurt eve-
ryone eventually. To avoid that damage, we need not only care more for all life, but we
also need improved conceptual frameworks for administering information that codes all
life exchanges on Earth.
If, as Horkenheimer wrote, reason has been corrupted because it was born to conquer
nature by separating itself from it, the brain, where rationality originates, has as its main
function to sustain the life of the organism. If the concept of reason grew out of the separa-
tion of humans from the environment, then our realization that this separation is impos-
sible brings us back to the organic brain thinking through flesh. This is how nature thinks.6
Imitating nature in economic and technological thought would extend the principle of care
to the planet, leaving room for wilderness, and filling human spaces with gardens.

Notes
1 Antispeciests believe that human species should not be given exceptional treatment and considered
superior to other species. In other words, they are against human exceptionalism.
2 The P2P economy is a cooperative framework, where people contribute their best expertise to
social projects that they are interested in on a voluntary basis and pro publico bono. Wikipedia,
file sharing, Airbnb house exchange, Relay Rides, SnapGoods, eBay, or OuiShare are just some
examples of platforms that engage people in direct exchanges of knowledge that remains open
access, avoiding the large multinational firms and governmental agencies as mediators. (For more,
see Beilin 2016.)
3 For example, Ecoherencia, a social enterprise with transformative vision and activist approach.
(See Beilin, 2019).
4 Biomimetics is a principle of cutting edge technologies that find new possibilities by observing and
learning from nature, such as bullet train shaped like a bird’s beak.
5 Jorge Riechmann (2011) postulates that we learn to think of ourselves as interdependent and
ecodependent.
6 The concept of thinking has been applied to nonhumans by various scholars: Eduardo Kohn, Susan
Simmard, and myself (Beilin 2019).

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Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. La cruel pedagogía del virus. Ediciones Akal, S.A., 2020.
Savater, Fernando. Tauroética. Turpial, 2010.
Shotwell, Alexis. “The Virus Is a Relation.” Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action, 5
May 2020. https://uppingtheanti.org/blog/entry/the-virus-is-a-relation.
Terradas, Jaume. “Los factores ecológicos en las epidemias.” Investigación y Ciencia, Nov. 2020.
https://www.investigacionyciencia.es/revistas/investigacion-y-ciencia/grandes-hitos-y-prximos-
retos-de-la-ciencia-811/los-factores-ecolgicos-en-las-epidemias-19149.

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 PART 2

Histories and Narratives

 7
NARRATING CONFLICT
The Politics of Historical Memory in Spain

Sebastiaan Faber

What Is Historical Memory?

To help my American students understand the concept of historical memory, I sometimes
resort to a simple exercise. “Imagine you’re a parent of a six-year-old,” I tell them. “One
morning, on your way to dropping your son or daughter off at school, your child asks: What
happened during World War II? You’re just a couple minutes from arriving. Try to answer
that question in three or four sentences so that your first-grader will understand.” What
the students produce in response are miniature stories, with a beginning (“There was a bad
guy in Germany”), a middle (“There was a war”), and an end, often told in the first-person
plural (“And then we won”). These mini plots, I tell my students, are what we call historical
memory: narrative blocks assembled from a wide range of sources – from history classes to
movies, books, comics, museums, monuments, video games, songs, and family lore – that
are broadly shared among the members of a community and that together make up what
that community considers its collective past. As Paloma Aguilar has explained, these nar-
ratives are the product of a process of selection – some episodes make it into the collective
consciousness while others don’t – and they are never just stories told in the first-person
plural; they also come with a moral lesson for the present, often in the form of an example
to follow or to avoid (1–24).
In Spain over the past twenty years, it’s been common to dismiss the phrase “historical
memory” as a silly oxymoron with little analytical value and no place in politics. “La memo-
ria y la historia son, en principio, opuestas,” the novelist Javier Cercas wrote in his bestsell-
ing book El impostor (2014): “La memoria es individual, parcial y subjetiva; en cambio, la
historia es colectiva y aspira a ser total y objetiva” (“Memory and history are, in principle,
opposites. Memory is individual, partial, and subjective; history is collective and aspires to
be total and objective”; 3690).1 Cercas borrowed this argument from the late Santos Juliá
(“Presentación” 17, 19), who first wielded it in order to shore up the authority of academic
historians like himself in relation to other collectives that claimed some form of agency to
help shape the narrative of the national past – particularly the grassroots movement that
emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century and adopted the “recovery of historical
memory” as the umbrella term for a broad range of political and judicial demands. Juliá and

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Cercas also argued that it’s not the government’s role to legislate in matters of memory or
history and that anything resembling a politics of memory runs the risk of imposing a single
version of the past at the expense of all others (Juliá “Memorias”; “Por la autonomía”).
Since then, versions of this argument have become a standard objection, not only from
the right but also from the center-left, in response to those grassroots demands, as well as
to the legislative initiatives to which they have given rise. Thus, when in September 2020
the progressive coalition government led by Pedro Sánchez approved a new Law for Demo-
cratic Memory – presented as a much-needed update of a similar law passed in 2007 –
Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, an aristocrat and prominent Partido Popular deputy, wrote in
a column in the right-wing daily El Mundo: “La memoria no es una construcción política,
impuesta desde arriba, uniformemente roja o azul; es un caleidoscopio formado por recuer-
dos personales, sesgos inconscientes y referencias sobrevenidas” (“Memory is not a politi-
cal construction, imposed from above, uniformly red or blue; it is a kaleidoscope made up
of personal memories, unconscious biases, and subsequent references”; “Franco”).
This position is unproductive. If decades’ worth of academic memory studies have
shown us anything, it is that memory very much can be a political construct, in the same
way that historians’ aspirations to totality and objectivity are never actually realized, even
if their work is peer reviewed and they hold legitimate PhDs. As Ricard Vinyes has shown,
moreover, it is not true that a politics of memory necessarily implies privileging one version
of the past over another (39–46). Rather than rejecting the notion of historical or collective
memory out of hand, therefore, it makes more sense to properly define and use it – as many
authors in memory studies have done – to understand and describe the representations that
a community holds about its past, along with the influence those representations exert on
that community’s political present. The Spanish case shows, in fact, that historical memory,
and the struggle over it, can be a remarkably effective tool for political mobilization.
In what follows, I hope to make four points. First, over the past twenty years or so, the
battle over historical memory has been at the center of most major political conflicts in Spain,
as revisionist narratives – defined as anti-establishment versions of the past that diverge from
those agreed on by most academic historians or those holding the most prestige – have found
increasing acceptance among broad segments of the population. Second, although the rep-
resentation of the collective past has been a political battlefield in many places, in Spain
the phenomenon has been intensified by a set of country-specific factors. These include the
nature of a relatively recent transition to democracy and the largely passive role that, in the
forty-some years following that transition, the state and the educational system have assumed
in shaping narratives about the past. In the absence of a clearly defined politics of mem-
ory from the state, and without a thorough treatment in the primary and secondary school
curriculum of the Second Republic (1931–36), the war (1936–39), the Franco dictatorship
(1939–75), and the transition (1975–78) (Hernández Sánchez), most Spaniards’ relationship
to the often violent events of those years has been shaped primarily by affective factors, such
as family ties and sentimental identifications, as well as by popular culture – including novels,
television, comics, and film. Interestingly, this trend in some ways replicated the central role
that cultural production took on during the years of Francoism. Yet in the end, the passivity
of the state and its institutions in post-Franco Spain has made historical memory even more
powerful as a tool for political mobilization. In this context, both the left and the right have
resorted to explicitly anti-establishment positions on the narratives of the past.
Yet – my third point – the revisionist tendency on the right has differed in impor-
tant respects from that on the left. To be sure, both have been critical of the academic

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establishment and both have emphasized a more affective relation to the past than academic
historians have allowed. Rejecting the historians’ canonical narrative of the transition as the
moment when Spain miraculously freed itself from the fatal weight of its own history, both
right and left have also privileged readings of the political present that emphasize the con-
tinued influence of the pre-transition past. Still, there are key differences. While right-wing
revisionists (including the far-right party Vox) have tended to advocate for a return to
traditional forms of “patriotic” national history, the left has, instead, sought to give voice
to subaltern groups. It has also explicitly claimed citizens’ rights to actively participate in
the politically critical task of shaping the story of a collective past (Faber, Exhuming 229).
My final point is that the centrality of historical memory in Spanish politics, while serv-
ing as an important lever for critique and change, has also had its pitfalls. For one thing,
the focus on the narratives of the past has in some cases become a distraction from politi-
cal struggles in the present. Worse yet, it seems to have tempted some political actors and
analysts into a kind of fatalist determinism: If political and social problems are diagnosed
as the inevitable consequence of the collective national past, then the possibility of mean-
ingful change quickly drifts out of reach. To illustrate this last point, I will briefly consider
the debate within the Spanish left about the persistence of Francoist legacies in the country
today.

Left and Right Revisionisms

As noted earlier, those who seek to delegitimize the memory movement on logical grounds
by claiming that the very notion of historical memory is nonsensical, throw the baby out
with the bathwater. By reducing the concept of memory to individual, subjective and partial
recollections, they limit their own ability to properly understand the social and political
forces that collective representations of the past have had in Spain since the transition – rep-
resentations that no one, including the critics of the memory movement, can do without.
At some point in their argument, they are bound to resort to precisely the kind of morally
inflected miniature narratives that I ask my students to produce.
So, too, does Álvarez de Toledo in her column in El Mundo. After denouncing the
Sánchez government’s proposed new memory law – which, in her opinion, “pretende con-
tar en las aulas una novela épica y maniquea en la que la Segunda República emerge como
la Arcadia agredida” (“aims to present classrooms with an epic, Manichean fiction in which
the Second Republic emerges as an Arcadia under attack”) – she provides, by way of coun-
terargument, her own terse political synopsis of the Civil War, complete with a lesson for
the present: “Demócratas hubo pocos, en un bando y en el otro” (“democrats there were
few, in one camp or the other”; “Franco”). In effect, this summary statement harkens back
to the historical memory of the war that became commonplace during late Francoism and
would remain hegemonic in the decades following the democratic transition. This version
portrayed the conflict as a senseless battle among brothers – a moment of collective insanity
that should not serve as an inspiration for the present unless in a purely negative sense. The
only lesson here is that its recurrence should be avoided at all costs (Aguilar 1–24). It also
assumes that many of those who fought on the Republican side, including Communists and
Anarchists, cannot be identified as “democrats,” and therefore locates the birth of contem-
porary Spanish democracy not in the years of the Spanish Republic – when, following the
demise of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, Spain had free elections, female suffrage, and a
multi-party system – but in the later years of Francoism.

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In her column, however, Álvarez de Toledo went one step further. The new memory law,
she wrote, was based on a scandalous fallacy: “La identificación entre antifranquismo y
democracia” (“the identification of anti-Francoism with democracy”). It is precisely this
identification, she added, that fuels “la insólita superioridad moral” (“the unbelievable
moral superiority”) that she feels the Spanish left, along with the Basque and Catalan Inde-
pendence movements, is claiming today – in her view, illegitimately – over Spain’s center
right. “Claro que hubo antifranquistas demócratas, la inmensa mayoría,” Álvarez con-
ceded; “pero también los hubo anti-demócratas” (“Of course, there were anti-Francoists
who were democrats, the immense majority of them were. But there were also those who
were anti-democrats”; “Franco”).
The significance of Álvarez’s claim was not lost on Spain’s newly emboldened national-
ist far right, represented by the young party Vox, which portrays itself as waging a brave
resistance against “the dictatorship of political correctness.” Among other things, Vox
defends its voters’ right to celebrate Franco’s greatness and is quick to paint the historical
anti-Francoist opposition – in which communists played a key role, as they did elsewhere in
the worldwide resistance against fascism – as “terrorists.” In this political climate, the col-
umn by Álvarez de Toledo, who was at the time one of the PP deputies most sympathetic to
Vox, staked out a clear position. Fascism, she suggested, is not the opposite of democracy.
Elsewhere in Europe, similar forms of revisionism have been gaining ground. The Ger-
man far-right party Alternative für Deutschland has been calling for historical narratives,
including of the Nazi period, that evoke national pride rather than shame (Reuters), while
right-wing parties from the former Soviet bloc are all too eager to blur the distinction
between fascism and communism. There have been echoes in the United States as well,
ranging from former President Trump’s claim that, in the dispute over the Confederate
legacy, there are “fine people on both sides” to the demonization of “antifa” as a radical,
violent, terrorist, or antipatriotic movement. In Spain, however, this trend is less new than
elsewhere in the Western world. Álvarez de Toledo’s column is only the most recent exam-
ple of a larger revisionist wave from the right and far right that began to gain strength after
the Partido Popular’s electoral victory in 1996 and was first put into practice by bestselling
authors like Pío Moa and César Vidal (Faber, Memory 61). Presented as a critique against
an academic consensus supposedly biased toward the left, these right-wing revisionists in
practice recycled a handful of key Francoist tropes about the 1930s, the Civil War, and the
dictatorship (Ealham). These included the idea that the years of the Spanish Republic were
marked by chaos; that the Civil War was not prompted by the right-wing coup of 1936
but by the left-wing radicalism that preceded it; that the Popular Front electoral victory of
February 1936 was fraudulent; that Spain would have become a Soviet satellite state had it
not been the military uprising; and that it was Francoism, not the anti-Francoist opposition,
that laid the basis for post-Francoist democracy.
Around the turn of the century, this right-wing revisionism found a response from the
left in what later became known as the memory movement, a network of grassroots initia-
tives initially centered around locating and exhuming mass graves of victims of right-wing
repression. Over the years, the movement broadened its claims and activities to include
other forms of memory activism in support of specific demands for political change and
legal recognition, ranging from political rallies to volunteer-led exhumation projects, court
cases in Spain and abroad, and formal appeals to the United Nations.2 Like the revision-
ists from the right, the memory movement has been critical of the academic establishment,
arguing that academic historians have not paid sufficient attention to the fate of the victims

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of the dictatorship and the Transition or, worse, have been complicit in silencing their
voices. Over time, they have found allies among academics, including Francisco Ferrándiz,
Noelia Adánez, Francisco Espinosa, Pedro Ruiz Torres, Jesús Izquierdo Martín, and Pablo
Sánchez León, but it is no coincidence that many of these allies – not all of whom are histo-
rians – have been on the academic periphery or belong to younger generations.
Both the right-wing revisionists and the memory movement illustrate the political force
that the battle over historical memory has had in Spain over the past two decades. The for-
mer helped lay the basis for a flag-waving Spanish centralist nationalism that, after finding
itself discredited for decades following the dictator’s death by its association with Franco-
ism, resurfaced in full force – and “without hang-ups” (“sin complejos”), as its adherents
proudly affirm (Muñoz Soro) – around the 2017 Catalan referendum, when this nationalism
was embraced by the Partido Popular, Vox and part of the PSOE. The memory movement,
in turn, helped pave the way for the broad questioning of the transition that fueled the
15-M (the indignados protests that started around the May 2011 elections) and, eventually,
the emergence of new progressive political parties like Podemos and Els Comuns (Faber,
Memory 1–3). These new parties have incorporated the “recovery of historical memory” as
a natural plank in their political platforms.
The historical memory of the transition that came to be rejected by the memory move-
ment and the anti-austerity left is perhaps best illustrated by yet another miniature narra-
tive, this time voiced by the novelist Arturo Pérez Reverte in his La Guerra Civil contada
a los jóvenes (2015), a short book meant to make up for the lack of knowledge about
twentieth-century Spanish history among the country’s youth. “A la muerte del dictador,”
Pérez Reverte writes in the last chapter,

España se convirtió en una monarquía parlamentaria por decisión personal del Rey
Juan Carlos, . . . que había sido designado sucesor por el general Franco. Mediante
el jefe de gobierno Adolfo Suárez, asesorado por sus preceptores y con el apoyo de
todas las fuerzas políticas del momento, Juan Carlos I volvió a legalizar los partidos
políticos, procuró la reconciliación nacional, liquidó el régimen franquista y devolvió
a España la democracia. (126)
When the dictator died, Spain turned into a parliamentary monarchy as the result
of a personal decision by King Juan Carlos, . . . whom Franco had designated as his
successor. Through Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez, with the advice of his preceptors
and with the support of all the political forces of the moment, Juan Carlos I legalized
political parties, achieved national reconciliation, liquidated the Franco regime and
brought democracy back to Spain.

Pérez Reverte’s summary neatly reflects the canonical memory of the transition “como
construcción narrativa encomiástica” (“as an exemplary narrative construction”) that was
established during the Socialist governments of the 1980s, as the historian Juan Andrade
explains in a recent interview. What made it so powerful, he adds, was its broad author-
ship: It was shaped through mutually reinforcing feedback loops in “reportajes y retrospec-
tivas, declaraciones y conmemoraciones públicas, eventos universitarios y publicaciones”
(“reportages and retrospectives, public declarations and commemorations, academic events
and publications”) fueled not by only academic historians but also journalists and politi-
cians, most of whom, incidentally, belonged to the generation that brokered the transition
(Suárez).

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This canonical version of the transition depended on two key elements that have been
increasingly questioned in the last twenty years. The first is the idea that the transition man-
aged to neutralize Spain’s recent past – from the Second Republic to the Civil War to the
Franco regime – as a determining factor in present-day politics and society. Thanks to the
“mature” attitude of the political and cultural elites as well as the electorate, the narrative
maintained, Spain was able to overcome its longstanding divisions through a combination
of forgiveness, reconciliation, amnesty and willful forgetting. The second element is the
idea that, for this situation to hold, the task of telling the story of the national past authori-
tatively could not be entrusted to just anyone. Rather, it should be limited to academic
historians who, immunized by their rigorous methodologies, would be able to delve into
the past without fear for contagion by its ideological viruses. This view was formulated
most explicitly by Juliá, who associated the demise of this view of (objective, dispassionate)
history with the – for him, alarming – rise of (subjective, affective) memory (“Bajo” 14).
Both left-wing and right-wing revisionism have undermined this view, as both have
sought to emphasize the continued political and cultural relevance for Spain’s present of
the period from 1931 to 1981 while, at the same time, disputing the authority of those
groups who had claimed the exclusive right to narrate the truth about the national past.
The memory movement, in particular, has demanded a more prominent role for citizens’
voices, at the same time that it has denounced the central state’s lack of attention for the
victims of the Franco regime, both in judicial terms (reparations, restoration of honor)
and in representational terms (memory policies, monuments, education) (Faber, Memory
57–88). And if right-wing revisionists have been recycling key elements of official Francoist
historiography, the left has found inspiration in the Second Republic and the legacy of the
thousands of Spaniards who went into exile during the Civil War or following Franco’s
victory – particularly the rejection of the monarchy (as an undemocratic institution and
Francoist imposition) and, more broadly, an appreciation for the political and cultural
projects that shaped the progressive political agenda in 1930s Spain and the work of the
Republican exiles, such as federalism, women’s rights, social justice and the separation of
church and state – all of which appear to them as tasks still pending, tareas pendientes, in
post-Franco democracy.
To be sure, what has made possible this progressive historical memory of the Second
Republic and Republican exile is a certain amount of homogenization and erasure of con-
flict. Those who joined forces to defend the democratically elected government against the
attempted 1936 coup, after all, were notoriously divided along political and regional lines.
These divisions, which only grew deeper after the 1939 defeat of the Republic and the
outbreak of the Cold War, ran not only between political parties and groups – POUMistas
and anarchists versus socialists and communists, for example – but also within parties, as
the PSOE saw itself split into several different factions. In the recovery of Spain’s Repub-
lican legacy over the past twenty years, those ideological rifts are generally papered over.
(It is telling, for example, that the Republican soldier-hero in Javier Cercas’s Soldados de
Salamina – the 2001 novel that arguably set off the moda de la memoria in Spanish narra-
tive fiction – has no known ideology or party affiliation beyond his opposition to fascism.)

Narrative Fiction
The revival of republicanism in twenty-first–century Spain was preceded by a partial recov-
ery of narrative fiction written by exiled Republicans such as Max Aub and Arturo Barea.3

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Over the past 20 years, narrative fiction – particularly novels and films – has continued to
play a central role in the redefinition of Spain’s relationship to its past, echoing its impor-
tance for the historical memory of the Civil War in the decades following the Republic’s
defeat, both in exile and in Francoist Spain.4 As I have argued elsewhere, narrative fiction
since about 2000 has also helped provide opportunities for authors and their readers to find
what academic historians’ accounts did not offer: A more affective and politicized relation
to the past, the desire for which had helped fuel the various revisionist narratives discussed
previously. Indeed, since the late twentieth century, Spanish novelists and filmmakers have
turned their works into “affiliative acts,” in which they, along with their characters, seek
not only to recover and understand truths about the collective past, but also to present that
past and those who lived and shaped it as objects of admiration, identification, inspiration
and solidarity. For the public, in turn, reading or viewing these novels and films becomes
an act of political affiliation as well (Faber, Memory 155–70).
One way to view this by now substantial body of cultural production inspired by Spain’s
twentieth-century history is as a series of homages, as novels and films become a kind
of public-sphere monument. It is no coincidence that their appearance has been accom-
panied by legislative initiatives that have sought to address the lack of acknowledgment
of the Republican and anti-Francoist in public spaces still dominated by Francoist names
and imagery. A milestone in this respect was the so-called “Law of Historical Memory”
approved by the Spanish parliament in 2007 – on the eve of the Great Recession and
toward the end of the government led by Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez
Zapatero – which, among other things, prohibited the presence of Francoist symbols in
public spaces (Boletín 2007). Despite intense negotiations, deputies of the conservative
Partido Popular voted against the bulk of the law’s provisions, which, they claimed, only
served to “open old wounds.” Since, the Spanish right has narrativized Zapatero’s adop-
tion of the cause of historical memory – which broke with the Socialist policy in that area
maintained during its 14-year rule in the 1980s and ’90s – as a negative turning point. The
moment when “the Socialist Party embraced a revisionist take on the Transition,” the con-
servative journalist José Antonio Zarzalejos told me in early 2020, was the moment “when
things started going wrong” (Faber, Exhuming 124).
In this right-wing version of events, the two most important historical-memory-related
initiatives so far undertaken by the progressive coalition government of Pedro Sánchez –
Franco’s exhumation in the fall of 2019 and the draft Law of Democratic Memory a year
later – are painted as the neck shot against the pact of the transition and the stability it
supposedly brought. Among the left, meanwhile, these two initiatives – set against the back-
drop of the 2017 Catalan referendum for independence and the election of deputies of the
far-right Vox into regional and national parliaments in 2018 and 2019, respectively – have
intensified the debate about the relative weight that should be assigned to the past in the
diagnosis of Spain’s present-day challenges and the path toward their solution. The dynam-
ics of this debate illustrate some of the downsides of employing historical memory as a tool
for political activism.

The Francoist Legacy

As has been mentioned, the 15M movement that surged in the spring of 2011 was a broad
mobilization of civil society – initially sparked by the austerity policies imposed in response
to the Great Recession – that denounced the “regime of 1978” as rigid, closed, corrupt, and

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undemocratic. In the years following, the 15M inspired the creation of new political parties
such as Podemos, whose rapid rise broke open what until then had largely been a two-party
system, at least at the national level. Within only a couple of years, Spain’s political land-
scape changed beyond recognition. Podemos’s success at the ballot box only months after
its foundation sent shock waves through the system; among other things, it prompted King
Juan Carlos I to hurriedly abdicate in favor of his son, Felipe VI. In May 2015, politicians
allied with Podemos won the elections in several of the country’s largest cities, including
Madrid and Barcelona; later that year, the party was voted into the national parliament. In
early 2020, Podemos and the social-democratic PSOE formed the first progressive coalition
government Spain has seen since the 1930s. Although its parliamentary minority had made
it dependent on other parties to pass legislation, the coalition has weathered the 2020–21
pandemic and is determined to complete its four-year electoral mandate.
Ironically, the threat to the establishment posed by the political newcomers who
denounced the dysfunctions of Spanish democracy exacerbated those same dysfunctions,
at least initially, as the economic and political elites fought tooth and nail to preserve their
power and privilege. At the same time, the widening cracks in the existing structures – not
only in politics but also in the media and the judiciary – have opened spaces for new actors
who are not afraid to break long-standing taboos and expose systemic corruption in all
spheres of Spanish society. As a result, over the past decade the Spanish public sphere has
been inundated with examples large and small of kickback schemes, power abuse, judicial
malfeasance, and forms of social and economic inequality. These revelations – and the
near-total lack of accountability of those involved – in turn pushed citizens’ levels of trust of
the political system, the monarchy, the judiciary, the university, the press, and other central
democratic institutions to new lows (European Commission).
The widespread discontent is undeniable. How to frame it, however, has become a deeply
political question in which historical memory once more has claimed a central role. While
some insist on identifying the country’s deep-seated problems as evidence of a powerful,
unprocessed legacy of the Franco dictatorship – a legacy largely left unchallenged by the
transition – others reject that diagnosis as historically misguided and politically unproduc-
tive. A reader’s reaction to a January 2020 column by Rosa María Artal in ElDiario.es, one
of the country’s largest online newspapers, perfectly illustrates the first position: It identifies
Spain’s current, deficient democracy as the result, first, of an “adaptation maneuver” by the
Franco regime that allowed its structures to persist under a democratic cloak and, second,
of the Socialist Party’s inability to break this continuity during its fourteen years of rule,
from 1982 to 1996 (Osiris, qtd in Faber, Exhuming 12). Some influential pundits agree with
this analysis. For Emilio Silva, a leading figure in the grassroots movement defending the
rights of Franco’s victims, Francoism is still very much “part of [Spain’s] political culture,”
causing both the systemic fragility of Spanish democracy and the excessive politicization of
the entire state apparatus (“Exhumar”).
This history-driven reading of the political present is not limited to the left. The Basques
and Catalans who favor independence from Spain – and who straddle the left-right
divide – also like to portray the Spanish state as a Trojan horse of Francoist values, while
presenting the regional independence movements as engines of democratic renewal (Faber
and Mulder 2018; RTVE). In parliament and outside of it, this idea is met with scorn and
indignation by the Madrid-based political and media establishment. The notion that the
Spanish state in its current form suffers from a stubbornly persistent Francoism, after all,
belies Spanish elites’ long-held aspiration to European “normality” – a key concept in what

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has since become known as “the Culture of the Transition” (Delgado; Martínez). For the
critics, by contrast, Spain is the exact opposite of normal. For all its protestations to the
contrary, they say, in the Western European landscape Spain continues to stand out like a
sore thumb.
Yet not everyone on the left believes that the unprocessed Francoist legacy is a useful
explanatory framework. “The remnants of Francoism, for all their visibility, are not the
main problem of Spanish society – far from it,” Ignacio Echevarría, a prominent literary
critic, wrote in the magazine Contexto a month after Franco’s 2019 exhumation. Those
critics that claim the contrary, he added, are caught in a misperception. The phenomena
they denounce as traces of Francoism “en parte vienen de mucho más atrás y en parte
son de naturaleza radicalmente nueva” (“in part date from much earlier and in part are
radically new”). That’s even true for the far-right party Vox, Echevarría added, some of
whose supporters appear openly nostalgic of the dictatorship. “Parece,” Echevarría wrote,
“como si el pedigrí franquista de una parte significativa de la derecha española – incluida
la catalana – estableciera algún tipo de diferencia sustancial entre ella y el resto de las
derechas europeas” (“It would appear that the Francoist pedigree of a significant part of
the Spanish Right . . . marks some kind of fundamental difference between it and the rest
of the European Right”). But the reality is different. In practice, “sus fundamentos y sus
intereses . . . vienen a ser los sempiternos de la derecha en todo el resto del mundo” (“the
underpinnings and interests of the Spanish Right . . . are the same perduring ones as those
of the Right in the rest of the world”). In fact, Echevarría added, “no pocos representantes
del neoliberalismo español [tienen] poco o nada que ver con el franquismo y profesan
una sólida confianza en la democracia representativa” (“many representatives of Spanish
neoliberalism have little or nothing to do with Francoism and profess a solid faith in rep-
resentative democracy”; “Apuntes”). True, Echevarría admitted, the designers of Spain’s
transition may have neglected to eliminate Francoism and its symbols from public life.
But that doesn’t change the fact that “el franquismo – como el fascismo . . . – es hoy cosa
el pasado”([“Francoism, like fascism, . . . is today a thing of the past”). This also means
that those who refuse to accept this basic fact are committing a serious political mistake:
A misidentification of the enemy.
There seems to be plenty of empirical evidence to support Echevarría’s position. Spain
today is unrecognizably different from what it was at any point during Franco’s almost
forty-year rule. Apart from the simple fact that it is a parliamentary democracy and a mem-
ber of the European Union, Spain has also been at the vanguard of progressive causes, from
the innovative deployment of universal jurisdiction to persecute human rights violations
to the legalization of same-sex marriage. International rankings and statistics routinely
place Spain among the most advanced democracies of the world. The 2019 Democracy
Index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Spain as number 16, ahead of
France, and as one of the world’s 24 “full democracies” (EIU 2019). On the other hand, it’s
also important to acknowledge that Francoism did not appear out of nowhere; it emerged
from, and helped unify, reactionary organizations, projects, and ideologies that go back
at least to the nineteenth century – and that are not exclusive to Spain, either. “Francoism
didn’t actually invent much,” the historian Jaume Claret told me when I spoke with him
in early 2020. “It simply took advantage of its totalitarian power to grant pride of place
to the ultra-conservative strain of Spanish right-wing political thought, at the expense
of liberalism and Christian democracy, the Right’s other two principal currents” (Faber,
Exhuming 16).

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Echeverría and Claret point to the risk inherent in the deployment of historical memory
as a political tool: It may result in not only reductionism but a kind of fatalism. In an ironic
twist, in fact, the very temptation to read current problems as traces of an improperly pro-
cessed past, a virus, or curse, can itself be read as a Francoist legacy of sorts. Franco, after
all, identified himself fully with the destiny of the Spanish nation, which he consistently
defined in exceptionalist terms. He also presented himself as a providential leader, whose
hard hand (“mano dura”) was necessary for a country afflicted with an unruly and fratri-
cidal national character. In fact, the far right coincides with some of the most critical sectors
of the left in underscoring how much Spain today owes to the dictatorship, to the extent
that it views Spain’s current democracy as one of Franco’s many valuable gifts to the nation.
Franco’s embrace of Spanish exceptionalism, nationalism and imperialism fueled his
obsession with Spain’s international status, while Francoist propaganda and textbooks
portrayed Spain as a providential nation, a “spiritual guide of the world,” chosen by God
himself to save the rest of humanity. Although few people beyond the far religious right
defend this notion today, the concern with Spain’s status in the world continues to feature
centrally in public discourse. In recent years, it has served to fuel a wave of revisionist
history. Elvira Roca Barea, a high school history teacher from Andalusia and author of
several bestselling books, maintains that over the past 200 years Spain’s intellectual elites
have done their country a great disservice by swallowing hook, line and sinker the critical
views of Spanish history spread by the country’s international rivals (Imperiofobia; Frac-
asología). These rivals, she argues, have consistently painted the actions of Spaniards in too
negative a light – whether it’s regarding the Inquisition, the fifteenth-century expulsion of
the Jews and Muslims, the colonization of the Americas, the Enlightenment, or the bloody
conflicts of the twentieth century. In recent years, some of Roca Barea’s controversial tenets
have seeped into official government discourse. When the social-democratic government
launched its campaign to reinforce Spain’s democratic image in 2019, Irene Lozano, the
secretary of state in charge of the operation, suggested that anyone who doubts the quality
of the country’s democracy plays into the hand of “Spain’s enemies” (España Global). By
invoking this phrase – whose Francoist overtones are unmistakable – Lozano was referring
to Spain’s historical rivals, including England, the United States, and the Netherlands, but
also the Catalan and Basque independence movements, which, as we saw, like to paint the
Spanish central state as retrograde, inefficient, and authoritarian.

Openings
As all this makes clear, if historical memory has been a central element in Spain’s political
struggles over the past twenty years, its role has been mixed. Still, I would argue that the
overall balance is a positive one. Not only because the debate over the ethical and episte-
mological dimensions of history has fueled civic mobilization from the left as much as the
right but also because this mobilization has served two other purposes: It has submitted
the field of Spanish historiography to methodological critiques, interdisciplinary insights,
and critical institutional histories, and it has helped redefine the relationship between the
academy and civil society more broadly. It is no coincidence that, in the country’s new
political parties, academics like Pablo Iglesias, a political scientist, and the historian Xavier
Domènech have occupied leadership roles alongside activists like Ada Colau and Irene
Montero. Thanks in part to these developments, many more scholars, activists, and citi-
zens are participating in the debate – which by now has transcended the confines of the

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university – about the narrative of the past and the influence of that past on the country’s
political present. The debate, moreover, is not limited to the half century worth of Spanish
history that unleashed it (roughly from 1931 until 1981) but has grown to include the entire
narrative of the national past.
As Elena Delgado and Luis Moreno Caballud have argued, the intellectuals who domi-
nated the Spanish university and public sphere in the years following Franco’s death strongly
identified the transition with the concept of normalization. And as Manuel Artime points
out, liberal historians like Juan Pablo Fusi or José Álvarez Junco further associated this
normalizing process with their own ability, as objective scholars, to write history without
politics – shielding the political present from any meaningful connections to the past – so
that Spain could free itself from the weight of the past and do politics without history. Yet
by framing Spanish modernization as normalization, Artime argues, historians and other
intellectuals in fact impoverished the country’s relationship to its own past. By burying or
dismissing emancipatory narratives from the past, they deprived post-Franco democracy
from the possibility of mining that past for political alternatives to a present that many
experienced as politically deficient (Artime 20). In the process, the intellectual elites that
dominated the public sphere in the quarter century following Franco’s death flattened Span-
ish democracy. The development of the past twenty years – marked by the rise of histori-
cal memory as a focus of debate and a tool for political mobilization – has given Spanish
democracy the depth that it long lacked.

Notes
1 All translations are mine.
2 Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg define memory activism as “the strategic commemoration of
a contested past to achieve mnemonic or political change by working outside state channels” (5).
3 In 1996, for example, Antonio Muñoz Molina, a poster child of Spain’s “new narrative” of the
1980s and ‘90s, took advantage of his induction into the Royal Academy to vindicate Aub’s work
(Destierro).
4 This was in part due to the relative weakness of Spanish historiography in the decades following
the war. While exiled Republicans lacked resources, had no access to archives, and were drawn
into bitter internal disputes, historians in Franco’s Spain were eager, or forced, to adhere to those
versions of the war that satisfied the regime’s ideological needs (Preston 1–13).

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 8
REPRESENTING LOSS
Ghosts, Ruins, and Other Traces

Jo Labanyi

In the introduction to his study of the erasure of memory produced by urban speculation in
Los Angeles, Norman Klein describes how he takes his students on “anti-tours”: “I would
stop at locations where no buildings existed any longer, tell them what had been there once:
A movie studio, a whorehouse, whatever. We would get out, look around, and agree that
it was gone all right” (3). This chapter analyzes a mode of memory work that, like Klein’s
anti-tours, is concerned not with recovering the past but with documenting or recreating its
loss. The relaxation of censorship in Spain on Franco’s death in 1975 and its eventual aboli-
tion in December 1977 produced a desire to “tell it all,” manifest initially in a proliferation
of historical studies about the Civil War, now able to narrate the violent past from the los-
ers’ perspective. This was followed by a series of collections of first-person testimonies; for
example, Manuel Leguineche and Jesús Torbado’s publication in 1977 of their interviews,
conducted in the late 1960s, with those who went into hiding for years after the war; Ron-
ald Fraser’s 1979 oral history of the Civil War, Blood of Spain, published in Spanish transla-
tion in the same year; or Tomasa Cuevas Gutiérrez’s late 1970s interviews, published in the
mid-1980s, with former women political prisoners in Francoist jails, of which she was one.
The twenty-first–century memory boom was ushered in by the foundation, after the first
public excavation in 2000 of a mass grave from the Francoist wartime repression, of the
non-profit Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH; Association
for the Recovery of Historical Memory), which assists families wanting to exhume rela-
tives extrajudicially executed by the war’s victors. The connection between the “recovery
of historical memory” and the recovery of victims’ remains led to a commonly expressed
assumption that the function of memory was to “recover the past.” The result, in the first
decade of the twenty-first century, was a flood of novels and films on “historical memory”
(the term becoming synonymous with the Francoist wartime and postwar repression) that
largely adopted a realist aesthetic in the attempt to transport readers and viewers back to
the past “as it really was.”
Memory, however, does not give us the past “as it really was.” Exhumations do recover
the remains of the dead, but memory constructs the past from the present standpoint of the
agent doing the remembering. For that reason, the past is by definition contested and keeps
changing. No testimony can bring the past back. As Isabel Cadenas Cañón has noted (46),

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-10 
 Representing Loss

it is not a matter of overcoming loss (the past cannot be undone) but of finding ways of
representing it; that is, finding ways of representing what is no longer there but nonetheless
impinges on the present. Realism – which strives to suture gaps – cannot do this. We need,
Cadenas Cañón suggests, to stop regarding the past as something to be mastered and to
focus on what the past – including the losses that mark it – does to us (61). This means to
be attentive to affect: The forces that touch us and move us to action.1 Susan Sontag has
famously argued that the realism of atrocity photography can make viewers feel good for
having contemplated what we prefer not to see; I suspect that a similar feel-good factor
accounts, at least in part, for the sales and box-office success of the flood of twenty-first–
century Spanish novels and films about the Francoist repression. The cultural representa-
tions of realities marked by loss discussed in this chapter – related partly but not only to the
Francoist repression – depict the damage done to people and places indirectly, by making
us feel the force of a history that is absent but makes its presence felt through its material
traces. As we shall see, the emphasis on materiality is what makes loss tangible – a force
that affects us through its physicality.
This chapter draws on the now well-populated field of spectrality studies (Blanco and
Pereen). The recent interest in haunting as a mode of historical analysis was sparked by
Derrida’s 1994 Specters of Marx, which explored the possibilities of radical politics after
the collapse of the Communist bloc and loss of belief in master narratives of progress.
Developing the Communist Manifesto’s opening image of a specter haunting Europe, Der-
rida argues for a post-Marxist politics based not on progress but on attentiveness to past
injustice: “a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (xix; emphasis in origi-
nal). Specters provide a figure for this politics because, in returning from the past to haunt
us, they summon us to rectify the injustices they suffered. As in Hamlet, ghosts are a sign
that “time is out of joint” not only because they unsettle the present but, more specifically,
because they upset the notion of linear progression. Derrida’s key aim is to deconstruct the
division of time into the separate categories of past, present, and future, arguing that the
past, while technically “gone,” is a living force in the present, as is the future: “they are
always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are
not yet” (176; emphasis in original).
In her seminal 1997 Ghostly Matters, the sociologist Avery Gordon developed Der-
rida’s call for a politics of memory based on the haunting of the present by past injustices.
Ghosts, she notes, cannot be verified empirically but their presence is felt (8). She explores
the capacity of literature for expressing such hauntings, observing, with Toni Morrison,
that “invisible things are not necessarily not-there”; ghosts are real in that “they produce
material effects” (17). If Freud, in his rejection of animism, saw haunting (the uncanny)
as originating in the unconscious, Gordon stresses haunting as a force that comes from
the outside (48–9). The relation of spectrality to psychoanalysis is a vexed one, with some
seeing Derrida’s concept of haunting as the expression of a traumatic past blocked from
consciousness (Baer), and others as the expression of a melancholic refusal to let go of
the past (Freccero). In the 2008 second edition of her book, Gordon argues that Derrida’s
proposal offers a corrective to the trauma studies dominant in the 1990s, whose focus
on the blocking of consciousness ran the risk of presenting trauma victims as the passive
sufferers of psychic processes, sidelining the political implications of the violence done to
them and depriving them of agency. By contrast, Gordon insists that haunting produces “a
something-to-be-done” (xvi). In Politics out of History (2001), Wendy Brown, like Derrida,
links spectrality with mourning, but cautions against Freud’s view that the objective of the

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mourning process is to produce closure, manifest in political acts of reparation and apology
designed to liberate the present from the past (140). For Brown, Derrida’s concept of haunt-
ology is, rather, a multi-directional “practice of responsible relations between generations”
that involves our debt to the past, the past’s legacy to the present, and our obligation to the
future (147). The factual reconstruction of past injustices – as, for example, in the reports of
National Truth and Reconciliation Commissions – is necessary to secure legal reparations,
but it cannot “do justice” to the ways in which the past haunts the present as an invisible
but tangible force (Brown 141). This means that realism – as the aesthetic equivalent of
empirical evidence – is insufficient, since it fails to capture the invisible but tangible force of
haunting through which the past endures, and continues to affect us, in the present.
I will start with an image from Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the
Beehive) that encapsulates the temporal dynamics and materiality of haunting, as theorized
previously. On returning on her own to the semi-ruined hut where her elder sister had told
her the “spirit” of Frankenstein’s monster lives, the film’s child protagonist Ana spots a
footprint in the ground. Slowly, she inserts her tiny foot into its imprint. In so doing, Ana
is connecting physically with a material trace of the past. The film’s end, as Ana utters the
phrase that her sister has told her will summon the spirit (“materialized” for her in the
wounded fugitive who takes refuge in the hut and is shot by the Civil Guard), indicates
that this is also a connection with the future: Despite realizing that the fugitive has been
killed, Ana persists in summoning him. The Civil War is not depicted or mentioned explic-
itly in the film but is omnipresent through the silences (we are told at the start that the
action takes place in 1940, with the Francoist repression referenced by the Falangist yoke
and arrows stenciled on a building’s wall as we enter the village). It is also evoked as an
overwhelming “absent presence” (not depicted but alluded to) by Teresa, the protagonist’s
mother, as she makes mention, in her letters to a missing loved one (addressed to the Red
Cross in France, which helped to locate Republican refugees abroad), of “tantas ausencias,
tantas cosas destruidas” (“so many absences, so many things destroyed”). The impact of a
past that remains off-screen is also conveyed by the photo album viewed by Ana, with its
happy pre-war images of Teresa and her husband Fernando, in which Teresa’s school photo
wearing a lab coat shows that she was studying science (reminding us of the Republic’s
progressive educational measures) and Fernando is depicted with philosopher Unamuno
(implying that before the war he was an intellectual). Leafing through these photographs of
a past unknown to her, little Ana touches a particularly happy image of her mother with her
finger – again, connecting physically with an absent past. In fingering the photograph, Ana
reminds us of the indexicality of analog photography, which depicts the material imprint on
the negative of a past reality. This scene has further layers of “absent presence” with Teresa
playing, on an out-of-tune piano, the folksong “Las morillas de Jaén” (The Moorish Girls
from Jaén) that was famously recorded with Federico García Lorca as the pianist, remind-
ing us of the poet’s assassination at the start of the Civil War and of Spain’s multicultural
medieval past, now replaced by an intolerant National-Catholicism.
I have argued elsewhere (Labanyi 76–9) for a reading of Frankenstein’s monster – which
“haunts” Ana after seeing James Whale’s 1931 film Frankenstein in the village hall – as
a ghost rather than an embodiment of evil; Frankenstein’s monster was, after all, created
from body parts belonging to the dead. The abandoned hut set in an empty landscape
where Ana finds the wounded fugitive is a perfect location for a ghostly apparition. Ana
will be found, after she runs away, behind a ruined arch (all that remains of what was once
a house) in the middle of an empty landscape, again making us feel absence as a tangible

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presence. Luis Cuadrado’s suggestive cinematography makes the empty landscape the mate-
rial cipher of a haunting. Ana’s succor of the fugitive anticipates Derrida’s call to offer
ghosts “a hospitable memory . . . out of a concern for justice” (175; emphasis in original).
Erice’s film was made in 1973, two years before Franco’s death, under a return to hardline
censorship that made indirect statement necessary. The trope of haunting is, in fact, found
in much Spanish cultural production from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s, before
the memory boom produced a shift to realism.2
The excavations of mass graves that proliferated in Spain from 2000, triggering the
memory boom, have been widely documented by photographers, concerned to produce
material evidence of crimes against humanity. I analyze here an instance of photographic
documentation that evokes the horror of the Francoist killing fields by focusing on material
objects not just as evidence but as indicators of the haunting of the present by an absent
past: the 2007 bilingual photobook Dark Is the Room Where We Sleep/Oscura es la hab-
itación donde dormimos, by photographer and installation artist Francesc Torres. Its first
epigraph, from W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, ends: “And might it not be, continued Austerlitz,
that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the
most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some
connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?” (Dark 13). Torres’ book starts with
a single page and two double-page spreads of empty landscapes outside the village of Vil-
lamayor de los Montes, in Burgos province, where the exhumation documented by Torres
was conducted in 2004. The table of contents faces the photograph of a ruined building.
The resonances of these photographs of empty landscapes and a ruined building, devoid of
human habitation, with Erice’s film are strong.
In his introductory text, Torres describes his previous experience of collecting battle-
ground debris from the Civil War: human bones, shrapnel, boots, spoons, empty food cans
(Dark 19–20). An excavation, he reflects, is a book whose pages are the earth and whose
alphabet is the objects excavated (Dark 22). His main interest in documenting the Vil-
lamayor exhumation was to photograph the objects found in the grave, which he described
as “impregnated with history” (“The Images” 160). To capture the materiality of these
signs of absence, he used an analog camera, which produces an image from the object’s
imprint on the photographic negative; he chose still photography rather than the moving
image because he wanted to let the spaces between the images – the absences – speak (“The
Images” 161). He also chose black-and-white photography to evoke the pastness of the
objects depicted (the images switch to color in the final appendix documenting the reburial
of the human remains two years later, after identification).
This stress on materiality as the conveyor of absence translates into an emphasis on
the earth, which conserves the material traces of the extra-judicial killing and burial of
forty-six inhabitants of Villamayor de los Montes on September 24th, 1936, just as the
earth imprints itself on the photographic negative in the most intricate detail. The first
image of the grave shows its bare surface before excavation, followed by three extreme
close-ups of the earth exposed by the archaeologist volunteers: in the first case, punctuated
by a bullet hole; in the last two, providing a resting place for archaeological tools (a brush, a
spatula). The last image before the three appendices (the forensic report; an essay on trauma
by historian Joanna Bourke; the color photos of the subsequent reburial) is a double-page
spread of roots weaving their way through the bare earth of the now cleared grave – an
image of absence that conveys time as a living force (the roots that have continued to grow
since the executions took place sixty-eight years before). In several photographs, we see

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objects emerge from the soil (a bullet, a wedding ring, and, in a sequence of five images, the
remains of shoes). In his introductory essay, Torres admits that these shoes were his emo-
tional undoing, because of their former contiguity to the now disappeared flesh, and the still
discernible marks they had left on the earth while their owners were still standing – another
double-page spread shows the tread marks of shoes, again with roots growing through
them. Other photographs emphasize the absence conveyed by these material remains by
isolating them on the palm of a hand (a bullet, a tiny fragment of cloth). One image cap-
tures a handful of prewar photographs of victims and/or a relative spread on the floor of
the now empty grave, signaling the ability of the analog photograph to give an afterlife to
the photographic subject by conserving the imprint of the then living body.
The book’s layout includes tracing paper inserts whose semi-transparency produces a
ghostly effect. The blown-up image of the face of one of the victims is printed on the back
side of the tracing paper so that we first see it, before turning the page, as a specter. A detail
of three corpses from Goya’s Disasters of War is printed on another tracing paper insert,
allowing us to dimly view behind it a photograph of three skulls in the grave at Villamayor,
in a literal layering of temporalities and visual media. A detail of an arm brandishing a club
from Goya’s mural painting “Duel with Cudgels” is included in black-and-white at the end
of Torres’ introductory essay. Perhaps the most eloquent evocation of loss is the reproduc-
tion, in the appendices, of a blown-up detail from a family photo, showing a young mother
holding her child on her lap, with her husband (one of the victims) standing at her side,
the right half of his body and his head and feet excised by the cropping. The complete
photograph appears in the preceding forensic report, where his stocky body and flashy
black-and-white shoes contrast with his semi-invisible appearance in the cropped image.
The empty landscapes of Erice’s film and Torres’ photobook evoke what, following the
book of the same name by Sergio del Molino, has come to be known as “la España vacía”
(“empty Spain”). The rural veterinarian and poet María Sánchez has argued that we should
talk rather of “la España vaciada” (“emptied Spain”) for the dereliction of rural Spain – a
process that dates back to the privatization of land with the mid–nineteenth-century dis-
entailments of Church and seigneurial property – has been provoked by economic forces,
regarded as “progress.” The mass exodus from the rural hinterland to escape hunger in the
postwar period, especially in the 1950s and 60s with emigration to northern Europe as well
as to the shanty towns encircling Spanish cities, has largely been studied by historians and
treated in literature and film in terms of its impact on the migrants in their new environ-
ments. One of the few explorations of this postwar mass migration from the perspective
of those left behind is Julio Llamazares’ 1988 novel La lluvia amarilla (The Yellow Rain),
written before the twenty-first–century memory boom. The text imagines the musings of its
narrator-protagonist, for nearly ten years the last inhabitant of his Pyrenean village as he
lies dying – or may already have died; he wonders if his consciousness is the continuation
of his memories after death. A prefatory note tells us that the ruins of the village, Ainielle,
abandoned since 1970, still stand. Life and death blur: the narrator, if not already a ghost (a
voice that continues to address us after death), lives in terms of the ghosts of the past, which
accompany him in his solitude. He describes himself as “un fantasma solitario en medio del
olvido y las ruinas” (“a solitary ghost in the midst of ruins and oblivion”; 51).
Following the meanderings of memory rather than linear time, the narrative recalls the
succession of departures, noting that many local villages suffered the same fate The first
family left when the narrator-protagonist was still a child; another family never returned
after the inhabitants of the village were evacuated during the Civil War to escape air raids;

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his younger son went missing in the war as a military recruit; his next-door neighbor left
after the war to work in the hydroelectric power plant in the valley below; his other son
Andrés left for the French border in 1949 (the first letter from him arrived in 1970, the pre-
sent time of narration, with a photograph of himself with a wife and children in Germany);
the elderly servant abandoned by another departing family, who the narrator and his wife
had taken in, left never to be heard of again in 1950, by when only two other families were
left in the village. And finally, on the departure of the last remaining neighbor in 1961, his
wife Sabina hanged herself in the abandoned mill. The narrator remarks that it was as if
“un día, de pronto, las gentes hubieran levantado sus cabezas de la tierra, después de tan-
tos siglos, y hubieran descubierto la miseria en que vivían y la posibilidad de remediarla
en otra parte” (“one day, all of a sudden, people had, after so many centuries, looked up
from the earth and discovered the poverty in which they were living and the possibility of
alleviating it elsewhere”; 77). What triggers the “éxodo imparable” (76) is the “discovery”
of progress; that is, the possibility of bettering one’s condition.
In similar fashion, the narrator details the successive stages of ruination of the buildings,
collapsing in the same order in which they were abandoned. Despite his attempts to patch
up the cracks, the narrator’s own house starts to be invaded by ivy; the woodworm eating
the beams are eating his heart and memory (84). This is not the Romantic ruin as an ideal-
ized return to nature; the rot is in nature too, symbolized by the yellow rain of the title,
which in autumn covers the village with dead poplar leaves – a yellow rain that continued
for five or six weeks after Sabina’s suicide (81). The landscape, with no one left to cultivate
it, moans like the abandoned buildings, filled with the murmurs of their former owners’
ghosts. Photographs resuscitate the past: after Sabina’s death, the narrator burns the photos
of her that hung on the wall, because he cannot bear her stare. Each loss triggers the return
of phantoms that embody previous losses: Andrés’s departure revives the ghosts of the son
who disappeared in the war and the daughter who had died in childhood twenty years
before, whose rasping breath the narrator hears in her now locked bedroom; after Sabina’s
death, the narrator’s long-deceased mother starts to appear in the kitchen at night, subse-
quently accompanied by the “sombras” (shadows) of the other dead family members. At
first the narrator doubts whether these apparitions are coming from within or without,
but he sees and hears them engaged in conversation round the kitchen hearth and, in the
morning, finds the fire in the hearth (which he had put out) burning. Sabina “returns” from
death to watch over him when he nearly dies from a snake bite – a benevolent ghost that,
rather than seeking redress for an injustice, takes care of the present. Having initially tried
to get rid of it, he ties the rope with which Sabina hanged herself round his waist for perpe-
tuity, accepting to be bound materially by the past. The ghostly visitations are described as
“resuscitations”: the past coming back to life. Whether they are real or imagined is, in the
end, irrelevant; memory keeps the past alive in the present. What the narrator most fears
is not death but being forgotten after he is gone, with no one left to remember him: that,
and not death itself, means extinction. Llamazares’ novel is an attempt to keep villages like
Ainielle alive in the collective memory.
The novel is infused with melancholy, not as a nostalgic clinging to the past but as a
recognition that what has died is not just the past but the future. Andrés’s decision to emi-
grate hits Sabina and the narrator so hard because it means the impossibility, with no more
children left, of their home’s survival (53). Ainielle’s future had died, the narrator reflects,
long before its last inhabitants departed. The death of the future means that the narrator,
too, dies before his physical death; hence his ambiguous status as perhaps already a ghost.

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The only future he can imagine (in the first and last chapters) is the arrival of the men from
the next village who will find him dead.
Mercedes Álvarez’s 2004 documentary El cielo gira (The Sky Turns) is also about a
dying village: her birthplace Aldealseñor, in Soria province, which she left at the age of
three, the last child to be born there. She set out to make a film about the moment preced-
ing disappearance, paying attention to the palimpsestic presence in the area of traces of past
habitation going back to prehistoric times, but, during the nine months of filming, things
happened that complicated the already complex temporal scheme she had in mind. While
the villagers’ remaining inhabitants are all elderly and village life will certainly die with the
last of them, the future kept intruding in various forms.
Like Llamazares, Álvarez sees emigration to the city as inevitable: the final credits thank
not only the inhabitants of Soria’s Tierras Altas region (sixteen villagers appear in the film),
but also “los que un día se tuvieron que marchar” (“those who once had to leave”). In the
DVD extras, she describes the century-long depopulation of Soria as “un retroceso impara-
ble, acelerado en las últimas décadas” (“an unstoppable decline, which has accelerated in
recent decades”). However, we never hear the villagers talk of the departure of those who
left, their concerns are for the present: the increasing lack of attention of the outside world
as the population diminishes – the baker, fishmonger, and postman come less and less often;
the election activists for both the Socialist Party and conservative Popular Party no longer
stop to canvass their votes but drive off after sticking up their posters.
As in La lluvia amarilla, the village is not outside history, but what is stressed is its incor-
poration into the present: in this case, the Iraq War (the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq
took place during the film’s shooting from Autumn 2002 to June 2003). A shepherd up in the
hills listens to a news report on his transistor radio; a villager watches the dropping of smart
bombs on Iraq on her TV set. The villagers chatting in the square discuss whether Spain will
join the invasion. The director’s voice-over describes the waves of planes (assumed to be war
planes) passing overhead from the north as bound for distant cities that are perhaps wait-
ing to be destroyed (buried in the rubble of history, as the voice-over puts it). This inscribes
Aldealseñor, facing a different kind of death, into a historical continuum of repeated destruc-
tion. The discussion of the invasion in the square triggers memories of the Civil War, with
the men recalling – to collective amusement – how a villager was shot for shouting “¡Viva
la República!” (“Long Live the Republic!”) when he was ordered to say “¡Viva Franco!”
(“Long Live Franco!”). Later we are shown photographs, functioning as material memories,
of a Falangist meeting in the village, with those assembled giving the fascist salute.
This historical continuum is shown to go back to prehistory, with successive eras ending
in destruction but enduring through their material traces. The film starts with a villager
pointing out the fossilized imprints of dinosaurs in the quarry where she played as a child;
we are shown prehistoric dolmens and the foundations of a Celtiberian fort and join a
tour of the nearby remains of Numancia, destroyed by its inhabitants rather than surren-
der to Scipio’s Roman army in the second century BC. The ruins of the village’s medieval
Arabic palace testify to Spain’s Islamic past. Viewing the remains of the Celtiberian fort, a
villager muses that the death of Aldealseñor will be a repeat of “lo que pasó hace dos mil
años” (“what happened two thousand years ago”). There is no melancholy in the villag-
ers’ ponderings on the lost civilizations (animal and human) that previously populated the
area; they are a fact of life. The end of one cycle is the start of another. The film ends with
Antonino and José climbing up a hill, ruminating on how “te vas dando cuenta de que
vamos de paso, que esto es un soplo” (“you come to realize we are just passing through,

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that this is but a fleeting moment”) – an understanding of their imminent death and that of
their village as a moment of transition rather than an extinction. These cycles, which endure
through their material traces, are vegetable as well as human and animal: The centuries-old
elm tree that used to be the center of village life in the square (recalled via another photo)
and was removed when it died of Dutch elm disease lives on, after death, in its new location
facing the Arab palace. The materiality of its remains is emphasized in a series of extreme
close-ups of the nearly blind painter, Pello Azketa, fingering its gnarled surface and crev-
ices: An evocative example of the haptic tactile gaze. The weaving into the film of Azketa’s
paintings pays tribute to forms of representation that are not limited to visual observation;
having almost lost his sight, Azketa paints the landscape from memory.
The landscapes we see in the film, with their traces of past civilizations, are, similarly,
material memories. The film’s recurring image of a single holm oak on the skyline of a hill
is, the narrator’s voiceover tells us, the view (forgotten by her but still there) that she had
from her house as an infant. (The final credits give special thanks to Víctor Erice, whose
use of empty landscapes we have noted.) The film ends with Antonino and José, as they
reach the top of the hill, merging with the holm oak as a speck on the horizon. But behind
the hill, a new era is being born: during the film’s shooting, a wind farm was constructed
along a nearby ridge: We see a giant excavator move in, its long arm echoing the neck of
the dinosaur statues erected in the area to memorialize its prehistoric past. In a stunning
shot (used for the menu page of the DVD), we see the tips of the blades of one of the giant
turbines revolve behind the skyline. A new future is signaled also with the Moroccan immi-
grant shepherd (his daughters offering a future to the village bereft of young people) and
the Moroccan runner training for the next World Athletics Championship. An additional
future intruded into the film’s shooting with the start of construction work aimed at repur-
posing the Arab palace as a five-star hotel. This, together with the dinosaur statues and
guided tour of Numancia, introduces the theme of heritage into the film’s meditation on
the continuing presence of the past. As Andreas Huyssen has noted, the heritage industry,
by equating conservation with the elimination of signs of deterioration (of pastness), repre-
sents “a fear or denial of the ruination by time” (8). If El cielo gira constructs history as a
series of cycles in which destruction is followed by renewal (hence the film’s title), heritage
is an attempt to “stop the sky from turning.” Nonetheless, it signals a future for Aldealse-
ñor, albeit not one from which the villagers will benefit, as they note.
As Huyssen also comments, today’s obsession with restoring ruins to their pre-ruinous
state “hides a nostalgia for an earlier age that had not yet lost its power to imagine other
futures” (7). I will finish with a brief consideration of the “modern ruins” left by the inter-
ruption of construction projects in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. These are ruins,
not of the past, but of the future – specters of a projected future that was aborted. Olsen
and Pétursdóttir note that, for a ruin to be regarded as having sufficient historical value
to be converted into a heritage site, it must not be too modern (3–5). Gastón Gordillo
has observed that modern construction materials – concrete and steel – do not age in an
aesthetically pleasing manner. He recalls the Nazi architect Albert Speer’s advice to Hitler
to construct a Berlin that was not a tribute to modernity but a monumental city of stone,
marble, and brick that in a thousand years’ time would look like the ruins of imperial Rome
(244). The concrete and steel – concrete, above all – of the white elephants of Spain’s con-
struction boom make them monuments not to past grandeur but simply to incompletion.
Olsen and Pétursdóttir coin the term “premature ruins” for abandoned structures that
were never inhabited or used. Such ruins are regarded as having no value, especially if they

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were abandoned before completion: The ruins of unfinished structures cannot be restored
to an original state; they are remains without an original (6). They note, however, that
“premature ruins” are felt to have value by those critical of the capitalist developmental-
ism that produced them, for they evoke, not an original state, but an originary failure (8).
In the introduction “The Past Remains” to her edited volume Imperial Debris, Ann Laura
Stoler argues that ruins should be studied as a way of revealing the processes of ruination
that destroyed certain futures (11). Nowhere is this clearer than in the unfinished housing
projects, the roads that lead nowhere, the airports that have never seen a passenger that
litter contemporary Spain. Among the various artists and collectives that have documented
these sites, Markel Redondo and Marc Femenia have produced online interactive maps that
allow one to situate geographically the abandoned construction sites they have documented
through drone photography.3 Kathy Korcheck has dubbed these specters of an aborted
future “speculative ruins” since “market speculation is always future-oriented” (92).
Germán Labrador Méndez, in his appropriately titled “Lo que en España no ha habido”
(“What in Spain Has Never Been”), notes that this future-oriented speculation burns up the
future in the name of short-term profit (170); as a result, we have the future (the speculative
designs of past years) behind us (189). As Stoler insists, we need to ask whose futures were
thereby destroyed – not just the futures of those responsible for, or who bought into, those
aborted projects, but the possible futures that might have been had by others if resources
had been used for the common good (10–11).
The various cinematic, photographic, fictional, and architectural objects of study dis-
cussed in this chapter have in common their evocation of loss through its material traces.
The resulting haunting shows the past and the future to be active forces in the present;
indeed, past and future are bound up with each other since past losses suppose the loss of
other possible futures. This multi-temporal view of history makes us aware that, behind
every historical “fact,” there lies the specter of an alternative possibility that was eliminated.

Notes
1 I use “affect” in the sense it has acquired in recent affect studies, that is, as a force or intensity that
impacts us corporally, and that precedes the formulation of a specific emotion. In this respect, affect
studies is closely related to the New Materialisms, which stress the capacity of things to act on us.
2 For a broad discussion of the trope of haunting in late twentieth-century Spanish fiction and film,
see Labanyi.
3 I am indebted here to Christine Martínez, whose 2021 doctoral dissertation at New York Univer-
sity brought these and other photographers of Spain’s “modern ruins” to my attention.

Works Cited
Álvarez, Mercedes, director. El cielo gira. José María Lara/Alokatu SL, 2004.
Baer, Ulrich. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. MIT P, 2002.
Blanco, María del Pilar, and Esther Pereen, editors. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in
Contemporary Cultural Theory. Bloomsbury, 2013.
Brown, Wendy. Politics out of History. Princeton UP, 2001.
Cadenas Cañón, Isabel. Poética de la ausencia. Cátedra, 2019.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Seven Rendall, U of California
P, 1984.
Cuevas Gutiérrez, Tomasa. Cárcel de mujeres. 2 vols. Sirocco, 1985a.
Cuevas Gutiérrez, Tomasa. Mujeres de la resistencia. Sirocco, 1985b.

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Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New Inter-
national. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 1994.
Erice, Víctor, director. El espíritu de la colmena. Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas
SL, 1973.
Femenia, Marc. “España: Error de sistema.” 2017. www.lab.eldiario.es/error_de_sistema. Accessed
1 Dec. 2020.
Fraser, Ronald. Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War. Pantheon, 1979. Spanish
translation Recuérdalo tú y recuérdalo a los otros. Crítica, 1979.
Freccero, Carla. Queer/Early/Modern. Duke UP, 2006.
Gordillo, Gastón. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Duke UP, 2014.
Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 2nd ed., U of Min-
nesota P, 2008 [1997].
Huyssen, Andreas. “Nostalgia for Ruins.” Grey Room, vol. 23, 2006, pp. 6–21.
Klein, Norman M. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. Verso, 1997.
Korchek, Kathy. “Speculative Ruins: Photographic Interrogations of the Spanish Economic Crisis.”
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, vol. 19, 2005, pp. 91–110.
Labanyi, Jo. “History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past? Reflec-
tions on Spanish Film and Fiction of the Post-Franco Period.” Disremembering the Dictatorship:
The Politics of Memory Since the Spanish Transition to Democracy, edited by Joan Ramon Resina,
Rodopi, 2000, pp. 65–82.
Labrador Méndez, Germán. “Lo que en España no ha habido. La lógica normalizadora de la cultura
postfranquista en la actual crisis.” Revista Hispánica Moderna, vol. 69, no. 2, 2016, pp. 165–92.
Leguineche, Manuel, and Jesús Torbado. Los topos. El testimonio de quiénes pasaron su vida escon-
didos en la España de la posguerra. Argos, 1977.
Llamazares, Julio. La lluvia amarilla. 17th ed., Seix Barral, 1991 [1988].
Martínez, Christine. “Living Finitude in an Age of Growth: Spanish Late Capitalism and Its Discon-
tents.” Ph.D. Dissertation. New York University, 2021.
Molino, Sergio del. La España vacía. Viaje por un país que nunca fue. Turner, 2013.
Olsen, Bjørnar, and Þóra Pétersdóttir, editors. Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the
Archaeology of the Recent Past. Routledge, 2014.
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Sánchez, María. Tierra de mujeres. Una mirada íntima y familiar al mundo rural. Planeta, 2019.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador, 2003.
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 9
BUSCANDO AL ABUELO
(SEARCHING FOR GRANDPA)
Unearthing the Lost Bodies and Missing
Histories of the Spanish Civil War

Dacia Viejo-Rose and Layla Renshaw

The Production of Mass Graves and Mass Silences

The Spanish Civil War (1936–9) was a period of sustained violence and upheaval, impacting
both soldiers and civilians, a period that left a legacy of profound trauma and loss. The war
was triggered by a failed military coup organized by rebel factions of the military rising against
a democratically elected progressive government. The politicians and public figures who sup-
ported the uprising presented this as a crusade and launched campaigns that urged the extermi-
nation of the left as a patriotic and religious duty (Preston, The Spanish Holocaust). The result
was a war characterized by concerted violence against non-combatants; this violence took
many forms, including the aerial bombardment of towns and cities at a then-unprecedented
scale, as well as massacres and mass graves throughout Spain. Current research suggests that
over 175,000 people were killed away from the battlefields during the Spanish Civil War, with
an estimated 127,000 killed by Francoist violence and 49,000 by Republican violence (Pres-
ton, The Spanish Holocaust; Rios, et al., “Patterns of Perimortem Trauma”).
In the first brutal decade of Franco’s dictatorship, the violence continued; civilians,
ex-combatants, and political prisoners were targeted in extra-judicial killings, sentenced
by military courts, or died in Francoist camps and prisons (Marco; Rodrigo). Thousands
of Spaniards were killed in paseos (promenades), when victims were abducted from their
homes by military or paramilitary death squads, or in sacas de presos (taking out prison-
ers) when detained civilians were rounded up from police stations or prison cells and killed
without due process (Renshaw 47). This violence continued, to varying degrees, throughout
the nearly four decades of Franco’s dictatorship. Women were also killed in these paseos,
but in considerably smaller numbers than men (Solé). Female Republicans were instead ter-
rorized with sexual assault, public humiliation, institutionalization, and by being forcibly
separated from their children (Amir; Graham, Gender and the State).

Post War Repression and Memory Politics Under Franco

Franco’s victory in 1939 initiated his dictatorship, which endured until 1975. For close
to forty years, there was no democracy, and many repressive strategies were instituted to

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-11 
 Buscando al Abuelo (Searching for Grandpa)

demonize the losing side and to concertedly suppress the memory of the many murdered
Republicans (Renshaw, Exhuming Loss; Viejo-Rose, Reconstructing Spain; Rodrigo, Hasta
la Raíz). A Spain in ruins became the substrate on which Franco’s regime could impress its
image of the “new” nation, supported by a total control of the education system, censor-
ship of cultural activity, and a policy of revenge (Preston, Dreams and Nightmares). In the
process, a new historic, symbolic and commemorative landscape was forged (Viejo-Rose,
Reconstructing Spain). It was politically dangerous to mourn or even acknowledge the
Republican dead publicly. Attempts to locate or recover Republican bodies could provoke
reprisals (Graham). These repressive strategies were effective in inculcating a deep fear and
anxiety about disturbing the dead.
In contrast to the suppression of Republican memory, the dictatorship orchestrated an
elaborate commemorative culture to celebrate the victors of the Civil War and mourn those
who had died fighting for Franco. Statues and street names dedicated to Franco’s mili-
tary and ideological leaders dominated public spaces (Ferrándiz “The Return of Civil War
Ghosts”; Ledesma and Rodrigo). Smaller-scale monuments naming those “Fallen for God
and Spain” were erected in nearly every settlement. The memory of the recent war was per-
formed through victory parades, masses, and inaugurations of monuments to the fallen, as
well as countless activities commemorating events of the war and celebrating its heroes and
martyrs (Viejo-Rose, “Memorial Functions”). This remembering was one-sided. Erased
from the public sphere were the Spaniards who had died fighting to defend a democrati-
cally elected government. Franco’s commemorative project found its most dramatic expres-
sion at the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), a vast monumental complex outside
Madrid that was built over a twenty-year period by using the enforced labor of Republi-
can prisoners held in dire conditions (Viejo-Rose, Reconstructing Spain; Stockey; González
Ruibal et al.). In the post-war period, tens of thousands of war dead from throughout Spain
were exhumed, transported to the Valley of the Fallen, and incorporated into the monu-
ment, often without the permission or even knowledge of their families. An example of how
bodies on the move serve the state during periods of symbolic reordering (Verdery), gather-
ing bodies at the Valley strengthened the symbolic and propagandistic power of the site by
making it possible to present it as the centralized locus of mourning and thereby supporting
the ideological exaltation of martyrdom.1 In contrast to this necropolis of pharaonic pro-
portions, the memorialization of the defeated was silenced, forced into exile, or from the
1950s onward, subsumed into a narrative of “fratricidal violence.”

Transition to Democracy and the Pact of Silence

Following Franco’s death in 1975, a transition to democracy took place in a tense climate
over which hung the threat of war or a military coup. This uneasy atmosphere was punc-
tuated by acts of violence such as the Atocha massacre, – the murder of five civil rights
lawyers and labor activists by a far-right extremist cell, in 1977. In the interest of peace,
democracy and modernization, political parties approved an Amnesty Law in 1977 that
released the Franco regime’s political prisoners and allowed for the return of exiles, but the
law also exonerated the regime of its crimes. This law resulted in a largely unchanged status
quo, a situation further reinforced by the fact that many of the new political leaders were
the sons and daughters of Franco’s oligarchy. Preston refers to this phenomenon as “build-
ing a new world with the bricks of the old” (Reaction Revolution and Revenge, 209–61).
To the dismay of many, and the relief of others, a broad consensus was forged across the

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political spectrum that deemed as destabilizing any attempt to interrogate the events of the
Civil War and the ensuing dictatorship, or to assign culpability for the abuses committed
by Francoism. This tacit agreement among political parties to turn a blind eye to the crimes
of the dictatorship was such a determining element in the politics of the transition that it
came to be known as the Pacto de Silencio (Pact of Silence) or Pacto del Olvido (Pact of
Forgetting) (Aguilar; Tremlett).
The political transition to democracy, so feted as a model around the world, was not as
smooth as it is often made out to be. Political violence claimed 20 lives between Franco’s
death in 1975 and the 1977 elections; and the violence continued throughout the dec-
ade. The fragility of the democratic transition was underscored by a plot to overthrow
the government discovered in 1978 and by the attempted military coup of 1981 in which
armed Guardia Civil occupied parliament. It was only in 1982, with the electoral victory
of the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE) that the Transition to democracy was more
securely cemented. Yet the political consensus, amnesty and silence that made this victory
possible also meant that the socialist program for “national regeneration” was compro-
mised by a policy of keeping quiet about the recent past. Recent scholarship has turned
its attention to a brief period of mass grave exhumations that followed immediately after
Franco’s death. For example, Rios et al. identify a time between 1975 and 1982 when
“hundreds of exhumations were carried out to recover the victims of Francoist violence by
the families themselves, without any state support. These exhumations declined after the
attempted coup of 23 February 1981” (622). This is a necessary corrective to the widely
held perception that there was no desire to recover the dead immediately after the demo-
cratic transition.
In a thoughtful analysis, Aguilar and Ferrándiz summarize the differences between the
investigations that took place during the Transition to democracy and the recent Republi-
can memory movement (2–20).
The exhumations taking place immediately after the dictatorship had a number of fea-
tures which differentiated them from the better-known (and far more numerous) exhuma-
tions that have taken place in the twenty-first century: “(a) they were promoted by relatives
and their impact was mostly local; (b) they were carried out without any kind of technical
(e.g. forensic, anthropological), judicial or economic support; (c) they took place in the
absence of any official memory policies; (d) they had very limited (and often no) media
exposure” (Aguilar and Ferrándiz 2). These points of comparison between the exhumations
of the 1970s and those commencing in 2000 explain why the later exhumations were so
impactful in galvanizing public discourse, with news and social media exposure as arguably
the most significant development. From 2000 onward, technology allowed local exhuma-
tions to connect with each other and to the national efforts as a whole, building momentum
and scale.
Although the political transition maintained much of the status quo, as Aguilar argues,
this was not the case in the social and cultural fields (250–265). Spain’s urban population
raced to catch up with the rest of Europe, cramming into a single decade over 30 years of
social, political, economic, and cultural developments. The mood and desire for change
inspired a renaissance in Spanish arts and entertainment that came to be known as La
Movida (The Move, or The Scene). It instigated a period of intense productivity in Span-
ish cinema with filmmakers presenting visions of the Civil War and the dictatorship
that departed from those that the regime had imposed. Some films sought to denounce
crimes of the past and their continued impunity (Pilar Miro’s El Crimen de Cuenca,

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1979); others sought to tell the story of the “other” side (Francisco Betriú’s Requiem por
un Campesino Español, 1985); others attempted to capture the tense mood and harsh
realities of the postwar period (Mario Camus’s La Colmena, 1983); and yet others tried
putting forth more optimistic and even comic notes (Antonio Mercero’s Espérame en el
Cielo, 1988).2
After the 1980s, cracks began to appear between the cultural exploration of the Civil
War and government policy. In the late 1990s, José María Aznar’s right-wing Partido Popu-
lar government rejected periodic calls to assist in locating Civil War graves, even as it sus-
tained State support for the Valley of the Fallen monument and the veneration of Franco’s
tomb. More controversially, the Aznar government commissioned and financed the mass
exhumation and repatriation of the remains of the Blue Division, Spanish soldiers who
had been conscripted or volunteered to fight for Hitler’s army on the Eastern Front during
World War II (Kovras 373). This stark disparity in the treatment of different categories of
the dead galvanized public opinion, particularly on the left.
In tandem with these domestic developments, the examples of the Latin American Truth
Commissions in Argentina and Chile were closely followed in Spain. The international
community, along with broad public approval, also coalesced around the South African
Truth and Reconciliation Commission while international media covered the massive-scale
forensic investigations undertaken in the wake of the Yugoslav wars in the late 1990s,
explicitly linking progress in forensic science with the advancement of human rights, in the
emergence of what Moon has identified as “forensic humanitarianism.” (49–63). As we
will see, the vocabulary used to discuss the Spanish case gradually became internationalized
from 2000 onward, with terms like desaparecidos [the disappeared] coming into frequent
use (Buschmann and Souto).
The timing of the more recent instances of mass grave exhumations in 2000 may be
explained through a combination of the aforementioned factors. Partly it was a genera-
tional shift which engendered a deeper confidence in civil society and human rights, as
fewer individuals had firsthand experience of Franco’s dictatorship. There was also a
heightened awareness that the Civil War’s generation was dying without having shared
their understanding of the past and that, as a result, an important piece of Spanish history
would be lost with them.

The Recovery of Historical Memory and the Exhumation of Republican

Mass Graves From 2000 to the Present Day
In 2000, journalist Emilio Silva travelled back to his ancestral village of Priaranza de
Bierzo to research the history of his grandfather, Emilio Silva Faba, a Republican who
had been killed by Francoists in the Civil War and buried in a clandestine grave (Silva
and Macias). After preliminary investigations, he published an article in a regional paper
entitled “My Grandfather was also a Desaparecido,” a title which explicitly referenced
the disappeared of Latin America’s Dirty Wars, and by extension, the subsequent forensic
investigations and transitional justice processes that had taken place in countries such as
Argentina and Chile. Drawing a comparison with these countries was a powerful form
of argumentation, in that it was a context that many Spanish readers were familiar with,
especially after the highly mediatized case of Pinochet’s indictment by the Judge Baltasar-
Garzón in 1998. This juxtaposition drew an obvious negative comparison between the
actions taken by the Latin American Truth Commissions, and the ongoing denial and

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inertia of the Spanish state. The publication of Silva’s article drew the attention of an
archaeologist and anthropologist who volunteered to help with the logistics of exhuma-
tion. It also produced an outpouring of supportive letters and enquiries from those with
a similar urge to recover their own family members. This first exhumation resulted in the
recovery and identification of Silva’s grandfather, along with twelve other victims located
in the same mass grave (Tremlett).
The network drawn together by this exhumation grew into a grassroots organization,
the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), founded by Silva in
2000. The investigations spearheaded by ARMH and a mosaic of smaller organizations
coalesced into a nationwide campaign, producing a radical rupture in the Pact of Silence
that had held sway for twenty years after Franco’s death. From the very early exhumations
onwards, internationally recognized standards of evidence collection and recording have
been employed (Ríos and Etxeberria). ARMH engaged the help of academics and specialists
from Spain’s leading universities and established a collaboration with the Science Society of
the Basque Country, Aranzadi. Since the inception of ARMH, thousands of graves across
Spain have been opened, ranging in size from single burials to vast sites containing the
victims of massacres, as well as various systematic executions at camps and prisons.3 After
2000, the number of exhumations grew rapidly, with Congram and Steadman stating that
more than 3,000 victims had been exhumed by 2007 (162) and Rios et al. providing the
figure of 6,174 individuals recovered by 2014 (622). The centralized database of exhuma-
tions coordinated by the aforementioned cientific society Aranzadi currently documents the
recovery of over 8,000 victims (Etxeberria).
The locations of these graves include roadside ditches, agricultural land, and unmarked
plots within municipal cemeteries, among others. Mass graves occur in some form in every
autonomous region of Spain. There are sizable graves attached to small rural communities,
such as graves containing 40 or 50 victims on the outskirts of villages in Palencia or Bur-
gos Province. During a two-year long investigation, the remains of over 400 victims were
recovered from a prison site and its environs at Ucles in Cuenca (Congram et al. 43–64).
Although the growth in exhumations has been rapid, these numbers represent only a small
proportion of the total bodies remaining in clandestine burials. The International Commis-
sion for Missing Persons (ICMP 2020) noted that the official Map of Graves established as
a result of the Historical Memory Law records 2,382 burial sites across the country, which
are believed to contain more than 45,000 human remains. Fewer than 400 of these graves
have been opened to date.
Alongside the exhumations, the systematic collection of witness testimonies and oral
histories was undertaken by ARMH and allied organizations, as well as conducting vital
research within private and state archives. This research was primarily structured around
the location of mass graves, the reconstruction of these crimes and the identification of the
dead, but also revealed much longer histories of political persecution, trauma and grief,
both during and after the Civil War.
There have been several initiatives to collate and co-ordinate these local investigations.
The map of Spain’s graves has been a dynamic resource, interacting with the Aranzadi
database that endeavors to maintain an overview of the different exhumations throughout
the country. The initiative led by Judge Baltasar Garzón to create a comprehensive list of
Republican victims of the Civil War was the first attempt to produce a tangible record of
these losses. Multiple local initiatives, such as Todos los Nombres (All the Names) in Anda-
lusia, endeavored to recover the names and histories of Republican victims on a regional

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level. Preston’s systematic accounting of regional Civil War deaths in The Spanish Holo-
caust has enhanced these efforts further. The evidentiary strands of names, histories and
the bodies and objects recovered from mass graves are now being coordinated further in
concerted efforts to identify the dead via DNA sampling of living relatives and the creation
of new DNA databases (Baeta et al.).

National and International Legal Frameworks

The ARMH also made rapid progress in formalizing the status of their movement, by
reaching out to NGOs working in the areas of transitional justice and forced disappear-
ances. Alongside the adoption of internationally recognized exhumation protocols and
standards, this appeal to international legal frameworks situated their movement firmly
within the emerging global human rights discourse that linked the Spanish context to geo-
graphically diverse cases in Latin America, Africa and the Balkans. The ARMH also col-
laborated with both the United Nations and Amnesty International to gain recognition for
Spain’s disappeared.4
In November 2002, the Spanish parliament passed an unprecedented motion to con-
demn Franco’s military uprising (Ferrandiz, The Return,10). A cross-governmental com-
mission was established to hear testimonies from various groups and experts associated
with the Republican memory campaign (Espinosa). Then, in 2004, in extraordinarily tense
conditions marked by the March 11 terrorist train bombings in and around Madrid, José
Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s Socialist Party (PSOE) won the General Elections. With this vic-
tory, the sons and daughters of the “defeated” side of the war entered into; Zapatero’s own
grandfather who had been a Republican officer was executed by members of the rebel army
a month into the war. The symbolic weight of this history, and the fraught circumstances
of the election, lay the ground for an acrimonious political environment, further polarizing
official discourse about Spain’s twentieth century. In demonstrations against Zapatero’s
government slogans were often shouted such as Zapatero, vete con tu abuelo (Zapatero,
go with your grandfather), implying that he too should be “disappeared.” In 2004 the
PSOE government set up a Memorial Commission charged with rehabilitating those who
had suffered abuses during the war and dictatorship, and in March 2005 the government
ordered the removal of the last remaining statue of Franco in Madrid. This whole process,
which came to be called the recuperación de la memoria histórica (the recovery of historical
memory), began gaining momentum after 2006, a year which also marked the 70th anni-
versary of the start of the war.
The sustained pressure from the campaign that had led to the 2002 parliamentary motion
in favor of memory work, also provided some legal framework within which to operate and
eventually produced the so-called “Law of Historical Memory.”5 This wide-ranging piece
of legislation has provoked a divided response across Spain’s political spectrum, with critics
on the left finding it too limited in its scope and possibilities for enforcement, and critics
on the right judging it rancorous and divisive (Moreno). The law included provisions for
the right to request state help in tracing, exhuming and identifying Republican victims of
Francoist violence, the outlawing of political gatherings at the Valley of the Fallen, and the
removal of Francoist imagery (including statues) from public spaces or official buildings.
Some criticism levelled at the time of the law’s passing has proved prescient as both the
implementation and influence of this law have waxed and waned, following shifts in Spain’s
ruling political party and the country’s economic fortunes.

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Limitations and Setbacks to the Republican Memory Campaign

Although a range of new rights and sources of state support was set out by the Law of
Memory, several events hampered the application of these rights to their full potential.
These included the advent of the global financial crash in 2008, the imposition of severe
austerity measures, and the victory in the 2011 General Elections of Mariano Rajoy’s
right-wing Popular Party (PP). In 2012 Rajoy’s government closed the Office for Victims
of the Civil War and the Dictatorship, transferring its functions to an existing department
in the Ministry of Justice. While not directly revoking or altering the legislation, Rajoy’s
government imposed an effective moratorium on the allocation of state resources for mass
grave exhumations.
Several international organizations that were supportive of the ARMH and the 2007
Memory Law expressed their concern about this period of inactivity. In July 2014, the
UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of
non-Recurrence, Pablo de Greiff, argued for establishing an independent official mechanism
to investigate the human rights violations committed during the Civil War and the Franco
era. The Special Rapporteur proposed an Archive Law, to address the lack of public access
to important state archives that contain information about Civil War repression and disap-
pearances. The report paints a picture of the official obstruction and indifference faced by
those investigating their family history. It concluded that “the strength of democratic insti-
tutions must be measured not by their ability to ignore certain issues, especially those that
refer to fundamental rights, but rather by their ability to manage them effectively, however
complex and awkward they may be” (de Greiff 19).
A further limitation on the Republican memory movement is that the 1977 Law of Polit-
ical Amnesty, passed during the Transition, has proven highly resistant to legal challenges.
When in 2008 Judge Baltasar Garzón made one of the first concerted efforts to prosecute
the crimes of the Franco era, he was dramatically halted by a backlash from parts of the
legal establishment that almost ended his career. The International Commission for Missing
Persons (ICMP) and the UN’s Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances
(WGEID) made a critical evaluation of the stalled investigations under Rajoy’s govern-
ment, identifying the Amnesty Law and a resistant judiciary as stumbling blocks.6 They
particularly criticized the failure to establish “a state body with full institutional support,
and adequate human, technical and financial resources to deal with all matters relating to
enforced disappearances, including the creation and administration of a central database
on disappearances” (ICMP 2020).
Rubin identifies the paradoxical situation as many investigations gather evidence follow-
ing international protocols and reaching a legally admissible standard, yet with no eventual
legal outcome within Spain:

this new wave of exhumations was led by forensic doctors and archaeologists, using
protocols explicitly developed for post-conflict transitional processes around the
world. And yet, unlike forensic interventions conducted by their peers in the immedi-
ate aftermath of civil wars and dictatorships, these exhumations were not carried out
to support a truth commission, war crimes tribunal or any other juridical process. . . .
Although the legal categories and practices associated with transitional justice had
come to Spain, they did so without the force of law.
(Rubin, 107)

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The mass grave exhumations in Spain resemble a transitional justice project but without
the legal frameworks or public fora to present, evaluate, or synthesize the huge volume of
evidence produced. Where these necessary elements have not been provided by a court or
tribunal, civil society has stepped in to fill the breach, including through artistic and creative
responses to the exhumations.

Impact of Exhumations
Despite legal and institutional setbacks, the Republican memory campaign has had an
extraordinary impact and continues to gather considerable momentum. These exhuma-
tions function as agents for social change, grave by grave, and village by village. In the
initial stages of the memory campaign, the opening of mass graves created new representa-
tional and social spaces, outside of the prevalent regime of desmemoria (studied oblivion),
where testimony and family history finally could be shared. Families, school children, and
the elderly could visit these exhumations and the intergenerational transmission of mem-
ory could take place, often for the first time (Ferrándiz, El pasado bajo tierra; Renshaw,
Exhuming Loss; Aragüete-Toribio, From the Archive to the Grave). It was not only bodies
that have been unearthed but personal experiences and social histories of repression,
The excavation of mass graves has mobilized grassroots initiatives across Spain, as
each year hundreds of students and amateurs volunteer alongside experts, including archae-
ologists, anthropologists, historians, and even psychologists to provide emotional support.
These collective endeavors entail an intense immersion in Spanish history and politics. Rela-
tives of the dead, memory activists, volunteers, and experts band together to bring about
a successful exhumation. The process creates a network of solidarity and support for the
descendants of Republican dead who had been previously isolated and silenced. The scale
of mass grave exhumations conducted thus far represents an extraordinary example of civil
society in action.
The exhumation process is often punctuated by a sequence of ceremonies and events
which further build community. These include vigils and gatherings at the gravesite, cul-
minating in the reburial of the dead. Enacting these ceremonies is a serious responsibility
and is fraught with complexity. For larger mass graves, it is likely some skeletons will
remain unidentified. This is one reason that many networks of relatives opt for a collec-
tive reburial and a shared monument for all the dead recovered from the same mass grave.
This means that collective decisions must be reached on the format of the ceremony, the
content of speeches and eulogies, and the wording on the monument (Aragüete-Toribio,
“Negotiating Identity”). A particularly thorny issue is the extent to which either religious
or political iconography should be deployed in commemorating the dead (Renshaw, “Unre-
covered Objects”). Some ceremonies attract hundreds of mourners and supporters, along
with media coverage, powerfully reclaiming the public sphere for the dead and their rela-
tives (Tremlett).
Even if the physical and documentary evidence amassed by these exhumations is never
presented to a Truth Commission or law court, the adoption of forensic investigative meth-
ods has been pivotal to transforming public discourse about the Civil War. The tangible
reality of the graves, and the scientific mode of investigation, enables a new engagement
and elicits trust, so that “[a]rchaeological and forensic methodologies play a vital role . . .
by communicating the scientific objectivity, political neutrality, and calm and methodical
orderliness of the current exhumations” (Renshaw 197). Iturriaga succinctly explains how

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the forensic methods and physical evidence of the grave lend a politically neutral framing
to a discussion of Civil War violence. Furthermore, the authority established by scientific
evidence allows the investigators to then segue into their message on the injustice of these
killings:

activists giving forensic classes during ARMH-led mass exhumations use depoliti-
cized scientific framing to deliver a counter-memory of the Spanish Civil War and
Franco regime. After scientific authenticity is established, activists then make moral
and transitional justice claims.
(Iturriaga 1)

The bodies and objects uncovered in Spain’s mass graves have their own material affor-
dances and aesthetic power. In a very real sense, the remains of the dead have become
agents in the changes wrought on Spain’s memory politics (Renshaw, Exhuming Loss). The
visual and material properties of the graves have expanded into these silences. Thousands of
people have now participated in some way in an exhumation or commemoration, witness-
ing some of these material traces first-hand. Due to the digital production and circulation
of exhumation images, millions more have seen the bodies and objects in virtual form (Fer-
randiz and Baer). As the public becomes increasingly familiar with forensic evidence and
able to decode its meaning (Keenan and Weizman), images from the graves strongly shape
our emotional responses to the dead (Renshaw, Scientific and Affective Identification).7

Criticisms and Backlash Against the Republican Memory Campaign

As might be expected, the Republican memory campaign has met with a backlash from
the right. Acts that seek to make visible the disappeared voices and people have given rise
to violent reactions with accusations of victimismo (playing the victim card), engaging in
the politics of rancor and division, or dwelling on the past. There have, however, also been
commentators and detractors from the political left, objecting to the particular form and
focus that the Republican memory campaign has taken. In the absence of clear legal frame-
works or political oversight, in the early years, the exhumation campaign gained its moral
legitimacy and authority to conduct exhumations by championing the relatives of the dead.
Much of the public discourse of ARMH presented their campaign as working with, and on
behalf of, the bereaved families of the missing. This led the exhumations to foreground the
individual and familial identities of the dead – as the focus of the many initiatives centered
on la búsqueda de mi abuelo (the search for my grandfather). As a result, at many exhuma-
tions there was a failure to publicly acknowledge the ideology, collective class and political
identities of the great majority of the civilian dead, and the inherently political aims moti-
vating these mass killings.
Without representing the socio-political identities of the dead, it is very difficult to situate
these graves in their true historical context or confront the fact that these killings resulted
from two competing and inimical visions of Spain. The inherent focus on the individual
identity of a skeleton which is a core tenet of forensic protocols, combined with ARMH’s
embrace of an often ahistorical and universalizing global human rights discourse, further
compounded this tendency to minimize the political biographies of the dead. For critics
on the political left in Spain, this is perceived as a major failing. Organizations such as the
communist Foro por la Memoria (Memory Forum) argue that this apolitical framing of the

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Figure 9.1 Wall Commemorating the Site Where People Were Summarily Killed by Firing Squad,
Almudena Cemetery, Madrid, August 2011.
Source: Photo by Viejo-Rose.

graves fails to fully honor the dead and the values they espoused, and ultimately fails to
create an enduring legacy of historical understanding of this period. Yet, within individual
families and communities, the exhumations trigger an engagement with Republicanism and
growing knowledge of the political struggles that prefigured the outbreak of war. At a 2011
ceremony held in Madrid’s Almudena cemetery (see Figure 9.1) that honored the 1,500
people summarily shot against a wall of the cemetery, one attendee, Marcos Ana, noted:
“[W]e have not come to cry for them but to sustain their ideals.”
A further criticism of adopting a forensic investigative paradigm is that it focuses the
Republican memory project on the mass graves and thus a narrow window of cataclysmic
violence, primarily during the war and its immediate aftermath. This focus on graves might
lead to the potential exclusion of other forms of suffering and loss. Mass grave exhumations
afford less attention to the repressive and exploitative tactics employed over decades of
Francoism, and the extent to which this permeated “normal” life in peacetime. The experi-
ences of Republican women and children, living in the aftermath of terror, and the fortitude
required to survive the war and dictatorship, cannot be explored or represented adequately
via the lens of the mass grave (Renshaw 428–446).

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Evolving Memory Laws and the Legacy of the

Republican Memory Movement
The grassroots Republican memory campaign has arguably been a victim of its own suc-
cess. It has conducted the exhumations with professionalism (Rubin), with the support of
Spain’s leading experts in forensic science and archaeology, mobilizing dedicated volun-
teers, and maintaining broad approval from the public and the relatives of the dead. As
voluntary networks filled the breach, the Spanish state has never been forced into assuming
wholesale responsibility for this process.
Since the 2019 election that saw a coalition government of the Spanish Socialist Work-
er’s Party (PSOE) and Unidas Podemos in Spain, many new initiatives have sought to undo
the damage caused by decades of desmemoria (willful forgetting or forgetfulness). At the
start of 2020, the Secretaría de Estado de Memoria Democrática (Department of State for
Democratic Memory) was created to address this need for government-led memory work.
In 2022, the Democratic Memory Law was passed and represented a step-change in the
state’s engagement with the past. The law was passed with an absolute majority, although
all right-wing parties voted against it. The new bill mandates government agencies at all
levels to help find and open mass graves. The law initiated a DNA database for victim
identification and planned the creation of new memorial sites. There will be a prosecutor in
charge of human rights and democratic memory with the power to investigate deaths under
the Franco regime. This is a significant change in the judicial status of the exhumations,
although advocates of the bill acknowledge it is highly unlikely to result in prosecutions,
given the combination of Spain’s Amnesty Law and the passage of time.
Moving beyond the graves, there are key provisions that impact Spain’s wider memory
landscape. The bill provides for secondary school education that addresses the severity of
Francoist repression and dictatorship rather than perpetuating a false equivalence between
the two sides. The law mandates prosecution and fines for those displaying Francoist sym-
bols or seeking to denigrate the victims of Francoism. There is also a further acknowledge-
ment of the exiles who fled Spain, with the extension of citizenship eligibility to children
born of Spaniards living abroad during the dictatorship.
The new legislation addresses many of the criticisms of the 2007 laws and represents a
bolder challenge to Spain’s political right. As with the exhumation of Franco’s corpse from
the Valle de Los Caídos, the new law marks an end to the consensus-building discourse that
emerged from the Pact of Silence. Yet these gains remain fragile. There has been a backlash to
the new law and an escalation in Spain’s culture wars. The right-wing Vox and Partido Popu-
lar parties who opposed the legislation have pledged to revoke it at the first opportunity.
The impact of this legislation and how much of it can survive future changes in gov-
ernment, remain to be seen. If successful, it will formalize and centralize the Republican
memory project, embedding it in state structures. This could strengthen the legacy of the
exhumations, allowing the findings from individuals’ graves to be synthesized, becoming
part of the historical record, and countering revisionism and denial. The marked gains of
the right in the 2023 local elections have, however, exposed the vulnerability of this process
to the pendulum swing between political parties. The localities that saw a change in politi-
cal party have experienced a sudden halt to planned exhumations, and a chilling effect on
wider cultural, academic, and civic initiatives on memory. These stop-start processes are
incredibly painful for the relatives of the dead. Despite the rather depoliticized discourse
of universal human rights adopted by ARMH, the topic of historical memory remains

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polarized. More than twenty years after the opening of the mass graves, political attitudes
toward exhumation remain entrenched, and the recovery of Republican memory has not
been embraced across Spanish society as a whole.
Unearthing the lost bodies and missing histories of the Spanish Civil War requires com-
ing to terms with the absences and silences that the dictatorship imposed. The exhumations
and the cultural production they inspired, lent materiality to those absences. The opening
of graves has bolstered the telling of a past that had been suppressed and neglected in the
hope that with generational change it would be forgotten. Yet the legacies of violence are
not so easy to erase from society, and their scars remain. The bodies and objects discovered
in Spain’s mass graves are the enduring physical traces of violence that have acted as both
catalysts and conduits to other forms of memory.
In the words of one young woman at a launch event for the 2018 documentary El silen-
cio de los otros (The Silence of Others):

In this I have always heard that in all of this there are generations and that the gen-
eration of our great-grandmothers is the generation of silence, the generation of our
grandmothers is the generation of forgetting due to the fear and sorrow that it caused
them to talk about it, the generation of our mothers is that of memory, and as I under-
stand it ours is the generation of repair. That it is up to us to repair. Well, I am asking
you for help because I have no idea where to begin nor how to do it.
(Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología 37:40)

Acknowledging loss and recovering missing histories is a point of departure for the process
of reparation, but we will never be able to repair the damage without first fully understand-
ing the extent of its legacies; that is the next step.

Notes
1 After his death, Franco’s remains were buried at the apex of the Basilica as he had intended. They
were only removed in 2019, despite objections from Franco’s family and supporters and after much
controversy about where they should be interred instead.
2 These are just a handful of examples of what was a rich period of cinematic production; other
films that more and less directly addressed the Civil War and dictatorship include: El espiritu de la
colmena, Víctor Erice 1973; Cría Cuervos, Carlos Saura 1976; La escopeta nacional, Luis García
Berlanga 1978; Patrimonio nacional, Luis García Berlanga 1981; Las bicicletas son para el verano,
Jaime Chávarri 1983; La vaquilla, Luis García Berlanga 1985; Dragón Rapide, Jaime Camino
1986; Ay Carmela!, Carlos Saura 1990.
3 See González-Ruibal “From the Battlefield to the Labour Camp” and The Archaeology of the Span-
ish Civil War; Nunez et al., “A Grave in my Garden”; Rios et al. “Patterns of Perimortem Trauma
in Skeletons” for detailed reports on the broad spectrum of Civil War sites under investigation.
4 See “Aportaciones de Amnistía Internacional al Informe de Seguimiento del Relator Especial Sobre
la Promoción de la Verdad, la Justicia, la Reparación y las Garantías de no Repetición.”
5 The official title of this legislation is Ley 52/2007, de 26 de diciembre, por la que se reconocen y
amplían derechos y se establecen medidas en favor de quienes padecieron persecución o violencia
durante la guerra civil y la dictadura (Law 52/2007, of 26 December by which the rights of those
who suffered persecution or violence during the Civil War and dictatorship are recognized and
extended and measures are put in place to support them). The full text of this legislation is repro-
duced in the Official State Bulletin number 310 (BOE no 310, 27 December 2007), http://noticias.
juridicas.com/base_datos/Admin/l52-2007.html.

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6 A parallel exists here with Argentina’s leyes de “Obediencia Debida” and “Punto Final.” An impor-
tant difference is that in the case of Argentina, these were repealed to allow for trials and eventual
convictions.
7 For a sustained exploration of the impact of exhumation images, see Ferrán, “Grievability and the
Politics of Visibility”; Torres, “The Images of Memory”; Ribero de Menezes, Embodying Memory
in Contemporary Spain.

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 10
POSING THE QUESTION
Robert Capa and Gerda Taro in Three Shots
From the Spanish Civil War

Michael Iarocci

What can photography tell us about history? How does the past come to us when we view
photographic images? And what are we to do with photographs whose evidentiary status
is uncertain? These are questions that most cultural historians deal with at some level when
they reflect on photography, and they are particularly acute in the case of photographs of
the Spanish Civil War. In what follows, I offer a brief meditation on the subject. From our
contemporary truth-crisis, and in an era marked by forms of political polarization not seen
since the 1930s, I propose to return to Robert Capa and Gerda Taro’s Spanish Civil War
photography to ask what these pictures might tell us about the thorny question of photo-
graphic truth and its relationship to history. To that end, I will be dwelling on a handful of
iconic photographs – one by Taro and two by Capa – to probe a series of questions concern-
ing the complexities of photographic truth. While my hope is that the insights that come
from deliberating on this small group of images might inform the way viewers think about
the broader corpus of Capa and Taro’s photography more generally, my primary interest is
to reflect on a set of issues related to the nature of photographic images and what they can
tell us about the past.
Part of my argument in what follows is that the aesthetics of the image – the “how”
of photography, as it were – is as important as photography’s much-celebrated indexical-
ity – its “that was there” – when it comes to thinking about photographs historically.
Another part of my argument is that we must attend fully to both. The three photographs
I discuss are all well known, and my discussion of the first two is a prelude of sorts to revis-
iting the third, Capa’s “Death of a Loyalist Soldier,” also known as “The Falling Soldier,”
which is arguably the most famous photograph of the Spanish Civil War. I should add that
while I will reference a well-known debate about the authenticity of this last photograph,
my interest is not so much to participate in the debate as it is to explore some of the under-
lying phenomena that frame it and to reflect on the methodological questions it raises.

Taro Shoots a Woman Shooting

We begin with a celebrated photograph by Taro, the dark silhouette of a woman on one
knee, pistol in hand, in a shooting stance, seemingly moments before pulling the trigger. It

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-12
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

Figure 10.1 Republican Militiawoman, Training on the Beach Outside Barcelona.

Source: Photograph reprinted by permission of Magnum Photos.1

was taken in August of 1936. From the outset it is worth noting the curious doubling-effect
at work in this renowned image. As my title suggests, there are two women shooting here.
The longstanding analogy between the press of the shutter-button and the pull of the trigger
sets up a fascinating parallel, and I raise it here to underscore the shared commitment to the
struggle by both Taro and her subject. Neither Capa nor Taro were ever neutral, detached
observers of the Spanish Civil War. They were decidedly partisan, anti-fascist photogra-
phers. They believed that if fascism could be stopped in Spain, the geopolitical calculus
of leaders like Hitler and Mussolini might be altered and even perhaps contained. Their
photographs were part of the struggle, both in the subjects they shot and in the aesthetics of
their images. It is no surprise that some of the strongest criticism of their work today often
comes from right-of-center positions.
The doubling effect of the photo, however, is also the result of another important paral-
lel. These were two women fighting for the cause. Militiawomen were a novel reality on
the ground during the first months of the war, and they quickly became a potent image as

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well. The figure seemed to embody a spontaneous form of egalitarianism breaking out amid
the struggle.2 To many, such a figure was the symbol of a new, more radically democratic
world to come, and along with this idealism, sex appeal was often also part the figure’s
allure. Taro’s photograph participates in such mythmaking by delivering the image of an
alluringly mysterious, decidedly feminine combatant. Part miliciana, part Republican Mata
Hari, she is a woman who, visually at least, seems as much at home in a Hollywood still as
she does on the front lines. Then we turn to Gerda Taro herself, a woman similarly entering
the “man’s world” of wartime photojournalism, a woman who routinely wore the revolu-
tionary blue coveralls – the mono azul – that was the de facto uniform of the early militias.
Photographer and subject converge for a moment here and illuminate one another as mili-
cianas taking shots. If looking at photographic images always has a double register – you
see the photographed subject, but you also “see” the photographer in her photos – in this
photograph the relationship between the two echoes with a particular intensity. Part of the
success of the photograph is that it delivers an idealized image of a figure not unlike Taro
herself.
Formally, the picture is a masterful play in contrasts: The darkness of the silhouette,
which verges on washing out the detail of the woman’s clothing, set against a lighter
cloud-strewn sky; the solid strength of the woman’s stance, accentuated by the dark tones
and the broad-legged trousers, next to the delicacy of the lighter-toned face, the wisps of
hair, the wrist, and a gun that seems almost dainty in comparison to the woman wielding
it; the gender-neutralizing clothing – here, likely also a mono azul – but then the feminine
touch of the woman’s pumps. While she occupies what at the time was considered the con-
ventional position of a man, she is by no means trying to be a man. Contrasts also abound
technically between the indexical realism that photographs almost inevitably conveyed until
recently and the artistry of those facets of the shot that Taro controls. If for some there is
an initial you-are-there immediacy to this picture, as if we were on a firing line looking over
at the militiawoman, the photograph is clearly no accident or randomly captured slice of
life, and its stylizing gestures are not difficult to appreciate: The careful composition – most
of the major compositional lines follow the rule of thirds – the restricted focal field that
hovers around the woman, and the extraordinarily low camera-angle. Even on the ground,
kneeling, her feet almost at the horizon line behind her, we are looking up at her. Taro must
have held the camera as close to the ground as possible. The effect is to aggrandize the
subject, visually and symbolically, and whether by coincidence or design, the photo echoes
the stylized representations of fighting workers that proliferated in the graphic arts of the
Republic – on banners, posters, and leaflets – where simplified figures in silhouette were a
mainstay of the medium’s visual rhetoric. We might ask of this woman the questions that
all photos of human subjects from the past elicit – Who was she? How was she swept into
the war? What happened to her? – but the photograph does not make such questions seem
pressing. She has been photographed not so much to individuate as to elevate, to render
iconic. In addition, there is something else that nudges this picture from “life” to “larger
than life.” It is something most viewers know intuitively because it too is in front of the
camera as plainly as the woman. The subject of this picture is clearly posing.
The practice was widespread, broadly understood, and for the most part uncontroversial
in its day. Many celebrated wartime photos – the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima is perhaps
the most famous from the Second World War – were staged photographs. For viewers
today, however, these have become uncomfortable truths, and it is worth reflecting on the
reasons. Staged photography, especially in the news arena, seems to break a tacit viewing

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contract that calls for more unvarnished forms of truth. A staged picture appears to flout
the standard of authenticity that hovers around indexical images: “A painting or drawing is
judged a fake” – Susan Sontag reminds – “when it turns out not to be by the artist to whom
it had been attributed. A photograph – or a filmed document available on television or the
internet – is judged a fake when it turns out to be deceiving the viewer about the scene it
purports to depict” (Regarding 38).
By such a measure, staged photography could be taken as a kind of trickery, a marshal-
ling of photography’s truth-effect for less than honest purposes, but such a judgement too
quickly equates staging with deception.3 In images like this one, what is before the camera is
a particular kind of feigning that nevertheless aims to convey truths. Truth as indexicality is
one matter – this image remains indexical through and through – but what is indexed here
is a form of pretending. Through such “play,” Taro’s photograph discloses any number of
historical truths: The truth of women’s participation in the early months of the war; the
truth of the initial gender-egalitarianism that accompanied many of Spain’s revolutionary
movements; the poignant truth for those who know the history, that the miliciana would
soon disappear, relegated to more traditional roles – cooks, nurses, behind-the-front sup-
port – as the war progressed; and the truth of the often heroic, aggrandizing lens through
which photographers like Taro and Capa frequently shot the war. The picture is staged, but
it is honest about its staging, and viewers today are unlikely to understand the shot as a
representation of something the camera caught by chance. In short, this picture is up front
about the game it is playing, and within the context of wartime photojournalism in the
1930s, the photograph would have readily been understood for what it was.
In addition, it is worth noting that photojournalism itself was in its infancy in the 1930s.
Capa and Taro helped to establish the field, and the rules of the game were not those that
aim to govern photojournalism today.4 If posed photographs like this one are rarely part of
the way photojournalists cover war in our own time, the development tells us more about
important shifts within the socio-professional field of photojournalism since the 1930s than
it does about Taro’s practices. In addition to the many truths Taro’s shooter offers then, we
must add the truth of the historically variable norms and conventions of photojournalism
itself. Contemporary assessments of Taro’s work that do not take that history into account
run the risk of anachronistic judgement. With such reflections around a posed photograph
in view, we can turn to a famous unposed, candid shot.

How to Photograph Warplanes

The shot’s subjects are unaware of the camera, and much of the impact of this image has
to do with the fact that their attention is focused elsewhere. It seems like a quick, almost
random shot, and Capa must have been halfway across the street that the mother and child
are stepping into when he turned to take it. Such considerations make the compositional
strengths of the photograph all the more striking: The balance between the foreground
figures on the right and the bystanders behind them on the corner, with a center line that
runs down through the woman in the white coat and the little girl’s right leg to bisect the
image into almost symmetrical halves; the dramatic intersecting diagonals formed by the
line that runs from the man’s head at the top-left, through the shoulder of the man with a
cane, through the child’s head toward the bottom-right, and the second line angling down
from the sign at top-right, through the woman’s head as she glances skyward, and along the
girl’s free arm to the bottom left; the internal framing, the way the sidewalk’s curbs parallel

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Figure 10.2 
Crowds Running for Shelter When the Air-Raid Alarm Sounded, Bilbao, Spain.
May 1937.
Source: Photograph reprinted by permission of Magnum Photos.

the bottom and right edges of the picture. Part of the success of this image is the way the
seemingly haphazard is nevertheless, and improbably, composed.
At the same time, the deep focal length of this shot makes its context much more central
than it was in the first picture, and this in turn has a bearing on the kind of historical truth
the picture proffers. The primary subjects – presumably mother and daughter – certainly
capture the lion’s share of our visual attention, but the five bystanders are also individu-
ated, and they are very much a part of the narrative content of the picture as well. Four
of them are looking up with the woman in the foreground. Behind them, a street sign,
an automobile, and the facades of buildings are also a part of the story. The deeper focal
length delivers more of history’s realia. It puts viewers in the realm of what Barthes called
photography’s studium: “It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs,
whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes . . . the
faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions” (26). Here the invitation to further historical
research is, visually speaking, stronger than in the earlier pictures. One might profitably
research the clothing, the signage, the make of the automobile. The woman and child are
in an urban social context that is as much a part of the photograph as they are. In short,
when it comes to documenting the past, this picture gives viewers some broader sense of
what Bilbao was like in 1937. “It immediately yields up those ‘details’ which constitute the
very raw material of ethnological knowledge” (Barthes, 28), even if the wartime context is
not visually obvious.

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After the previous picture, turning to this one brings into relief another dimension of
photography’s relationship to history that can easily be obscured by its indexical, docu-
mentary force. To put it simply, some photographs satisfy our desire for history more than
others. All photographs are of course equally “certificates of presence” (Barthes 87), and as
such they make history visible. Taro’s subject is, in this sense, as historical as the people in
this picture. There is an important distinction, however, between the way the past appears
in the previous photo and the way it does here. The earlier shot does not embed its sub-
ject within her historical milieu the way this one does. That picture purposefully softens
or attenuates setting for expressive reasons (to aggrandize the shooter). In contrast, this
photograph delivers something like a slice of historical life in all its detail. If Taro’s shooter
exhibited the truth of staged photographs, this seemingly random shot of people on a street,
unaware of the camera, during an air raid, more closely adheres to the news-ideal of captur-
ing a historical event on film.
Sustained reflection on just what the event here is, however, quickly makes clear that for
all that the camera delivers, much of its power here stems from what it withholds. Sontag
reminds us that “to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude” (On Photography
46), but not all photographs play as pointedly as this one with what one can and can-
not see. Paradoxically the air raid is more present and foreboding precisely because the
airplanes remain out of sight. Through a sort of visual metonymy, we witness the effects
of the air raid without access to the cause. Among other things, this image thematizes the
difference between the glances of the people we see, on one hand, and our own looking on
the other. The result is akin to the way masterpieces of painting – Velásquez’s Las Meni-
nas or Goya’s 3rd of May, 1808 – produce extraordinary effects by gesturing beyond the
frame. Based solely on the image, we cannot of course know for sure what these people saw
looking up on that day in Bilbao in 1937. If they saw warplanes, they were likely those of
Nazi Germany’s Condor Legion, which routinely provided air support to the Nationalists.
A detailed reconstruction of just what air force they belonged to, whether they were met
by Republican fighters, and the outcome of that day’s sorties, however, would take us away
from the subject here, which is the historical experience of living in a city under the threat
of air raids.
Part of what is so captivating about the image in fact, is that the skyward glances belong
to people on a city street who otherwise were simply going about their daily business. The
picture testifies to the quotidian activity of city-dwellers in times of war. Crowds huddle
on a corner. A mother takes her daughter’s hand to cross the street. There is no panicked
fleeing, ducking and covering, or rushing to shelter here. (The official caption to the photo-
graph is in this sense at odds with what we see in the image.) Urgent responses do of course
occur in times of war, but what this image so powerfully conveys is the way ordinary, “eve-
ryday life” – went on – even under the threat of death from above. There seems to be con-
cern in the eyes of those looking skyward, especially the mother in the foreground, but this
is neither a terrified city nor a stoic one. What Capa captures, precisely because the subjects
are unaware of the camera – and we might ask how their gazes might have changed, had
they been aware – is the almost surreal juxtaposition of “business as usual” and “deadly
peril” that historically was part and parcel of urban life during the Spanish Civil War. For
viewers aware of the relationship between the Spanish Civil War and World War II, there is
also an additional wrinkle. The fascist bombardment of civilian centers in Spain was a trial
run for the larger-scale air raids across Europe that would follow. To view this picture with
such knowledge is to see on this street in Bilbao, in 1937, a moment that presages London

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in 1940 or Dresden in 1945. The historical knowledge we bring to photographs shape their
truths in important ways.
At the center of it all, a girl in an oversized coat, holding her mother’s hand as she crosses
the street. She looks neither at the camera nor up at the sky. Peering ahead at something
down the street, she has not been captivated the way the adults around her have. (The
woman in white behind her is also an exception in this regard.) For the girl it seems as if this
were just another day, a day filled with the many street-sights the city offers a child walk-
ing with her parent. What is happening in the sky does not seem a novelty to her; it might
already be part of her routine, or perhaps she does not fully understand. Whatever the case,
what is behind us to the right is just as interesting to her as the airplanes are to the adults.
If the photograph is about the experience of air raids, the girl signals that for many, and
for children especially, such events were not exceptional. They were simply the way things
were, almost banal, and not always worthy of attention.
Along with the standard repertoire of war-images to which we have become accus-
tomed – soldiers, trenches, military machinery, violence, death – images like this one seem
to deliver a different truth. This – they seem to say – is what the war looked like for civilians
trying to go about their lives in difficult times. This is what the war was for a girl in Bilbao
in 1937 during an air raid, and the fact that neither she nor those around her knew they
were being photographed is central to the way the image works. We call such shots “can-
did” precisely because the photographic self-consciousness of people in pictures so often
seems to get in the way of what the camera might otherwise reveal. We hunger for seeing
images of people as they are or were, rather than as they were for the camera. There is no
doubt something voyeuristic in the impulse, which may fulfill the fantasy of looking at oth-
ers without being seen, but there is also an acknowledgement that these two different kinds
of shots – the posed and the unposed – offer up very different truths about their subjects.
Taro’s shooter knew she was being photographed and she played to the camera for iconic
effect; in this shot, the subjects did not know that the camera was there, and the result is
an unposed truth about daily life during the war. With such distinctions in mind, I would
like to now turn to what is arguably the most famous and controversial photograph from
the Spanish Civil War, Capa’s “Death of a Loyalist Soldier,” also known as “The Falling
Soldier.”

What the Soldier Knew

A soldier fell in front of the camera. That much we know for certain about this picture,
which Capa called “probably the best picture I ever took” (Capa). For many, it is “one of
the most famous images of combat ever” (Rohter), a photograph capturing the moment
of death as a soldier who has been shot collapses to the ground. Such is the narrative with
which the image first circulated in Vu (September 23, 1936) and then, more widely in the
English-speaking world, in the pages of Life magazine (July 12, 1937). The caption in Life
read: “Robert Capa’s camera captures a Spanish soldier the instant he is dropped by a bullet
through the head in front of Córdoba.” Since the mid-1970s, however – beginning with the
publication of Knightely’s The First Casualty – that story and the photograph itself have
been embroiled in controversies over its authenticity. To begin with, the caption-editor
at Life seems to have mistaken the tassel on the soldier’s cap for a head wound (Whelan
54). In addition, Capa’s stories about the picture were inconsistent, and details about the
photograph have changed over the years. The place in which the photograph was taken,

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Figure 10.3 Death of a Loyalist Militiaman. Cordoba Front. September 1936.

Source: Photograph reprinted by permission of Magnum Photos.

originally thought to be near the town of Cerro Muriano in Córdoba, has recently been
shown to be the outskirts of a different town in the same province, the town of Espejo (Sus-
perregui 2009). The change of venue has in turn put into question an earlier identification
of the falling soldier as the anarchist militiaman, Federico Borrell García, and it has raised
questions about whether there was any fighting at all when Capa and Taro were in Espejo.
Those questioning the authenticity of the photograph have gone as far as to claim that
it is a fake, that the man in the picture was not killed in the moment depicted but instead
was pretending to die for the camera. We enter the realm of Taro’s shooter once again, but
with an important distinction. The accusation against Capa’s photograph is not simply that
the picture may have been staged, but rather – and more damningly – that a staged shot
(like picture one) was intentionally passed off as a candid (like picture two). At the core of
the controversy is the charge of deception. Appeals to the widespread practice of staging do
little to settle the score on that matter. Similarly, invocations of the “symbolic” or “artistic
truth” of the photograph miss the mark because the picture stands accused of duping view-
ers into believing they were seeing a man at the moment of death. For this reason, the most
robust defense of the photograph’s authenticity draws not on the question of staging, its
artistic merits, or reportage practices of the day but on forensic evidence that strongly sug-
gests that the body falling back is indeed lifeless (Whelan 74).
Such evidence addresses the charge of deception head on. It acknowledges that while
the location and the identity of the victim may have been mistaken, there is still reason to
believe that what we have before us here is a man at the moment of his death. The newer
narrative context invoked by those defending the authenticity of the shot, is that soldiers

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were in fact playing for the camera, but that something unexpected happened in the midst
of it:

Sometime in the 1940s . . . Capa would privately tell . . . a fellow photographer from
Stuttgart, Gerda’s hometown, that he and Gerda and the soldiers had all been actors
in a tragedy of coincidence. They’d been fooling around, he said, running, firing their
weapons, acting crazy, laughing . . . and he’d been taking pictures; he didn’t hear any
shots, “not at first.” But as the soldiers played at combat for the benefit of his cam-
era, a real bullet, fired perhaps from a fascist sniper’s high-powered hunting rifle, or
by one of the rebel Guardia Civil active in those hills, had pierced a real man’s heart.
(Vaill 58)

Because forensic analysis of the photograph is not definitive or fully dispositive, however,
we may never know for certain what happened in front of the camera to produce this
picture. As the juridical echoes of my own language of charges, defenses, and dispositions
is meant to suggest, the jury remains out. To date, neither side has been able to settle the
question definitively.
Rather than attempting to push the debate further – and it is a debate that should very
much remain open and subject to additional findings and argument – I will instead make
some more general observations about the way it has unfolded. They are observations
that can easily fall by the wayside in the heat of argument. The first, is that the debate is
fundamentally a moralistic one – it is about honesty, integrity, and truth-telling when it
comes to the most important question about this picture. It is also a debate about facts.
Either we are seeing a man at the moment of his death or we are not, and the answer to
that question matters. It leads to two very different ways of approaching the image. If it
is a staged shot, appeals to its symbolism, to the way it attests to the sacrifice of Republi-
can soldiers more generally, and to the way it eerily encapsulates the fate of the Republic
itself, which would also fall, are illuminating avenues of inquiry. If in contrast, we are
in fact looking at the picture of a man falling back at the moment of his death, however,
there is something almost obscene in dwelling on the symbolic dimensions of the image
first, and the ethics of photographic looking and making comes to the fore. What does
it mean to look at a photograph of a man as he dies? What does it mean to display the
picture, to celebrate it? Just what is celebrated here as one of the all-time greats of com-
bat photography? Is it a celebration of accident? And what is to be gained by it? Ethical
dilemmas of the kind Susan Sontag famously discussed in her classic On Photography
might ensue. “Images transfix. Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs
certainly becomes more real. . . . But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes
less real” (15). What does it mean to expose oneself to such visual anesthesia if what
is being anesthetized is our responsiveness to the death of another? While some might
dismiss the distinction in terms of how the photograph contributes to an understanding
of the war (Faber “Truth” 9), such a distinction is crucial to how one might understand
the picture. It is also doubtful that the photograph would have become the most famous
photograph of the war had it not circulated with captions claiming that it represented the
actual moment of death of the soldier. In short, the two sides of the authenticity debate
seem to lead in very different interpretive directions, and this is even before we form judg-
ments regarding possible deception.

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On the matter of intentional deception there are also no definitive answers. Capa did
not write his captions, and while he was inconsistent in his accounts of how this picture
was made, it is a leap to presume willful deception on his part. Such judgements involve
the difficult task of ascribing intentions, long after the fact, and the burden of proof in such
cases rests as it should with the accusers. Here too the observation that staged photographs
were common does little to clarify the matter. New information about the photograph in
recent years has helped to revise and complicate the history of this photograph, and the
controversy surrounding it is now routinely part of the way the photograph is exhibited
and discussed. Less discussed in such contexts, however, is the fact that the moral debate
over whether Capa aimed purposefully to deceive has clearly played out along the ideologi-
cal fault-lines that continue to inform remembrance of the Civil War. Behind the discourse
of photographic right and wrong is the longstanding conflict between right and left on the
matter of the war.

Over time [critics who were] skeptical of the entire story of the heroic Left – espe-
cially after the fall of the Soviet Union, when more details about Stalin’s role in Spain
became public – were happy to see the favorite image of the Left challenged. Capa’s
fraud, if it was that, seemed to symbolize all the tattered, unraveling myths and leg-
ends of the “good” fight against fascism.
(Aronson 252)

Determinations of fact concerning the photograph routinely take place within an ideologi-
cally saturated field of inquiry, and like the “memory-battles” concerning the Spanish Civil
War itself, opinions of this most famous of Capa’s pictures have been colored strongly by
political convictions.
Because the question of photographic authenticity remains an open one, Capa’s “Falling
Soldier” continues to lend itself to two different ideologically inflected stories: A story of
heroism and tragic sacrifice on the left and a story of deceitful manipulation on the right.
It is an unsettling example of the way in which intense political conflict can generate com-
peting truth-claims. Indeed, it is a case-study in how notions of a non-partisan truth can
quickly crumble in the heat of conflict and debate. In this sense, the lasting truth of this
most famous photograph may in fact be the truth of continuing political struggle; that is,
the way this picture has become and remains a contested site of memory.5 Especially in
our times, as “fake news” is weaponized for political purposes, however, general claims
about the way all photography creates illusions or assertions that all photographs are by
definition manipulations are at best category mistakes – answering at the accusation of
deception at the wrong level of analysis – and at worst they are obfuscations. What is called
for is a more granular approach, one that acknowledges the role of photographic indexi-
cality – Barthes’ “certificate of presence” – and the legitimate questions it can raise about
what was present in any given picture, along with photography’s many other dimensions.
What is also called for is more modesty about what we do and do not know, something that
both sides of the debate in this case would do well to remember before dismissing either the
picture or the charges.
A deliberate, slow dwelling in photographic images of the kind I have tried to model
in the preceding pages teaches that what such pictures put before us, what they pose, is
indeed visual documentation but also, as I have tried to suggest, much more. They deliver
many kinds of truth, and as humanists we should speak to such truths unabashedly without

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falling into philosophical relativism on the question of factual truth itself. At the same time,
we should address questions of photographic authenticity with the seriousness they deserve,
which is to say at the factual levels at which the questions are raised. When it comes to the
past, photographs are, at their best, occasions for narrative, deliberation, and conversation,
and as this brief tour through three photographs from the war has aimed to suggest, along
with what was there before the camera, photographs also inevitably open windows onto
the social, aesthetic, and political complexities of the way they were made and the way we
look at them today.

Notes
1 The captions to Capa and Taro’s photographs varied considerably from publication to publication.
I reproduced here those used by the International Center for Photography (ICP).
2 For a useful historical overview of the milicianas, see Martínez.
3 For a theoretical overview of the distinctions between fiction, non-fiction and deception in photog-
raphy, see Atencia-Linares.
4 For an overview of Capa and Taro as “inventors” of photojournalism, see Aronson and Bhudo.
5 The classic work on the site of memory as an analytic concept remains Nora. See Faber (Memory
Battles) for an overview of conflicts over remembrance of the Civil War in Spain. Faber (“Truth”)
also suggests that the question of whether Capa’s “Falling Soldier” is staged or not is ultimately of
little importance.

Works Cited
Alted Vigil, Alicia. “Las consecuencias de la Guerra Civil española en los niños de la República: de la
dispersion al exilio.” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie Contemporánea, 1996, pp. 207–28.
Aronson, Marc, and Marina Budhos. Eyes of the World: Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and the Invention
of Modern Photojournalism. Henry Holt and Company, 2017.
Atencia Linares, Paloma. “Fiction, Non-Fiction and Deceptive Photographic Representation.” Jour-
nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 70, 2012, pp.19–30.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981.
Capa, Robert. “Bob Capa Tells of Photographic Experiences Abroad.” Hi Jinx, Interviewed and
Hosted by Jinx Falkenburg and Tex McCrary, NBC Radio, 20 Oct. 1947. Audiofile, https://www.
icp.org/news/robert-capa-1947-radio-interview. Accessed 12 Jun. 2024.
Faber, Sebastian. “Truth in the Making: The Never-Ending Saga of Capa’s Falling Soldier.” The Vol-
unteer, vol. 26, no. 4, 2009, pp. 7–10.
Faber, Sebastian. Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War. History, Fiction, Photography. Vanderbilt
UP, 2018.
Knightley, Phillip. The First Casualty. From the Crimea to Vietnam. The War Correspondent as Hero,
Propagandist, and Mythmaker. Harcourt Brace, 1975.
Nora, Pierre. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Columbia UP, 1997.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2003.
Susperregui, Jose Manuel. Sombras de la fotografía. Los enigmas desvelados de Nicolasa Ugartemen-
dia, Muerte de un miliciano, La aldea Española, y El lute. Universidad del País Vasco, 2009.
Vaill, Amanda. Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War. Farrar, Straus, Gir-
oux, 2015.

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 11
THE PERIÓDICOS MURALES OF
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Recycled Imprints, Contested Conventions and
Shared Histories

Jordana Mendelson

El periódico mural tiene la eficacia rápida del cartel y la trascendencia literaria del libro. Es
el libro, en la calle, abierto a todas las miradas. . . . Es la cultura en un juego de puzles y de
estampas. Es, además, algo que está sobre la propaganda, porque es el grito colectivo de
afán de saber, de comprender, de afirmar su personalidad de pueblo culto y libre. (Fornet 5)
The wall newspaper has the rapid efficiency of the poster and the literary transcendence
of the book. It is the book, in the street, open to every gaze. . . . It is culture in a game of
puzzles and prints. It is, moreover, something that is above propaganda, because it is the
collective cry for the desire to learn, to understand, to affirm its character as a cultured
and free people.1

Written at the height of the Spanish Civil War, E. Fornet’s assessment of the periódico mural
and its role in wartime propaganda is one of the most concise and evocative commentaries
on this multimedia paper-based form of communication (see Figure 11.1). The compari-
sons he makes fold together the vast print ecology of the Civil War to capture what was
most highly valued in the wall newspaper: Its efficiency and visibility. As Fornet writes, it
is “open to every gaze” and a “collective cry” that marries the characteristics of the poster
and the book. Fornet also signals to his readers that viewing and experiencing wall news-
papers forms part of the wartime effort to defend culture and democracy. Conversations
about wall newspapers extended beyond those who made them for others to view or read
(or read about them in the press), to implicate readers and viewers who were also poten-
tial makers of wall newspapers. In the wartime context, any reader or viewer might also
become a maker since the production of wall newspapers extended broadly across different
readers, viewers and contexts. Given the weight and significance that Fornet and so many
others placed on wall newspapers, it is striking that studies of Spanish Civil War propa-
ganda have paid so little attention to this particular print genre.
Perhaps most striking about the wall newspaper, when considered within the larger
frame of print culture and the broad circulation of posters, newspapers and magazines
during the war,2 was its widespread appeal: The production of periódicos murales was
not limited to army units on the front lines (though their presence there was certainly

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-13 
 The Periódicos Murales of the Spanish Civil War

Figure 11.1 E. Fornet, “Cultura Popular trae a Valencia los periódicos murales de Madrid” (“Cultura
Popular Brings to Valencia the Wall Newspapers of Madrid”). Ayuda. Semanario de
la Solidaridad [Valencia], edited by Socorro Rojo de España (S.R.I.), vol. 2, no. 99,
July 31, 1938, p. 5.
Source: Courtesy of Archivos Estatales de España, Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte.

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covered the most in the wartime press); instead, they were produced and discussed across
the spectrum of formal and informal groups on the Loyalist side, which spanned army
units, political organizations (including the anarchist group Mujeres Libres in Barcelona),
trade unions and worker collectives and even children’s colonies far from the front lines.3
Wall newspapers also took quite varied forms, from printed, poster-size single sheets, which
looked more like broadsides and circulated like any other serial, to unique hand-crafted
newspapers that could be small or large in size and included cutouts from the press or
illustrations drawn just for this purpose (often humorous cartoons or decorative details). In
every case, the wall newspaper appears to have been intended to be both viewed and read:
To be seen as a whole object composed of image and text. It also was able to communicate
information to an individual or be experienced as part of a group as it was read aloud. The
documentation that exists about the use of wall newspapers suggests all of these iterations
and interactions were possible, and most of that documentation can be found in the objects
themselves or in the newspapers and magazines that covered their manufacture and circula-
tion. A photograph by Luis Vidal Corella that accompanies Fornet’s article, of three young
boys standing attentively in front of a wall newspaper, recorded the encounter between the
wall newspapers and their viewers/readers; it is an image-type that is repeated over and over
across different contexts and within different serials.
This chapter aims to tease out some of the ways the wall newspaper was mobilized the-
matically within the press but also to try to understand the relationship of the wall newspa-
per to other forms of serial publication during the war since this genre sits both within and
apart from other forms of print culture. It was often (but not always) produced as a unique
object whose components were nonetheless standardized and repeated through the staging
of regular contests and exhibitions (see Figure 11.2), and it relates in form and purpose to
newspapers and magazines yet also mines those publications for content, thus appropriat-
ing, replicating, amplifying and revising the previously published materials it includes. At
the same time, the handmade and hand-drawn elements in the wall newspaper served to
editorialize, revise and even correct those materials already in circulation by creating a loop
between the serials published during the war and their reappearance in wall newspapers,
which were then themselves put into circulation in exhibitions and reproduced in the press
(as in Fornet’s article). The variety in the wall newspapers that have survived from the
war in various archives demonstrates that even though there are standard elements that
appear in most wall newspapers, there was also great diversity within these conventions.
For example, most wall newspapers visibly display the title of the newspaper, most feature
a selection of materials that are both text- and image-based and most blend information
from other sources with content crafted specifically for the paper, thus sharing stories that
are both of general and specific relevance. One thing all wall newspapers had in common
is that they were mounted or hung and meant to be read and viewed by an individual or
group standing before them, which distinguishes them from other print artifacts that are
bound and handheld.4
The Soviet origin of the wall newspaper was discussed in several articles throughout the
war. Even when it was not named explicitly, the rhetoric around their production, critique
and display was drawn directly from the Soviet use of wall newspapers among the work-
ers’ collectives in factories where an alignment between ideology and practice was forged
through public instruction and criticism. In the USSR, the wall newspaper emerged out of
a revolutionary context, and, by invoking the past of these material objects, writers were

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Figure 11.2 “Concurso de Periódicos Murales” (“Wall Newspaper Contest”). A Sus Puestos, no. 3,
April 1938, n.p.
Source: Courtesy of Hemeroteca Municipal, Ayuntamiento de Madrid.

enforcing the connection between the Soviet revolution and the Spanish Civil War. Fornet,
in the same article cited earlier, recalled the wall newspaper came:

de lejos, desde allá de la revolución rusa, [con] el nerviosismo genial del poeta May-
akovski, que fué su inspirado inventor. Para aquel poeta de la revolución, toda la
ciudad – con sus muros, sus tranvías, sus paredes – podía servir de periódico de un
periodismo instantáneo, nervioso, zigzagueante. . . . Pues bien, en el Madrid de noviem-
bre, el espíritu de Mayakovski estuvo en las calles conmocionadas. Uno de los primeros
periódicos murales fué el confeccionado en los sótanos del que fué Teatro Fontalba . . . .
Luego surgieron otros. Y otros. Se multiplicaban con una rapidez maravillosa.
from far away, from the Russian revolution, the nervous genius of [Vladimir] May-
akovksy, who was its inspired inventor. For that poet of the revolution, the whole
city – with its walls, trains and façades – could serve as a newspaper for a spontane-
ous, nervous, zigzagging journalism. . . . Well, in the Madrid of that November [of
1936], the spirit of Mayakovksy was in the emotion-filled streets. One of the first
wall newspapers was made in the basement of the Teatro Fontalba . . . . Then others
emerged. And others. They multiplied with marvelous swiftness.

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Another article in Milicia Popular, titled “Ventajas de un periódico mural” (“Advantages of

the wall newspaper”), similarly pointed to the genre’s Soviet origins, however this time the
author stressed both its ubiquity in the USSR – “En la Unión Soviética existen periódicos
murales en todos los centros de actividad, en las fábricas, en los cuarteles, en las universidades
y en los clubs. No se concibe ningún centro de actividad sin el periódico mural” (“In the Soviet
Union wall newspapers exist in every activity center, in the factories, in the barracks, in the uni-
versities and in the clubs. One can’t imagine an activity center without a wall newspaper”) – as
well as its political function – “Precisamente una de las manifestaciones más elocuentes de la
democracia que existe en la Unión Soviética es el periódico mural” (“Precisely one of the most
eloquent manifestations of democracy that exists in the Soviet Union is the wall newspaper”;
“Ventajas de un periódico mural” 2). While these accounts by Spanish authors during the war
described the wall newspaper as democratic because it offered a space for workers’ voices and
opinions, more recently historians have argued that there was also a danger that the public
exposition of wall newspapers could turn into a de facto test of allegiance and be used for
political exclusion or punishment. As Brigitte Beck Pristed has explained, the wall newspaper
offered “a peer-to-peer network for social organization, it assembled readers/writers, educated
their political vision, and forced them to act and react,” but it also had the potential of con-
verting citizens into “informal informants” and the public forum created by the wall news-
paper could become a repressive enforcement mechanism through the practice of community
criticism (1).5 The viewing experience was necessarily public, which meant the readers’ reac-
tions could be monitored by their peers. Where the Soviet model best translated into the Span-
ish Civil War context was in offering a means for incorporating previously published official
materials and instructions, often issued by commissars, into the local discourse – to produce
consistency and a shared vocabulary – while also providing space for local issues and debates.
In response to the question “What Is a Wall Newspaper?” authors across a range of
Spanish Civil War publications described it variously as “el verdadero periódico del frente”
(“the true newspaper of the front”; “El periódico mural, portavoz”), “la expresión más
sencilla de la Prensa” (“the simplest expression of the press”; “Nuestros periódicos”), “una
tabla, un trozo de muro, una parte cualquiera donde exponga el soldado sus pensamientos”
(“a tablet, a piece of wall, wherever a soldiers exhibit their thoughts”; Melguizo Puente)
and perhaps most idealistically as “un gimnasio, un campo de entrenamiento intelectual y
artístico, donde se manifiestan las actividades culturales de nuestros soldados” (“a gymna-
sium, an intellectual and artistic training camp, where the cultural activities of our soldiers
are manifested”; Fusté). Alongside the vast and diverse praise for wall newspapers and the
array of organizations producing them, was also an effort to standardize who made them
and how, and a drive to assess and rank their efficacy as political tools for building solidarity
within and beyond the organizations that produced them. Among the countless articles that
announce the significance of the wall newspaper is a subset of articles and reviews that focus
on guidelines for and criticism of those produced by individual brigades, clubs and unions.
As with their Soviet precedent, here too the emphasis is on providing templates to follow
and a space for feedback meant to improve the efficacy of the wall newspaper. The mix of
preexisting sources, new texts and illustrated features was meant to engage the reader in
a way that also indicated a hierarchy of information: From the most urgent commands to
opinion and reflection from the brigade. For example, in El Combatiente del Este, J. O.
Martínez details the individual elements that should be included in a model wall newspa-
per with a key to what each element is and the ideal arrangement for maximum visibility
and impact (see Figure 11.3). The detail with which the author outlines instructions for

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Figure 11.3 
J. O. Martínez, “El periódico mural.” El Combatiente del Este, vol. 2, no. 175,
January 5, 1938, p. 8.
Source: Courtesy of Hemeroteca Municipal, Ayuntamiento de Madrid.

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producing a wall newspaper indicates that these kinds of articles were written in part as a
critical mechanism but also, more basically, as an easy-to-follow set of guidelines: “En el
ángulo superior izquierdo va el nombre del periódico. En el espacio que queda de la parte
superior colocamos los titulares de la noticia más importante. . . . Inmediatamente debajo,
y siguiendo la dirección de la línea oblicua trazada desde el margen superior del periódico,
va un largo artículo hablando del tema anunciado” (“In the upper left-hand corner goes the
name of the newspaper. In the space that remains in the upper part we put the most impor-
tant headlines. . . . Immediately below, and following the diagonal coming from the upper
part of the newspaper, place a large article that discusses the announced theme”; Martínez).
Martínez goes on to detail each element and includes the layout of photographs and other
materials. In the end, however, he also emphasizes that what takes him so long to outline
is quite quick in practice and that there are many ways to organize the wall newspaper:
“Insisto en que eso es solamente un ejemplo, pues ya sabéis que las combinaciones a que
se presta el periódico mural son tantas como vuestra imaginación nos permita” (“I insist
that this is just an example. We know that the combinations that can be used in the wall
newspaper are as many as your imagination allows”).
Critics and commissars offered suggestions for creating wall newspapers that were pub-
lished in military magazines and disseminated through the wartime press. Columns that
described the evaluation process of wall newspapers as “autocrítica” (“self-criticism”) fur-
ther highlight the impact of the Soviet orientation toward discipline, collective responsibil-
ity and shared spaces for the enforcement of political ideology. A series of “Wall-Paper
Score Charts” conserved in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive at the Tamiment Library,
New York University, details the categories used to grade submissions to a wall newspa-
per competition: Illustration, balance, general appearance, originality, content of articles
(political, military, etc.) and number of contributors. The critical reviews of wall news-
papers echo these categories, leveling judgment on: The degree of collaboration (many
wanted a greater number of contributors to ensure that the wall newspaper was truly a
communally produced object), the reproduction of texts versus their summary, the need to
constantly update wall newspapers posted for viewing on the front (to stimulate interest in
their content), the relation of the wall newspaper to both army-wide and brigade-specific
concerns and the need to make the wall newspaper open to everyone, not just professional
writers or artists.
By studying wall newspapers, one also gains further appreciation for the extent to which
the circulation and reuse of wartime magazines became a widespread, if sometimes criti-
cized, practice both in cities and on the front lines of battle far outside urban centers. Even
with complaints like the one published in Al Ataque in August 1937 that “un periódico
mural, compuesto por recortes de revistas gráficas, no tiene efectividad ninguna” (“a wall
newspaper composed of cut-outs from picture magazines is not at all effective”; “Autoc-
rítica”), the majority of documented wall newspapers from the period demonstrate that,
in fact, the recycling of images first published in the press and reworked in bold, often
idiosyncratic, compositions was one of the most characteristic methods used to produce
wall newspapers during the war. In the periódico mural created by the sick and wounded
at the Hospital Militar Clínico in Barcelona, images were culled from diverse publications
to produce often surprising juxtapositions of Hollywood film stars with agricultural scenes,
soldiers on the front, propaganda and hand-drawn or hand-painted scenes of war and
humorous vignettes.6 Appropriation and emulation, as conventions, are immediately vis-
ible if we compare, for example, the initial publication of a photograph on the cover of the

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special issue of Ejército del Pueblo from July 1937 and its reappearance on the poster-sized
Solidaridad: Periódico Mural del Socorro Rojo de España from a year later.7 In both forms
(handmade and mass reproduced), the wall newspaper was seen as a vital instrument for
connecting writers, editors and readers with each other and with a larger public. Thousands
of wall newspapers were produced throughout the war, yet commentators at the time advo-
cated for even more. One writer suggested: “es necesario que se intensifique [la producción
de periódicos murales] hasta lograr que haya una cantidad de murales en todo Madrid no
inferior a 12 o 15,000” (“it is necessary for [the production of wall newspapers] to intensify
until there are no fewer than 12 to 15,000 murals in all of Madrid”; “Agit-Prop”).
Despite the material, visual and functional similarities between posters, magazines and
wall newspapers (and the recurring comparison in the press between wall newspapers and
these other forms of print media), art critic Francisco Carreño, in one of the most detailed
explanations of “Qué es y cómo se hace un periódico mural” (“What a wall newspaper is
and how to make one”), dissented:

El periódico mural es una creación popular y no una obra profesional. Es, en su fondo
y en su espíritu, diferente a cualquier otro medio de información y propaganda. No es
un periódico impreso ni un cartel, no solamente porque se crea con medios diferentes,
sino porque su carácter es particular e independiente. (51)
The wall newspaper is a popular creation and not the work of a professional. It
is, at its base and in its spirit, different from any other medium of information and
propaganda. It is not a printed newspaper nor a poster, not only because it is created
by different means, but because its character is particular and independent.

One has the sense that Carreño, as someone who was trained in looking closely at works of
art, the intentions behind their creation and the intricacies of their production, saw in the
medium the potential for it to move beyond the restrictions of its political agenda, despite
the fact that the article itself was published in the October 1938 issue of the military maga-
zine Comisario: Revista Mensual (Commissar: Monthly Journal). For Carreño, the wall
newspaper was different from both the text-dominated magazine and the image-dominated
poster because it was polyvalent, open to multiple, layered meanings at once, while still
following shared guidelines and conventions. Carreño saw the wall newspaper as unique
in its complexity. In particular, he was drawn to the ways in which the wall newspaper
registered in its form both what it shared with other media and the singular outlook of
its editors. Carreño paid particular attention to the visual and material aspects of the wall
newspaper advocating for the inclusion of humorous drawings and the “mayor número
de dibujantes espontáneos” (“greatest number of spontaneous illustrators”). At the same
time that he argued against the frequent use of images and texts drawn from magazines,
he recommended the establishment of a graphic archive in which the material derived from
other publications would be organized into folders by category. Carreño then outlined the
process for creating a wall newspaper (see Figure 11.4):

1) Make a sketch
2) Cut out a piece of paper the size of the desired wall newspaper (if paper is in short sup-
ply, reuse the un-inked side of posters)
3) Use color to unify the composition and be sure that slogans are legible
4) Place a date, title and name of the military unit on the upper part of the mural

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Figure 11.4 Francisco Carreño, “Qué es y cómo se hace un periódico mural?” Comisario, vol. 1, no.
2, October 1938, p. 53.
Source: Courtesy of Hemeroteca Municipal, Ayuntamiento de Madrid.

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 The Periódicos Murales of the Spanish Civil War

We have, thus, a wall newspaper created with a used poster that relies on previously pub-
lished magazine images and abides by both museological and archival standards by employ-
ing formal techniques for the creation of the mural and bibliographic standards to ensure
its status as a historical document for posterity.
The crux of the wall newspaper is, in fact, and despite Carreño’s argument otherwise,
something it shares with Civil War magazines: Both are textual and visual objects that func-
tion aesthetically and politically. This may, in part, explain the proliferation of exhibitions
dedicated to the wall newspaper during the war. Many writers recognized the artistic value
of the wall newspaper and described it in ways that parallel discussions of other forms of
visual art. Mariano García instructed in the September 1937 issue of Norte. Órgano de la 2
División (North: Bulletin of the 2nd Division): “Hay que hacer periódicos que tengan movi-
lidad, dinamismo, diversidad de secciones, amenidad, en suma, para que sean agradables a
la vista, porque de esta forma lo leerán más fácilmente los soldados” (“[o]ne has to make
[wall] newspapers that have mobility, dynamism, a diversity of sections, [and] pleasantness
all together, so that they are agreeable to the eyes, because in this way the soldiers will read
it more easily”; 12). Here, the wall newspaper’s visual dynamism becomes the tool through
which literacy is activated by attracting attention and improving comprehension: “lo leerán
más fácilmente” (“they will read it more easily”). Another article on “Periódicos murales”
from almost a year later, published in Ayuda, drew a further connection between forms of
visual display and the creation of wall newspapers. Lamenting the government decree that
removed posters from Madrid’s walls, the author explained: “La capital de España, con la
pérdida de sus carteles, da ahora la sensación de una gigantesca Exposición clausurada, al
tiempo que una ola de agitación y arte popular ha penetrado en el corazón y las entrañas
de Madrid, en las inmensas profundidades de las fábricas y lugares de producción” (“The
capital of Spain, with the loss of its posters now has the sensation of a gigantic exhibition
that has been closed, at the same time that a wave of agitation and popular art has pen-
etrated into the heart and bowels of Madrid, in the immense depths of the factories and
sites of production”). What would take hold of Madrid in the absence of the poster was
the wall newspaper. Although the article recognized that not all wall newspapers shared the
same artistic value, the medium filled a void left by the absent posters and functioned as a
creative tool for people to participate in crafting their own images and slogans, at a time
when paper and ink (as well as staff) were in short supply in the besieged city.
Wall newspapers could be viewed beyond the sites where they were originally posted.
Photographs of individuals viewing wall newspapers in the streets on the home front and as
part of the daily life on the war front were paralleled by the documentation of the numerous
exhibitions of wall newspapers that were held throughout Spain during the war. Repeatedly
we see photographers capturing the moment when a reader engages with the object with
rapt attention. Portraying more than a moment of contemplation (though there are simi-
larities in the photographic compositions between the viewer’s relationship with the wall
newspapers and with a work of art), these scenes show viewers in an active role as readers.
It was on the occasion of Cultura Popular’s Valencia exhibition of wall newspapers from
Madrid, that Fornet published his extensive review in Ayuda. He embraced the medium as
a hybrid and saw, like Carreño, that its polyvalence opened up multiple points of political
and artistic entry for the viewer. Fornet’s writing served as an opening for this chapter in
large part because he captured in his observations a bit of the awe and wonder that accom-
panied the proliferation of the wall newspaper as a vehicle for propaganda during the war:
It is both poster and book, spontaneous and transcendent, authored and anonymous.

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The multiple posters that Cultura Popular published announcing the exhibition indicate
that it was aimed at bringing in the greatest number of people to see the collection of wall
newspapers. Special posters were made to target potential visitors: Women, workers and
soldiers. Each one presented a different framing of the wall newspaper in relation to their
audience. The poster dedicated to bringing women to the exhibition portrayed a scene in
which three different figures were captured in profile looking at the wall newspapers hang-
ing on display. The poster artist collapsed the implied distance between object and viewer
by having the main figure hold between her fingers an image that simultaneously appeared
to be adhered to the wall. This subtle spatial shift introduced the possibility that viewers
were also participant-creators. The other posters offered similar devices for thinking about
the objects on display differently: The poster of the worker showed his arms emerging from
a factory-scape holding up a wall newspaper that towers over the composition (see Ruís
Melendreras), while the poster dedicated to soldiers features an empty space within the wall
newspaper that invites viewers (in this case, soldiers) to imagine themselves filling the blank
field with their own images and ideas.
The exhibitors’ desire to allow visitors to identify with the act of creating a wall news-
paper served a political function as well. Because wall newspapers required little of the
special equipment that was necessary for printing a magazine or newspaper, the exhibitions
opened up the possibility for readers and viewers to think about themselves not as the pas-
sive recipients of political slogans but potentially as agents who were able to voice their
concerns and engage actively in the production of wartime media. The goal of this format
as a tool could not be clearer: Convert viewers into producers, exhibitions into opportuni-
ties for cultural and political education and the display of two-dimensional objects into
transformational situations in which a viewer might move from being an observer of war
into an active defender of the republic in the fight against fascism.
Like Cultura Popular, which had organized the exhibition of wall newspapers while also
publishing its own magazine, the 5th Regiment of the Popular Militias became one of the
leaders in using this multifaceted genre to bring the work of soldiers into view. From 1936
to 1937, the 5th Regiment published the magazine Milicia Popular. Both María Teresa
León and Rafael Alberti formed part of a core group of artists, writers and intellectu-
als who contributed to the reputation of the regiment as the “Talent Battalion” (Comín
Colomer 22). In 1937, the regiment sponsored an exhibition of their cultural work and
published a commemorative book as a souvenir. Within the exhibition, there was a section
devoted to publications, and the display of this publishing history provided testimony to
the status of the regiment as a cultural producer. The page of the catalog dedicated to the
wall newspaper designed on the occasion of the exhibition (which carried the same name
as its magazine), Milicia Popular: Periódico Mural de la Exposición del 5o Regimiento, is
provocative in that it reproduces a board specially created for the exhibit that openly invites
visitor participation and critique by leaving a space empty: The visitor to the exhibition and
the reader of the catalog are explicitly invited to write “sus opiniones y críticas” (“their
opinions and criticism”) onto the blank space of the wall newspaper.8 They are invited to
become not only contributors but also (potentially) soldiers in the fight against fascism.
Activated in the space of public display, the 5th Regiment’s wall newspaper epitomizes the
dialogue that emerged among artists – professional and amateur, individual and collective,
producers and consumers – and between soldier-artists and viewers.
There are reasons both ideological and practical for the rise of the wall newspaper dur-
ing the Spanish Civil War, especially in 1937–8. The influence of the Soviet Union during

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this period of the war is well documented, and so it should come as no surprise that its par-
ticular forms of propaganda would also migrate to Spain. It is also apparent that because
guidelines were produced, models exhibited and debates published about the wall news-
paper in the press, it became a form that could easily be replicated. It was moreover a sus-
tainable form of propaganda, one that required very little training or access to expensive
materials or machines to create. It depended on neither fine papers, trained artists or sea-
soned journalists. Instead, as indicated in the guidelines that circulated widely throughout
the war, a wall newspaper could be made out of just about anything and by just about any-
one. In this, the wall newspaper in Spain followed its Soviet precursor in opening up more
inclusive spaces for orientation to and participation in the political debates that filled the
pages of the press. In the guides for making a wall newspaper, it is also clear that there was
a recommended hierarchy for the display of information that could be copied and repeated
(ensuring consistency and shared messaging from the front lines to the home front), while
also allowing for some novelty and improvisation. The exhibits of wall newspapers and
their press coverage further provided a critical outlet for their review, which meant, like all
forms of criticism, an imposition of norms and expectations. The other, practical reason
for the expanded use of wall newspapers across Spain, with their numbers reaching well
into the thousands, was a lack of resources as the war continued. The scarcity of paper,
ink and staff to produce new content was also remarked upon in the press, as well as in
correspondence between magazine editors and potential contributors. The wall newspaper
could compensate for the shortage of supplies (and thus the potential deficit of propaganda
materials) as it depended on the reuse of previously published texts and images as part of its
process of incorporating and expanding the participation (and critique) of all.
What the wall newspaper shares with other print artifacts like newspapers, magazines
and posters is that all of them helped to create a rich historical archive, from which we can
study a vast array of reports and opinions about the role of the author, artist, editor, print-
ing press, distributor and reader during times of war. What the newspaper, magazine and
poster produced, the wall newspaper cropped, framed, incorporated and recycled in ways
that were both spontaneous and carefully designed. Unintentionally, perhaps, the reuse and
circulation of materials that were potentially outdated or out of sync with the latest reports
or policies also opened the door for irregularities or misunderstandings, where the war as
it was being recorded departed from the war as it was happening. By examining the wall
newspaper – the war’s most ephemeral output (even more so than serialized magazines or
large editions of posters) – within a broader print ecology that includes magazines, news-
papers and posters, we can begin to understand its impact on the everyday life of wartime
propaganda.

Notes
1 Translations by the author unless otherwise noted.
2 This chapter draws from my earlier research and publications on Spanish Civil War magazines (see
Mendelson, Revistas, modernidad, Revistas y guerra, and “Fortificaciones”).
3 While the vast majority of wall newspapers were created by the Loyalist side, there was interest in
the wall newspaper on the Nationalist side as well, especially from student groups in the postwar
period.
4 I am borrowing the term “print artifacts” from Patrick Collier, who argues that this is an encom-
passing term that allows scholars to see magazines within a broader framework of print culture.
Lisa Gittelman opposes the use of the term “print culture,” arguing that it is too broad and loses its

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meaning when deployed in relation to specific documents, however since my essay focuses on mate-
rials that are generated specifically in relation to the printing press or pull materials from original
sources that were in print I use this term throughout along with Collier’s print artifacts.
5 For more on Soviet wall newspapers, see Kelly.
6 Illustrated in Mendelson, Revistas y guerra 93.
7 Both are illustrated in Mendelson, Revistas y guerra 64.
8 Illustrated in Mendelson, Revistas y guerra 97.

Works Cited
“Agit-Prop.” Nuestras Tareas. Boletín Inferior del Comité Provincial de Madrid, vol. 2, no. 26,
1937, p. 3.
“Autocrítica. Periódicos murals.” Al Ataque, vol. 1, no. 26, 1937, p. 6.
Beck Pristed, Brigette. “Soviet Wall Newspapers: Social(ist) Media of an Analog Age.” The Oxford
Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, edited by Aga Skodzka et al., Oxford UP, 2020,
pp. 1–28.
Carreño, Francisco. “Qué es y cómo se hace un periódico mural.” Comisario, no. 2, 1938, p. 51.
Collier, Patrick. Modern Print Artefacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British Print Cul-
ture, 1890s–1930s. Edinburgh UP, 2016.
Comín Colomer, Eduardo. El 5° Regimiento de Milicias Populares. Historia de la unidad político-militar
que fue cuna del Ejército Popular y del comisariado político. Liberería Editorial San Martín, 1973.
“El periódico mural, portavoz gráfico de nuestro Ejército popular.” Acero, no. 1, 1937.
Fornet, E. “Cultura Popular trae a Valencia los periódicos murales de Madrid.” Ayuda. Semanario de
la Solidaridad [Valencia], edited by Socorro Rojo de España (S.R.I.), vol. 2, no. 99, 1938.
Fusté, Jaime. “El periódico mural.” Tracción, 2nd era, vol. 2, Special Issue, 1939.
García, Mariano. “Nuestros murales.” Norte. Órgano de la 2 División, vol. 1, no. 6, 1937, p. 12.
Gittelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. MIT P, 2014.
Kelly, Catriona. “ ‘A Laboratory for the Manufacture of Proletarian Writers’: The Stengazeta (Wall
Newspaper), Kul’turnost’ and the Language of Politics in the Early Soviet Period.” Europe-Asia
Studies, vol. 54, no. 4, 2002, pp. 573–602.
Martínez, J. O. “El Periódico Mural.” El Combatiente del Este, vol. 2, no. 175, 1938, p. 8.
Melguizo Puente, Bienvenido. “¿Qué es el periódico mural?” Centro, vol. 1, no. 1, 1938.
Mendelson, Jordana. Revistas y guerra 1936–1939/Magazines and War 1936–1939. Ministerio de
Cultura/Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2007.
Mendelson, Jordana, editor. Revistas, modernidad y guerra/Magazines, Modernity and War. Ministe-
rio de Cultura/Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2008.
Mendelson, Jordana. “Fortificaciones de papel: La defensa de Madrid y la proliferación de la prensa
durante la Guerra Civil.” Translated by Isabel Cadenas Cañón. Madrid, musa de las artes, edited
by Javier Pérez Segura, Museo de Arte Contemporánea, 2018, pp. 145–53.
“Nuestros periódicos murales.” Valor. Órgano de la 4 División, vol. 1, no. 4, 1937.
“Periódicos murales.” Ayuda, vol. 2, no. 91, 1938, p. 6.
Ruís Melendreras, Emeterio. “Obreros: Acudid al concurso-exposición de periódicos murals.” Taller
de Dibujo del Sindicato de Bellas Artes, UGT; Cultura Popular, ca. 1938. PS-Carteles, 152. Centro
Documental de la Memoria Histórica. Ref. code: ES.37274.CDMH/3//PS-CARTELES,152.
“Ventajas de un periódico mural.” Milicia Popular, vol. 1, no. 28, 1936, p. 2.

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 12
TRANSITIONS, RESTORATIONS,
EXILES
Assessing the Legacies of the Expelled
Second Republic

Mari Paz Balibrea

This chapter is concerned with the place of Republican exile in 20th- and 21st-century
cultural and political discourses in Spain. It does not offer a summary of the history of the
1939 Republican exile or its cultural production.1 Instead, by using representative examples
from the exiles’ cultural corpus, the chapter focuses on their leading ideas about Spain and
on how they imagined the role they might occupy in Spain in their eventual return. Moreo-
ver, the chapter provides a critical account of the ways in which the Spanish state and its
agents, in turn, managed the meaning of and knowledge about this exile as Spain’s “other.”2
Discussions about the politics of memory, about remembering and forgetting, and about
the conditions of reception and recuperation relevant to this Republican exile are to be
understood as articulated with those of a wider set of historical realities. Along with the
Second Republic (1931–1939), the Civil War (1936–1939) and the Francoist dictatorship
(1939–1975), this exile constitutes the core of 20th-century Spain’s contested past, at the
core of which lie starkly opposed views about Spain. The outcome of the Civil War, a strug-
gle in which these antagonistic versions of Spanish identity confronted each other, divided
Spaniards into winners and losers, a chasm further enforced and perpetuated by the dicta-
torship. Needless to say, political and ideological reasons prevented Francoists from grant-
ing the reality of Republican exile any prominent visibility. But an analogous reluctance
characterized for more than two decades the subsequent democratic state. Such attitudes
turned the legacies of these exiles’ defeated national projects into unacknowledged dead
ends. Despite the power imbalance, the defeated exiles were able, even if precariously, to
keep their memories alive, and in this way preserved their own ability to demonstrate the
legitimacy of their national project and of what they had been prepared to do to defend it.
Beginning in January of 1939 more than half a million people were forced to cross the
Spanish border with France at the Pyrenees, mostly on foot, but also by road vehicles or in
trains. Others fled by boat from Alicante to Northern Africa, shortly before the war offi-
cially ended on April 1. France, on the brink of entering the Second World War and amidst
a climate of growing xenophobia, was overwhelmed by the refugee avalanche. The Dala-
dier government initially responded by confining approximately 150,000 of those refugees
in concentration camps in Southern France. Forced and incentivized repatriations in 1939

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-14
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

(often greeted with retaliation once the exiles arrived back to the Spanish side) and volun-
tary returns taking place until 1945 brought the eventual number of exiles down to 200,000
from the 500,000 that had initially fled to France. The majority of these 200,000 exiles
remained in France, with the rest settling in Latin American countries (Mexico, Argentina,
Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Cuba) and,
to a lesser extent, elsewhere in Europe (Belgium, United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union)
or in the United States.
Republican exiles left Spain defeated and in disarray. However, many kept a deeply
entrenched sense of patriotism and of having been – and remaining – the historical repre-
sentatives of Spain’s best version of itself. They were proud to have opposed Franco and
felt validated in their fight against fascism by the conflict escalating globally into the Sec-
ond World War immediately after the Spanish war. In these early days, thousands of exiles
lived in a reality of squalor and persecution, made bearable by their conviction that the
Allies would defeat the Axis powers and, in the process, remove Franco from power. But
a long-lasting source of strength came from their epic sense of moral superiority and from
the conviction that they, and not the Francoists, were Spain’s legitimate representatives,
sharing “una identidad republicana común, internacionalista y antifascista” (“a common
Republican, internationalist and anti-fascist identity”; Naharro Calderón 21; emphasis in
original).3 The contempt the exiles had for the Francoists is forcefully expressed by Luis
Cernuda in his poem “Ser de Sansueña” (Being from Sansueña), written in the late 1940s.
In the poem Cernuda represents Franco’s followers as repulsive worms feeding on the dead
body of the nation:

Vivieron muerte, sí, pero con Gloria

Monstruosa. Hoy la vida morimos
En ajeno rincón. Y mientras tanto
Los gusanos, de ella y su ruina irreparable,
Crecen, prosperan. (270)
Yes, they lived death, but their glory
was monstrous. Today, we die life,
in an alien corner. And in the meantime,
the worms feed off her [Spain’s] irreparable ruins
and prosper at her expense.

The oxymoronic verses convey the moral impossibility of a country populated by those
who killed it, and in so doing “lived death,” usurping Spain from those who had instead
filled it with life, and who now languish (“we die life”) in the margins and outside of Spain
(“an alien corner”).
Max Aub, another key exile intellectual, never tired of documenting and reinstating the
ethical argument in favor of exiles and, by extension, the Spain that they defended. A very
eloquent and dramatic example of his exile writing can be found in the novel Campo de los
almendros (Field of the Almond Trees, 1968), the sixth instalment of his Campos (Fields)
also known as El Laberinto Mágico (The Magical Labyrinth) series chronicling the Civil
War. The book is devoted to the waning days of the war in the port of Alicante. There,
thousands of people huddled together as they waited in vain for a boat that would allow
them to escape capture by the Francoists. The narrative brings together the voices of hun-
dreds of these defeated Republicans as they remain in standby, the focus moving from one

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to the other in no particular order, effectively conveying the chaos and desperation of the
situation. Amongst them Claudio Piqueras, a schoolteacher, hopelessly tries to convey the
tragic meaning of the situation to his five-year-old son:

Estos que ves ahora deshechos, maltrechos, furiosos, aplanados, sin afeitar, sin lavar,
cochinos, sucios, cansados, mordiéndose, hechos un asco, destrozados, son, sin
embargo, no lo olvides, hijo, no lo olvides nunca pase lo que pase, son lo mejor de
España, los únicos que, de verdad, se han alzado, sin nada, con sus manos, contra
el fascismo, contra los militares, contra los poderosos, por la sola justicia; cada uno
a su modo, a su manera, como han podido, sin que les importara su comodidad, su
familia, su dinero. Estos que ves, españoles rotos, derrotados, hacinados, heridos,
soñolientos, medio muertos, esperanzados todavía en escapar, son, no lo olvides, lo
mejor del mundo. No es hermoso. Pero es lo mejor del mundo. No lo olvides nunca,
hijo, no lo olvides.
These people that you see here in pieces, battered, furious, beaten down, unshaved,
unwashed, swinish, filthy, tired, biting themselves, messed-up, shattered, are, how-
ever, do not forget it son, never forget it no matter what, they are the best of Spain, the
only ones who truly rose up, with nothing but their hands, against fascism, against
the military, against the powerful, and just for justice; each one of them in their own
way, the best that they could, without minding their own convenience, their fami-
lies, their money. These people that you see here, broken down Spaniards, defeated,
crammed together, wounded, sleep-deprived, half-dead, still hoping to escape, are, do
not forget it, the best in the world. It is not pretty. But it is the best in the world. Never
forget this son, do not forget it.
(405)

Campo de los almendros can be read as an attempt to keep the dignity of the defeated
alive for the record, since by the time Aub was writing the novel he was all too aware
of how the dictatorship had rewritten history to erase and discredit the Republicans and
their reasons to fight. Nobody familiar with the war and the terror that ensued after
Franco came to power will be surprised by the ferocity and vindictiveness with which
the Francoist dictatorship demonized exiles. They incarnated the anti-Spain that needed
to be wiped from the consciousness of the nation. Writing for the magazine Destino in
July of 1939 about the exiles interned in concentration camps in Southern France, the
pro-Franco journalist José Esteban Vilaró describes their fate as “el naufragio pestilente
de la inmundicia roja” (“the stinking shipwreck of red filth”; qtd. in Larraz, Monopolio
36). According to this narrative, Republicans had earned their misfortunes through their
bad behavior. While the anonymous masses of refugees were represented at worst as evil
and at best as imbeciles whom political leaders had manipulated at will, the most vitriolic
attacks were reserved for their leaders. They were decried as implacable, cold-blooded,
murderous, treacherous and lascivious and, more generally, were accused of enjoying a
life of luxury abroad with the money and patrimony they stole from the state (Larraz,
Monopolio 17–41).
In the cultural arena, the place of exiled writers, artists, and intellectuals disappeared
from Francoist historical narratives. Their absence was first justified on moral and political
grounds, but the more durable, structural reasons for it were the historians’ own igno-
rance of what exiles were publishing or producing abroad, plus the view that work created

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outside of Spain did not qualify anymore as part of the country’s cultural history (Bali-
brea, Tiempo 37–64; Larraz, Monopolio 81–100, 229–49 and “El lugar . . .”). In the first
instance, going back to political discourses, the regime sought to undermine exiles’ pres-
tige abroad in order to neutralize their ability to influence international opinion against
Francoism, but this was no longer necessary once it became clear after the Second World
War that Franco’s position was secure. In the realm of culture, however, with a majority
of the greatest and more prestigious artists and intellectuals either dead or in exile, things
played out differently. Arguments about the quality of Spanish culture, how successfully
it had flourished under the dictatorship and, crucially, its prestige abroad proliferated for
the duration of the dictatorship. They were, implicitly or explicitly, statements intended to
undermine and grant only a lesser position to that other Spanish culture that had continued
to be produced in the diaspora. Despite its pompous rhetoric, it was impossible for the
regime to re-erect the dismantled cultural sector overnight, so rivalry and discredit did not
suffice as approaches to deal with the threat of exile culture. A different and long-lasting
strategy emerged from the 1950s Cold War, as the regime became an ally to western liberal
democracies in their fight against communism and received a substantial infusion of US dol-
lars in exchange for allowing the installation of American bases on Spanish soil. To adapt
to this new role, the regime was compelled to promote forms of modernity that brought
its approach to cultural and economic matters, if not political ones, in closer alignment
to its newly found democratic friends. Republican exiles played a significant role in this
process. To the extent that the shift towards modernity also involved presenting a more
tolerant and liberal attitude for the benefit of international observers, the exiled commu-
nity provided the regime with an opportunity to strengthen its position by exhibiting its
benevolence towards these one-time enemies. To this end, between 1954 and 1969 Franco-
ism would enact a number of laws that facilitated the return of political exiles (Glondys
218). Particularly important was to secure the return of renown intellectuals and artists or
of their oeuvre.4 Efforts to re-establish networks between intellectuals inside and outside
of Spain that could help overcome the Spanish cultural divide and pave the way for some
exiles’ return were also significant. This phenomenon came to be known as “el puente”
[the bridge] and included epistolary exchanges and, although they ultimately failed, several
journal and book publication projects (Montiel Rayo). Institutional frameworks facilitated
these initiatives through an increasing tolerance towards the publication of articles and
books by exile writers and by inviting them to speak at public events while visiting Spain.
But behind all this good will was the attempt to manipulate the exiles by representing their
ability to return and have their work published and exhibited as proof that the conditions
that had created their exile in the first place had disappeared and, therefore, that remain-
ing outside of Spain was now a matter of personal choice rather than coercion. Similarly,
by agreeing to publish, work or/and live in Spain, Republican exiles were expected to stay
silent; to relinquish their obstinate political claims to their version of history; and to tac-
itly, if not openly, accept the regime. To use Zambrano’s neologism, exiles, in order to be
recognized, were required to “des-exiliarse,” to “de-exile themselves,” to forget everything
related to their time in exile but also to dismiss what had made them exiles of Francoism to
begin with (“Carta” 69). Needless to say, if their ambition was to consign any of their work
to public view, their production was subject to the same censorship rules as everyone else’s.
In conclusion, while we have examples of successful “puentes” between important intel-
lectuals (Gracia; Larraz, Monopolio 165–90, 209–28), and this is not insignificant, once we
take into account the political superstructure that determined the position occupied by the

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individuals at each end of the “puente,” it becomes clear that exiles were at a disadvantage
and had to accept concessions to cross it.
As the news about activities by young dissidents in Spain reached exiles abroad,
the latter expressed their solidarity, hoping that room would be made for them in any
anti-Francoist national project. Even as international support against Franco evaporated
after 1945, an eventual physical return to the land, but also a figurative return to an
unfinished nation-building project (that of the Second Republic) featured centrally in the
narratives generated by exiles. They insisted on the representative value of these absent
Republicans as incarnating Spain in its most desirable democratic, secular, pluri-national,
and progressive version of itself. Their presence as returned Republicans or, as time went
by, that of their legacy and memory, was seen as indispensable to achieve a Spain free from
Francoism and a nation back on track towards modernity. In the earlier quote by Aub
we encountered the imperative necessity that exiles attach to being remembered, and the
demand to be acknowledged and valued. In Pedro Garfias’ poem “Entre España y México”
(“Between Spain and Mexico”)5 the lyrical I exhorts a country hollowed out by the exiles’
departure to reserve for them that empty space as, once re-energized, exiles will be back
to occupy it:

España que perdimos, no nos pierdas;

...
conserva a tu costado el hueco vivo
de nuestra ausencia amarga
que un día volveremos, más veloces,
sobre la densa y poderosa espalda
de este mar . . . (264)
Spain that we lost, do not lose us;
...
keep the living hollow
of our bitter absence by your side,
because we will return one day, faster,
on the dense powerful back
of this sea . . .

Another poet, León Felipe, crafted in Español del éxodo y del llanto (Spaniard of Exo-
dus and Weeping; 1939) a metaphor that became famous to signify what exile artists and
intellectuals deemed to be the importance of their contribution, now withdrawn, to Spain.
Francoism had defaced the nation by depriving it of culture, or “la canción” (“song”), that
exiles had taken away, and this absence would cripple the country. In the poem, “Reparto”
(“Distribution”), the exiled poetic voice confronts the now dictatorial nation defiantly:

Tú te quedas con todo

y me dejas desnudo y errante por el mundo,
mas . . . ,
¿cómo vas a recoger el trigo
y a alimentar el fuego
si yo me llevo la canción? (18)
You keep everything

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and leave me naked wandering across the world

but . . .
how are you going to harvest the wheat
and to feed the fire
if I carry off the song?
(Aguirre-Oteiza 266)

Both in the realm of politics and culture, the sharing of an idea of Spain and the con-
viction about the role that exiles played in keeping that vision alive gives purpose and
meaning to a myriad of initiatives, from those implemented by successive governments of
the Spanish Republic and various political parties to those appearing in periodicals and
publishing houses (Hoyos Puente). In open but unequal competition with dictatorial Spain,
the practices of exiles reproduced alternative imaginaries of the nation abroad, rehears-
ing genealogies and myths, portions of which the Francoist regime at times appropriated,
skewed or silenced (Hoyos Puente; Larraz “Introducción”). But despite their disposition,
exiles never found a central role in the anti-Francoist democratic imaginary and practices.
On the contrary, for the most part, young Spaniards who had come of age during the
dictatorship and had not experienced the Second Republic or the war, deemed discussions
about the past as a burden in the fight against the regime or the advancement of democ-
racy. Much like the regime itself, since the 1950s, young anti-Francoists came to see the
Civil War as an impediment to achieve any kind of national reconciliation. Coming to
terms with or incorporating the experience of exiled Republicans was part of a topic to
be avoided in political discourses. Exiles were irrelevant, if not a liability. Moreover, they
lacked practical knowledge of the situation in Spain and were trapped in the past. Even the
Spanish Communist Party which, despite having its leadership and many of its members in
exile, was the most important clandestine political organization of the dictatorship,6 was
affected by this view.7
Likewise, in the cultural realm, young intellectuals and artists mostly saw the exile gener-
ation as remote, connected to an obsolete past and/or to an outside world that did not con-
cern them. Max Aub’s diary La gallina ciega (The Blind Hen; 1971), documenting his 1969
visit to Spain, is an exemplary account of this generational disconnect, revealed through
the testimonies that he gathers from exile friends who had returned to Spain, including
Juan Gil-Albert and Américo Castro, and those of young Spaniards he meets. To counter
this dismissal, philosopher María Zambrano addressed her 1961 “Carta sobre el exilio”
(“A Letter on Exile”) to young anti-Francoists. Shifting the focus away from acquaintance
with current local affairs, an area of knowledge bound to put exiles at a disadvantage, she
argued that, rather than being useless, exiles possessed something the nation could not
do without: Their memory of the Civil War, that of a Republican democratic Spain, and
the wisdom brought by the experience of defeat: “Somos memoria, memoria que rescata”
(“Carta” 69) (“We [Republican exiles] are memory, memory that rescues”; “A letter” 974).
To acknowledge and welcome this memory of exile is the only way for a future democratic
Spain to succeed in leaving the tragic consequences of the past behind. Nowadays a preva-
lent metaphor in memory discourses on Spain, Zambrano was among the first to deploy the
ghost as the return of those whose version of history had been silenced:

Lo pasado condenado . . . se convierte en un fantasma. Y los fantasmas, ya se sabe,

vuelven. Solo no vuelve lo pasado rescatado, clarificado por la conciencia, lo pasado

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de donde ha salido una palabra de verdad. La historia que va a dar en verdad es la

que no vuelve, la que no puede volver. (“Carta” 70)
The condemned past . . . becomes a ghost. And ghosts, as you know, return. The
only thing that does not return to haunt us is that which has been salvaged, clarified
by consciousness, the past from which has come forth a word of truth. History which
will lead to truth is that which does not return, which cannot return.
(“A letter” 975)

While the end of Francoism provided a more fair playing field for the victims of Francoism to
argue their case, it did not bring a substantial change to this situation. Unaware of or unin-
terested in Zambrano’s warning, the Transition (1975–1982) and democratic governments in
the subsequent decade and a half of democracy successfully consigned the debates about exile
and reparations to oblivion by advocating a narrative focused on Spain’s future rather than
on its past. According to Santos Juliá, this wilful disavowal was supported by Spanish soci-
ety, with a majority of the population fearing that the confrontation that might follow upon
revisiting this toxic past could jeopardize the democratic process and even lead the country to
another war. Ricard Vinyes disagrees with this view, arguing that the Transition’s celebration
of reconciliation was an ideology. In his view, this dominant narrative sanctioned what he
calls the “buena memoria” (“good memory”) in the social body, that is, an attitude towards
the past that condemned anything other than the willingness to erase its difficult elements
and move on (23). Whether one is inclined to attribute agency to civil society or rather sees
the reluctance to revisit the past as a discourse made hegemonic by the pact-making of the
political elites, the fact remains that the possibility of reparations for victims of Francoism,
Republican exiles amongst them, was sacrificed at the altar of the so-called Pact of Oblivion
(“pacto del olvido,” also known as “pacto del silencio,” Pact of Silence). To issue reparations
for the victims would have required an acknowledgement that the Second Republic was the
legitimate precedent to the nascent democracy, which would also signify an unequivocal
condemnation of the illegal coup d’état of 1936, and of the terror that ensued. But this was
unthinkable within the power dynamics of the Transition. Instead, a disingenuous interpreta-
tion forged during late-Francoism was accepted as truth: The Civil War had been an ominous
confrontation where both sides had been equally victims and victimizers and, therefore, the
responsibility for the conflict and its aftermath fell equally on both sides. Presented in this
way, it made sense to argue that the best path forward was to pardon everyone and move
on, a view politically and legally sanctified by the Amnesty Law of 1977 (Balibrea “1977”;
Vinyes). And so Republican exiles remained as “the defeated” within the national narrative,
those to be left out in order to construct a viable idea of the Spanish nation.8
Still, it is not that the Transition, and the firmly established democracy that followed it,
completely disavowed exiles, but their recognition was partial and subject to strict param-
eters. While well-known political and cultural figures were honored upon their return, their
celebration as icons of democracy was performed so as not to contradict the wholesale
rejection of the Republic as a viable and desirable state form for democratic Spain (Balibrea
“Constituyendo”). The media, from the newspaper press to television, consolidated this
effort to reject a possible return to a Republic. Times had certainly changed, but those who
returned from exile still did it with the knowledge that they were expected to keep a low
political profile. As returning exiles were elderly, their age was used as a convenient synec-
doche to suggest that their Republican ideas and their committed political struggle had no
currency in the present. The representation of the exile as an emasculated or terminally ill

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old man in the films Vente a Alemania Pepe (Come to Germany, Pepe; Pedro Lazaga, 1971);
El amor del capitán Brando (The Love of Captain Brando; Jaime de Armiñán, 1974) and
Volver a empezar (Begin the Beguine; José Luis Garci, 1982) is an eloquent cultural mani-
festation of this discourse (Balibrea 2021).
To the extent that the republican alternative as a state form was neutralized at the political
and legal levels during the Transition, to study the memory and legacy of Republican exile
in democratic Spain in subsequent years mainly concerns the cultural sphere. Once democ-
racy was consolidated in the 1980s, Prime Minister Felipe González’s socialist government
reinforced the link between its modernizing and Europeanizing national project with the
continued need to turn the page on Spain’s troubled past. Still, the plurality of views that
democracy made possible, aided by the devolution of political and economic responsibilities
and powers over cultural matters to the recently created autonomous regions, along with
the end of censorship, enabled the proliferation of public uses of Republican culture in exile
(Quaggio 199–259). This included disseminating work by writers and intellectuals such
as Rafael Alberti, Aub, Francisco Ayala, Rosa Chacel, Mercè Rodoreda, Sender and Zam-
brano, as well as creating archives, foundations, prizes and awards devoted to preserving the
stature of these public figures. Some initiatives were paid for with public money, others were
privately funded, but they all contributed to an increase in the cultural profile, democratic
pedigree and tourist revenues for the localities that were the repositories of these authors’
symbolic and physical legacies. Away from the media’s focus, academic studies steadily pro-
duce their indispensable work of recuperation, analysis and interpretation of exile archives
and corpuses scattered throughout various continents, in ongoing research that is often the
result of international collaborations (Balibrea “Exilio republicano”; Vinyes).
The political angle of the Republican exile controversy was not salient again until the
end of the 1990s, when the repressed past returned to gain a prominence it has retained
until the present. It coincided with the coming to power of the Partido Popular (PP) in
1996 and with the creation four years later of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la
Memoria Histórica (Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory). Questions about
the victims of Francoism, including Republican exiles’ ignored claims, resurfaced, which
in turn emboldened right-wing sectors of society to come out in defence of the dictator-
ship. Zambrano’s assertion about the repressed past returning as a haunting ghost had
been vindicated in a new conjuncture some have called the second Transition. In its return
to government in 2004, the PSOE led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero adopted these
demands as part of its political platform. Although the 2007 Law of Historical Memory
approved by the socialist government did not overcome the narrative about the equal and
shared responsibility for war atrocities, it supplied symbolic support for the victims of
Francoism and a budget destined as reparations,9 while offering Spanish citizenship to the
descendants of Republican exiles. After Mariano Rajoy’s Partido Popular regained power
in 2011, while Spain suffered from the effects of the 2008 global economic crisis, the Law
of Historical Memory was defunded. The PSOE’s return to government in 2018, now led by
Pedro Sánchez, took up with renewed energy the question of reparations for the defeated.
This government’s support in 2019 for the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the
start of the Republican exile signalled a shift away from the cautious approach that had
characterized the actions of previous democratic Spanish governments vis à vis the Repub-
lican legacy. Sánchez’s official 2019 trip to France included a visit to the graves of Antonio
Machado in Collioure and Manuel Azaña in Montauban,10 as well as to the site of the
Argelès concentration camp in the Mediterranean coast. This visit was followed soon after

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by Sánchez’s participation in an homage to exiles in Mexico. Both visits finally exhibited a

long-awaited commitment and homage by the Spanish democratic state toward those who
were forced to leave, as well as their descendants and allies.11

Open Legacies
It is undeniable that exile memory is tied to the biographies of its protagonists, the great
majority of whom died without returning to Spain. Devoid in exile of a real political frame-
work, radically undermined by the hostile geopolitics of the Cold War, by the inexorable
passing of time and the diasporic location of its constituents, their alternative political and
cultural “proyectos de nación” (“national projects”; Hoyos Puente), shed their original
political significance. They grew increasingly purposeless, sometimes losing steam – or
financing – and disappearing, others shifting their priorities to focus on their new homes
and historical situations. Bearing all that in mind, it may not seem unreasonable to limit the
validity and viability of this memory exclusively to the duration of the lives of those who
sustained it, consequently deeming it as obsolete and out of place once it is “disembodied.”
This interpretation has enjoyed enormous explanatory power in supporting the argument
that Republican exile is alien and, therefore, irrelevant to the Spanish nation, becoming the
hegemonic position of the Spanish state on this topic after the dictatorship (Gracia). Even
more, the view that exile and nation will stay irreparably separated can be extended to the
exiles themselves. Many of them not only refused to consider returning to a dictatorial Spain
but lost hope that the pernicious changes imposed by Francoism could ever be reversed.
Once again, Luis Cernuda exemplifies the most pessimistic outlook. Unlike Zambrano, he
did not see how the memory of exiles might become relevant in Spain, not even after Fran-
co’s eventual death. In “Un español habla de su tierra” (“A Spaniard Speaks About His
Homeland”), written in the early 1940s, Cernuda addresses fellow Spaniards bitterly:

Un día, tú ya libre
de la mentira de ellos,
me buscarás. Entonces
¿Qué ha de decir un muerto? (182)
One day, you [Spaniard] will be free
from their [Francoists’] lies.
Then, you will come looking for me. At that point:
What is a dead person to say?

But while the dead cannot speak as Cernuda somberly observes, the legacy of the Second
Republic was kept alive and incarnated in great measure by exiles. Their memory, more
than their biographies alone, encompassed ideas and objects, worldviews and technical
knowledge, cultural traditions and collective imaginaries that are preserved in the historical
record and have been passed on to new generations in Spain and elsewhere. In this chapter
I have summarized a history of the Spanish state’s relation to the Republican exile, one that
has been sometimes narrow-minded, at other times disingenuous, but always the result of
activating the legacy of exile according to particular historical and geopolitical configura-
tions which were subject to change and indeed kept being modified (Balibrea and Faber).12
While nobody can guarantee that this legacy will continue to intervene in the future or the
form that this intervention might take – as all this will depend on the actions of historical

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agents – we can categorically say that the potential exists, that the legacies of Republican
exiles are still available and open to be mobilized.
Last but not least, the relevance of exiles for the nation extends beyond their involvement
with the Second Republic and the Civil War. Being away from Spain was not only trau-
matic. Routes and encounters made possible in the diaspora were, for many, enabling too.
They are a very important part of a Republican exile legacy whose interpretation necessar-
ily decentres any national focus, demanding that we think beyond the nation to approach
exile’s multiple locations, connecting Spain with trans- and international networks, influ-
ences, intersections and lineages where the Spanish dimension is just one amongst many
elements to consider. For example, given their prominence, it is easy to accept that the tra-
jectories of Republican exiles Luis Buñuel and Pablo Picasso require a multi-national per-
spective to be fully grasped. However, such an approach can also be extended to appraising
Luis Seoane’s role in avant-garde circles in Buenos Aires; Agustí Bartra and Pere Calders’
writings in Catalan about indigenous cultures in Mexico; Arturo Barea’s work for the BBC
and his enthusiastic endorsement of the UK’s nascent welfare state; Jorge Semprún’s writ-
ing in French about his Holocaust experience at Buchenwald; Josep Lluis Sert’s architecture
in the United States and Latin America; Severo Ochoa or Josep Trueta’s contributions to
the global advancement of medicine; Salvador de Madariaga and Julián Gorkin’s contri-
butions to the creation of Cold War European institutions; Roger Bartra’s anthropology
dismantling the myths of post-revolutionary Mexican identity; in addition to second- and
third-generation exiles revisiting the (post)memory of their (grand)parents from places other
than Spain, as in Jordi Soler’s novel Los rojos de ultramar (The Reds from Overseas; 2004),
and in languages other than Spanish, as in Lydie Salvayre’s novel Pas pleurer (Cry, Mother
Spain; 2014) or in the artistic work in the UK of Sonia Boué and María Mencía. Each and
all of these examples challenge the validity of single national interpretive approaches to
tackle the full complexity of the question of exile.
The Republican exile philosopher Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez famously wrote in 1977
about the “exilio sin fin” (“never-ending exile”) to refer to the impossibility for exiles to
ever return, in the sense of being restored to a contented pre-exile existence, even when
the political conditions that forced them to leave their country had disappeared. Sánchez
Vázquez’s concern was with the exile’s experience of the world as one that cannot be con-
tained within one nation, a condition that, he claims, is worth accepting as ultimately
enriching and subsidiary to maintaining a coherent ethical stance. But there is a lesson here
as well to learn for the nation that once ejected them. To deal ethically with the complexities
of the Republican exile does not have to be a matter of deciding how much of their legacy
can be included within or needs to be excluded from Spanish national narratives according
to self-imposed rules. It is rather a question of realizing that this is a legacy to be shared
with others. Accounting respectfully and accurately for this condition requires the activa-
tion of different methods of interpretation. Even while these will undermine well-established
assumptions about the priority of national frameworks to make sense of Republican exile
culture, as Sánchez Vázquez points out, this can prove an ultimately enriching exercise.

Notes
1 See Balibrea Líneas de fuga (Lines of Flight; 2017) for a comprehensive introduction to the cul-
tural aspects of that history, including an ample bibliography for a more in-depth exploration of
the subject.

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2 The focus in this chapter on the relationship between exile and nation should not be taken as
implying that Republican exile has no meaning or is not worth studying if not in relation to
Spain. I will briefly reflect on what is at stake in considering exile beyond the nation at the end
of this piece. For approaches that explore exile’s critical potential to undermine the very premises
sustaining national and state narratives, see Aguirre-Oteiza’s literary analysis of Republican exile
poetry and Sánchez Cuervo’s study of Republican exiles’ political philosophy. Likewise, while this
chapter focuses on the Spanish state, it is the case that Republican exiles’ relations to the different
minority nations of Spain presented their own specificities, which I have no space to address here.
For accounts and further bibliography on these specificities, see Balibrea Líneas, pp. 87–136, and
notes 9 and 12 below.
3 All translations from Spanish are my own unless otherwise noted.
4 Recall for instance Franco’s efforts in 1968 to persuade Picasso to relocate Guernica to Spain,
with the promise of creating a museum devoted to the artist’s work – an offer the painter rejected.
Or the diplomatic fiasco with the Vatican in 1961 that resulted from welcoming Buñuel back to
the country to shoot Viridiana and to exhibit it as a Spanish film (Salvador).
5 The poem was written in 1939 aboard the Sinaia, one of the vessels that brought Republican
exiles to Mexico.
6 Indeed, the PCE (Spanish Communist Party) provided the bulk of the political and cultural infra-
structure, as well as the human resources in the fight against Francoism inside of Spain.
7 To cite one example, Jorge Semprún, a member of the party’s Central Committee in exile in
France, performed critical undercover work in Madrid, organizing university students against the
regime from 1953 to 1962. But in 1964 his dissenting opinions, along with those of fellow Central
Committee member Fernardo Claudín, on the best approach to take to defeat the dictatorship,
would unleash a crisis in the party and their expulsion from it. Key to their critical argument was
that party leaders were too removed in exile from Spain’s daily reality to assess the situation accu-
rately. Semprún’s frustration with the situation was expressed in his screenplay for Alain Resnais’
film La guerre est finie (The War Is Over; 1966) and more acrimoniously in his Autobiografía de
Federico Sánchez (Federico Sánchez’s Autobiography; 1977). Federico Sánchez was Semprún’s
nom de guerre while infiltrated in Spain.
8 In the political arena, this is exemplified by the opposite fate that befell the two main parties of
the left. The PSOE (socialist party) dismantled its leadership in exile in its 1972 Toulouse congress
and replaced it with Felipe González, a young leader who would take the party from one success
to another until its sweeping victory in the general elections of 1982. Conversely, the Communist
Party, legalized in 1977, maintained Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, and Santiago Carrillo as
leaders, believing that their prestige as icons in the fight against fascism in the Civil War and in
exile during the dictatorship, a feat no other party could match, was an asset. Instead, their strat-
egy proved a disastrous miscalculation of the voters’ mood when the PCE barely obtained 9% of
the vote in the general elections of 1977 and never really recovered (Balibrea “1977”).
9 Actions in this direction materialized unevenly across the Spanish geography, depending on who
was in power in the different autonomous regions and local municipalities in charge of imple-
menting the law, with Andalucía, the Euzkadi and Catalunya being the more active in pursuing
the Law’s provisions.
10 The poet Antonio Machado fled Spain with his elder mother in January of 1939. Both died
only days after crossing the French border in the town of Collioure. Manuel Azaña, second presi-
dent of the Spanish Republic, died in the French town of Montauban in 1940. In Argelès-sur-Mer
in southeastern France the French government created one of the various concentration camps
meant to confine the mass of Spanish Republican exiles crossing the border to flee from Francoist
troops in January of 1939.
11 The biggest commitment of the Sánchez government with the victims of Francoism is in the Ley de
Memoria Democrática (Law of Democratic Memory), which came into effect on October 2022,
and has been aggressively contested by the right-wing.
12 In order to illustrate the argument that the Spanish-nation state’s “othering” of Republican exile
is a historically contingent outcome, it is instructive to consider how differently Republican exile
was featured in relation to Catalonia’s democratic reconstruction against and after Francoism. See
Balibrea “El paradigma . . .” (“The paradigm . . .”).

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Works Cited
Aguirre-Oteiza, Daniel. This Ghostly Poetry. History and Memory of Exiled Spanish Republican
Poets. U of Toronto P, 2020.
Aub, Max. Campo de los almendros. Joaquín Mortiz, 1968.
Aub, Max. La gallina ciega: Diario español. Alba, 1995.
Balibrea, Mari Paz. Tiempo de exilio. Una mirada crítica a la modernidad española desde el pensami-
ento republicano en el exilio. Montesinos, 2007.
Balibrea, Mari Paz. “Constituyendo España: Estado y República en tres décadas de democracia.”
El “Otro” en la España contemporánea: Prácticas, discursos, representaciones, edited by Silvina
Schammah Gesser and Raanan Rein, Fundación Tres Culturas del Mediterráneo/U of Tel Aviv,
2011, pp. 407–34.
Balibrea, Mari Paz, editor. Líneas de fuga. Hacia otra historiografía cultural del exilio republicano
español. Akal, 2017a.
Balibrea, Mari Paz. “1977.” Líneas de fuga. Hacia otra historiografía cultural del exilio republicano
español, edited by Mari Paz Balibrea, Akal, 2017b, pp. 300–07.
Balibrea, Mari Paz. “El paradigma exilio en Catalunya. La Transición en clave comparativa.” A
vueltas con el retorno. La experiencia del exilio republicano en las culturas políticas de la España
contemporánea, edited by Aránzazu Sarria Buil, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux/Universidad
Nacional a Distancia, 2019a, pp. 137–60.
Balibrea, Mari Paz. “Exilio republicano: Hay futuro en este pasado.” Política Exterior, vol. 33, no.
189, 2019b, pp. 110–18. www.politicaexterior.com/producto/exilio-republicano-futuro-este-pas-
ado/. Accessed 30 Aug. 2021.
Balibrea, Mari Paz. “Un país con vistas al exterior.” Revista Contexto, 20 Jul. 2021. ctxt.es/es/20210701/
Firmas/36704/Mari-Paz-Balibrea-memoria-cine-transicion-franquismo-exilio-guerra-civil.
htm?utm_campaign=lecturas-del-20-dejulio&utm_medium=email&utm_source=acumbamail.
Accessed 30 Aug. 2021.
Balibrea, Mari Paz and Sebastiaan Faber. “Hacia otra historiografía del exilio republicano español.
Introducción a modo de manifiesto.” Líneas de fuga. Hacia otra historiografía cultural del exilio
republicano español, edited by Mari Paz Balibrea, Akal, 2017, pp. 13–24.
Cernuda, Luis. La realidad y el deseo. 1924–1962. Fondo de Cultura Económica,1998.
Felipe, León. Español del éxodo y del llanto. Visor, 1981.
Garfias, Pedro. Poesía completa, Compilation, Introduction and Notes by Francisco Moreno Gómez.
Ediciones de la Posada, 1989.
Glondys, Olga. “Regresos.” Líneas de fuga. Hacia otra historiografía cultural del exilio republicano
español, edited by Mari Paz Balibrea, Akal, 2017, pp. 217–24.
Gracia, Jordi. A la intemperie. Exilio y cultura en España. Anagrama, 2010.
Hoyos Puente, Jorge de. La utopía del regreso. Proyectos de Estado y sueños de nación en el exilio
republicano en México. El Colegio de México/Universidad de Cantabria, 2012.
Juliá, Santos. “Echar al olvido. Memoria y amnistía en la transición a la democracia.” Claves de razón
práctica, no. 243, 2003, pp. 248–69.
Larraz, Fernando. El monopolio de la palabra. El exilio intelectual en la España franquista. Biblioteca
Nueva, 2009.
Larraz, Fernando. “El lugar del exilio en las historias literarias postfranquistas.” Líneas de fuga.
Hacia otra historiografía cultural del exilio republicano español, edited by Mari Paz Balibrea,
Akal, 2017a, pp. 523–32.
Larraz, Fernando. “Introducción. Exilio y nación perdida.” Líneas de fuga. Hacia otra historiografía
cultural del exilio republicano español, edited by Mari Paz Balibrea, Akal, 2017b, pp. 311–13.
López García, José Ramón. “1939.” Líneas de fuga. Hacia otra historiografía cultural del exilio
republicano español, edited by Mari Paz Balibrea, Akal, 2017, pp. 234–45.
Montiel Rayo, Francisca. “Un puente imposible. La libertad intelectual en la España franquista y el
exilio republicano.” Líneas de fuga. Hacia otra historiografía cultural del exilio republicano espa-
ñol, edited by Mari Paz Balibrea, Akal, 2017, pp. 483–91.
Naharro-Calderón, José María. “Falacias de exilios.” Entre alambradas y exilios. Sangrías de Las
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Quaggio, Julia. La cultura en transición. Reconciliación y política cultural en España, 1976–1986.

Alianza Editorial, 2014.
Salvador, Alicia. “El ‘caso’ Viridiana.” Archivos de la Filmoteca, no. 47, 2004, pp. 10–47.
Sánchez Cuervo, Antolín. “Exilio como figura política.” Líneas de fuga. Hacia otra historiografía
cultural del exilio republicano español, edited by Mari Paz Balibrea, Akal, 2017, pp. 190–96.
Sánchez Vázquez, Adolfo. “Fin del exilio y exilio sin fin.” Guaraguao, Vol. 2, no. 5, 1977, pp. 121–23,
JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25596028.
Vinyes, Ricard. Asalto a la memoria. Impunidades y reconciliaciones, símbolos y éticas. Los libros
del lince, 2011.
Zambrano, María. “Carta sobre el exilio.” Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura,
no. 49, 1961, pp. 65–70.
Zambrano, María. “A Letter on Exile.” Translated by Daniela Omlor. History of European Ideas,
vol. 44, no. 7, 2018, pp. 970–76. doi:10.1080/01916599.2018.1517006.

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 13
TERRORISM AND
PEACEBUILDING NARRATIVES
IN SPAIN
Ioannis Tellidis

Introduction
More than ten years after Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) unilaterally declared “the defini-
tive cessation of its armed activity” (“Basque Ceasefire Statement”) in 2011, and four years
after its dissolution, news and research alike continue to be published about “terrorism”
in the Basque Country. This may be puzzling to those unfamiliar with the history of the
region, the motivation(s) behind the violence since the 1960s and the national and local
political scene since the Transition to democracy. But it comes as no surprise to those that
are familiar with all of these and, more specifically, with the narratives and discourses
manifest in each of the aforementioned subjects.
Narratives “offer a concrete story of some aspect of the world, complete with characters,
settings, outcomes or projected outcomes and plot” (Baker 349) and they are “employed to
make claims about ourselves and our identities” (Bamberg 356). Discourses, on the other
hand, are the motors behind the action that is called upon to defend/promote those narra-
tives (Potter and Hepburn 160). For instance, gender narratives according to which women
are framed as weaker and more vulnerable than men are supported by discourses that they
(along with children) should be attended to and saved first in the event of imminent danger.
The opposite – that is, the expectation that men are the ones that deal with violence and,
therefore, should be the ones that should fight or be prepared to be the recipients of vio-
lence – is also true. Because narratives and discourses are constructed according to specific
contexts (mainly social, political and/or economic) they may be transformed or altogether
eradicated, although not without significant effort. For example, even though they are not
as accepted as they were a few decades ago, colonialist behaviors (such as, say, the expec-
tation that someone should be your servant merely because of the color of their skin or
because of their socioeconomic stratification) are far from being completely gutted.
As this chapter aims to show, the Basque case is at a particular juncture where some
actors have succeeded in transforming ages-old discourses about their identities and their
raison d’être, while others refuse to do so because of perceptions that this would lead
to loss of power, loss of the ability to set the agenda, and therefore loss of primacy. The
chapter explores the narratives of the conflict’s three main actors: Broadly conceived and

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-15 
 Terrorism and Peacebuilding Narratives in Spain

grouped together these are ETA, the Spanish state and Basque civil society.1 Examining the
motivations and priorities of each of these actors and how they were narratively shaped
and discursively acted upon allows for an understanding of why violence lasted as long as
it did and what led to its cessation, as well as why some circles may not be content either
with the end of the killing or with the efforts to build peace. The following section provides
a short historical background that explains how ETA’s emergence cannot be seen indepen-
dently from the historical narratives and discourses that gave rise to the broader Basque
nationalist and separatist movement. Subsequently, the chapter explores the narratives and
discourses of violence – both by the terrorist organization and the state – in order to show
why violence persisted, and in some cases still does, for such a long period of time. The final
section looks at how Basque civil society transformed whatever elements of the nationalist
discourse that, at worst, justified violence or, at best, were apathetic to it. The section’s aim
is to highlight those instances where the need for peace first emerges and the ways in which
it is pursued to this day.

Historical Background
As with every violent conflict that is rooted in, and has emanated from, ethnonationalist
sentiment, the very existence of ETA cannot be properly understood without looking back
at the emergence of Basque nationalism. Losing the Carlist wars in 1839 and 1876 meant
not only that whatever autonomy and independence the Basques had enjoyed until then
was irreversibly revoked, but it also confirmed the domination of the Spanish monarchy
and culture over the Basuqes: As with other local ethnic groups elsewhere that were faced
with larger nationalisms and stronger centralization forces, the Basque language, customs
and traditions slowly began to be considered anachronistic and outdated by the local soci-
ety. Everything Spanish, on the other hand, was seen as the face of modernity and some-
thing to be embraced in the name of progress. One person that did not entirely agree with
this sentiment was the father of Basque nationalism, Sabino Arana, who immersed himself
in a romantic effort to try and salvage as many cultural and linguistic elements as he could
from a collective identity that no longer existed. His historicist approach (inventing Basque
words, customs and traditions whenever he could not find sources, to “fill the gaps,” as it
were), attracted the attention of a sizeable audience which allowed him to found the Basque
Nationalist Party (Partido Nacionalista Vasco – PNV) in 1895. The party’s creation was
the point of departure that allowed for the birth of a modern, collective Basque identity. At
the same time, Basque nationalism allowed for the discursive formation of an identity that
rested on victimization, on the principles of “us-versus-them,” and on a confrontation that
proclaimed the mutual exclusivity of the two groups, Castilian and Basque.2
This narrative of ‘resisting oppression’ (Muro 670) solidified the identity and discourses
of the Basque radical nationalist movement. Franco’s dominance at the end of the Civil War
and his viciousness against anything that constituted an ethnological departure from main-
stream Castilian identity, seemed to confirm to the Basques that their collective identity was
not rooted in a simple narrative but in a historical truth. Yet Franco’s oppression (markedly
more severe in the Basque Country than it was in other provinces) led to a period of sur-
render and apathy amongst the Basques. The emergence of ETA and its self-projection as
the sole legitimate heir to the historic duty of resistance can be attributed to three intercon-
nected factors: (a) the anticolonial struggles that began springing up elsewhere in the late
1950s and 1960s, (b) the narratives of patriotism and victimization that Arana had infused

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in the collective identity and (c) the rejection by the then exiled PNV of the request for
support and recognition by two youth groups – PNV’s youth wing and a magazine formed
by upper middle-class students engaged in the study of the language and culture – that
confirmed to the latter the party’s depth of apathy and weakness. The combination of
these three factors meant that ETA’s narrative was almost inescapably going to be one of
struggle and fight, and in the early years of its existence it counted with the wide support
of the Spanish nation, who saw in the organization the only possibility for Franco’s defeat
without paying much attention to the organization’s nationalist character. This acceptance
was made easier by the fact that ETA’s targets were for the most part symbolically linked to
the regime – they included people close to Franco, the regime’s torturers, officers of the Civil
Guard and so on. This state of affairs changed when, after the Transition to democracy,
ETA increased its level of violence in order to pressure the Spanish state to concede to its
demands for Basque independence.
Although a significant segment of the Basque populace continued to support the organi-
zation during those days, ETA’s methods began to resemble those of the very dictator the
organization sought to defeat: From the 1990s onwards, ETA began conducting attacks
inside the Basque Country and its targets were broadened to include anyone who spoke
against its existence or expressed a preference for a non-violent, strictly political road-
map towards independence. At the same time, although the Transition to democracy was
deemed to have been successful, the Spanish state continued to target non- (or even anti-)
violent nationalists, simply because their objectives were a threat to the preservation of its
territoriality. Basque civil society found itself trapped between two violent entities (ETA
and the Spanish state), as a result of which it transformed into the only actor that was seek-
ing a peaceful way to preserve the agenda of independence. In other words, the narrative(s)
and discourse(s) of oppression that helped shape an entire movement were now turned on
their head: ETA was increasingly being seen as another aggressor. In the end, it appears that
this transformation of the discourse – of what “being Basque” means, of how the concept
of “struggle” is discursively formed, and how violence hampers the very objective it seeks
to fulfil – was what compelled the organization to disarm and eventually dissolve (Murua).
The following two sections look more closely at this process of transformation. The first
examines how ETA’s violence distanced its social base to the point of no return. The second
analyzes how the narrative of the Spanish state, regardless of which political party is in
power, has proposed that nationalism, rather than terrorism, is the real threat that needs
to be addressed. These two discursive blocks, that is, the central state’s discourse that the
Basque Nationalist Movement must end and ETA’s discourse that there will be no Basque
Country unless the Spanish state concedes defeat, were the motors behind the eventual
emergence of a discourse for peace.

Delegitimizing Terrorism
Transitions to democracy are often complex and sluggish processes, leading some actors to
perceive them as the perfect opportunity to promote their agendas – particularly in a black-
mailing way, claiming that the alternative is the collapse of the Transition and the return
to the previous state of affairs. This was also the case with ETA, since the organization saw
the Transition as an opportunity to force the new regime to give in to its demands. The year
1980 has been recorded as the deadliest year in Spain’s history with regard to terrorism.
The violence culminated in an amnesty offer that saw approximately 300 ETA members

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and prisoners abandoning the organization (Soldevilla 88). This was a pivotal moment for
the organization, for two reasons. First, as Soldevilla recounts, once the Basque Country
was granted its autonomy statute in 1979, a substantial number of ETA’s members per-
ceived that the leading role in the struggle for independence should be handed over to civil
society, “who felt less and less sympathy for the armed struggle” (86). This is important to
bear in mind because, first, it highlights that the public’s discontent with the organization
began long before ETA turned its guns against the Basque citizenry, which provoked an
even greater level of rejection and condemnation. Second, the change in the demograph-
ics of the organization’s members since the 1982 amnesty is also noteworthy, as nearly
60% of ETA’s members were 20 years old or younger, as opposed to 9% during the
final years of the dictatorship and the early Transition, and they were not as well educated
as their predecessors (Reinares). These factors might explain the adoption of what often
appeared to be senseless violence since the mid-1980s.
After the Transition ETA’s violence reached levels that were impossible to justify, par-
ticularly when children became its unintended victims (seven children dead in three separate
attacks between 1987 and 1991, and several children wounded in separate incidents in
1987, 2000 and 2009) (Montserrat; Duva; Piñol).These types of attacks gradually solidified
an increasingly vocal and pro-active movement in civil society that began to confront ETA.
It did not do so openly at first, nor quite as massively, until two kidnappings in 1997 that
became the straw that broke the camel’s back and brought an end to the preceding “years
of silence.”3 The first was that of the prison worker Ortega Lara, who was kept as a pris-
oner himself for 532 days, with the aim of starving him to death as a means of pressuring
the state to agree to the transfer of Basque inmates to prisons located in the Basque country.
When Lara was freed, the image of an emaciated and extremely debilitated young man
brought memories of Nazi concentration camps, causing a public backlash against ETA
(Delgado Soto and Mencía Gullón). A week later, ETA kidnapped a young town-councilor
that belonged to the Popular Party (Partido Popular – PP), Miguel Ángel Blanco. ETA gave
the authorities a deadline of 48 hours for all ETA prisoners to be moved to Basque prisons.
The deadline was too short for the government to complete the task, which made the vic-
tim’s execution all but certain. Blanco’s death provoked multiple and, most importantly,
spontaneous mass demonstrations with a message directed simultaneously towards ETA,
to put an end to its attacks, as well as “to the policy makers to start working seriously on
a solution to the conflict” (Mees 74–5). What followed was several arson attacks through-
out the Basque Country against the party offices of Herri Batasuna (HB – later changed to
Batasuna), ETA’s political wing at the time. These attacks were indicative of the growing
mass sentiment against ETA and the broader circles of the Basque nationalist left (“¡Basta
Ya!” 260). Despite these events, HB officials appeared completely disconnected and unable
to grasp the gravity of the situation when they responded that Blanco’s execution was the
fault of both the government’s inaction as well as the attitude and posture of the moder-
ate nationalists. This led to HB’s identification as nothing more than ETA’s mouthpiece, a
party with no agenda or initiative of its own (Mees 80). The situation also brought about a
change in the public’s perception of ETA and the entire extremist nationalist movement, as
civil society began confronting both.
For the first time, ordinary people were given the opportunity to express themselves
against terrorism through civil society organizations that were not linked to any politi-
cal party or state authority. As a result, a new narrative began being built around both
independence (that is, that politics rather than armed struggle was the only way to pursue

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such a goal) and nationalist extremism (that extremism was not an option).4 Founded in
1987, the Coordinadora Gesto por la Paz en Euskal Herria (Co-ordination of a Gesture for
Peace in the Basque Country) was the first of those organizations whose aim was to build
a pacifist social response to terrorist violence. It did so in part by organizing silent protests
as an immediate response to terrorist attacks, and it provided support to individuals and
groups affected by political violence (Coordinadora Gesto por la Paz 3). Another organiza-
tion, Lokarri (previously known as Elkarri), was equally determined to strive toward the
building of peace, without, however, shying away from the political character of the con-
flict. For Lokarri, addressing the demands for independence was as crucial for the resolu-
tion of the conflict as eradicating violence. Lokarri’s initiatives included conflict resolution
techniques, such as workshops and dialogue sessions between different members of local
Basque society, as well as meetings between local and state-wide parties (Lokarri 2). These
initiatives were reminiscent of Track II diplomacy seen in other global resolution efforts
that concerned interstate conflicts. This approach confirmed that the issue at stake was not
merely the violence of extremists but the failure to address the discursive gap between the
two antagonist identities, Basque and Castilian (Espiau), a gap which the homogenization
efforts of the central state had failed to erase (Conversi and Espiau 60). These types of
approaches in which violence was unequivocally condemned but the political discussions
surrounding independence were not suppressed, proved particularly irritating to both the
state and ETA. For while it was generally accepted that pro-independence but peaceful
approaches contributed to the draining of “human and material resources from the area
of influence of ETA” (Funes 508), they were also deemed insufficiently or hypocritically
anti-terrorist (Alonso 4; Alonso and Molina). For ETA this shift toward peaceful independ-
ence meant, on the one hand, its rejection by its social base and the community in whose
name it acted; and, on the other, the seizing of the independence discourse it had been build-
ing for so long by that same community (Lecours 133–4).
This alternative discourse continued to gain momentum and expand the social and
public base on which it was built. With the advent of social media in the 2000s, Basque
civil society became even quicker in its vocal and visible rejection against ETA’s attacks.
In 2009, the slogan “seceding does not mean blood-spilling” gained traction and became
ubiquitous in all protests organized in the aftermath of such attacks. Basque civil society
began to defy ETA’s claim that it was a separatist organization; instead, its members were
now openly called “terrorists” (Ciriza). For the first time, the scales began to tilt against
extremism, which could be seen in the reactions such radical postures generated in circles
that had previously been part of ETA’s network. The rejection of violence even began to
penetrate the organization itself, in a number of instances that are characteristic of the
power of the narrative’s transformation. First, in 2010, Batasuna announced its decision
to pursue independence solely through political means (“ ‘Democratic Independence’ for
Political Wing of ETA”), thus ending its decades-long role as ETA’s mouthpiece and deny-
ing, along with everyone else, the organization’s exclusivity in shaping and deploying the
discourse of independence (Aizpeolea).5 Second, the formation and electoral success of new
separatist, non-extremist political parties (like Aralar, Bildu and Sortu, among others) veri-
fied the potency of the pacifist and anti-violent movement, even though (or, perhaps, pre-
cisely because) the central authorities did everything they could to proclaim their illegality
as well. As San Sebastian’s mayor highlighted after losing the election to Bildu’s candidate,
the anti-terrorist hysteria and the politicization of the judiciary were the two biggest factors
that led to these pro-independence parties’ electoral victory (quoted in Zulaika and Murua

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350). Third, the resonance of the new discourse as it was formulated and put into practice
by associations such as Gesto and Lokarri forced other support groups, more militant in
character and closely linked to ETA, to mimic the peaceful initiatives to avoid suffering the
disaffection produced by the old violence narrative. For example, groups like Gestoras pro
Amnistía that deal with the issue of prisoners and their relatives (Sanideak), and whose
counter-protests up until then were considered a form of intimidation and often led to street
violence, have transformed into peaceful protest groups. The fourth and final instance that
highlights the massive momentum the new narrative has generated is ETA’s unilateral deci-
sion to disarm and dissolve, after being forced to realize that “it is possible to make greater
advance without, rather than with, armed activity” (Zabalo and Saratxo 362).

Delegitimizing State Narratives

The remark uttered by San Sebastian’s outgoing Socialist mayor mentioned previously is
characteristic of the mentality with which the central authorities tackled nationalist aspi-
rations, particularly when those were expressed by the same circles that had defied and
defeated ETA. Said mentality was and continues to be driven by archetypal, Westphalian
discourses. In brief, these revolve around state security which is guaranteed by the protec-
tion of a state’s sovereignty, territoriality and non-interference from other states. In the case
of Spain, state security is guaranteed by its constitution that prohibits the various autono-
mous regions from seceding.
Based on this discourse, it has been argued that there is no “conflict between the Basque
Country and Spain as distinct territorial entities” and that any attempt to define such a
conflict is “somewhat misleading” (Jeram and Conversi 60). As Alonso and Molina argued
(171–2), the “Basque conflict” is a “rhetorical device that legitimises or explains the prac-
tice of political violence . . . by identifying Basque history with the history of the ‘conflict.’ ”
Scientists and researchers, as Alonso and Molina claim, have contributed to the normali-
zation of this narrative of the “Basque conflict” (169). This narrative not only places the
state’s discourse above all else in terms of significance, but it also seeks to protect it from
any efforts to re-examine or re-formulate said discourse. The fact that the Westphalian
tradition is ubiquitous does not necessarily equate to a uniform approach when it comes to
dealing with internal “conflicts” elsewhere in Europe. Other cases, such as the United King-
dom and its reformulated approach to Northern Ireland, show that any state that seeks to
secure itself with peace, rather than from violence, should avoid targeting groups, commu-
nities or movements that seek to alter its institutional and conceptual rigidities – especially
when these efforts explicitly and unequivocally reject violence. The 2017 Catalan refer-
endum for independence, as well as the reaction of the Spanish central authorities to it, is
such an example: The declaration of its unconstitutionality by Spain’s Supreme Court gave
the central government in Madrid the excuse to send in the National Police and the Civil
Guard to prevent people from voting, and in some cases even to confiscate ballot boxes
(Jones “Spain: Government Apologises”). The violence with which the state responded
to a non-violent event is used to justify the perceptions of those who claim they do not
(want to) belong to that state. My argument is supported by research that shows that these
types of socio-political and socio-economic conflicts cannot be resolved with the state’s
exercise of power for the purposes of dominance (Burton). Nor can terrorism be fought
with exclusively punitive (Crenshaw 17) and potentially counterproductive (Argomaniz
and Vidal-Díez 176) measures, because there is the risk that such frameworks may reinforce

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narratives of state oppression, victimization, and therefore legitimize a supposed need for
opposition and resistance.
This is precisely what seems to have happened in the Basque Country. The repression
during Francoism is the foundation of the contemporary historical memory of the nation-
alist circles of Basque civil society, that is, those on the radical left but also the moderate,
non-violent sectors of the nationalist ambit. Additionally, the Transition to democracy did
not lead to any tangible or satisfactory change. In fact, the Transition itself and the adoption
of the statute of autonomy were perceived by the local population as yet another instance
whereby the central state was trying to be deceitful, only to procure more oppression and
discrimination (Conversi “The Basques, the Catalans and Spain” 148–9). These fears were
increasingly reinforced when the state’s policies and practices were shown to be anti-Basque,
rather than anti-terrorist, when, in 1981, three young men who were not only unrelated to
ETA but were not even Basque, were arrested, tortured and shot dead by members of the
Civil Guard in the renown Almería Case (Bew et al. 192). Well into the democratic period,
and under Felipe Gonzalez’s Socialist government, the Anti-terrorist Liberation Groups
(GAL – Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación) were formed with the explicit objective of
targeting suspected members of the terrorist organization through extrajudicial kidnap-
pings, torture and killings. The result was 27 people dead, half of which were, again, unre-
lated to ETA and the other half only suspected of having links to ETA.
In the 1990s, following the gradual acceptance of the alternative narrative that rejected
ETA and sought a political resolution to the conflict, successive Basque provincial gov-
ernments affiliated mostly with the PNV began to adopt the non-violence discourse and
to engage in talks with other political parties and civic associations. Various roadmaps
towards independence were also published that called for ETA’s exclusion from such efforts.
Instead of seeing the initiatives as an opportunity for peace, these roadmaps were auto-
matically rejected because they did not fall in line with the governmental narrative about
sovereignty and territoriality. This became even more evident in 1998, with the rejection
of the Pact of Lizarra by the PP government of José Maria Aznar. The agreement included
all nationalist parties in the Basque Country and resulted in ETA’s announcement of its first
indefinite and unilateral ceasefire in the organization’s history. Moreover, the Pact’s signifi-
cance lay in its recognition of the conflict as political in nature, and the insistence that no
parties should be excluded from crafting the conflict’s resolution – although any mention to
ETA was carefully omitted (Mees 139–41).
Aznar’s reaction was indicative of what was to follow with the PP in power. A clause in
the Pact that recognized the right to sovereignty of the Basque people led to the criminaliza-
tion of the entire nationalist bloc (Conversi “Why Do Peace Processes Collapse” 182) via
the justification that “everything is ETA” (Whitfield 307). In other words, the central gov-
ernment was prepared to treat anyone with nationalist aspirations as a “terrorist.” In this
attempt to dominate and subjugate the nationalist discourse, Aznar’s government leaked
the names of those who participated in the negotiation rounds in Zurich in 1999, resulting
in the arrest of one of the two interlocutors (Mees 139). In 2003, this time backed with
absolute congressional majority in the Spanish parliament, Aznar closed down Egunkaria,
the only newspaper at the time published in euskara, and had its staff arrested, accusing
them of belonging to ETA (Tremlett “Court Clears Basque Newspaper Bosses”). The social
reaction was particularly vocal because such policies confirmed the fears of Basque people
that the state’s dominance of the region was the only objective. As Conversi observed, “the

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very Francoist roots of PP were now laid bare to see and were rediscovered as an argument
of popular polemics” (“Why Do Peace Processes Collapse” 185).
The “everything is ETA” narrative was deployed again in 2004 after Al Qaeda’s train
bombings in Madrid. In an orchestrated effort, Aznar’s government initially blamed ETA
and the Basque nationalist movement, until the security agencies investigating the attack
presented evidence that proved otherwise. In 2011, Spain’s Supreme Court banned a new
separatist party (Sortu) that explicitly rejected violent and extremist politics as a means to
achieve independence.6 The Supreme Court’s argument rested on the grounds that Sortu
emerged from Batasuna – therefore its non-violent rhetoric was not to be taken at face
value, despite the fact that local politicians welcomed its rejection of the terrorist organiza-
tion (Bergen). The International Verification Commission (IVC)7 on ETA’s disarmament
also faced the government’s intransigence and inflexibility. In fact, the Interior minister
claimed that ETA’s defeat would not be the result of the work put in by verifiers, but rather
by the Spanish Police and the Civil Guard (“Basque ETA Militants ‘Put Some Arms Beyond
Use’ ”). Soon after the first inspection and decommissioning meeting between IVC and ETA,
the Spanish High Court summoned and questioned the two IVC members about the iden-
tity and whereabouts of ETA members (“ETA Mediators Quizzed”).
There is, of course, a very good reason why the elimination of terrorism does not suit
the statist agenda, even when the terrorists want to lay down their arms. As Zulaika has
argued, counterterrorism (with all its prerogatives, powers and threat-defining functions)
cannot exist without “terrorism.” As such, the threat of terrorism must be maintained even
when terrorism does not exist, for the state to preserve control and define the sectors where
perceived threats emanate from. As a former minister of the interior, Alfredo Perez Rubal-
caba, succinctly put it, “after winning the war, what we cannot allow is that they [ETA] win
the war” (quoted in Zulaika and Murua 354). After decades of central authority figures
believing that the end of ETA would also bring an end to secessionism, the opposite appears
to be true. This policy design, however, leads to situations that would be funny if they were
not also dangerous. In 2016, a pub brawl between two off-duty Civil Guard officers and
fifty other patrons was deemed as a “terrorist” incident, leading to the arrest of 8 youths
and the initial petition for a collective sentence of 375 years of imprisonment for terrorist
crimes (Sagardoy-Leuza; Davies).
The situation, then, in which pro-independence but anti-violent Basque civil society
finds itself is that, after having faced ETA’s violence, they are now left with the violence
of the state. Their narrative that independence does not need violence clashes with the
state’s violent narrative as espoused by successive central governments on all sides of
the political spectrum. How the situation will develop from here on is anyone’s guess.
The only sure thing, however, is that none of those central governments have been pre-
pared to discuss claims of independence seriously. In a 2004 interview with one of the
most prominent Spanish researchers in Spain I said to him that I understood “that deal-
ing with terrorism is necessary and pertinent,” but then asked him “what about the
nationalist demands?” His reply was that there is no nationalist problem because Basque
autonomy is already guaranteed by the Statute of Gernika which covers everything. This
is indicative of two things: First, of how little the state narrative has changed with regards
to the pressing demands and persisting narratives for independence. Second, it reveals
that the deep-rooted nature of this state narrative will not change any time soon, and if
it does, it will not do so easily.

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Conclusion
This chapter sought to explain how two different narratives and the discourses supporting
them, have clashed and continue to clash, leading to confrontation; lethal violence; and
human, social and political insecurity. The Basque nationalist narrative began with a violent
and confrontational discourse that, initially, enjoyed support from the broader sectors of
Spanish society, because the actor behind it was perceived not only as an anti-dictatorship
group but as the only agent with a possibility of defeating the regime. As the Transition to
democracy began, however, and ETA’s violence became more senseless, said support turned
to enmity throughout Spain. Gradually, the same happened in the Basque Country, as the
local civil society began to formulate a second discourse according to which support for
violence, whether tacit or explicit, was incompatible with the objective for independence,
thus forcing even the sectors that were traditionally close to ETA to withdraw their support
and to compel the organization de facto to disarm, dissolve and disappear. The second nar-
rative, that espoused by the central authority of the state, has changed very little through-
out the years. As its discourse manifests, the problem has never been one of actors and
discourses that justify or promote violence, but rather the very pro-independence narrative
itself, because it is seen as undermining the constitutional character of the Spanish state,
its sovereignty and territoriality. This narrative and the discourse behind it are not only
present in the Basque Country, but became evident recently in Catalunya, the other major
autonomous region, one that is historically independence driven and highly differentiated,
culturally speaking, from the central/statist nationalism. The reaction against Catalunya
took place when its leaders actively sought to hold a referendum for its independence. The
state responded by arresting some of the Catalan leaders and the police brutally repressed
voters in the streets of Barcelona. This response showed the uncomfortable relationship
between the central authority and those autonomous provinces which never abandoned
their aspirations toward independence.
Insofar as the Basque Country is concerned, the new non-/anti-violent narrative that has
emerged appears to have put a strain on the state in a sense that ETA never did. Arrest-
ing, jailing and sentencing murderers is always going to strengthen legitimacy and earn
support, yet the same cannot be said about repressing peaceful protestors, journalists, and
politicians. Of course, the situation in the Basque Country is not a straightforward one:
There are various gradations of supporters of nationalism as well as various groups that
outright reject independence. Euskobarómetro, a survey conducted in the Basque Country
annually, is indicative of this societal divide showing that in 2019 those in favor of inde-
pendence represented 46% of those surveyed, while those against independence were 50%
(Euskobarómetro 48). This should be seen as a problem that the Basque Country itself
must address, to find some form of consensus. Usually, one possibility is to hold a referen-
dum, but that is quite difficult when the central authority considers any such referendum
as casus belli, as shown in the Catalan case. As Whitfield noted, there is a very poignant
contradiction between the state promoting conflict resolution initiatives when it comes to
terrorist conflicts elsewhere, and the state being intransigent and violently defensive even
towards non-violent actors in pro-independence movements (85–86). When, as per the
Euskobarómetro survey, civil society already shows a propensity towards one particular
stance, there should be no reason for a liberal democratic state to see such non-violent yet
deeply political claims as an opportunity to justify its political and constitutional insecurity
that emanates from a concrete narrative. More so, there should be no room for that state to

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react in ways that may tilt the balance against the state (again). As such, perhaps a second
Transition that redefines and accepts its relationship to its past may be necessary, as Faber
argues in this volume.

Notes
1 Each of these actors manifests diverse ideological and temporal differences that, at first glance,
make it inappropriate to group them together as I do here. As I have explained elsewhere, how-
ever, the foundations of each grouping’s narrative(s) and discourse(s) exhibit sufficient similarities
temporally-speaking, so as to allow me to treat them almost monolithically (Tellidis 516–7).
2 For a detailed account of the early phases of Basque Nationalism, see Heiberg; Conversi; Mees.
3 ETA’s acceptance as a “punisher” in the early years of the Transition meant that, in public opinion,
the death of its victims did not amount to much, because they were seen as having done something
wrong or bad to be targeted by the organization (Irribarren 240, 253–254).
4 I am aware that, in some circles, secession equals extremism. In this chapter, however, my use of
the term “extremism” refers to the use of violence whose aim is to force one or more other parties
to succumb to the nationalist demands of the group exercising the violence.
5 It must be noted, however, that, in the end, Batasuna did not avoid illegalization.
6 Bildu, another coalition consisting mainly of two legal parties (social-democratic Eusko Alkar-
tasuna and Alternatiba), was also initially banned by the Supreme Court. However, on May 5,
2011, the day the electoral campaign began, the Court overturned its decision and allowed Bildu
to participate with full legal status.
7 The IVC is composed of six members, including a former secretary general of Interpol, a former
director of the British government’s Northern Ireland Office whose efforts led to the Good Friday
Agreement, and a former deputy to the UN Secretary General’s Special Adviser on Post-Conflict
Planning for Libya (Comisión Internacional de Verificación).

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 14
“EVOLUTION WITHOUT
REVOLUTION”
Narratives of Rupture and Reconciliation in
Spanish and Portuguese Democratization

Manuel Loff

Narratives about historical processes of state-rebuilding are always, inevitably,

self-referential discourses of political legitimization. In fact, few narratives are as political
as those produced about political transitions. The re-founding nature of such contexts, in
which social and political contracts are supposed to be negotiated and settled, compels
social and political actors to re-appropriate narratives on these pasts.1
The Spanish democratic Transition that took place in the 1970s is as celebrated as it is
controversial. Few European democratic regimes established in the last quarter of the 20th
century have become so permanently contested as the Spanish parliamentary monarchy.
Unlike the central-eastern European democratization of the late 1980s, which is very sel-
dom blamed for the authoritarian transitions presently in process (for instance, in Hungary
and Poland), Spain remains an exceptional case in Europe due to a startling incongru-
ity between domestic and international praise for the “ ‘over-determined’ success of the
Spanish model of political engineering” (Linz and Stepan 89) and the persistent contention
about the illegitimacy of the regime of 1978 (Monedero), a derogatory appellation used to
imply the authoritarian/dysfunctional nature of the transition that produced it.
The Portuguese regime change that began on April 1974 remains a good counterex-
ample for the Spanish transitional model. The so-called Carnation Revolution took place
two years before political reform, as Francoist reformists called it, began in Spain, and
three months before the Greek Metapolitefsi (1974–75). In fact, the Portuguese transi-
tion concluded in April 1976 when there was still no clear sign of any democratization in
Spain under Arias Navarro (Baby, Le Mythe 432). While the Portuguese became “arguably
the most radical transition process” of the last three decades of the 20th century, linking
“social revolution to the construction of the new democratic institutions,” the Spanish case
was, “in contrast, one of the least radical democratic transitions” (Fishman, Democratic
19). Although some critics assure that all three cases “were invariably hailed as ‘success
stories’ of democratization” (Kornetis and Cavallaro 2), the Spanish has always been, for a
number of reasons, the perfect case study on how to depart with “elegance” from dictator-
ship and safely arrive at democracy (Linz and Stepan 89).

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-16 
 “Evolution Without Revolution”

If this early stage of the 1970s third wave of democratization (Huntington) is only intel-
ligible as part of the global democratic demands of the long 1960s, the Portuguese and the
Spanish cases relate very differently with the 1968 legacy. On the one hand, the Portuguese
experience – as a triumphant social revolution, constitutionalized in 1976 and fully reversed
in the late 1980s when the 1989 constitutional reform provided for the full privatization of
the economy – started as a striking example of the end of the progressive and emancipatory
swing that won victory over victory worldwide from 1945 until the mid-1970s. On the
other, the Spanish Transition was a state-guided political process, in which an authoritarian
elite under strong pressure from below was forced to dismantle the Franco regime’s politi-
cal institutions, while entirely safeguarding economic and social hierarchies. This offered a
good example of the elite controlled political processes of change that were to be replicated
throughout Latin America and in the Far East in the 1980s. At that time, in the 1980s,
Spain, and not Portugal, became the example to follow.
From this point of view, the Portuguese Revolution offered a fundamentally different
mode of transition, and thus could hardly be considered as the starting point of a third
wave of democratization. To begin, it was a doubly legitimated democratic order both
from an electoral and military/revolutionary standpoint: It was born thanks to and through
a revolution and was fully ratified by democratic elections. At the end of the transitional
process, in April 1976, a broad constitutional consensus was achieved, including agreement
on a socializing economic platform. This coalition ranged from Communists and radical
leftists to Socialists and the Center right. Although this constitutional block was similar to
the one that supported the Spanish Constitution in 1978 (with the far-right opposition but
also, in the case of Spain, the Basque and Catalan left-wing nationalists), the starting point
and the contents of the two texts are essentially different: Republic vs. monarchy, explicit
rejection of fascism and colonialism vs. absence of any reference to previous authoritarian
rule, commitment to socialism vs. classic liberal-democratic values.

Democratize Through Chaos or Stability?

Mainstream literature always emphasized the “stability” and “continuity” of the Spanish
process while describing the Portuguese one as “polarizing” and “conflictive.” Proposing
eight “major differences” between the Spanish and Portuguese “openings to democracy,”
Wiarda and MacLeish Mott reiterated the institutional pilot thesis (“Spain had a monarch
who provided crucial stability and continuity in the transition” but “Portugal had no such
institution”) while overlooking the unavoidable legitimacy problem that affected King Juan
Carlos’s trajectory during the Transition. While recalling that “the Portuguese revolution
was initiated and led by the armed forces”2 and disregarding the fact that civilians were the
majority in all provisional governments throughout the transitional period, they point out
that “in Spain the transition was led by civilians,” assuming nevertheless that “the military
remained largely nonpolitical,” a surprising assessment for the intrinsically political role
of the body (the military) that secured the authoritarian regime’s stability and provided it
with its specific identity in the person of the Caudillo. Pointing out that “the center was
ground down and almost disappeared for a time” in Portugal, the authors observe that “in
Spain it was the political center that guided the transition and never lost control of it to the
extremes” (Wiarda and MacLeish Mott 69). This is demonstrably inaccurate, since four out
of the five major political parties (representing over 80% of the voters in the first democratic

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elections of April 1975), including the major center-right Partido Popular Democrático
(PPD), were part of the Portuguese transitional governments, whereas in Spain during the
Transition period one could only find Francoist reformists in government, as well as openly
authoritarian military reluctant toward democratization. Finally, a classic assumption of
some scholarly comparative work is that “the Portuguese revolution was highly conflictual,
whereas in Spain ‘social pacts’ negotiated between labor, employers, and the state served to
reduce greatly the potential for conflict and violence” (Wiarda and MacLeish Mott 69). It
should be obvious that conflict was never absent from the Spanish case; quite the opposite.
The difference was that, during the Portuguese Revolution, strikes, demonstrations and sub-
version of the authoritarian economic order through the occupation of factories and land
property, was the result of a massive collective perception of opportunity: “the possibility
of radicalization” of social movements (especially of the working class) occurred “because
the workers perceived the weakness of the state, but also because the state authorities per-
ceived such strength in the workers that repression would have become the most expensive
of the alternatives” (Durán, “Fortaleza”175). Having lost protection from the state and
its coercive effectiveness, “not even the employers were able to use their power to punish”
(Durán, “Fortaleza” 175). In Spain, on the other hand, the democratic demands that the
impetuous working-class and student movements were making during 1976 and 1977 were
met by “arrests . . . , imprisonments, charges, . . . rubber bullets, . . . tear gas, shots in the
air,” workers were “wounded, hospitalized, even killed” (Molinero and Ysàs; Durán, Con-
tención). During the Spanish Transition, as had happened under the dictatorship, the state
was able to “delimit at all times – not so in Portugal – the scope of social pressure, protest
and demands, whether the demonstrators were workers or not.” Once a “vacuum of politi-
cal power was not perceived at any time, there was also no vacuum of employer power and,
therefore, no opportunity for transgression, but, on the contrary, reasons for containment”
(Durán, “Fortaleza” 175). When the dictatorship was pushed to the brink by social protest
movements (Molinero and Ysàs) and as it became increasingly evident that it was impos-
sible to revitalize Francoism once the Caudillo was dead, both the working-class movement
and “social conflict” in general, were perceived by all segments of the regime (by the bun-
ker ultra-right but also by the reformists) “as ‘a frontal political challenge,’ to use Fraga’s
words,”3 associating “criminals, hostage-takers, agents and accomplices of subversion, and
also those who organize social riots and those who are dragged by them” (Fraga, qtd. in
Baby, “Le Mythe” 249). The quintessential conservative “equivalence between public dis-
order and the presence of the masses in the street” (Sánchez-Terán,4 qtd. in Baby, Le mythe
253), more than a mere anti-democratic assertion on who retains legitimacy to occupy the
public space, became a mainstream explanation for why the Spanish democratization pro-
cess seemed to be always under threat. In other words, a basic democratic right – the right
to public protest – was presented as a threat to the very process toward achieving democ-
racy. “Is it not preferable to count in the ballot boxes what otherwise we would have to
measure on the poor basis of unrest in the streets?” asked the then–prime minister, Adolfo
Suárez, in his speech justifying the legalization of the PCE in April of 1977, thus drawing a
“dichotomous opposition between the institutionalized expression of voter preferences at
the ballot box and the mobilization of citizens in the streets” (qtd. in Fishman, Democratic
58). This way of characterizing mass protests became a “crucial development” in Spanish
transitional culture: “The framing of mobilization in the streets as ‘unrest’ opposed to the
logic of electoral democracy conceptualized politics in the streets as antagonistic to the
essence of representative democracy” (Fishman, Democratic 59).5

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The Exemplary Transition

Since the late 1980s and early 90s, when the Chilean transition and the post-communist
transitions in central-eastern Europe were underway, and in the very same context of neo-
liberal hegemonic thought, these regime-changes helped to consolidate the “case of Spain”
(Linz) within the so-called third wave of democratization of the late 20th century (Hunting-
ton). Indeed, the Spanish case has been recurrently proposed as a “paradigmatic, exemplary
or canonical” regime transition model “with a universal character”, as Javier Tusell puts
it. The same author suggests that “the arrival of democracy” to Spain once the transitional
process was started “was very swift and could serve as an example for other latitudes”
(Tusell 26). It was not simply another model; it appeared to be the ideal one, in which
“regime and opposition moderates crafted a pacted reform” and “eventually, negotiations
led to a pacted rupture that allowed the dismantling of the nondemocratic elements of
the Franco state and the creation of new democratic structures” (Linz and Stepan 61). A
“growing consensus” within mainstream political scientists emerged around the Spanish
Transition as “the paradigmatic case for the study of pacted democratic transition and
rapid democratic consolidation, much as the Weimar Republic became paradigmatic for the
study of democratic breakdown” (Linz and Stepan 87).
Spanish institutions gladly adopted this discourse. By assessing it as “a process that
represents the greatest political success in contemporary Spain,” one “we can all be genu-
inely proud of” (King Felipe VI), the Spanish Crown and the mainstream political forces
who have had a grip on the political system since 1977 – from moderate Socialists to the
hard-right Partido Popular (PP) and across to the center-right Unión de Centro Democrático
(UCD) – were always committed to convey the idea of the Transition as an exceptionally
inclusive collective achievement, creating an environment in which any serious critical reap-
praisal of the process and its outcomes (especially the 1978 Constitution) tends to be per-
ceived as an attack against a common legacy and against democratic coexistence, the latter
being an archetypical concept of this hegemonic discourse. Whenever social and political
unrest takes the center stage in the Spanish public sphere, as it was the case with the 15-M
(May 15, 2011) massive street protests, the moral and political example of the Transition
is “paraded like an old icon” (Monedero 34).
Why has the Spanish model been so acclaimed? After all, it remains an exception in
the European democratic tradition in which democracy is embedded in revolutions or,
after World War II, (re)emerged emancipated from fascism. I believe that the reason for
such praise derives exactly because it is a non-revolutionary model and has been perma-
nently proposed even as anti-revolutionary. Coherently with a neoliberal and neocolonial
approach that had become largely hegemonic soon after the Spanish Transition, pacted
reform has been presented as an ideal type of political change. Inscribing them within
modernization theory, especially with its 1950s/60s outcomes (e.g. Lipset), pacted reforms
have been described as adequate to Western societies with “high levels of socioeconomic
development” (Linz and Stepan 77) and with strong middle-classes supposed to provide
social stability, while (somehow orientalized) contexts in which these pre-conditions were
not met – from Chile and Argentina in the 1970s to Iraq in the 2000s – were subjected to
coercive neoliberalization processes and eventually democratized once they seemed ripe
for democracy. That is exactly how King Juan Carlos thought the Transition had been
possible, because “during the forty years [of Franco’s regime] a powerful and prosperous
middle class was formed . . . that became the backbone of my country” (qtd. in Vilallonga

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315). The elitist (and western-centric) implications of it are obvious, and they have suited
some comparative explanations on the two Iberian democratic transitions, assuming that
the wider dimension of Spanish middle-class in the 1970s not only helped to explain how
“sociologically, Spain,” unlike Portugal, “had in fact begun its transition to democracy
even while Franco was still alive,” but it was also central to understand the relative politi-
cal moderation of the Spanish process versus the radicality of the Portuguese one, a society
with a “[smaller] size middle class” (Wiarda and MacLeish Mott 69, 132–3). This sort of
mesocratic (Sánchez León) explanation on how democracy emerges from within authoritar-
ian societies, not only replicates a 19th-century bourgeois liberal concept of citizenship (and
of who deserves it), it also reveals the same patronizing suspicion about the (lack of) quality
and specific nature of popular participation, especially by the working classes, in political
change, a perspective widely shared by the late-Francoist supposed reformists.
A comparative approach to the Portuguese and Spanish democratization in the 1970s
sheds a different light on the essential assumptions of the Spanish Transition as an ideal
model for regime change, which, despite having been widely criticized by 21st-century
social movements, remains at the core of the institutional discourse and the mainstream
media narrative. Its model is based on the idea that complex processes of political change
(or peacebuilding) are more effective and lasting if they remain under control by the elites,
i.e., those in power at the time that the transitional process is triggered and those in opposi-
tion who have been perceived/elected by the incumbent power as gathering enough repre-
sentational capacity to make it useful to negotiate with them. To ensure the effectiveness of
the transitional model, popular participation is contained in order to avoid a political and
social dérapage, that is, the loss of political control measured by the inability of the elites to
impose their choices, more or less agreed upon among different segments of that privileged
sector.
The Spanish state’s institutional account of why and how democracy emerged from
within an authoritarian regime that was not overthrown by force has always emphasized
the essentially moral dimension of the process, describing it as “a great pact based on the
generosity of all, fruit of renunciations and sacrifices inspired by the desire for consensus,
general interest and the harmonious search for a better future,” guided “from its begin-
ning” by “the integrating impulse of the Crown” (King Juan Carlos I). In this narrative,
“Spanish democracy would be a bestowed democracy, an outcome of the will and ability
of the ruling elites . . . in a context in which the Spanish people would have shown great
maturity through extensive political passivity” (Molinero, Ysàs, La transición 244). The
assumption underlying this sort of discourse is that the success of the Spanish Transition to
democracy would have relied on how people backed off from the political arena and trusted
institutional actors to find out the best solutions.

Thank God It Did Not Slide Into a Revolution! Peace, Consensus, Stability
and . . . Violence
The Spanish Transition was definitely not a revolution, and its virtue, according to most,
lies in not having been one. In fact, Spanish mainstream political culture is one of the most
striking examples of the crisis brought about by any political or cultural use of revolution
as a synonym for deep, positive structural change, “a linguistic product of our modernity”
(Koselleck 44; Loff, “Revolución”). Spanish democracy was not born through a politi-
cal revolution and in contrast with several other modern democracies, both Western and

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non-Western, the French and the American to begin with, the Spanish does not claim to
have in its DNA any of the 18th and 19th century liberal revolutions as do these other
examples. The hegemonic narrative about how and why democracy emerged in Spain in
the 1970s rejects the idea of rupture as such. According to Juliá, “The transition was less
exciting than a revolution or a party, but it was much more effective and lasting in its ability
to integrate and in the strength of its results” (Un siglo 236). In other words, its virtue lies
in its non-radicality. According to this account, the fear of “radicalism” (Aguilar) would
have pushed Spanish democratic forces, and specifically Socialists and Communists, toward
a more realistic approach to the transitional process: Reform instead of rupture – the two
antithetical concepts at the center of the political dispute on how to overcome Franco’s
rule – and a legal transition (“de la Ley a la Ley”) instead of a clear break with the past. It
is as if mainstream accounts of the past ratify the late-Francoism slogan of evolution with-
out revolution (“evolución sin revolución”), reiterated even as, in Portugal, the authoritar-
ian regime was being torn apart, as well as threatening most of the economic oligarchic
structure. In the Spanish public sphere, particularly since the 1990s, when neonationalist
discourse regained momentum (Núñez-Seixas), revolutions are almost always presented
in a very negative light, as it usually happens with the Asturian revolution of October of
1934, the Summer of 1936, not to mention the whole of the 19th century, utterly despised
by conservative political culture, all summed-up as chaos, tragedy, bloody confrontation
and material catastrophe, and all of it brought about by illegitimate or at least misconceived
concerns.
The haunting memory of the Civil War (1936–39) is often described as a “sword of
Damocles” refraining political actors from confrontation (Tusell; Lamo de Espinosa).
Indeed, during the Transition, the specter of revolution or of any mass political move-
ment perceivable as revolutionary was in these accounts from the 1970s equated with the
possibility of war, civil war. Few prevailing political cultures have gone so far to adopt
and impose this “interrelationship of war and revolution, their reciprocation and mutual
dependence, . . . [in which] the emphasis in the relationship has shifted more and more
from war to revolution” (Arendt 17). The most influential political actors as well as main-
stream historical accounts on the Transition assume that the memory of the actual Civil
War remained ubiquitous in 1970s Spain. Some, such as Javier Tusell, go as far as to assure
that for “many foreign observers, a new civil war was foreseeable at the very moment of
Franco’s death.” In that sense, “the memory of the past [could have played] a negative
role. . . . But it was exactly the opposite: the memory of what happened in the 1930s served
as a warning . . . forcing rectifications at those times when there was a feeling that there was
a danger that the process would be derailed” (Tusell 28).
In such a context, institutional discourses celebrating the Transition tend to dramatize
the moral choices which would have inspired late-Francoist rulers, providing a condescend-
ing narrative of the Transition depicted more as a process to prevent a new civil war than
one conceived to settle accounts with the authoritarian rule and to establish a new demo-
cratic regime. In this sense, it is assumed that a peaceful post-authoritarian transition would
always imply a necessary self-imposed silence on the past, as if democracy should emerge
from a virtuous outcome of self-restraint. Ultimately, such moral assumptions led to a rejec-
tion of democratic transparency about Spain’s authoritarian legacy and a denial of memory
as a human right, both (transparency and memory) presented as a threat to peace.
Peace and harmony (“convivencia”) were already, long before the Transition, two of
the most recurrent propaganda arguments of Franco’s regime. The focal point of the 1964

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campaign on the 25 Years of Peace, designed mostly by Manuel Fraga, had been to present
Franco’s rule as an effective therapy to fully exorcise the Spanish family demons (“demonios
familiares”). Reactionary tradition obsessively rebuked the “150 years” of Liberalism and
Republic for the “divisions and internal struggles, catastrophes, hesitations and failures.”
(Franco, Pensamiento 686) Under Franco, at last, “Spain has once again learned about the
success of its projects, the security of its system of coexistence in harmony” (Franco, Pen-
samiento 686). Juan Carlos de Borbón, the Transition pilot, according to the canonical defi-
nition by Charles Powell (“El piloto”), fully incorporated such assumptions in his accounts
of what he believed the dictatorship had been and on what were the pre-conditions for
democratization: “I inherited a country that had known forty years of peace” and “every-
thing I did as soon as I saw myself with my hands free I was able to do it because we had
had forty years of peace before” (Vilallonga 310–11). It is hardly surprising that this should
be the historical appraisal on the (first) totalitarian (then) authoritarian regime, one that has
gone down in History as among the most violent, an appraisal fully adopted by the man
whose strategy to secure political legitimacy is in itself a synthesis of the Spanish model of
democratization (appointed crown prince by the dictator and later ratified as head of the
state by a democratic constitutional referendum).
Prevented from sustaining itself on the rejection of the dictatorship it intended to over-
come, the Spanish Transition sought, therefore, to legitimize itself through the celebration
of peace and reconciliation. To do so, it was essential “to achieve a transition without
confrontation or shocks, and that we did not have to commit ourselves to a brutal rupture
between the old regime and the democracy we all wanted” (Juan Carlos, qtd. in Vilallonga
310). To some scholars, this is the myth of the Transition (Gallego), sustained on a “politi-
cal and bibliographic mythology” (Baby, Le mythe 10). Looking at the number of deaths
due to political violence, “violence has profoundly marked the stages, the pace, the limits
of the reform and guided the behavior of the actors,” “clearly weakening” that same “myth
of an immaculate transition,” although it “did not provoke the dreaded implosion nor did
it irrevocably halt the democratization that allowed the myth of transition to blossom”
(Baby, Le mythe 430–1).
Overall, 591 people were killed because of political violence between November 1975
(the month Franco died) and December 1983 (when GAL, a death squad articulated with
the Spanish police, killed for the first time). Police forces and state-endorsed death squads
have been responsible for one third (188) of these deaths, the remaining being caused by
terrorist organizations (ETA and GRAPO, mostly). 28.5% of the victims (169) were killed
by the moment the Constitution was adopted in December 1978 (Sánchez Soler 353–4).
Such figures show how tense and violent the Spanish Transition really was, and inscrib-
ing them in the period’s historical appraisal should not be a contested issue. After all,
such violence was to be expected in a context in which state institutions of a traditionally
violent authoritarian regime, already under attack by armed organizations, were forced to
introduce/accept changes but were able to keep control of the public space throughout the
entire process.
What may seem paradoxical is that a state-guided process of change produced so many
more victims (more than twice as many, population and duration considered) than a revo-
lution classically described as chaotic such as the Portuguese, in a country where the state
lost both its coercive efficacy and the monopoly of weapons, even as 150,000 soldiers were
being evacuated from the African colonies, and arms were fairly accessible to the different
political movements. From May 1975 (beginning of the anti-communist violence in the

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northern and central parts of the country and on the Atlantic islands) to December 1976,
14 people were killed for political motives, 6 of them by the police or the military, the
remaining by extreme-right terrorism (Pinto, “Saneamentos” 46; Palacios 346–56).
Political as well as scholarly accounts of the Portuguese revolution tend to translate
radicality and subversion of social hierarchies as violence, while by over-emphasizing the
likelihood of another civil war, they tend to “minimize” (Baby, Le mythe 436) the physical
violence that actually taints the representation of the Spanish Transition that they endorse:
“In a regime that was born in a civil war with a million dead, I think that what would have
been serious . . . is watching this regime disappear in another civil war with another million
dead” (Martín Villa, qtd. in Baby, Le mythe 437) – and not a mere 600.
The extensive praise for the “permanent search for consensus” in which antagonistic
political actors were engaged in during the Transition, both as a political strategy and a
moral duty, as if any open confrontation of opposing political projects (full democracy of
the rupturistas vs. Francoist reformists’ authoritarian liberalism, monarchy vs. republic,
unitarian state vs. federalism, socialization vs. liberalization of the economy) would have
automatically caused the country to slide into civil war, has some inevitable similarities
with the top-down political governance Franco subscribed to in the 1960s, a moment in
which the regime, while acknowledging the need to update its political institutions, sys-
tematically warned society against the risks of debate. The Transition, with its “obsession
with consensus” (Delgado 19), with the preservation of peace, stability, normalcy under
Western patterns, succeeded in “virtually banning the concept of revolution from politi-
cal language” (Fuentes 1080) and proscribing it from the political vocabulary of Spanish
democratic tradition, promoting a semantic environment contaminated by the Totalitarian
theory, demonizing revolution(s) and assuming they all have an intrinsic totalitarian nature
(Loff, “Revolución”). In this sense, the whole institutional discourse on the rationale of the
Transition anticipates what 15 years later would emerge as a trendy narration of a history
“rid of revolutions once and for all” (Traverso 70). A recent extreme example of it is how
the Spanish state television chose to amalgamate the massive movement to promote a refer-
endum on the independence of Catalonia (in October 2017) and the Russian Revolution of
a century earlier, the two presented as “politically and morally dead revolutions that betray
the people” (Televisión Española, “Informe”).
This is not, by any means, a situation specific to Spain. Horror accounts of the Portuguese
revolution as a democratizing process are absolutely commonplace. Cavaco Silva, the most
successful leader of the Portuguese right since 1974 (prime minister 1985–95, president
2006–16), described it in his official capacity as “a period of permanent and orchestrated
unrest, of systematic upheaval, of generalized uneasiness, of persecutions, of insecurity, of
ruin of the national economy, of the attempt to demean the noblest institutions and the Mil-
itary Institution, of the attempt to de-characterize the culture of our people” (117). The dif-
ference with the Spanish case is that this attitude was (and remains) a characteristic feature
of how the right-wing sections of society address the 1974–76 period and, confrontational
as it is with the constitutional narrative celebrating a democratic armed rebellion supported
by the people on the streets as the source of democracy, it remains unable to dispute what
is still the hegemonic representation of April 25, 1974. In Portugal, there is no consensus
on consensus as the best procedure to overcome dictatorship and build democracy, while
consensus is the core of the moral and political narrative of the Spanish Transition.
Portuguese democratic tradition is embedded in two 20th-century revolutions: the 1910
republican revolution and the 1974 democratic-socialist one whose political semantics

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and imagination was, not only anti-authoritarian, but mostly socialist, emancipatory
and implanted within the European anti-fascist culture that emerged in the 1930s (Span-
ish Civil War, World War II) and had been successfully evolving since 1945. In a sense,
it is clearly easier to compare the Portuguese process to the anti-fascist democratization
context of 1943–47 rather than to the Polish Solidarność, post-Yugoslav and post-Soviet
national-democratic or the Chilean post-Pinochet transitional processes in the early 1990s.
However, the end of the Portuguese Revolution coincides with the crisis of anti-fascist
culture that is at the root of the democratic tradition (Traverso). In this sense, immedi-
ately after 1974 right-wing narratives engaged in an anti-revolutionary frenzy, countering
the constitutional definition of the Portuguese special route to democracy and socialism
with the “two dictatorships rhetoric” (Loff, “1989 im Kontext”) – first Salazar’s, then a
“totalitarian” revolution stopped by military intervention (November 1975) normalizing6
the transitional process. Although remaining the outcome of a social revolution at the clos-
ing moment of the progressive post-1945 cycle, the Portuguese democratic regime evolved
towards a quasi-classic liberal democracy, following the neoliberal and neoconservative
worldwide swing of the 1980s and 90s. What in fact fits with Huntington’s third wave
is not the Carnation Revolution of 1974–76, but the neoliberalization process of the late
1980s. Nevertheless, “political democracy does not exist in Portugal despite the revolution,
but because there was a revolution” (Rosas 203).

All About Forgiveness and Reconciliation – But No Transitional Justice

By so often addressing the Spanish democratic Transition from a moral point of view, the
most successful argument to legitimate it has been stressing how it was built upon a general
act of forgiveness and reconciliation (Juliá, Un siglo). That is surely why eminent intellectu-
als describe Spanish democracy as a “moral (and not only a political) problem,” allowing
Spain to return to “normality” by showing enough maturity to solve that problem (Fusi,
Un siglo 149, 159).
Santos Juliá was probably the major herald of the “new political and moral climate” he
thought the Transition had produced. As Juliá states, “the power of the myth of reconcilia-
tion as a story that gave meaning to the future was such that everyone came to drink in its
waters” (Un siglo 235–6). The myth was forged from the “political and moral courage of
so many children of the war (‘niños de la guerra’),” the ones “coming from the world of the
winners,” to begin with, “who did not hesitate . . . to establish emotional and political links
with other children of the war from the world of the defeated,” all “decided to ensure that
the terrible fate of their parents would not determine their future” (Juliá, “Memoria” 42).
For former late-Francoist young hierarchs such as Martín Villa, this narrative allowed them
to retrospectively democratize their own political biography: “The transition was when the
Francoist reformists and the anti-Francoists met. In the end, both wanted the same thing”
(Martín Villa, qtd. in Televisión Española, La noche).
Thus, reconciliation is not simply an intellectual appraisal of the period, it is the institu-
tional one. In 2018, amidst the major constitutional crisis (the Catalan secession) that Spain
has experienced since the military coup of February 23, 1981, King Felipe VI described the
Constitution as “the great national pact of coexistence among Spaniards for concord and
reconciliation,” as well as “for democracy and for freedom” (Felipe VI) – again, morals and
politics. It remains, thus, possible for the head of the Spanish state to celebrate 40 years
of a democratic Constitution, adopted after another 40 years of one of the bloodiest

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dictatorships in 20th-century Europe, without mentioning the latter. However, by system-

atically focusing on the moral and political significance of reconciliation and reunion, this
approach required “presenting this story of aggressors and assaults as the struggle between
the two Spains,” “apporting blame” on the two sides (Monedero 33), i.e., as if the Second
Republic (1931–39) and Franco’s dictatorship were equally harmful and destructive, as if
democratically elected rulers and military insurgents should be equally blamed for the war,
as if fascist and antifascist were equally evil. In this sense, the institutional discourse about
a reconciliatory transition endorses the core of the historical revisionist attack on the post–
World War II democratic tradition.
It is probably true that the idea of a reconciliatory transition “was not new, but was
thirty years old in its basic demands: end of the discourse on the war, reconciliation,
amnesty and renunciation to revenge: that was said and repeated since the 1940s” (Juliá,
Un siglo 235). What is puzzling, however, is that the whole discourse about reconcilia-
tion and peace is inscribed in history as if it was enunciated in 1939, at the end of the
war, and not in 1977, as if it were Franco, Queipo de Llano and Alfonso XIII agreeing to
meet Negrín, Azaña and Companys to negotiate peace, to put “an end to extreme hatred”
and “building on the embrace of forgiveness the best Spain we have ever known” (Suárez
Illana), to use the words of Adolfo Suárez’s son, incidentally the president of the Founda-
tion Concordia y Libertad.7 Again, as Carme Molinero insists (“Memòria”), as if there had
not been forty years of autocracy, heavy repression and the tens shed by the thousands of
people executed (and their loved ones) by those who had already won the war. For Ricard
Vinyes, it was as if the Transition, was “a political product without historical causality,”
whose “causal process,” the (crisis of the) dictatorship, became “a taboo, a set of elements
that disintegrate the community” (35). Transformed into a “national totem,” this interpre-
tation of the Transition has been imposed to that very same community who, accordingly,
is asked not to debate the taboo. What the Spanish state actually promoted since the end
of the Transition as “the good memory” aimed, therefore, to “socialize an idea: That the
institutional abstinence from recognizing democratic struggles and their costs was benefi-
cial and necessary for the reconciliation of the country” (Vinyes 34).
The concept of reconciliation “runs obsessively” in every post-authoritarian policy
focused on amnesty (Lefranc 296). Attractive as it may seem, the attempt to depoliticize the
Spanish Transition and reduce it to a moving moral operation of forgiveness is what has
stood the worst against the passage of time. Regime changes achieved through pacts were
still welcomed at the beginning of the 21st century, but by then what international public
opinion increasingly sensed as impunity for state-sponsored terrorism became a permanent
cause of embarrassment for several post-authoritarian political and judiciary systems. All
these celebratory narratives about the Spanish Transition became the object of hard criticism
because they obliterated any reference to transitional justice, which incidentally became the
most important legacy of the third wave for conflict resolution and democratization studies,
as well as for international law (Teitel). Realizing that “the Spanish model of transitional
justice has been one of absolute oblivion with partial rehabilitation . . . as a result of the
political and social situation in which it was developed,” the so-called generation of the
grandchildren (of grandparents who were the largest number of victims of Franco’s terror
in the 1930s, 40s and 50s) could no longer accept the moral arguments on which a “rec-
onciliation without criminal justice was made possible by a number of circumstances and
no doubt by the sacrifice of justice for peace that many victims generously accepted” (Gil
151). For Josep Ramoneda, “If there was a political pact for the transition, it was that the

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Francoists would not go to prison and that, in exchange, the victims of Francoism would
be given amnesty.” At the turn of the century, a significant segment of Spanish society
understood this had been “an asymmetric agreement that allowed the Francoists to redeem
themselves from real crimes and, in exchange, pardon the anti-Francoist delinquents who
were considered as such only under the legality of the dictatorship.” It could have been “the
maximum allowed by the power relations of that moment” (Ramoneda 185), but, as in any
democratic society – and as was happening all throughout Latin America – power relations
change. In the early 1990s, King Juan Carlos, when asked if he was “aware of the Franco
family’s fear of what might happen to them after the General’s death,” still felt at ease to
reply: “Fear? Fear of what? Franco’s family knew . . . that my first concern as head of state
would be to prevent by any means a case against the wrongs committed by the Francoist
regime. Because . . . there was no need to get bogged down in revenge and personal vendet-
tas” – his description of reparatory justice – “that would have meant a return to post-civil
war times (sic)” (Vilallonga 310). A few years later, he would surely have omitted such a
concern.
Again, Spain is not alone in this respect. According to Kornetis and Cavallaro, “Spain,
Portugal and Greece promoted a pacific consolidation of democracy, sacrificing, at the
same time, the construction of historical memory and the promotion of reflexivity on
the role played by their respective civil societies” (2). In all three countries, like in most
post-authoritarian societies, a new ruling elite assumed that the previous one was useful
and/or had a legitimate role in building a new political order, surely different from the
authoritarian, but an order nonetheless.
The transitional justice that was actually carried out after 1974 in Portugal was designed
and administered by the military. In July 1975, under pressure from left-wing social move-
ments, the military decided to implement a general accountability process of political and
legal responsibilities for the violations of human rights carried out under the authoritarian
regime; a few months later (December), under a different political context forced by the
military themselves, they reverted that decision and reinstated what they described as the
rule of law by administering a swift and benevolent justice, or simply by not accounting for
the crimes of the past (Pimentel). No military or civil perpetrator of war crimes against the
African population (especially the 1961 massacres in Angola or those of 1972 in Mozam-
bique) were ever brought to justice, and no investigation was opened on pre-war colonial
violence (Loff, “Estado”). Both things say a lot about how the democratic regime’s concep-
tions about justice, human rights and accountability remained colonial.
Justice – in the sense of a politically and morally motivated transitional justice on the
crimes of the authoritarian regime – was, therefore, perceived as disorder, unsuitable for
the new democratic order. In this sense, the Portuguese democracy, although very similar
altogether to the European (re)democratization process of 1943–47, was even nearer to the
Spanish transitional model. But while the Portuguese was a case of a transitional justice
process interrupted for political convenience, the Spanish Transition, by refusing any sort
of justice, “provided incumbent anti-democratic rulers with hope that they could avoid
retribution for repressive conduct if only they participated in making democratic reform
happen” (Fishman, Democratic 28).
The myth of the Transition, if there was one, is waning. It seemed paradoxical to try to
ban rupture from the mainstream political imagination in a country whose stereotype, both
in erudite and popular culture, is that of a passionate people, unafraid of confrontation,
believing that in fact Spain is different.8 In fact, the spirit of the Transition is systematically

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recalled into the public debate as a top-down strategy to inhibit and constrain public dem-
onstrations of unrest, as the ones that have been taking place since the beginning of the
21st century, motivated by the will to recover the memory and dignity of the victims of
Francoist terror, protest against austerity policies and state manipulation of terrorist actions
(especially related to the 11 March 2004 attacks in Madrid), for Catalan independence or
against the securitization of the Catalan conflict. Since the indignados movement of 2011,
the crisis of the duopoly party system (PSOE vs. PP) and of the monarchy (the abdication
and fall into disgrace of King Juan Carlos), the constitutional impasse over the Catalan
question, the memory of the Transition plays an even lesser role than the one played today
by the unresolved memory of the Civil War, showing outrightly “the crucial flaws in the
contemporary management of Spain’s traumatic past that derive from institutional and
judicial negligence and human rights outsourcing policies” (Ferrándiz 51). Public opinion
mobilization around those issues brought millions of Spaniards (including millions of Cata-
lans and Basques) to the streets and helped to create and consolidate some of the strongest
social movements Europe has known in this century. On the other side of the intra-Iberian
border, the last of the European socialist revolutions, although decaffeinated by a series
of constitutional reforms, remains inevitably an intrinsic part of Portuguese democratic
tradition, legitimizing radicality in a country whose people are stereotypically described as
nostalgic, resigned and proudly poor (Lourenço).
Altogether, it is reasonable to believe that “the Spanish transition was almost certainly
the only viable pathway to democracy in that country in 1976–1977, and its success
required . . . a significant dose of courage on the part of crucial political actors. . . . But
several decades later it is clear that the cultural legacies of the path followed have intro-
duced difficulties and unfortunate exclusionary tendencies in the predominant forms of
democratic practice” (Fishman, Democratic 228).
Already in February 1981, a few days before the February 23 military coup, unfortunate
(soon to be) Prime Minister Calvo-Sotelo was sure that “the transition is over, our democ-
racy is ready” (qtd. in Fuentes 1180). He was mistaken forty years ago – but so would be
anyone claiming the same thing today. Democracy in Spain, as everywhere in the world, is
permanently in process. In permanent transition.

Notes
1 All translations are my own unless noted otherwise.
2 The Movimento das Forças Armadas (Armed Forces Movement) was the young captains’ move-
ment created in 1973 that prepared the 25 April 1974 democratic coup to overthrow the Portu-
guese authoritarian regime. It became a sociopolitical movement on its own all throughout the
Revolution, with its own democratically elected structure within the ranks, in fact circumventing
the military hierarchy which would win back full control of the Armed Forces only in 1982.
3 Manuel Fraga was the member of Franco’s government in 1962–69 responsible for informa-
tion and tourism, and Interior Minister in Arias Navarro’s government (1975–76). He was a
self-appointed reformer of the authoritarian regime and a systematically unsuccessful candidate to
lead post-Franco governments.
4 Governor of Barcelona in 1976–77.
5 Even from this perspective the Portuguese process was more participatory than the Spanish. In the
two general elections celebrated during the Spanish democratization process (June 1977, to elect
the Cortes which would become constituent, and March 1979, to elect the first Parliament once
the Constitution was passed and approved through a referendum) and in the first democratic local
elections (April 1979) voter turnout (78.8%, 68% and 62.5%, respectively) was comparatively

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lower than the one estimated for the three equivalent elections in Portugal (April 1975, 91.7%;
April 1976, 83.5%, and December 1976, 64.7%). See “Consulta de resultados electorales,” www.
infoelectoral.mir.es/min/ and “Resultados eleitorais” http://eleicoes.cne.pt/.
6 Democratic normalization is the current expression used to describe the period from November 1975
to December 1976 (first local democratic elections, after parliamentary and presidential in April and
June) following the ousting from power of radical left military and an anti-communist swing in
government. See Loff, “Democratizar.”
7 The Fundación Concordia y Libertad, headed by Adolfo Suárez Illana, son of former PM Adolfo
Suárez, is a political think-tank linked to the right-wing Spanish People’s Party (PP). It was created
in 1977 as Fundación Humanismo y Libertad, by that time associated to Suárez Center-Right UCD
(disbanded in 1983) and changed its name in 2018.
8 “Spain Is Different” was the slogan adopted in 1964 by Manuel Fraga’s Ministry of Tourism, at a
time when the country was attracting the first waves of mass tourism. It remained one of the most
recurrent popular definitions of Spanish identity. For a comprehensive illustration of how the Span-
ish government portrayed this difference see the booklet Spain for You, Subsecretaría de Turismo,
Spain, 1964, at www.flickr.com/photos/papelcontinuo/40255121/in/album-901940/.

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 15
ACOUSTIC CONFLICT AND
THE SPANISH FAR RIGHT
DURING THE TRANSITION TO
DEMOCRACY
Tom Whittaker

The urban soundscape of the Transition to democracy was composed of various kinds
of collective voicing. The noises of demonstrations, marches and strikes frequently domi-
nated Spanish cities during this period, with their auditory presence intensifying after
the legalization of political meetings and associations in July 1976, which was followed
by the decriminalization of strikes in May 1977. Countless protests in favor of democ-
racy, political amnesty and workers’ rights drew on the affective power of the collective
voice – whether through chanting, shouting or singing – to bring about political and social
change. Several of the acoustic strategies used by pro-democratic groups, however, were
also re-appropriated by a resurgent far right – in particular by Blas Piñar and Fuerza Nueva
(New Force)1 – who used the voice in its various manifestations as a means of creating
sonic disruption and conflict. While according to Kunreuther, the “voice serves as a meta-
phor for political participation” and “liberal democracy is founded on the ideal that every
adult citizen has a voice . . . and that these voices/votes are functionally equivalent to each
other” (1), the extreme right used the voice not as a means of dialogue but as a means of
reappropriating and dominating public space. This chapter explores the ways in which the
far right sought to destabilize and transform the process of democratization through sound.
Through examining the auditory dimensions of counter protests, military processions, ral-
lies and terrorist attacks, it shows how the production of acoustic conflict was a crucial yet
overlooked strategy of the extreme right. In drawing on several different sources – from
documentary footage and films to “earwitness” accounts in the press and sound archive
recordings – the chapter will attempt show the extent to which the soundscape of urban
Spain during the Transition was shaped and contested by the far right. In doing so, it ulti-
mately explores how the extreme right used – and continues to use today – the affective
power of sound in an attempt to change the course of Spanish history.
The roots of the noisy radicalization of the far right in Spain go back to the aperturismo
(opening up) of the 1960s, as extremist groups became increasingly antagonistic towards
the modernizing stance of the regime. Paul Preston and Sophie Baby show how the growing
hostility of the far right was a reaction against the rise of student and workers movements,
as well as Franco’s sidelining of the Falange in favor of the modernizing Opus Dei within

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-17
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

the Movimiento Nacional (National Movement) (Baby 153; Preston 162).2 This resulted
in the emergence of a bewildering array of extremist affiliations and groupings, including,
the Círculo Español de Amigos de Europa (Spanish Circle of European Friends), Acción
Universitaria Nacional (National University Action), Partido Español Nacional Socialista
(National Socialist Party of Spain) and the particularly dangerous Guerrilleros del Cristo
Rey (GCR) (Warriors of Christ the King). Under the leadership of Mariano Sánchez Covisa,
GCR carried out a number of attacks on bookshops and art galleries in the early 1970s,
becoming best known for their violent campaign against the 1971 Picasso exhibition which
celebrated the painter’s ninetieth birthday.3 GCR maintained links with Fuerza Nueva,
undoubtedly the most influential political association of the far right, which was established
as a political party by its charismatic founder Blas Piñar in 1976. The organization man-
aged to attract a great number of Falangists and Carlists, former Civil War combatants and
other members associated with the so-called “bunker” (a nickname for the Far-right sectors
opposing any political liberalization during Late Francoism and the Transition) (Baby 159).
Significantly, Fuerza Nueva’s membership soared after Franco’s death, with Piñar’s opposi-
tion to political reform becoming ever more vociferous as Spain’s process of democrati-
zation progressed through its various stages. After unsuccessfully campaigning for “No”
in the Political Reform Referendum of 1976, the beleaguered extreme right increasingly
sought to assert their presence through sound. By deploying an intensified use of amplified
sounds in rallies, through chanting and music, the far right repeatedly sought to assert their
acoustic presence in public space. This strategy echoed that employed in Nazi Germany,
which as Carolyn Birdsall has shown, maintained dominance and intimidated opponents
through the generation of what she terms “acoustic conflict” (36). Birdsall further shows
how, for the Nazis, “various manifestations of sound – whether music, voice, silence or
noise – were conceived as amenable tools for political appropriation” (109). The creation
of acoustic conflict was similarly central to the strategy of Fuerza Nueva and other far-right
groups during this period, particularly as they sought to compete with the noisy protests
associated with progressive causes. Indeed, in seeking to occupy and contest public space
through sound, the far right appeared to re-engineer and remobilize some of the political
tactics of the left as their own.4
This approach was actively encouraged by Blas Piñar, who was the central figurehead
in countless processions, demonstrations and rallies that brought together the various fac-
tions of the far right during the Transition. On several occasions, Piñar defiantly announced
to his followers that “la calle es también nuestra” (“the street belongs also to us”).5 The
phrase was a likely riposte to Manuel Fraga who, during his tenure as interior minister and
vice president of the government during 1975–1976, famously declared that “la calle es
mía” (“the street is mine”) in an acrimonious response to the growing public revolt on the
streets of Spanish cities. While, like Fraga, Piñar was similarly obsessed with public order,
“la calle es también nuestra” was more specifically a rallying cry for counter-protest, a call
for his supporters to re-occupy the public sphere that had otherwise become dominated
with voices clamoring for democracy, political amnesty, regional autonomy and workers’
rights. In calling for his followers to appropriate space noisily, Piñar sought to create what
the Sound Studies scholar Brandon LaBelle has termed “acoustic territories,” whereby the
“divergent, associative networking of sound comes to provides not only points of contact
and appropriation, but also meaningful challenge” (xxiv).
One of the ways in which the extreme right challenged the process of democratiza-
tion was through the re-enactment of ostentatious military processions. The processions

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provided an opportunity for various factions of the far right to come together and impose
their own acoustic territories in Spanish cities. The performance of mass marches and
processions were one of the most conspicuous acoustic markers or “soundmarks” of the
early years of the regime. A term coined by Murray Schafer (7), “soundmarks” describe
types of sound that are instantly recognized and meaningful within a particular community
or social group. These processions not only evoked the historical soundscapes of the period
in which Falange held sway within the regime, but were re-invoked in the context of the
Transition as a form of political contestation over public space. This could be heard, for
instance, in a procession held in defiance against ETA’s terrorist campaign which appears
in Cecilia and Juan José Bartolomé’s documentary Después de . . . Atado y bien atado
(After . . . Tied and Well Tied) (the second part to Después de . . . No se os puede dejar
solos [After . . . You Can Not Be Left Alone]). Shot with a lightweight Arriflex camera
and recorded with direct sound, the two-part documentary provides a crucial archive of
the auditory landscape of protest in Spain between April 1979 and the end of 1980. The
small film crew meant that the filmmakers were able to insert themselves within the thick
of Fuerza Nueva demonstrations, as hundreds of flag-waving supporters observed parading
squadrons of teenage boys dressed in Falangist Youth uniforms. Accompanied by a line of
drummers, the boys march in lockstep through the center of the streets, their synchronized
movement merging their bodies into one. Their choreography echoes the military marching
witnessed during the early years of the regime, whose aim in the words of Nil Santiáñez, was
to “rewrite the city’s grammar after a fascist ideology” and to create “a militarized absolute
space controlled by the Falangists where the subject melds into the masses” (226). As the
procession moves closer to the crowd and the sound of the drums gains intensity, onlookers
stand firm and perform the fascist salute. Brandon LaBelle writes that the marching band
“interweaves music and place in a way that amplifies the inherent power of sound” (123).
The disciplined mass of bodies, held in step by the drums, here serves to remind us that,
according to LaBelle, to “keep time” is to hold power (118). As well as acoustically mark-
ing out space, the procession here also marks out an appropriation of time. As a sonorous
expression of homogeneity, conformity and hierarchy, the sonic orchestration of the dem-
onstration adheres to the temporality of fascism.
This is in striking contrast with the more chaotic rhythmic contours of pro-amnesty and
pro-democracy demonstrations, footage of which can be seen in the astonishing opening
sequence of Pere Portabella’s documentary Informe general (1977). Taking place in Barce-
lona on February 1 and 8 of 1976, the demonstrations are chiefly made up of self-organized
and spontaneously assembled crowds, moving haphazardly yet with purpose through the
streets of the city. In the film we see the police throwing smoke bombs and chasing protes-
tors, with one particular officer meting out a brutal beating against a demonstrator. The
rapid pace and jagged editing style, containing a number of disorientating jump cuts, under-
scores the chaotic scenes as the crowds escape from the authorities and disperse throughout
the city. We also discern a multitude of shouts and car horns overlaid on Carles Santos’s dis-
sonant and experimental score, its fast-paced tempo and insistent bass line further reflecting
the political urgency of the demonstrations. LaBelle writes that along with riots and street
fights, demonstrations can “produce an audibility that seeks to overturn and overwhelm the
written record, the law, house rule” (109). Taking place before demonstrations had been
formally legalized in Spain, their violent struggle over public space here illustrates, in the
words of LaBelle, how “such actions in turn instigate new patterns, aiming to reconfigure
set rhythms with other timing” (109).

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Against these emerging rhythms, however, the far right sought to create acoustic conflict
by re-imposing their own rhythms of ritual and regimentation – a tactic that was not only
carried out through the sonic orchestration of military processions but also through songs.
A third pro-amnesty demonstration held in Barcelona on April 1976 was met with the same
police brutality depicted in Portabella’s film, as well as interrupted by counter-demonstrators
defiantly singing the Falangist hymn “Cara al sol” (“Face to the Sun”) (Sopena). The hymn
is also sung by the demonstrators at the end of the procession shown in Después de . . .
as a public display of nationalism, as cheers of “Viva España” and “España una y no cin-
cuentaiuna” (Spain, one and not fifty-one!) are heard in the background. Along with the
Carlist hymn “Marcha de Oriamendi,” the “Cara al sol” was one of the official national
songs of the regime. Heard at particular moments throughout the day, its auditory presence
imposed rhythmic order and regularity on Spanish daily life during much of the regime. At
the beginning of the school day, for instance, children would sing “Cara al sol” after lining
up in military formation, raising the Spanish flag and praying (Preston 37). The hymn could
also be heard at the end of each day on Spanish radio and was regularly heard on public
occasions until the mid-1960s (36). As was customary, Spaniards were made to respect-
fully stand while singing, their bodies rigidly upright like machines. The social function of
military processions and nationalist hymns alike are examples of what Henri Lefebvre has
likened to “dressage,” a term he uses to describe how the human body becomes disciplined
through acts of rhythmic repetition and normative routine, thereby creating unreflexive
automatism in people (43).
As the song became less frequently heard during the last decade of the regime, it corre-
spondingly became a fraught site of contention for many within the “bunker” and the vari-
ous factions of the extreme right, for whom perceived slights aganist the song were seen as
an attack on the Francoist social order and on the integrity of the Patria (fatherland). After
a Basque terrorist attack that killed twelve people in 1974, Blas Piñar reportedly stood
up in the Spanish parliament and sang “Cara al sol” before demanding a return to more
hardline policies (Olga López-Valero Colbert 17). Gónzalez Sáez details the controversy
around a 1972 pop cover of the hymn, which was banned by the authorities (289). Deem-
ing the version disrespectful, Sánchez Covisa (the leader of Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey) sent
a threatening telegram to the Francoist authorities warning of possible conflicts with the
Falange if the single ever saw the light of day (Gónzalez Sáez 289). During the Transition
to democracy, renditions of the “Cara al sol” were repeatedly sung by the far right as a
righteous act of defiance against the process of democratization. As the Political Reform
Act was debated on 29 October 1976, for instance, far-right demonstrators congregated on
the steps of parliament and sang “Cara al sol” while giving the fascist salute (Baby 176).6
The sounds of “Cara al sol” and far-right chants could most conspicuously be heard
around the date of November 20th, which jointly marked the commemoration of the death
of Franco and José Antonio Primo de Rivera. While Francoists who supported democratic
reform were more likely to attend the religious ceremony held annually in the basilica of
the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), those who opposed democracy in any form
congregated at the Plaza de Oriente in Madrid (Baby 171). The square assumed a particu-
lar symbolism during the regime, as it was the location from which Franco addressed the
crowd whilst looking down from the Royal Palace balcony (Baby 171). Blas Piñar, who
frequently referred to the square as the “Plaza Mayor del Occidente Cristiano” (“Main
Square of the Christian West”), would continue to deliver speeches every year there until
his death in 2014, albeit with dwindling crowds as the years wore on. During these events,

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Piñar actively sought to interact with his audience, encouraging the crowd to fill the square
with their chanting, cheers and shouts – an effect which unified and empowered his sup-
port through sound. Steven Connor has recently coined the term “chorality” to explore the
mysterious power of the collective voice, as he examines the reasons why humans “merge
and magnify the voice through assimilating it to the voices of others” (3). Shaped like
a huge amphitheater, the acoustic architecture of the Plaza de Oriente further served to
amplify sound and magnify the voice. In sound recordings of Piñar’s speeches, his voice
can be heard to echo across the large distances of the square, as he addresses the crowds as
“españoles” in the same way that Franco did.
In an archive sound recording of the commemoration held on November 20, 1980, the
300,000 chanting supporters provided a powerful re-assertion of unitary national identity
(20-N).7 As Piñar tells the crowd that Franco and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the late
leader of the Falange, are sending them their greetings “desde la otra orilla de la mortali-
dad” (“from the other side”) and that “nos sonríen complacientes” (“they are smiling at us
willingly”), the magnitude of the choric voice grows, as chants of “Franco, Franco, Franco”
resonate through the square. Piñar reassures the audience of the transcendence of the ideas
of the dead leaders, which he describes “más allá de los siglos y el tiempo. Por eso las
ideas son inmortales” (“beyond the centuries and time. For that reason, ideas are immor-
tal”). These ideals are then juxtaposed with the earthly dangers of the present moment,
as Piñar denounces the ills of democracy – separatism, pornography, abortion and the
dangers of “huelgas salvajes” (savage strikes) – his intonation and volume intensifying as
he lists each evil. Then, as he arrives at the climax of his peroration, Piñar grandiloquently
calls on the crowd to invoke the presence of the martyred leaders: “Españoles . . . gritáis
conmigo: José Antonio Primero de Rivera y Francisco Franco, caídos por Dios y España”
(“Spanish people . . . shout with me: Primero de Rivera and Franco, fallen for God and for
Spain”), to which the crowd responds “¡Presentes!” (“Present!”), before echoing his words
“¡Viva Cristo Rey! ¡Viva España!” (“Long Live Christ the King! Long Live Spain!”). The
choric utterances of the crowd are called upon to symbolically resurrect Franco’s ideals
posthumously. As Stephen Connor writes, “the voice is the physical confirmation of my
fantasy – that is no less a fantasy for being the plain truth – that I can bring about effects
in the world simply by using my voice” (19). In summoning up the presence of “El aus-
ente” (“the absent one,” a term by which Primo de Rivera was commonly referred) and of
Franco, the collective voice of the far right sought to actualize the past within the present
moment, thereby attempting to restore the national body politic to an imaginary past glory
through sound.
The ubiquity of far-right voices was further amplified by the relatively recent technology
of the radio cassette. Commemoration speeches such as this, along with a vast number of
other demonstrations and rallies taking place in various cities, were recorded onto cas-
sette and made available for purchase by mail order from Fuerza Nueva’s headquarters
in Madrid. The technological reproduction of these events served to extend the far-right
soundscape into the private sphere of the home, bringing listeners from around the country
into synchronicity with one another. Manuel Pérez Martín, a sound recordist and engineer,
was employed by Fuerza Nueva to carry out the recordings; he also organized the broad-
casting of recordings of military marches and hymns through loudspeakers at their events,
where the cassettes and other paraphernalia were also sold. An integral figure in the crea-
tion of the far-right soundscape of this period, Pérez Martín even set up his own minor
record label called Percasa Music through which singles and albums of the fascist singer

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De Raymond (whose real name was Ramón Margenet Castillo) were released. Nicknamed
“el juglar de la Fuerza Nueva” (“Fuerza Nueva’s minstrel”), De Raymond recorded a song
in homage to José Antonio entitled “Canción del ausente” (“Song of the Absent One”),
giving the latter’s sister Pilar Primo de Rivera the original pressing version of the single as
a gift. The signer also recorded versions of “Cara al sol” and other nationalist songs. De
Raymond would sing at several Fuerza Nueva rallies, and his overt allegiance to party led
him to be excluded from being played on the Spanish radio – with one radio station report-
edly publicly smashing one of his records (Margenet Castillo 76).
The cassette recordings of far-right rallies would often feature photographs of crowds on
their covers, images that more clearly emphasized the collective voice of the people rather
than that of the actual speakers. Repeated allusions to the voice of the people were an inte-
gral part of Fuerza Nueva’s populist strategy, as illustrated by a typical headline in the front
page of their newspaper that, in reporting a recent demonstration, read “Habla, pueblo,
habla . . . y el pueblo habló” (“Speak, people, speak . . . and the people spoke!”) (“Habla,
pueblo, habla” 1). Further amplifying the acoustic effect of the headline, the accompany-
ing photograph of a flag-waving crowd underscored the populist message. At a rally held
in Morasol cinema on April 1976, the audience chanted “Franco, Franco, Franco” con-
tinuously for an hour before Piñar eventually appeared “entre un clamor indescriptible”
(“amidst an indescribable clamor”) – a description that points to both Piñar’s shameless
move to incarnate the dictator, as well as the non-discursive and non-signifying intensity
of sound. Piñar’s two-hour speech was interrupted by shouting and applause so frequently
that he was unable to even finish his sentences (“Fuerza Nueva”). By allowing the sounds
from the auditorium to fold into and even overwhelm his own speech, Blas Piñar incorpo-
rated the voice of the “people” as part of his political spectacle, amalgamating the voice of
the crowd as he channeled Franco.8 The event at Cine Morasal was one of a vast number
of rallies that were held in cinemas, theaters and bull rings during the late 1970s and early
1980s. In drawing on the energy of audiences and allowing them to reach a crescendo at
key moments during his speeches, Piñar deployed the voice in order to appropriate public
space. Connor writes that “[v]olume is voluminous. . . . To chant is to spread the individual
voice out into a kind of imaginary amplitude which corresponds to the spreading of sound
to occupy space” (11). In filling spaces that were normally used for public entertainment
with the echoing sounds of the choric voice of the people, Fuerza Nueva vividly trans-
formed them into acoustic territories of political contestation.
While one of the most common tropes of the right was the necessity to reimpose order
on the streets, their acoustic territorialization of space often achieved precisely the opposite.
Given the sheer amount of people attending these rallies, the sounds from within the build-
ings in which they were held often spilt out onto the surrounding streets. In the aforemen-
tioned 1976 Cine Morasal rally, the 6,000 supporters could barely fit into the cinema, and
their shouts were heard in the square next to the building (“Fuerza Nueva”). Other rallies
would conclude with the delegates leaving the building to form demonstrations. At one held
in the bull ring in Las Ventas, during the general elections of June 1977, Piñar proudly pro-
claimed to his 30,000 followers that “aquí estamos los contestatarios” (“we are the rebels
here”) (“Piñar: ‘Aquí estamos los contestatarios’ ” 17). A convoy of some 2,500 Fuerza
Nueva supporters formed a demonstration outside the bull ring, accompanied by a line of
vehicles festooned with Nationalist, Falange and Carlist flags, while repeating the chants
“Viva España and “Franco, Franco, Franco” that were also heard during the rally (“Piñar:
‘Aquí estamos los contestatarios’ ” 17). As their acoustic territory moved slowly from Las

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Ventas to the Plaza de Colón, from the fixed site of the rally to the mobile rhythms of street
marching, the demonstration illustrated the way that “sound imparts great flexibility, and
uncertainty, to the stability of space” (LaBelle 201). The shifting acoustic boundaries of
the rallies and demonstrations brought disruption and disarray, a sonic disordering that
Blas Piñar himself actively encouraged. Indeed, Piñar provocatively told his supporters in
Cine Morasol in October 1977 “a veces es preciso quebrantar la disciplina para mantener
la lealtdad” (“sometimes it is necessary to break discipline in order to maintain loyalty”)
(“Blas Piñar” 7). Several of Fuerza Nueva’s rallies correspondingly led to spates of street
violence, where its most hardcore members would repeat the chants and songs heard during
the speeches in order terrorize passersby. After the aforementioned 1977 Las Ventas rally,
young extremists blared out “Cara al sol” from a Mercedes Benz while chasing another car
of youngsters whom they believed to be “rojos” (“reds,” or communists). Soon surrounded
by other militants, the victims were forced out of their car and violently beaten (“Brutal
agresión” 21). A similar pattern of violence occurred after a rally in Las Ventas on July 18,
1979, where drivers of several vehicles were attacked by a far-right mob (Luca de Tena 23).
As they overflowed their prescribed limits, events like these exemplified paradoxical forma-
tion of the soundscapes of the far right, where the “organized” sounds of hymns, marches
and chants frequently devolved into the more chaotic noises of uncontrolled shouting, cursing
and gunshots. The sudden fluctuations between order and disorder, synchronized rhythms
and noise, were therefore an integral part of the acoustic conflict generated by Fuerza Nueva
and other extremist groups. In turn, these fluctuations would only end up compounding the
sense of civil insecurity and panic felt in the streets which Piñar so emphatically denounced.
Known as the “incontrolados” (“uncontrollable”) by the police and the media alike,
these thugs acted as individuals or in small groups, their spontaneous acts of violence char-
acterized by a lack of cohesive strategy or structure. As well as wielding pistols, chains
and clubs, the “incontrolados” frequently imposed their acoustic territories on the general
public by force, generating sonic conflict as means of coercion and domination. The small
but vociferous Frente Anticomunista Español (Spanish Anticommunist Front), a far-right
faction which included Blas Piñar’s occasional bodyguard among its members, stormed into
a bar in Málaga where they then forced a group of students to sing “Cara al sol” whilst
making them give the fascist salute (“Extrema Derecha” 26). Baby notes how the use of the
term “incontrolados” suggested that these thugs were granted the necessary freedom to act
(869). While they were all too aware of these aggressions, the Fuerzas de Orden Público
(the police) too often failed to intervene against the far right during the early years of the
Transition. After the Atocha massacre in January 1977, for instance, when five communist
lawyers were assassinated by neo-fascist militants, Triunfo criticized the police and Manuel
Fraga for refusing to acknowledge the murderers’ links to the Fuerza Nueva (Gonzalez
160).9 Indeed, Xavier Casals notes how several of the perpetrators had contacts within
the police and the intelligence services (205). Their continued impunity possibly played
into a broader strategy that had been inherited from the final years of the regime. Preston
has argued how dissenting ultra-right wing forces were in fact useful for Francoism, given
that “the invention of a fanatical extreme right placed the regime as if by magic in a centre
position” (166). If the “incontrolados” were complicitly allowed to make noise, moreover,
this in turn justified Fraga’s law-and-order authoritarianism and his subsequent status as
natural heir to Franco as Spain’s custodian of peace.
As well as on the streets, these terrorists frequently disrupted screenings of films that
they deemed disrespectful to the rightist values of authority, discipline and patriotism.

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A prominent example was Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón’s highly controversial 1977 film Cam-
ada negra (Black Brood), whose explicit depiction of fascist violence meant that it had to
be shot under the strictest secrecy for fear of interference (“Camada Negra”). The film’s
soundtrack provides a strikingly authentic portrayal of Spanish neofascism, one which viv-
idly illustrated the way in which organized sounds rapidly transformed into chaotic noise.
The rhythmic sounds of a military drum, heard during the title sequence, are followed by
images of masked terrorists vandalizing and setting off a Molotov cocktail in a bookshop –
a location which was an actual bookshop that had been destroyed by a far-right group some
weeks prior, and whose owners were still receiving threats (“Camada Negra”). In the film,
the leader of the group, ex-police officer Juan (Joaquín Hinojosa) and his teenage brother,
Tatin (José Luis Alonso) live in a large mansion outside of Madrid along with the rest of
the terrorists, under the strict tutelage of their disciplinarian mother Blanca (María Luisa
Ponte). The sonic disorder inflicted upon the bookshop is followed by a scene in which the
terrorists sing together in a choir, their voices in perfect harmony as they rehearse a Grego-
rian chant. Serving as a front to their criminal acts, the choir also brings together the sonic
bodies of the terrorists as a corporatist and de-individuated whole, serving as a metaphor
for Spanish fascism. Presiding over a dinner of callos (tripe stew), Blanca chastises two
of the men for fighting, before warning the whole group: “Pero aún más importante es la
unidad, somos un cuerpo” (“But more important still is our unity, we are a single body”).
Indeed, the fascist choir here provides an illustration of how, according to Stephen Connor,
“the choric voice gives rise to the fantasy of a collective voice-body that is not to be identi-
fied with any of the individuals who compose it” (5). The choric voice can also be heard
when Tatin later attends a pro-Franco demonstration at the Plaza de Oriente, a sequence
which was made up of real-life archive footage taken from a recent No-Do newsreel, where
nationalist cheers and chants from the “March of Oriamandi” are audible. In the film’s
shockingly violent conclusion, Tatin kills his girlfriend (Ángela Molina) by bashing her
head with a heavy stone, while shouting repeatedly “¡España! ¡España! ¡España!” before
joining the others as they sing in the choir.
While it was frozen by the authorities for four months, Camada negra was eventually
released without censorship. Several cinema owners, however, were too scared to screen the
film, particularly after the violence associated with the infamous release of Carlos Saura’s
1974 La prima Angélica (Cousin Angelica). The premiere of Saura’s movie had seen far-right
“incontrolados” break into the projectionist’s cabin in the Amaya cinema in Madrid and
steal twelve meters of the film; on another occasion at the same cinema, fifty Falangist
demonstrators threw bags of paint at the screen and yelled “¡Saura, farsante! ¡Viva España!
¡Falange sí, farsantes no!” (“Saura is a fake! Long live Spain! Falange yes, fakes no!”)
(Thomas 32). Many were therefore expecting the worst when Camada negra premiered
in Madrid’s Luchana cinema, an event that sparked a particularly disruptive response in
the auditorium. Shouts and arguments reportedly broke out throughout the course of the
film (G. de la Puerta), with the murder scene provoking protests of “Viva España!” and
“esto es una vergüenza nacional” (“this is a national disgrace”), as several members of the
audience left the auditorium (P.C.). Tensions came to a head when two Molotov cocktails
were thrown at the cinema on two different occasions – attacks which led to the arrest of
two seventeen-year-old boys (“Cóctel Molotov”). Outside of Madrid, the exhibition of
the film was similarly fraught with obstacles: Repeated bomb threats from the far right
subsequently led the Cine Palacio in Zaragoza to withdraw the film (Martínez). If, as we
have seen, the soundtrack of Camada negra registered the acoustic conflict generated by the

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far right, the exhibition and reception of the film only served to exacerbate these tensions,
turning the cinema auditorium itself into a site of social disorder – a pattern which would
be repeated in the exhibition of other polemical films of the period, such as El Proceso de
Burgos (The Burgos Trial) (Imanol Uribe, 1979), Dolores (José Luis García Sánchez, 1981)
and Comando Txiquia (José Luis Madrid, 1977).
Similar fears swirled around the release of Basilio Martín Patino’s well-known docu-
mentary Canciones para después de una guerra (Songs for After a War), which had been
produced in 1970 and personally banned by Admiral Carrero Blanco the following year,
eventually finding its release in 1976. The film is composed of a mosaic of newsreels, let-
ters and extracts from the end of the Civil War until 1954, accompanied by a soundtrack
of popular songs, hymns, speeches, as well as recordings of crowds cheering and chanting.
It opens with an early recording of “Cara al sol” whose sounds accompany scenes of vast
crowds performing the fascist salute. As images of Franco’s portrait and signs of “Arriba
España” are attached to buildings, we hear Cecilia Gámez’s fascist chotis “Ya hemos
pasao” (“We Have Already Passed”). A riposte to the Republican hymn “No pasarán”
(“They Shall Not Pass”) and the slogan for Madrid’s defense, the lyrics of Gámez’s song
speak of the Nationalist acoustic re-territorialization of the capital after its occupation by
the Republicans: “¡No pasarán!, gritaban por las calles. . . . Por plazas y plazuelas con voces
miserables ¡No pasarán!” (“They shall not pass! They shouted on the streets. . . . On the
squares with their miserable voices. They shall not pass!”) which is followed triumphantly
by the chorus “¡Ya hemos pasado, y estamos en el Prado!” (“We have passed, and we are
in the Prado!”). During a screening of the film, Martín Patino observed that while “Cara al
sol” provoked some in the audience to sit automatically upright and salute, “seguramente
por aquellos de los reflejos condicionados de Pavlov” (“surely because of Pavlovian con-
ditioning”) – a description which evokes Lefebvre’s notion of dressage – the sound of the
hymn also resulted in noisy protests (Martín Patino). Audiences also applauded during the
death of Mussolini, and broke out in laughter and song (R.M.P.). The soundscape from
within the auditorium – including both the diegetic and non-diegetic sounds of the film
soundtrack, as well as from the response of the audience itself – therefore more broadly
reflected the diverse and conflicting cultural understandings of sound in Spain during this
period.
By way of conclusion, it is striking to hear how several of the acoustic strategies used by
the extreme right discussed in this chapter have resurfaced in Spain’s increasingly polarized
political discourse today. Indeed, Spain’s current far-right party Vox, which won 52 seats
in Spanish parliament in the general elections of November 2019, ensures its domination of
headlines through repeatedly producing acoustic conflict. Like Piñar’s Fuerza Nueva, only
with considerably more electoral success, Vox discursively positions itself as the voice of
the people (its name, after all, is taken from the Latin “vox populi”) and noisily intervenes
in and re-appropriates public spaces, such as the case of the rally they provocatively held in
the working-class and multi-racial Madrid barrio of Vallecas, on April 2021. Taking place
in the Plaza de la Constitución (Constitution Square), which is more commonly known as
the “Plaza Roja” because of its association with left-wing political resistance, the event led
to several clashes with anti-fascist demonstrators and the police.
Vox is all too aware of Spain’s sonic archaeology of far-right insurgency. After the party’s
success in the Madrid elections in May 2019, which in part led to the unseating of the
socialist mayor Manuela Carmena, Vox tweeted Celia Gámez’s song “Ya hemos pasao”
(“Ya hemos pasao”). Vox’s supporters have sung “Cara al sol” during countless rallies

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and demonstrations, with its General Secretary for the Balearic Islands publicly singing
the anthem in the Balearic Parliament, while a dance remix of the hymn even became one
of the most viral songs of 2018 on the popular music streaming service Spotify (“Cómo
es posible”). Alejandro Amenábar’s recent film Mientras dure la Guerra (While at War)
(2019), which depicts the final weeks of Unamuno’s life at the beginning of the Civil War,
was sonically disrupted by far-right hecklers shouting “Viva España” (“Ultraderechistas”).
As it was during the Transition to democracy, the formation of these acoustic territories
and their rhythmic intensities both serve to divide and disrupt, to foster belonging and
exclusion, to be heard and to be silenced. As we have heard in this chapter, these acoustic
strategies clearly echo those of Blas Piñar and other factions on the extreme right, for whom
sound was a key instrument through which to generate social disorder – so that they could
in turn attempt to impose an order that was exclusively their own.10

Notes
1 Fuerza Nueva (New Force) was a Spanish far-right political party founded by Blas Piñar in 1976.
The party grew out a publishing house of the same name, which was established in 1966, and
served as a de facto pressure group against the pro-liberalizing forces within the Francoist Mov-
imiento Nacional.
2 The Movimiento Nacional was the name given to the sole governing institution that was permit-
ted during the Franco regime.
3 For a comprehensive study of the fascist attacks on Picasso’s art, see Hernández.
4 For instance, in an excellent article, Samuel Llano has shown how workers’ choral societies,
such as the Orfeón Socialista de Madrid, created and appropriated acoustic territories in the city
between 1900–1936 (Llano).
5 As heard, for instance, during Fuerza Nueva rallies that took place in Cine Morasol in Madrid in
October 1977 (“Blas Piñar” 7) and Cine Campeador in the same city in December 1980 (“La calle
es nuestra” 4).
6 “Cara al sol” was also heard during the funeral services of several high-ranking victims of ETA
terrorists, such as that of the president of the Guipúzcoa government, Juan María Araluce y Villar
on October 6, 1976. The attendees sang the hymn as his coffin appeared, while shouting “ETA
asesina” (“ETA kills”) and “El pueblo unido nunca será vencido” (“The people united will never
be defeated”) (“Despedida a las víctimas” 13). It could also be heard during homages to National-
ist victims of the Spanish Civil War, such as those held on November 1977 in solemn memory of
the 1936 Paracuellos Massacres (Catalán 8).
7 El País notes that while the organizers claimed that there were one million present, 300,000 peo-
ple in fact attended the event (“Cerca de 300,000”).
8 Similar observations were made about a rally attended by 1,800 people in the Theater of Campos
Eliseos in Bilbao, in November 1976, which paid homage to the national flag. The speech was
interrupted by applause over twenty times, and the longest was at the end when Piñar invoked the
memory of Franco (“Blas Piñar rindió” 6).
9 The investigative journalism of El País, Diario 16 and Triunfo played a key role in unearthing the
links between members of Fuerza Nueva, Guerrilleros del Cristo Rey and terrorist attacks during
these years.
10 I would like to thank Jon Snyder and Samuel Llano for their very useful comments on this chapter.

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 PART 3

Governments and Institutions

 16
THE CONTESTED NATION(S),
1900–2023
Xosé M. Núñez Seixas

Spanish Identity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

The Spanish political community in the early modern period was a composite monarchy,
integrated by a diversity of territorial, juridical and social bodies. Its main principles of
legitimacy were dynastic loyalty and the Catholic faith. The 18th-century Bourbon dynasty
reduced the extent of territorial privileges, yet some of them (like the Basque and Navarrese
fueros [charters]) persisted. Similarly, the concentration of power in the monarchy and the
increasing strength of the principle that its political body had to be as homogeneous as pos-
sible was crucial to produce a protonationalism which simply lacked the idea of the nation
as subject of sovereignty.
The Anti-Napoleonic War (1808–14) marked the beginning of modern Spanish national-
ism. The first Spanish liberals, who gathered at the Cádiz parliament (Cortes) in 1810–12,
crafted a modern concept of the Spanish nation, regarded as the sovereign body of citizens
placed under a common Law. This concept, embodied by the 1812 Constitution, also incor-
porated an organic-historicist bias: Spain was regarded as a community shaped by history
and culture, which also extended to all citizens of both “hemispheres.” However, this did
not prevent most overseas territories from seceding. The prevailing concept of the Spanish
nation in traditionalist thought adapted Hapsburg protonationalism to the new elements
provided by cultural romanticism, particularly the idea of national spirit (Volksgeist). Span-
ish National identity was mostly the outcome of Catholic faith and dynastic loyalty.
The period inaugurated in 1833 was marked by the construction of a new liberal state,
which incarnated the nation (Álvarez Junco). The social diffusion of national belonging in
the Spanish population experienced some difficulties, due to: a) the persistence of territorial
imbalances in the level of economic modernization, which caused economic and political
elites not to coincide; b) the territorialization of inner political splits: the confrontation
between absolutists and Carlists, on the one hand, and liberals on the other, with the subse-
quent split of liberals between moderate (centralists) and revolutionary liberals (supporters
of decentralization); and c) the limited efficiency of nation-building policies carried out by
the state, due to a poorly financed system of national education, as well as the persistence
of a socially discriminatory military service, which enabled the upper middle classes to

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-19
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

avoid conscription well into the second decade of the 20th century. The state carried out
the task of propagating the new myths and promoting civic rites inadequately. However,
other symbols rooted in popular culture, from bullfighting to minor musical genres, also
played an informal role in mass nationalization. Last but not least, the Spanish nation also
lacked a foreign “other.” Although the Spanish-American war of 1898 favored an outburst
of patriotic rhetoric, after the defeat, Spanish nationalism turned increasingly towards the
defense of national integrity against its internal enemies. The Moroccan wars (1907–1927)
did not contribute to the creation of a new national unity against a foreign other either, due
to the lack of popularity of the colonial conflict.
From 1873 onwards, federalism was incorporated into the political vocabulary of
the Spanish left as the preferred state structure. However, Spanish federalism oscillated
between: a) the defense of a federation based on the free association of municipalities,
provinces and up to the nation and b) the conversion of the “ancient kingdoms” defined by
language and history into the units which should shape the federation. Many Republicans
also believed that the Spanish nation should be built on a common cultural basis crafted by
a strong central state. Since the 1880s, the workers’ movement also took up these interpre-
tations. Socialists, anarchists and communists oscillated between two extremes: federalism
as a magic recipe to radically democratize the state, and a fierce centralism, sometimes
counterbalanced by municipal autonomy: Only a strong central state could carry out the
task of transforming society. An additional element was the influence of a fin-de-siècle
reform movement or regeneracionismo, whose vague proposals could also be regarded as
a claim to regenerate the nation from below through the empowerment of municipalities
and regions.

The Origins of Substate Nationalisms

During the last quarter of the 19th century a number of new political actors emerged in
the Iberian periphery, particularly in Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia but also
in Valencia. Most had their origins in regionalized evolutions from progressive liberalism,
federal republicanism and local Carlism or Basque fuerismo. They created associations and
groupings that embraced first regionalist creeds, and later, once they had shifted their posi-
tion to define their territories as nations and not as regions or ancient nationalities, they
became substate nationalisms – social and cultural movements which aimed at achieving
self-determination in the long term for their territories and some form of self-government in
the short term. This process led to the articulation of regionalist movements between 1868
and 1875 in Catalonia, Galicia and the Valencia region, flanked by a literary revival of ver-
nacular languages (the Catalan Renaixença and the Galician Rexurdimento), as well as the
development of regional history writing. Symbols and traditions were codified and trans-
formed into alternative national icons, from dances to flags. Therefore, these movements
steadily reframed the discourse of territorial identity in nationalist terms and consequently
laid the basis for alternative nation-building projects that challenged the Spanish one.
The loss of the last overseas colonies (Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines) after the
short Spanish-American war of 1898, and the subsequent legitimacy crisis around the idea
of the Spanish nation also contributed to the increasing success of the alternative national
projects of the periphery, which gained the adherence of relevant sectors of the population
they targeted. This happened particularly in the case of Catalanism, mostly represented
until 1923 by the Lliga Regionalista (Regionalist League), a Catholic party which also

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aimed at modernizing the Spanish political system. In the Basque case, the frustration of
broad sectors of Biscayan society in the face of rapid industrialization after 1880 converged
with the radicalization of a part of the supporters of the ancient fueros. Sabino Arana,
the founder of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) in 1895, left a deep imprint on the
ideological profile of the movement. Arana crafted a new ideology based on xenophobia
towards Castilian immigrants, anti-Spanish sentiment and Catholicism. In his view, the
Basque nation was based on race and history. After his death in 1903, the PNV adopted an
increasingly political pragmatism and endorsed autonomy as a short-term goal while ton-
ing down its xenophobic component through the first decades of the 20th century (Mees).
From the start of the 20th century until 1936, substate nationalist movements experi-
enced a steady growth of social and political influence. In the Catalan case, this became evi-
dent after 1901; in the case of Basque nationalism after 1905–06; and in the Galician case,
although to a lesser extent, after 1916–18. In Catalonia, the nationalist movement diversi-
fied internally and new republican, left-wing and radical Catalanist groupings emerged. All
of them shared some basic tenets: the relevant role ascribed to the Catalan language and
history in their idea of the Catalan nation and the will to intervene in Spanish politics to
reform the state (Ucelay-Da Cal).

Visions of Spain During the First Third of the 20th Century

Throughout the period of 1900–1936, both traditionalist and liberal-progressive currents of
Spanish nationalism experienced a noteworthy continuity. Both trends shared a pessimistic
view of recent Spanish history as one of imperial decadence. However, both their interpreta-
tion of the national past and their proposals for the future diverged. Catholic-traditionalist
nationalism was influenced by the historicist interpretation of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo
and, in particular, by the work of historian and philologist Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo,
who crafted an interpretation of Spanish national history deeply marked by Catholicism
and royalism. In his view, Spain was an outcome of a diversity of kingdoms and traditions,
united by the monarchy and the Catholic faith. This view was further developed by think-
ers and political leaders such as Ramiro de Maeztu and Víctor Pradera, alongside several
currents of the anti-republican right during the 1930s. This trend would later lay the foun-
dations of national-Catholicism, which became the hegemonic creed during the Franco
regime.
On the other hand, until the 1930s, Republicans, liberals and the “bourgeois” left
embraced liberal-democratic Spanish nationalism. They mostly accepted the interpretation
of national history advanced by 19th-century liberals but also acknowledged the influence
of philosophers such as José Ortega y Gasset (España invertebrada, 1921; Invertebrate
Spain), who emphasized the role of Castile in Spanish unity and the necessity of building
a new “project,” a community of destiny under the aegis of that central region. They also
stressed the necessity of building the nation through the education of its citizens: Pro-active
citizenship was an urgent prerequisite for constructing a modern nation. For them, the
people were the reservoir of the historical essence of the Spanish nation, and all that was
needed to reawaken its innate qualities was education. The necessity of coming to terms
with republican Catalanists, who were indispensable to building a Spanish republic, also
forced Spanish republicans to display flexibility regarding the territorial structure of Spain.
Moreover, Ortega y Gasset’s influence was multidirectional. The minority fascist groups
that emerged in the 1930s, particularly the Falange of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, also

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adhered to the idea of Spain as a “mission,” based on a shared goal and not exclusively on
blood, soil or language.
The task of Spanish cultural nationalism since the first decade of the 20th century was
of particular relevance. This was promoted by institutions such as the Institución Libre de
Enseñanza (Free Institution of Teaching) and the Centro de Estudios Históricos (Center of
Historical Studies) and drew on the theories crafted by intellectuals and writers who after
the 1898 crisis “reinvented” the idea of Spain, rediscovered Castilian history and tradi-
tion and emphasized the role of the Castilian language as a national marker for Spain.
A new project of cultural expansion towards the Spanish-speaking American republics took
shape. Developed by intellectuals as ideologically diverse as Rafael Altamira and Maeztu,
Hispano-americanism searched for the roots of the Spanish grandeur in the reconstruction
of its cultural and economic links towards its former American empire (Moreno Luzón and
Núñez Seixas).
There also was a political design of Spain as a multinational or multiethnic polity that
emanated from substate nationalisms. Three main projects coexisted. One was multina-
tional federalism, either under the form of a republic or monarchy: The Spanish polity
would be composed of four organic nations defined by ethnocultural criteria: Galicia (with
or without Portugal), Catalonia (with or without Valencia and the Balearic Islands) and the
Basque Country and “Castile.” A second was the idea of a bilateral agreement between an
individual nation and the rest of the Spanish polity. The third was the medium-term accept-
ance of decentralization from above, where access to administrative and political autonomy
was granted to all Spanish regions, but where the “differential quality” of the “authentic”
nationalities was preserved. This latter option prevailed both in the period of 1914–23 and
during the Second Republic and became the most realistic way for substate nationalists to
achieve some of their political objectives.

From Renationalization From Above to Republican Decentralization

The dictatorship established by general Primo de Rivera in 1923 strove towards an authori-
tarian renationalization of Spain. After some vague promises of decentralization, the mili-
tary government forbade the official usage of regional languages in the schools and the
administration. Similarly, the dictatorship attempted to incarnate a new Spanish national-
ism through its cultural and education policies and the mobilization and militarization of
youth and of public ceremonies. However, this endeavor of renationalizing Spain com-
pletely failed, and social support for substate nationalisms did not substantially diminish.
While some of their activists opted for cultural activities, others fostered political opposi-
tion against the dictatorship abroad.
After the fall of Primo de Rivera in 1930, substate nationalists re-emerged. Conserva-
tive Catalanists failed in their attempt to broaden the support for the moribund monarchy
through the creation of a Spanish center party, while Catalanist and Spanish republicans
cooperated closely. In 1930–31, a new political hegemony was built in Catalonia thanks to
the political synthesis between social-reformist and federal republicanism, on the one hand,
and left-wing and radical Catalan nationalism, on the other. In March 1931, they merged
to create a new party, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC, Republican Left of Cata-
lonia). Basque nationalists played the card of strategic pragmatism and shifted politically
towards collaboration with Republicans and Socialists. Galician nationalists proved unable

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to reunite; however, in 1929 some of them merged with local republicans to set up an
autonomist organization, which played an important role in subsequent years.
From its inception, the nascent republic adopted a decentralized political structure. This
was also due to the political influence of Catalanist republicans. On the 14th of April of
1931, the republic was proclaimed in Madrid and other towns, while in Barcelona, ERC’s
leader Francesc Macià called into being the “Catalan Republic” within a still non-existent
Federal Spanish Republic. This move forced the provisional government to negotiate a
solution: The creation of a regional government in Barcelona, the Generalitat. The par-
liamentary elections of June 1931 clearly displayed that peripheral nationalisms enjoyed
remarkable social support.
The 1931 Constitution defined Spain as an “integral State,” a sole political nation that
also encompassed regions with statutes of autonomy. Only those territories where a broad
majority of citizens opted for it, were given the right to have access to home-rule. The Cata-
lan statute was passed by referendum in 1932, the Basque one in November 1933 and the
Galician one in June 1936. Only in Catalonia was decentralization implemented before the
outbreak of the Civil War.
Catalan nationalists consolidated their social support during the republican years. ERC’s
hegemonic role was based on its polyvalent creed, which blended the defense of Catalan
nationhood, federal republicanism and social reform. On the contrary, conservative cata-
lanism experienced a shift to the right, placing the defense of Catholic religion as its main
priority. Basque nationalists experienced continuous electoral growth and collected approx-
imately one third of all Basque suffrages in 1936. Galician nationalists founded a unified
party in December 1931 (the Partido Galeguista), which adopted a progressive-republican
orientation and was in favor of self-determination for Galicia within a multinational state,
yet focused in the short term on achieving home rule. The party was on the way to becom-
ing a mass organization when the Civil War broke out. Some other regionalist groupings
emerged in Andalusia, Valencia and Aragón, all of them rooted in variegated traditions of
local republicanism.
The electoral victory of the right in the parliamentary polls of November 1933 halted the
process of regional devolution. This event also caused center/periphery tensions to increase
and to overlap with political and social polarization between the right and the left, as
Companys’ failed proclamation of the Catalan state within the Federal Spanish Republic in
October 1934 made evident. From the end of that year, most factions of substate national-
isms linked in practice their political fate to that of the Spanish republican left.

The Nation Against Itself: Civil War and Francoism

The Spanish Civil War meant the confrontation between different ideas of the Spanish
nation. Both republicans and rebels appealed to similar slogans and historical myths to
endorse their cause, presenting it as a war of national liberation against a new invader:
rither Soviet communism or international fascism. Communist propaganda referred to the
heroes of the Second of May 1808 as forerunners of present militiamen fighting the fascists,
while General Franco defined the uprising as “our new War of Independence.” The left
insisted on the idea that the Spanish people (the popular classes) were the authentic repre-
sentatives of the nation’s virtues, threatened by a clique of landowners, capitalists, bishops
and military who had betrayed their homeland and accepted foreign dominance.

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The conflict also meant a clash between Spanish and peripheral nationalisms. In fact,
substate nationalists faced a difficult choice on July 1936. Catholic nationalists in Cata-
lonia, Galicia and some Basque provinces prioritized the defense of Catholicism and the
social order. However, most factions, including the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party), aligned
themselves with the republic. They expected that, following victory, the New Spanish repub-
lic would evolve towards a multinational federation. In Catalonia, anarcho-syndicalist and
revolutionary militias exerted real power, and after 1937 the government of the republic
attempted to erode the “excessive” autonomy that Catalonia had enjoyed due to the war-
time circumstances.
Until 1975, Spanish nationalism was practically monopolized by a Catholic-traditionalist
narrative, with some additional fascist touches. Francoism consecrated the hegemony of a
traditionalist version of Spanish identity, which centered its nationalist discourse on the
essentialist affirmation of a Catholic Spain, basically identified with Castile. It argued that
Spanish history had produced a Volksgeist whose best expression was the myth of Hispa-
nidad. Educational policy, the militarization of youth, military conscription and public
ceremonies were among the fields where this renationalizing program was promoted. How-
ever, in spite of its best efforts, including the imposition of a single state language, Francoist
nationalism failed to uproot alternative national identities. Moreover, state repression was
perceived by many in Catalonia and the Basque Country as a “Spanish occupation.” In
Galicia, on the contrary, the war interrupted a dynamic of social expansion of the national-
ist movement, which would not re-emerge under a new left-wing orientation until the late
1960s.
State repression and the survival of the peripheral nationalist legacy, along with the
partial failure of Spanish “authoritarian nation-building,” permitted substate nationalisms
to remain alive – although silent – during the 1940s and 1950s. After 1960, their main
characteristics changed. This corresponded with the profound transformations experienced
by Spanish society: modernization, industrialization and several new waves of internal
migration towards the Basque Country and Catalonia. There were also important ideologi-
cal mutations within substate nationalist movements. In the Catalan case, a new doctrine
emerged, influenced by Social-Catholicism and Christian personalist thought under the
patronage of broad sectors of the Catalan Church, which favored anti-Francoist mobiliza-
tion with the support of a large portion of Catalan civil society (Dowling). At the begin-
ning of the 1960s, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideology on the younger generation
of nationalist activists, along with the popularity of “internal colonialism” doctrines in
Europe, all contributed to the emergence of new nationalist parties that marked an ideolog-
ical rift with their predecessors. The depth of this break was particularly felt in the Basque
Country. In 1959, Basque Land and Freedom [Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, ETA] was founded
and from the mid-1960s evolved to embrace violence.
The monopolization of Spanish nationalist discourse by Francoism had significant con-
sequences for the whole spectrum of Spanish nationalism, particularly when it had to pre-
sent a democratically legitimized image during the democratic transition and consolidation
(from 1975 with the death of Franco to 1978, with the approval of the Constitution, and
further to 1982 with the Socialist Party’s [PSOE, or Partido Socialista Obrero Español] elec-
toral victory). At that time, any form of Spanish nationalism was automatically identified
with the defense of the old tenets advocated by Francoism. As a result, the Spanish left-wing
opposition was forced towards adopting federalist and even pro-multinational stances. But
the combination of peripheral nationalism and socialism within a federal project for Spain

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reached a stable level only in the case of left-wing Catalanist parties. As a consequence, the
1960s and 1970s were a period of uncertainty concerning how to articulate a future democ-
racy territorially. The Spanish Communist Party (PCE) followed a strategy of demanding
in principle the recognition of the right to self-determination for the Basque Country, Cata-
lonia and Galicia while embracing in practice an idea of Spain as a multiethnic homeland
identified with the popular classes. At its 1974 and 1976 conventions, the Socialist Party,
also affirmed the right to self-determination for “Iberian nationalities” while expressing its
preference for a federal republic.

The National Question in the Spanish Transition and Democratic

Consolidation
After General Franco’s death in November of 1975, the unsolved national question in Spain
emerged as one of the factors that would most influence the process of democratic transi-
tion. Some of the majority parties and currents within peripheral nationalist movements
played an important role in that process, and in several cases – particularly the Catalans
–a high level of political pragmatism was on display, as they gave priority to reestablishing
democracy over their own goals of self-determination. The re-establishment of democracy
brought about an ambitious attempt to achieve a peacefully negotiated solution to the
problem of the territorial articulation of the state and the satisfaction of peripheral nation-
alist demands.
During the early 1970s, the pressure exerted by the democratic opposition had increased
greatly in certain regions. This was particularly noticeable in Catalonia, where in 1971 a
multi-party plural platform (the Assembly of Catalonia) was set up under a common pro-
gram, which included political amnesty, democratic freedoms and the re-establishment of
autonomy. In the Basque Country, the 1970s was marked by the virulence of ETA’s terrorist
activity and also by the repression carried out by Francoist police, which, after the Burgos
trial of 1970 and the assassination of Franco’s prime minister Carrero Blanco three years
later, made ETA seem like they were the incarnation of a Basque collective resistance against
the dictatorship. This seriously damaged the legitimacy of the Spanish state in the Basque
Country in the ensuing decades. ETA’s terrorism did not cease until 2011, leaving behind
more than 900 victims.
The social influence of peripheral nationalisms was clearly felt in the results of the first
democratic parliamentary elections held in June 1977: Catalan nationalists reaped 26.9%
of the vote in their region, while Basque nationalism reached 39.3%. The polls also dem-
onstrated the persistence, although greatly weakened, of Galician nationalism (6.7%), as
well as the emergence of a new leftist Andalusian regionalism and a recently formed Canary
Islands’ nationalism.
Moderate Catalan nationalism incorporated new ideological ingredients, such as Chris-
tian democracy and even social democracy. The main nationalist party, Democratic Con-
vergence of Catalonia, was founded in 1974 by Jordi Pujol. Two years later, it merged with
the Christian-democrat Democratic Union of Catalonia to form the highly successful and
long-lasting electoral coalition Convergence and Union (Convergència i Unió, CiU), which
won all regional elections between 1980 and 2012. Until the second decade of the 21st
century, this political trend was characterized by pragmatism, aiming at the largest possible
degree of self-government within the framework of the Spanish state and the European
Union. CiU advocated full development of regional devolution to Catalonia. According to

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Catalan nationalists, political autonomy had to be constantly “deepened,” without specify-

ing the end point of those political aspirations. The party also collaborated with the central
government, both with Spanish socialists and conservatives. On the other hand, separatist
options were almost marginal in electoral terms between 1977 and 1992. After 1992, the
Catalan independence movement received a new impulse from the old ERC, which was by
then under new leadership.
In the Basque Country, peripheral nationalists gained social and electoral hegemony
after 1977. Nevertheless, the support for abertzale (nationalist) parties was internally
highly fragmented. Nationalist electoral results varied strongly in each of the Basque prov-
inces, and even within individual provinces there were strong variations between rural and
urban working-class areas, and Spanish-speaking versus Basque-speaking areas. Moreover,
Basque nationalism was divided into two main camps. On the one hand, there was the
PNV, whose main emphasis now was on the “historical rights” (the ancient fueros) and the
Basque language as basis for the existence of a distinctive nation. The PNV upheld a broad
social reformism in accord with its inter-class appeal, but it also demonstrated permanent
tension between a far-reaching pro-independence discourse and constant political pragma-
tism. Although the party has never given up the possibility of achieving self-determination
for the Basque Country, it has also been comfortable living with, and ruling, the Autonomy
Statute in place since 1980. The second group within Basque nationalism, the so-called
“patriotic Left,” constituted a broad social movement linked to ETA. This trend advocated
self-determination and total independence for Euskadi, socialism and the “reunification” of
all Basque territories located in Spain and France.
In contrast to the electoral strength of the Basque and Catalan movements, Galician
nationalism maintained a lower profile, and never surpassed 26% of the vote in any elec-
tion. Its political expression has been overwhelmingly monopolized by the Marxist-Leninist
left with a populist strategy, represented since 1982 by the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG).
Its pragmatic adaptation to the autonomy system, after a first phase of frontal rejection, has
enabled the BNG to achieve far more significant results since the early 1990s.
Substate nationalist movements also extended their influence to other spheres of civil
society, such as culture and labor relations. Apart from these three main “historical”
nationalisms, the existence of newly emergent peripheral nationalisms in other regions of
the country deserves mention. Nevertheless, the latter’s political influence remains quite
limited, and their ideological position is sometimes a mixture of regionalist proposals and
an imitation of Catalan dynamics, from Valencia to Aragon and the Canary Islands.

The State of the Autonomies: A Satisfactory Solution?

The Constitution of 1978 combined the conception of Spain as a single political nation with
the existence of autonomy statutes granted to all regions. Part VIII creates the so-called
“State of Autonomies,” conceived as a decentralized structure, composed of seventeen
“autonomous communities” (comunidades autónomas) which reframed the existing prov-
inces. Between 1979 and 1983, each of the new regions elaborated its own home rule stat-
ute. From the outset the autonomous communities were divided into two groups. The first
were the “nationalities,” also defined as the “historical nationalities,” a term which implic-
itly meant Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia, those regions which had approved
a home rule statute by referendum prior to the Spanish Civil War. The other group con-
sisted of the remaining fourteen regions. In reality the extension of a decentralized state

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structure to the entire Spanish territory was the result of a political agreement among the
various political actors that intervened in the shaping of the Constitution, as a part of the
elites’ settlement that brought into being Spanish democracy. Basque and Catalan national-
ists pressed for achieving self-government within the framework of a multinational state.
This claim was unacceptable to the right-wing parties, the Union of the Democratic Centre
(UCD) and especially the People’s Alliance (AP). In the end, the right to achieve autonomy
was extended to all the regions, while at the same time different routes towards home rule,
as well as different levels of autonomy, were established. Sovereignty was held by the Span-
ish state, which in turn transferred broad powers to the autonomous communities and
strengthened them with legislative and executive powers in many relevant areas (i.e. culture
and education, public health, tourism, commerce). At the same time, the central state main-
tained legislative pre-eminence in other areas, as well as the monopoly on taxation (with
the exception of the Basque Country and Navarre).
One of the key characteristics of the 1978 Constitution is its ambiguity concerning cer-
tain crucial concepts. On the one hand, it affirmed that Spain is the sole collective entity
enjoying full sovereignty, a nation defined as the “common and indivisible Fatherland of all
the Spaniards.” On the other, it also recognized the existence of “nationalities” and regions,
while the difference between a nationality and a nation was not established. Two different
paths for achieving autonomy were also delineated. One was the “fast track” reserved for
the “nationalities” (Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia), which were later joined
by Andalucía. The other was a “slow track” for the rest of the regions (Fernández García
and Petithomme).
The State of the Autonomies was conceived as a negotiated solution. Nevertheless, a
majority of the Basque nationalists did not accept the 1978 Constitution: The “patriotic
Left” rejected autonomy outright, while the PNV denounced that it failed to recognize the
Basque “historical rights” in a fashion which affirmed Basque pre-existing sovereignty.
Catalan nationalists, on the contrary, recommended the affirmative vote on the Consti-
tution. Moreover, not all parties that participated in the elaboration of the Constitution
were convinced of the long-term survival of the autonomic system. Strong criticisms were
directed at the recognition of the term “nationalities” by AP leaders, while federalism was
still preferred by some currents of the left.
The institutional framework of the state of the autonomies also contained several ambi-
guities. The financing system was side-lined, and no efficient mechanism was established
to ensure equalization transfers between richer and poorer regions. Finally, there was no
provision for a parliamentary forum that would allow co-participation in the government’s
tasks by the regions, nor was there any mechanism for the participation of the regions in
the formulation of Spain’s European policy after 1986. Therefore, the evolution of the state
of the autonomies was heavily dependent on short-term political negotiations between the
central government and the territorial parties. Moreover, the establishment of new admin-
istrations created a new political opportunity-structure open to the regional elites. Region-
alism provided old and new local elites with renewed democratic legitimacy, or simply an
ideal umbrella to give refuge to a variety of political actors.

The Idea of Spain at the Turn of the New Century

The new territorial framework drawn up by the 1978 Constitution also forced Span-
ish nationalism to redefine itself. The two main tendencies of Spanish nationalism since

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1975 correspond to the democratic right and the left, while Spanish nationalism of
Catholic-traditionalist origin became politically marginal. The whole of the Spanish “patri-
otic” spectrum since 1976 may be characterized by two features: the search for a new
identity and democratic legitimacy and, at the same time, a confrontation with substate
nationalisms (Muñoz Mendoza; Núñez Seixas).
Right-wing Spanish nationalism clearly suffers from legitimacy problems inherited from
Francoism. Since the second half of the 1980s, political messages coming from the right
have been quite contradictory. On the one hand, the political praxis of the Partido Popular
(PP) in Galicia and the Balearic Islands was characterized by the promotion of a strong
sense of regional identity. This was counterbalanced by the same party’s reactive policies
against peripheral nationalists in the Basque Country and Catalonia. However, right-wing
democratic nationalism between the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century also
made some attempts to undertake an ideological updating of their national project, under-
lining its civic contents. That said, according to conservative prime minister José María
Aznar (who governed from 1996 to 2004), Spain was a historical reality forged in the
15th century and unified by the agency of the monarchy and a common project for the
future. Spanish conservatives also advocated the highest possible degree of homogenization
of power competencies for all regions. However, since 2008/9, many of them also voiced
the necessity of recentralizing some basic competencies in order to avoid the growth of
separatism on the periphery, and they advocated for putting a definitive end to the process
of decentralization. Moreover, the relevance of the Castilian language as a core-value, and
as an ethnic marker of the Spanish nation, was re-emphasized.
Radical right-wing Spanish nationalism, whose political expression until 2017 had been
almost irrelevant, experimented a new resurgence in the second decade of the 21st century.
It was nurtured by the radicalization of Catalan nationalism, but also by the slow refram-
ing of the political discourse of the radical right. Thus, Francoist nostalgia was conveni-
ently put aside, and emphasis on nativism, xenophobia against immigrants and the aim of
re-centralization of the Spanish state took the lead, alongside an increasing euro-skepticism.
This expressed itself in the considerable electoral growth of the party Vox between 2018
and 2023.
Since the mid-1980s, the Spanish left has recovered a form of Spanish patriotic narra-
tive which appealed to the traditions of liberal republicanism, the motto of “modernity”
and the endorsement of a broader European identity. This discourse aimed at combining
belief in the existence of a Spanish political nation with the recognition of different cultural
nations. According to this, the variegated character of these cultural nations and a single
political nation under the umbrella of the Constitution makes it possible to refer to Spain as
a “nation of nations.” As a parallel element, Jürgen Habermas’ concept of “constitutional
patriotism” enjoyed much popularity with the Spanish left since the early 1990s. Neverthe-
less, this narrative was not totally free from the inherited idea of Spain as a historic nation
built upon a common culture since the late Middle Ages. In fact, some factions of the Span-
ish left remained loyal to the pseudo-Jacobin legacy and upheld the need for a strong central
state which should serve as an instrument for social reform.

Nations With Multiple Identities?

At the beginning of the 21st century, there was a tenuous balance between Spanish state
nationalism and minority nationalisms. Spain has not only constituted a paradoxical

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example of the failure of opposing nationalisms, which were “blocking” each other, but
also gives us a clear picture of the limits of nation-building policies carried out by both
state and regional governments within democratic contexts. The democratic state has not
been successful either in convincing all the citizens of the periphery of the new legitimacy
of the Spanish nation. However, the Basque and Catalan governments have also proven
less efficient than expected in promoting exclusive new national loyalties in their respective
territories.
Since 1975, collective identities in Spain have been heterogeneous. While Spanish
national symbolism is weaker than in other countries, opinion surveys also demonstrated
that even in the Basque Country and Catalonia a peculiar form of “dual patriotism” pre-
dominated. Dual identity, with a stronger emphasis on the Spanish, also predominated in
Valencia, Andalusia and Aragón. Even in those territories where minority nationalisms
have a strong foothold, dual patriotism persisted among a majority of the citizens. By the
end of the 2010s, dual or hybrid patriotism was the predominant identity – to a greater or
lesser degree – in Catalonia, the Basque Country, the Canary Islands and Galicia (Moreno).
Nonetheless, that situation was not necessarily permanent. A sudden deterioration of the
democratic system, a hypothetical loss of legitimacy by state institutions or a far-reaching
social and economic crisis may have unpredictable consequences on national allegiances.
This was precisely the new scenario created by the impact of the economic crisis on Spain
since 2008: A “perfect storm” whose effects have been particularly evident in Catalonia,
where long-term and short-term factors converged (Forti et al.). Amongst the former, the
results of the nation-building policy carried out by the Pujol governments since 1980s may
be mentioned; among the latter, there were short-term phenomena, such as the growing
political frustration caused by the failure of the reform of the Autonomy Statute since
2004, which would have formally recognized the distinctive quality of Catalonia within
the State of the Autonomous Communities. All those elements were accompanied by the
reframing of the pro-independence discourse by the main actors in the nationalist Catalan
scene. In the wake of the devastating effects of the economic crisis that affected the country
since 2008, Catalan nationalists prioritized civic values over cultural issues, placing the
achievement of an independent state within the EU as a necessary goal to improve the
welfare of the whole Catalan citizenry. This objective was to be fulfilled through peaceful
mass mobilization of Catalan civil society. Although in Catalonia support for full inde-
pendence did not surpass the threshold of 48 percent of the voters in the last regional
elections (in December of 2017), it is uncertain how this territorial issue will evolve in
the near future, particularly since the “hot autumn” of 2017, as unilateral secession pro-
moted by the Catalan government after a non-agreed independence referendum was coun-
teracted by the Spanish state. This was followed by the temporary suppression of Catalan
home-rule and the detention of several Catalan leaders, who were charged with “sedition”
and convicted two years later. Street riots in Barcelona and other towns did not become a
general insurrection. The pragmatic management of the Catalan question by the left-wing
coalition governments presided by Pedro Sánchez (2019–23, 2023–) contributed to calm
down the agitation in Catalonia, and made popular support for secession decrease. Despite
that, the unsolved Catalan question continues to be the litmus test for the evolution of
the Spanish territorial question, and for Spanish democracy as a whole, at the beginning
of the 2020s. The parallel radicalization of right-wing Spanish nationalism, expressed in
the electoral consolidation of Vox, makes the evolution of territorial politics in Spain even
more unpredictable.

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Works Cited
Álvarez Junco, José. Spanish Identity in the Age of Nations. Manchester UP, 2011.
Dowling, Andrew. Catalonia Since the Spanish Civil War: Reconstructing the Nation. Sussex Aca-
demic P, 2013.
Fernández García, Alicia, and Mathieu Petithomme, eds. Les nationalismes dans l’Espagne contem-
poraine (1975-2011): Compétition politique et identités nationales. Armand Collin, 2012.
Forti, Steven, et al., eds. El proceso separatista en Cataluña. Análisis de un pasado reciente
(2006-2017). Comares, 2017.
Mees, Ludger. The Basque Contention. Ethnicity, Politics, Violence. Routledge, 2019.
Moreno, Luis. The Federalization of Spain. Frank Cass, 2009.
Moreno Luzón, Javier, and Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, eds. Metaphors of Spain. Representation of Span-
ish National Identity in the Twentieth Century. Berghahn, 2020.
Muñoz Mendoza, Jordi. La construcción política de la identidad española: ¿Del nacionalcatolicismo
al patriotismo constitucional? Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2012.
Núñez Seixas, Xosé M. Die bewegte Nation. Der spanische Nationalgedanke, 1808–2019. Ham-
burger Edition, 2019 [Barcelona 2018].
Ortega y Gasset, José. España invertebrada: Bosquejo de algunos pensamientos históricos. Calpe, 1921.
Ucelay-Da Cal, Enric. El imperialismo catalán. Prat de la Riba, D’Ors, Cambó y la conquista moral
de España. Edhasa, 2003.

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 17
INDEPENDENCE AS A
POLITICAL STRATEGY
A Party Competition Approach to Secessionism
in Catalonia and the Basque Country

Gemma Sala

Introduction
Recurring demands of independence frequently question the territorial integrity of some of
the oldest states in Europe. Countries where multiple national identities coexist often face
challenges from political parties representing regionally concentrated minority groups in
pursuit of sovereignty. Spain is not an exception. Regional nationalist parties in Catalonia
and the Basque Country continuously make demands for extensive political powers and
have taken turns at pushing for independence. Having always preferred political decen-
tralization to secession in the past, in 2012 Convergència i Unió (Convergence and Union,
CiU), the leading nationalist party in Catalonia at the time, started a relentless campaign
in pursuit of independence that culminated in a unilateral referendum five years later, in
2017. Moving in the opposite direction, also in 2012, the leading Basque Nationalist Party
(Partido Nacionalista Vasco, PNV) returned to government in the Basque Country, but
opposite the secessionist direction taken in Catalonia, it emphasized a devolutionist agenda
that put an end to the secessionist push it had started in 1998. What might explain the
changing position on independence among these leading nationalist parties? When are they
more likely to make a push for secession? This chapter explores the motivations behind the
shift to secessionism in both parties beyond their hope for independence itself.
CiU’s and PNV’s secessionist demands cannot be taken for granted. After all, their
commitment to independence was new –even sudden, in Catalonia. Both parties continu-
ously held the regional government for long periods prior to the radicalization of their
demands (23 and 18 years, respectively). Throughout, their agenda focused on increased
self-government within Spain rather than on rupture with it. In addition, support for inde-
pendence had not increased in the Basque Country prior to the PNV’s 1998 drive for inde-
pendence. While support increased in Catalonia in 2012, it never reached a clear majority
that could guarantee victory in a referendum. Moreover, both parties could anticipate that
the Spanish government would successfully oppose any such referendum. This begs the
question why they radicalized their stances, nonetheless.
I argue that demands for a referendum of independence are contingent upon the prevail-
ing environment of political competition. CiU and PNV pushed for secession at a time when

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-20
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

their continued dominant position in their respective regions was dwindling. Their seces-
sionist drive forced a political realignment aimed to shift the electoral arena in their favor in
two main ways. On the one hand, it helped framing national identity as the main political
issue and positioning their party as its best exponent. On the other, it forced all political
parties to take a stand on the issue of independence, creating a firm dividing line between
both options. As such, I argue, their strategy aimed to help these parties take center stage
within the nationalist platform and push competitors away. Ultimately, their tactics proved
costly for both parties. CiU ceased to exist, as the coalition split and its many factions have
yet to regroup; the PNV survived, but lost government in the immediate aftermath. While
their strategies may have failed, both parties prioritized the potential gains from radicaliza-
tion over the losses they were experiencing while holding moderate positions.
The political competition account presented here adds to well-established explanations
that focus on the dysfunction and the limitations of the Estado de las Autonomías1 to
accommodate national diversity or ad hoc circumstances such as the depth of the economic
and constitutional crisis in Spain, leadership preferences or the international environment.
These accounts provide important pieces of the puzzle, but they either cannot explain the
timing of these parties’ shift to seeking secession or ignore the mid- to long-term motiva-
tions for the risks they took in their push for independence. Other arguments share the elec-
toral competition lens to nationalist radicalization presented here, focusing on outbidding
dynamics between competing ethnic parties. But they discount the role of non-nationalist
forces in those electoral calculations. This chapter analyzes why CiU and PNV chose to
radicalize their stands even though they faced competition not only from strongly secession-
ist parties but from non-nationalist platforms as well.

Catalonia’s Sudden Secessionist Drive

The Catalan government made a very sudden push for independence in 2012,
when then-President Artur Mas announced that “it is time to exercise our right to
self-determination” (García, “Artur Mas: ‘Ha Llegado’ ”). His declaration was unexpected.
Only a few days earlier, he had openly expressed his ambivalence and caution towards inde-
pendence in the context of the growing secessionist sentiment in Catalonia. When asked if
he would join what became a massive demonstration for independence on the Diada, the
main Catalan national holiday, he declined, arguing that, as president, he “had to take an
institutional role, attending to the different sensibilities and preferences of the people of
Catalonia, ensuring to the best of [his] abilities the unity of the Catalan people” (Roger).
He went on to say that independence is “a process that would take three or four decades,
not just three or four years” (García, “Artur Mas: ‘Iría’ ”). Mas’s embrace of secessionism
and push for a referendum was very much out of character, as well as an unprecedented
direction for his party, Convergència i Unió (CiU).
Indeed, since President Mas took office in 2010, he had repeatedly emphasized the need
for a gradual, poised, consensual (and non-specific) national transition that never intended
independence (Convergència i Unió manifesto). Mas’s nationalist strategy aimed to con-
tinue to deepen Catalonia’s self-government. His policy focus was to negotiate new and
improved fiscal conditions for Catalonia, in exchange for his party’s parliamentary support
to the conservative minority government of the Partido Popular (PP) in Spain. By all meas-
ures, his plans and ambitions were very much in line with CiU’s established practice to use
its position as a hinge party whenever the government in Spain fell short of a majority in

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order to negotiate enhanced self-government conditions. CiU’s trajectory up to the fall of

2012 was very much a continuation of the party’s modus operandi as seen throughout its
successive governments between 1980 and 2003.
Mas’s change of heart to embrace independence also runs against the notion that CiU is
an essentially moderate nationalist and devolutionist movement. Radical stands for seces-
sionism up to that point were exclusively attributed to Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya
(ERC), which since its founding in 1931 became a secessionist, left-wing and republican
alternative to the mainstream Catalan nationalism to which CiU was affiliated (Conversi
33). The continued association of these distinctive positions with each of these nationalist
parties generated the widespread notion that CiU’s demands for increased self-government
and ERC’s consistent claims for independence were their immutable defining features rather
than strategic choices, as I will demonstrate.
CiU’s unprecedented shift initiated a drawn-out “process” to attain independence that
fundamentally shook the Catalan political arena. Mas called for snap elections in 2012
and in 2015, which were to serve as referendum proxies. Each time, CiU lost relative sup-
port vis-à-vis ERC and other independentist forces. In the process, Mas lost his party’s
leadership on behalf of Carles Puigdemont, who had long-held strong personal preferences
for independence and who became president of Catalonia in 2016. Secessionist parties
never gathered the majority of the Catalan popular vote, though they were close at times,
and were able to establish governments and electoral coalitions to continue to develop
a roadmap toward independence. This roadmap included a non-binding consultation on
“the political future of Catalonia” in 2014 and a unilateral referendum of independ-
ence in 2017, which culminated in the Catalan Parliament’s declaration of independence
from Spain on October 27, 2017. Massive demonstrations in favor of secessionism, and
some against it, took place throughout the whole period. All along, the Catalan govern-
ment ignored the Spanish Constitutional Court’s rulings against its secessionist initiative
and the Spanish government refused to agree to a referendum. In the aftermath, Catalan
political autonomy was suspended for two months, when the Spanish government made
the unprecedented, and up to that point unthinkable, move of activating article 155 of
the Spanish Constitution to temporarily withhold regional powers. In addition, several
political and civil society organizers were imprisoned on grounds of sedition and other
serious charges, and Puigdemont fled the country to avoid trial and prison, starting a legal
prosecution process that has involved several European countries as well as the European
Union. This high-stakes fistfight between the Catalan and the Spanish governments rea-
ligned the regional party system, as it forced them (as well as the citizens of Catalonia)
to take a firm stand for or against independence and created an abysmal divide between
the two sides.

Secessionist Swings in the Basque Country

The situation in the Basque Country could not have been more different than in Catalonia
in 2012. The Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) won the regional election that same year and,
after a three-year Socialist hiatus, restored a nationalist government that lasts to this day.
Even as CiU mobilized its newfound commitment to Catalan independence, Basque Presi-
dent Iñigo Urkullu centered his priorities on seeking new levels of regional autonomy in the
Basque Country (Rioja Andueza). There was no mention of Basque sovereignty or allusions
to independence. Urkullu’s plans not only distanced his government from the events in

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Catalonia, but also established a clear break with the push for independence that his own
party led between 1998 and 2009.
Indeed, the PNV made a radical secessionist move in 1998, when it engaged in secret
peace negotiations with the Basque terrorist group ETA (Basque Land and Freedom) and
its political counterpart Herri Batasuna (HB, Popular Unity). The agreement resulted in
the Estella/Lizarra Pact and was signed by a wide range of Basque nationalist actors and
established common goals and lines of action. It claimed the recognition of the right of
self-determination of the Basque nation and established a commitment to the active pursuit
of sovereignty from all signatories. Remarkably, the agreement included the PNV’s obliga-
tion to cease cooperation with the main governing parties in Spain, the conservative PP and
the socialist PSOE, and their regional branches. Shortly after the agreement was signed,
ETA declared an indefinite ceasefire, which in practice lasted 14 months. The PNV’s line
of action was unprecedented. It decisively broke the existing 1988 Ajuria Enea Agreement,
which stipulated that only the Spanish government could establish negotiations with ETA
and exacted a commitment to exclude any political party endorsing violence from future
government coalitions. In response to the PNV’s unprecedented alignment with radical
secessionists, PP and PSOE renewed their commitment to each other in the Acuerdo por las
Libertades y contra el Terrorismo in 2000. As such, the main effect of the Estella/Lizarra
Pact was to realign the political schism in the Basque country, from one where violence was
the main dividing line, to one where independence itself drew the line.
Then-President Ibarretxe maintained his party’s commitment to secession even when
ETA renegued on the ceasefire in 1999. In 2001, he announced his ambition to reform the
constitution of the Basque Country in order to provide its government with powers to call
a referendum of independence, as an expression of their right of self-determination. His
proposal was informally referred to as Plan Ibarretxe. The Basque Parliament narrowly
approved it in 2004, with support only from nationalist parties.2 Ibarretxe’s proposal was
ultimately defeated in Madrid, where the PSOE and the PP held a sufficient majority of
the seats to successfully oppose it.3 Ibarretxe tried again in 2008 through other means.
Rather than a regional constitutional reform, he then proposed a referendum law, popu-
larly known as Ley Vasca de Consulta, which was ultimately stricken by the Constitutional
Court. Much like in Catalonia, the push for independence ultimately failed and created a
hard divide along the way between Basque and Spanish parties as diametrically antagonistic
political options.
Ibarretxe’s 1998 push for independence marked a stark departure from the PNV’s gener-
ally moderate strategies since the start of the democratic period. But unlike the 2012 Cata-
lan case, his secessionist drive was consonant with the party’s legacy. The new strategies
were radical but resonated with the ambitions toward sovereignty that important sectors of
the PNV had defended since its origins (Conversi 44–79). Such aspirations have most often
been strategically muffled to give room to less radical nationalist positions. The Basque
Nationalist Party is often characterized as a “patriotic pendulum,” for its long-standing bal-
ancing act between both positions, radical and moderate nationalism (de Pablo and Mees
463). As such, Ibarretxe’s secessionist agenda resonated with a segment of the party’s intel-
lectual trajectory as much as Urkullu’s 2012 return to moderate positions did for another
segment. Each of them represents a swing of the same pendulum in different directions.
The party, however, did not always strike a balance among nationalists of all stripes. In
the 1950s a range of young activists broke away from the PNV under the umbrella of the
Patriotic Left (Ezker Abertzalea). They stood for diametrically opposed ideological tenets

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to the PNV’s, combining Marxist, secularist and unambiguously secessionist agendas, and
many even stood in defense of armed conflict and ETA’s violence (Conversi 222–255). Since
democracy, Herri Batasuna (HB) became the dominant party in this radical left platform,
and it has been the PNV’s main nationalist rival since. In 2001, HB and its sister platforms
were banned for having ties to terrorism, and the nationalist left eventually regrouped in
a new party called Bildu (short for Euskal Herria Bildu, Basque Country Gather). Bildu
immediately became the second most voted coalition in the Basque Country, partially as a
result of ETA’s permanent ceasefire and its dissolution in 2018, and it managed to surpass
PNV in votes in the 2023 general election. Much like ERC in Catalonia, the Abertzale
(Patriotic) left has provided a secessionist counterpoint to the usually moderate compro-
mise in the PNV.

Existing Accounts for CiU’s and PNV’s Switch to Secessionism

What explains CiU’s sudden pursuit of independence in 2012? What accounts for the
PNV’s swing to secession in 1998 and its return to moderation in 2012? Changing their
stance between either accommodation in Spain or rupture with it, suggests that the choice
for one or another option is contingent upon the environment in which the parties oper-
ate. Several accounts on these political shifts focus on structural conditions, others rely on
ad hoc explanations and many combine both. All of them provide important context and
identify favorable conditions for these parties’ strategies. Yet they do not fully account for
the motivations and calculations behind their switching preferences.
Many fingers point at the Estado de las Autonomías as the main culprit for the vari-
ous successive tensions that erupted between the Spanish government and the Catalan and
Basque governments. The State of Autonomous Communities is often characterized as an
incomplete, imperfect or unfulfilled system that promotes competition rather than coopera-
tion between the center and the regions (Aja and Colino; Beramendi; Moreno). The Spanish
Constitution does not establish a federal system but allows for one to be developed (Sala).
It establishes the procedures through which regional governments could be established and,
once they are, it provides constitutional recognition to their jurisdiction. The system, how-
ever, anticipated the creation of self-government structures but hardly provides mechanisms
for shared government. As such, regional governments have come to rely on their leverage
in the Spanish parliament to negotiate increased and asymmetrical levels of political auton-
omy, which makes their voice, as well as the outcomes of their negotiations, conditional
upon the size of the electoral majorities that form after every election (Field 171–191).
From this perspective, generalized dissatisfaction with the functioning of the Estado
Autonómico is what prompted the Catalan government led by the Catalan branch of the
Spanish Socialist party (PSC or Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya) and ERC to promote
an ambitious reform of the Catalan regional constitution (Estatut d’Autonomia de Cata-
lunya). It was approved by both the regional and the Spanish governments, as well as by
popular referendum in Catalonia in 2006. This reform, however, did not have a seces-
sionist ambition. It aimed to deepen Catalan regional autonomy and to constitutionalize
bilateral relations between both governments as well as political prerogatives that up to
that point were contingent upon the changing political climate (Colino 268–277; Keating
and Wilson 551–555). Frustration with the functioning of the Estado de las Autonomías
was also the impulse behind Ibarretxe’s 2001 plan to reform the Basque constitution to
include the right to a referendum for independence and free association with Spain. The

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Basque constitutional project was defeated in the Spanish parliament in 2005; similarly,
the main ambitions of the newly approved Catalan constitution were declared null by the
Spanish Constitutional Court in 2010. Opponents to these regional constitutional changes
argued that the Catalan and Basque reforms were assuming original sovereignty in the
exercise of their autonomy and imposing their preferred territorial structures over the will
of the rest of the country and beyond what the Spanish Constitution allowed. Such defeats
only extended the notion that Spain’s current constitutional arrangement is one where the
country’s majority’s political will is systematically imposed on the regions, and, as such, the
existing framework has no room for Catalonia or the Basque Country’s distinctive political
ambitions. The constitutional crisis was served.
It is hard to say whether Spain’s idiosyncratic federal arrangement is the main problem
and if changing it would be the solution. The forms of cooperation that exist in other fed-
erations are not guaranteed to meet the expectations of bilateralism and free association
with Spain that these regional governments have demanded. In addition, it is known that
decentralized political structures tend to encourage increasing nationalist demands rather
than appease them (Brancati; Sorens). As such, the flaw is in federalism itself as a model
that fails to adequately accommodate multiple national claims. Moreover, if these struc-
tures feed centrifugal tendencies, it is not clear why secessionist drives come and go or why
they take place when they do.
Strategic changes and their timing can also be explained with a range of ad hoc contextual
considerations. If the failed reform of the Catalan constitution set the stage for the mobiliza-
tion for independence, the depth of the Spanish 2009 to 2014 financial crisis also contrib-
uted to it (Gray 47–63). The weakness of Spanish authorities to handle the crisis, and the
long-held belief among nationalists that Spain unfairly taxes Catalonia helped fuel regional
identities. Indeed, research shows that nationalist mobilization tends to increase at times of
economic crisis and of constitutional instability (Hierro and Rico; Muñoz and Tormos).
The 2012 Diada’s massive demonstration for independence, which prompted Catalan
President Mas’ secessionist shift, took place in this context of crisis. Hundreds of thousands
of Catalans took over the streets of Barcelona to claim independence. President Mas’s radi-
cal and immediate shift to embrace secession and to volunteer himself and his party to carry
out the ambitions of the protest is often attributed to the success of grassroots movements
in mobilizing large crowds and maintaining their commitment (Crameri; Gillespie). At a
minimum, popular mobilizations could have motivated Mas to show he was not out of
touch with the citizens’ roar. It also may have provided Mas with an opportunity to change
the focus away from his own government’s difficulties in addressing the economic crisis and
to distract from ongoing allegations of corruption by previous CiU’s governments.
However, constitutional deadlock, economic crisis and increased secessionist sentiment
cannot explain Ibarretxe’s radicalism starting in 1998, since none of these conditions were
present in the Basque country. Other ad hoc factors argue this particular case. Attention
must be placed, instead, on a change in the balance of power within the leadership of
the party in order to explain its independentist push in 1998. The PNV’s dual leadership
structure, keeping the leader of the party separate from the head of the government, has
often leveled accommodationist and secessionist sectors (de Pablo and Mees 408–425).
Ibarretxe’s appointment to lead the government broke that balance, as he and then-party
president Xabier Arzalluz shared secessionist views.
Northern Ireland’s peace process also provides context to understand the PNV’s decision
to negotiate with ETA and its political counterpart HB. The 1998 Good Friday Agreements

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in Belfast provided a referent for a parallel peace process in the Basque Country and a
favorable international environment to achieve it. In addition, France started to decisively
cooperate with Spain’s policing efforts against ETA, when in the past their efforts had been
rather meager (Mees 48). From this perspective, PNV’s negotiations were an attempt to
make a move toward peace in the Basque Country at a time when ETA appeared to be at
its weakest and ready to embrace it.
Ad hoc contextual explanations provide detailed accounts of the prevailing mentalities
and conditions that CiU and the PNV faced when they respectively moved toward seces-
sion. Unlike structural approaches, these conditions can explain the timing and change
from one option to another. Unfortunately, they do not take into account the calculations
that CiU and PNV made before opting for radicalism or for moderation. These accounts
presume that both parties thought that their push for independence would succeed or that
the short-term benefits of responding to popular demands, economic conditions, leadership
trends or organizational weaknesses would outnumber the costs of failing.

Secessionism as a Strategy for Political Competition

Why would CiU embrace independence and push for a unilateral referendum despite know-
ing that its chances to succeed were slim? Why did the PNV turn to secessionism and pursue
constitutional reforms to that effect knowing that their efforts would only be vetoed in
Madrid? Their strategies forged a deeper divide between nationalist and Spanish parties in
both regions and alienated former coalition partners in ways that left little room for rever-
sal if their strategies failed. The secessionist route is a risky one and the odds to achieve its
aims were not so apparent. Indeed, neither region attained independence nor support for
it from a majority of their populations. In addition, CiU did not survive the challenge; the
coalition dissolved in 2015, after 37 years of successful partnership. In the Basque Country,
Ibarretxe’s secessionist push costed the party its continuity in government, as it fueled sup-
port for the Socialist party, enabling the PSOE to take control over the regional government
for the first time. Given these outcomes, we must ask, why did these parties undertake these
risky and uncertain paths?
This section explores the ways in which the dynamics of electoral competition could
have factored into these parties’ strategic calculations. CiU’s and PNV’s secessionist turns
took place at a time when their existing political or electoral platforms were dwindling,
and their competitors were becoming menacing political alternatives (see Figures 17.1 and
17.2). In both cases, the parties’ radicalization shook the political arena, creating an oppor-
tunity for these parties to recover their dominance on the nationalist front and to displace
and weaken their state-wide competitors. From this perspective, these parties’ turn to seces-
sionism aimed to regain support from both radical and moderate voters ascribed to a strong
nationalist identity but who did not vote for CiU or PNV any longer.
The structure of political competition in Catalonia and the Basque Country is differ-
ent but shares important features. Both CiU and PNV are center-right parties and have
held dominant electoral positions in their respective regions (see Figures 17.1 and 17.2).
CiU was the most voted party in Catalonia in all but one regional election from 1980 to
2015, when the party dissolved. It formed consecutive governments for 23 years and held
absolute majorities, controlling more than half of the seats in the regional parliament, for
the first 11 years. The PNV’s record is equally impressive. It won every election and has
held government to this day, with the exception of one single legislative term when the

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Basque Socialists (PSE, Partido Socialista de Euskadi) took over. Party control falls short
of hegemonic only because it has never held an absolute majority, relying on coalitions or
parliamentary agreements to govern.
These parties’ main competitors also share similarities. Both CiU and PNV are flanked
between state-wide parties on one hand and the nationalist left on the other (Ross 488–495).
On the one hand, the regional branch of the Socialist party (PSC in Catalonia and PSE in
the Basque Country) has traditionally been their closest electoral rival in both regions, and
the conservative Partido Popular (PP or Popular Party) a close second at times in the Basque
Country. On the other, the nationalist left in each region consists of a number of factions
that consistently hold more radical stances than CiU and PNV in each region, among which
ERC and HB have been the most prominent. The secessionist push in both regions altered
the political landscape in ways that fundamentally changed these patterns. In Catalonia,
CiU’s coalition dissolved in 2015, Ciutadans (Citizens, or C’s) emerged as the new political
force relegating PSC to fourth position in 2017 and CUP (Candidatura d’Unitat Popular, or
Popular Unity Candidature) and CSP (Catalunya Sí Es Pot, Catalonia Yes We Can) entered
the political arena as well. In the Basque Country, the most relevant distortions to this pat-
tern took place in 2002 when HB was declared illegal for its ties to terrorism, leading to the
fragmentation of the Abertzale left, and in 2012 when it successfully regrouped as Bildu.
Just prior to their radicalization, these parties’ continued ability to sustain large majori-
ties dwindled significantly, for the first time threatening their dominant position. CiU’s
electoral majority became progressively eroded, reaching its lowest share of the vote in
2003 (see Figure 17.1) and paving the way for the three-party coalition (PSC, ERC and
ICV) that removed them from government. CiU only regained sufficient electoral strength

Figure 17.1 Results of Regional Parliamentary Elections in Catalonia 1980–2021 (% of Votes).

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to govern in 2010, with a majority that fell quite short of the landslides of the past. Party
leadership had good reasons to worry about CiU’s lower electoral ceiling, considering that
its two main competitors, the Socialist PSC and the independentist left ERC, were at an
all-time low in terms of votes, having been heavily penalized for failing to secure the ambi-
tious regional constitutional reform they embarked on during their three-party government.
Their support dropped a combined 17% in 2010, yet CiU only recovered 7% of votes from
the previous election. Adding to its limited majority were the aforementioned economic
downfall, constitutional crisis, massive protests and corruption charges against the party,
all of which did not make its regained majority seem long lasting.
The dominant position of the PNV in the Basque Country was not always as apparent
(see Figure 17.2). In 1986, a split in the party weakened its majority. Since then, the party’s
ability to form a government required successive coalitions with Eusko Alkartasuna (EA),
a splinter faction, and with the Basque Socialists (PSE). However, the electoral base of both
coalition partners grew weaker throughout the 1990s, threatening the PNV’s chances to
continue to be in government. Making matters worse for the PNV, there were no obvi-
ous candidates with whom to forge alternative alliances. On the one hand, the then-rising
conservative PP was unlikely to agree to a coalition government and, even if it did, it could
alienate the PNV’s nationalist base and the left-wing segment of its voters; on the other
hand, a pact with the nationalist left HB would question the party’s hard line against ETA’s
violence. By 1998, when PNV initiated its secessionist push, the party’s narrow majority,
weakening partners and limited options were not a good omen for their continued success.

Figure 17.2 
Results of Regional Parliamentary Elections in Basque Country 1980–2020 (% of
Votes).

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How could a shift toward secessionism improve the electoral and government chances
of CiU and PNV? It is certainly counterintuitive to expect that their radicalization could
broaden their base, especially when their closest competitors were not the existing seces-
sionist parties in their respective regions. Indeed, nationalist radicalization is often under-
stood as a process of ethnic outbidding between nationalist parties competing for the same
voters (Chandra; Fernandez-Albertos and Lago). From this perspective, these parties’ seces-
sionist surge would be due to increased competition with more radical secessionist plat-
forms in each region – ERC in Catalonia and HB in the Basque Country. Yet the evolution
of electoral competition leading up to their secessionist drift does not provide evidence for
that argument. ERC had just lost half of its voters in 2010; HB’s support prior to 1998
remained relatively low and unaltered. The electoral competition approach to secessionism
needs to look beyond the tensions between moderate and radical nationalists on which the
ethnic outbidding argument focuses, to include the role of non-nationalist parties in their
secessionist calculations.
To the extent that there were medium to long-term strategic calculations in CiU’s sudden
embrace of independence, its referendum strategy could have been an attempt to recover a
critical segment of the vote it had gradually lost. Why they lost these voters provides insight
into their strategies to get them back. On the one hand, a segment of dissatisfied CiU voters
had moved to ERC in the past, as it is its closest party in nationalist electoral spectrum. By
2012 the transfer to ERC was only expected to increase, as support for independence was on
the rise and strongly mobilized. For lack of a better alternative, CiU claimed a stake on that
movement, aiming to position the party as the spearhead and to limit a potential electoral
drain toward ERC. The logic of ethnic outbidding, understood as the dynamics of competition
between nationalist parties in pursuit for the same voters, works well from this perspective.
But CiU lost votes to their competitors on the other side of the spectrum as well. Indeed,
the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC) made a dent into CiU’s solid electoral base through time.
The PSC’s growing frustration at placing second in every Catalan election led to concerted
efforts to attract moderate nationalists who identify as Catalan but do not seek independ-
ence, distancing itself from the Spanish socialist PSOE, and developing an agenda to empha-
size the “C” (for Catalan) over the “S” (for Socialist) in their acronym (Roller and van
Houten 15–16). The strategy paid off in 1999 and 2003 – it took the PSC 19 years to obtain
a .2% electoral advantage and 23 years to be able to form a government (see Figure 17.1).
The PSC’s slow electoral accomplishments would suffer immensely in the “yes/no”
environment of a referendum. CiU secessionist move forced all political parties to take
unambiguous stands not only on independence but also on whether Catalonia has a right
to decide its future in a referendum at all – the latter being an issue that 71% of people
in Catalonia endorsed (Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió; Serrano). The PSC, as a branch of a
Spain-wide socialist platform, could only stand on the side of “no” on both counts, losing
its carefully built reputation as a party that is devoted to Catalonia’s interests. Since then,
the party reached unprecedented low levels of electoral support, from which it only began
to recover in the 2021 regional elections (see Figure 17.1). As such, CiU’s secessionist drive
quickly undermined the PSC’s decades-long efforts to court Catalanist voters. Consequen-
tially, the party’s referendum drive was not just an immediate response to popular demands
at a time of crisis, nor was it an outbidding race between competing nationalist parties.
Rather, it had its electoral competitors on both sides in mind.
In the Basque Country, the PNV’s secessionist turn in 1998 was also a response to the
dynamics of political competition and to the need to swing the political balance in its favor.

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 Independence as a Political Strategy

The 1998 Estella/Lizarra Agreements between nationalist platforms broke with the previ-
ous 1988 Ajuria Enea Agreements among the parties that condemned ETA’s violence. The
new pact placed the PNV in the driver’s seat of a major nation-building project, leading all
other nationalist forces. In addition, the new pact established a commitment among nation-
alist parties to back each other’s advancement towards sovereignty, opening new avenues
for parliamentary support and coalition-building that were not available under the terms of
Ajuria Enea – which only allowed for alliances with the weakened PSE and with an increas-
ingly strong but irreconcilable PP. The first evidence of the success of the new strategy was
that Ibarretxe’s investiture as president in 1998 counted for the first time with the support of
the radical Abertzales (EH), a sector that had abstained from voting every previous election
as an act of institutional defiance. Their support allowed the PNV to cut its dependence on
the Basque socialists and made it harder for an alternative government led by PP or PSE to
gather sufficient support in the regional parliament. Perhaps most revealing is the fact that the
Estella/Lizarra Pacts that fundamentally transformed the political alignments in the Basque
Country were signed a month prior to the 1998 election. At a minimum, the electoral schedule
and the increasingly likely possibility of a PP-PSE majority were unavoidable considerations.
After the Estella/Lizarra agreements failed once ETA resumed violence, President Ibar-
retxe furthered the PNV’s secessionist drive in 2001, with his attempt to inscribe the right
to hold a referendum for independence within the Basque constitution (Plan Ibarretxe), in
an effort to maintain the party’s position at the forefront of nationalism. Given the extent
of fractionalization of the radical nationalist left since HB and EH were banned in 2002 for
their connections to terrorism, the PNV had an opportunity to rally the nationalist platform
under its label, and to push the PP and PSE into the antagonistic role of denying Basque
citizens “their” right to decide. Indeed, by 2003, 78% of nationalist voters of any stripe
supported holding a referendum. In addition, support for the PSE among all voters dropped
13 percentage points in just six months (Euskobarómetro). However, the PNV’s reforms
were vetoed and the nation-building strategies they pursued also failed to galvanize sup-
port, probably because they had already spent their political capital in 1998 and because
the illegalization of radical left parties demobilized a large sector of secessionist voters.
Indeed, in the 2005 elections, turnout dropped by 11 points and the PNV lost 22% of the
votes they had amassed in the previous elections. Such a demobilization could potentially
explain why Ibarretxe did not push as hard for independence as Catalan nationalists would
ten years later, never attempting a unilateral referendum after Spain vetoed the PNV’s initial
efforts to reform the Spanish constitution.

Conclusion
There is a strategic logic to secessionism. The evolution of political competition in Cata-
lonia and the Basque Country suggests that CiU’s and PNV’s push for independence was
influenced by their relative strength in the political arena. Calls for a referendum of inde-
pendence in both regions were driven by their need to shake the political arena in a direc-
tion in which national identity became the centerpiece of the elections and where parties
in and outside the nationalist platform were forced to take unambiguous stands on the
question of secession. As such, CiU and PNV’s push for sovereignty can be understood as
an attempt to attract nationalist voters of any stripe. Their strategy intended not only to
usurp the space of more radical nationalist options but also to displace increasingly power-
ful state-wide parties whose commitment to the region was under question.

231
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

The arguments in this chapter intend to make two main contributions. One is to fill the
missing gaps in our understanding of the motivations behind these nationalist parties’ deci-
sion to take on radical positions, despite the risks. The dynamics of territorial decentraliza-
tion in Spain, demands from below, and circumstantial crises, all contribute to the build-up
of nationalist tension. But a full account of the calculations behind their secessionist drive
requires consideration of the additional electoral benefits that potentially derive from it.
Competition with more radical nationalisms is part of the story, but competition with
non-nationalist state-wide parties also contributes to their motivations for independence.
A second contribution of the chapter is to help define the conditions under which nation-
alist radicalization may take place in a comparative perspective. Since this is the story of
nationalist parties in weakened or threatened positions, secessionist drives should be less
likely in places where a dominant nationalist party can sustain its electoral base and its
ability to govern. In other words, strong nationalist parties will have less incentives to seek
independence than weaker or threatened ones, regardless of where that threat comes from.

Notes
1 Estado de las Autonomías is the name by which the Spanish model of political decentralization is
known.
2 PP and PSE opposed the proposal, as did three representatives from the radical nationalist coalition
EH, for whom the reform was not enough.
3 Regional constitutional reforms must be approved both in the regional and the central govern-
ments. In Spain, only regional nationalist parties from the Basque Country, Catalonia, Navarre and
Galicia, with representation in the national parliament, supported the proposed reforms.

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 18
PATRIARCHY, POWER, AND
WOMEN’S INDEPENDENCE
The Transformation of Marriage and Families
in Spain, 1976–2020

María José González

Introduction
Spain is marked by a long history of conservative and patriarchal structures that have pro-
foundly curtailed women’s opportunities for economic independence and self-fulfillment. In
contemporary times, the long Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975) set back Spanish women,
and also set them apart from their Western European counterparts.1 In the 1960s, most
married women were economically dependent on their husbands and assumed the bulk of
domestic and child or elder care activities. As women gained more opportunities in the labor
market since the early 1980s, the rules governing intimate partner relationships also changed.
Longtime taken-for-granted norms about couples’ economic organization and the gendered
division of labor had ceased to be valid for most young people since the 1980s, and individu-
als have been adopting new values and social norms to guide their daily lives. The traditional
“male breadwinner family,” a model prevalent in Spain until the late 20th century, entered
into a crisis during the early 1980s when alternate types of partnerships began to emerge.
The feminist movement and ideological shifts in the younger generations have driven
most changes in family life in Spain since the early 1980s. These factors have contrib-
uted to the erosion of traditional marriage and family structures, through lobbying for
policy reform from a gender equality perspective (Goldscheider, Bernhardt, and Lappegård;
Valiente). This situation has occurred in parallel to the unprecedented increased entry of
women into higher education and the labor market in the early 1990s, as well as some
limited changes to men’s roles within the family, as they take on some responsibilities tra-
ditionally performed by women. The weakening of the patriarchal family has been a grad-
ual process initiated during the mid-1970s that remains unfinished (González et al.; Abril,
Jurado-Guerrero, and Monferrer). When referring to the patriarchal family, I mean the
“male breadwinner family” where men specialize in paid work and hold most of the eco-
nomic power in the household, while women provide the unpaid domestic labor needed to
sustain the family. However, as I also argue throughout this chapter, due to the dominance
of patriarchal values, the transformation of traditional gender roles in the family and the
workplace remains very difficult to achieve. Indeed, patriarchal values still permeate gender
relations within both families and institutions in Spain.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-21 
 Patriarchy, Power, and Women’s Independence

Using data from the Labor Force Survey (LFS) for the period from 1976 to 2020 and sec-
ondary data from different national archives, this chapter will chart the transformation of
gender relations, the institution of marriage, and family structures in contemporary Spain.2
The chapter is organized in two parts and a conclusion. In the first part, I describe the insti-
tutional context including policy reforms over time and the pluralization of family forms.
In the second part, I illustrate the evolution of women’s participation in the labor market
and its connection to the transformation of the family structure. In the concluding section,
I reflect upon current barriers to improving gender equality in relationships and society as
a whole, as well as considering the uncertainties generated by the unexpected outbreak of
the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

The Weakening of the Patriarchal Family From the Mid-1970s to 2020

Policy Change and Gender Equality

A long history of patriarchy and sexism has shaped every aspect of women’s lives in Spain.
Well into the 1970s, Spain was considered a backward country in gender equality terms
(Valiente 101). More than three decades of Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975) and fam-
ily policies influenced by the ideology of National Catholicism severely curtailed women’s
right of access to paid work, reproductive rights, and sexual freedom (Valiente; Gallego
Méndez; Morcillo; Nash). Franco’s dictatorship was a despotic and corporatist political
system that adopted extremely conservative policies, particularly from 1939 to 1959. The
state developed the ideal of the “family wage” (i.e., the male earner’s wage was in theory
required to provide for his wife and children), which directly discouraged the participation
of married women in the labor market, and privileged male workers. At that time, a hus-
band’s salary in the industrial sector was adjusted according to the number of dependent
relatives at home and having a stay-at-home wife resulted in special wage enhancements
(Landwerlin 68–9). This remuneration system was justified to preserve the cohesion of tra-
ditional families, preferably large families, which were considered the foundation of a great
nation (Nash 160–177). In reality, this supposed pronatalist policy was ultimately used to
alleviate poverty among men working in the industrial sector during harsh economic times
(Landwerlin 69).
From the 1960s onward, Spain entered a new period of economic growth, but family
policies were still profoundly influenced by patriarchal values, which provided privileges
to husbands and men in general due to their access to paid work and welfare policies (Car-
rasco 93). However, new legislation was enacted to permit women’s participation in the
labor market during the new economic boom, in the period of desarrollismo or develop-
mentalism (1959–1974). In 1962, a new law was passed (Law 22/1961) that provided more
rights for working women, such as the recognition of equal pay, legislation against gender
discrimination at work, and prohibiting companies from dismissing women due to their
marital status. Yet married women still had to wait until the end of the dictatorship in 1975
to work outside of the household without their husbands’ permission.
The Spanish transition to democracy (1975–1978) represented a new milestone for wom-
en’s rights, as important social reforms were introduced to promote women’s emancipation.
At this time, male privileges as head of households began to deteriorate. Most gender equal-
ity policy reforms were orchestrated by well-organized feminist movements that flourished
at the time and were mobilized by left-wing political parties and civil society associations

235
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

(Valiente 10). The most notable reforms included legalizing the use of contraceptives (1978),
decriminalizing non-marital unions (1978), legalizing divorce (1981), recognizing children
born out of wedlock who were previously considered “illegitimate” (1981), partial decrimi-
nalizing of abortion (1985), and giving each couple the freedom to choose between joint or
individual taxation (1989), which incentivized the employment of partnered women. Some
feminist scholars remained critical of the resulting social policies, which in their opinion still
assumed the male breadwinner family model. For instance, married women were entitled to
public healthcare because they were dependent on their husbands, but were not eligible in
their own right. Furthermore, the supposed efficacy of traditional families to provide mutual
help and support for dependent family members, particularly by self-sacrificing wives who
performed most of the unpaid work, was interpreted as a disincentive for the expansion of
family policies (Carrasco; Naldini; León and Pavolini).
A new turn in gender equality policies took place from the 1990s onward, with legislation
aimed at supporting working parents. According to a European directive (Law 42/1994),
the state had to protect the rights of pregnant workers, as well as ensuring women’s right
to breastfeed at work. Thus, maternity leave was extended from the 14 weeks provided in
1989 to 16 weeks in 1994, and economic compensation was changed from 75% to 100%
of the regulatory base salary. Furthermore, the provision for child care services for children
under age 3 has increased significantly since the 1990s, and the provision for full-time
pre-primary school (three-year-olds and up) became universal from early 2000.3 During
the period of 1991–1992, only 3.3% of children under age 3 were in child care centers; by
2019–2020, this figure had increased to 41%.
The expansion of pre-primary education has been extremely important for supporting
working parents and dual-earner families (Nollenberger and Rodríguez-Planas 133–4).
The expansion of childcare services may have also created a beneficial, collateral effect on
work-life balance policies. Indeed, during the socialist governments (2004–2010), there
was a proliferation of new gender equality policies (Bustelo; Calvo and Martín; Lombardo,
“The Spanish Gender”; Valiente). Finally, the gender equality policies implemented since
the beginning of the 21st century have given a boost to women’s economic independence
and work-life balance.4 In this respect, the reform of the parental leave system and the
introduction of a “daddy” quota (i.e., an individual non-transferable right for fathers for
parental leave) have been particularly remarkable. During the 1980s, fathers only had
two days of paid leave to be with their newborn child, while working mothers had fourteen
weeks. In 2020, the policy permited 12 weeks of paid leave for employed fathers (including
self-employed) and 16 weeks for mothers; both compensated at 100% of earnings by the
Social Security Fund.5 On 1 January 2021, Spain reached a significant milestone by becom-
ing the first country in the world to offer equal and non-transferable parental leave to both
mothers and fathers, granting them 16 weeks of fully paid individual leave, irrespective of
their marital status or sexual orientation.6
Both policy makers and feminist academics have high expectations for this reform of the
parental leave system to reduce gender discrimination in the labor market (Pazos Morán
73). This discrimination occurs due to employers’ gender stereotypes and their perception
of women as less committed to paid employment than men. This particularly occurs when
women are mothers or when they are simply young (González, Cortina, and Rodríguez
10–11). Future studies will reveal the extent of the impact of the parental leave system on
gender equality within families, and whether it has reduced gender discrimination in the
labor market.

236
 Patriarchy, Power, and Women’s Independence

Plurality and Diversity of Family Relations

Policy reforms and ideological changes have prompted the transformation of family life
and life-long trajectories in Spain. Although from 1958 to 1977 (the baby boom years)
the norm was to have very large families (the total fertility rate was 2.93 children per
woman in 1965) and nearly all women married within the Catholic Church, from the late
1970s onward (a period of sharp fertility decline) women showed less interest in mar-
riage and homemaking, became more career-oriented, or simply enjoyed the educational
and labor-based opportunities that had not been available to their mothers. During the
early 1990s, Spain was already one of the countries with the lowest-low fertility rates in
Europe (Billari, “Lowest-Low” 2), and by 2019, it had reached the level of 1.23 children
per woman.7 The generational break from the baby boom to the baby bust was accompa-
nied by a dramatic increase in women’s higher education from the 1990s onward, which
at some point even surpassed that of men. In 2019, 54% of women between the ages of 25
and 29 had obtained a higher education compared to just 43% of their male counterparts
(see Figure 18.1).
The educational expansion also resulted in a progressive delay and reduction of marriage
and motherhood rates (see Figure 18.1), and has been parallel to an increase in childless-
ness. In 2018, 19% of women were still childless at the age of 40 according to the Fertility
Survey.8 Involuntary infertility and “single mother by choice” both represented new demo-
graphic behaviors that had also contributed to the rising demand for assisted reproductive
treatments. In 2018, at least 5.4% of women under the age of 55 had undergone some type
of reproductive treatment according to the Fertility Survey.9
It is worth noting that the delay of motherhood has not yet reached a ceiling; there is
room for further delays, as shown in Figure 18.1. This is problematic only because some
women may decide on motherhood too late (in order to achieve biological motherhood) or
may end up having fewer children than desired. Late motherhood should be understood in
the context of structural gender inequalities in families and the labor market. Most working
mothers still assume the “second shift” at home after their outside working day is over, while
fathers’ involvement in domestic tasks and parenting remains rather low (Abril et al.; Cano).

60 36
55 35
50 34
Tertiary education (%)

33
45
32
40 31
35
Mean age

30
30 29
25 28
20 27
26
15
25
10 24
5 23
0 22
1981

1985

1988

2010
2011
1982

2002

2015

2018
2012
1983

1987

1993

1997

2003
1999

2007

2013

2017
1977

1989

1991

1994

1996

1998

2000
2001

2004

2006

2009
1976

1979

1984

1986

1990

1995

2014

2016

2019
1980

1992

2005

2008
1978

2020

Tertiary education (%) Mean age at first child Mean age at first Marriage

Figure 18.1 Women’s Mean Age at First Marriage and First Child, and Proportion of Women in
Higher Education (Age Group 25–29): Spain, 1976–2020.
Source: LFS microdata.

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 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

In the labor market, “la cultura del presentismo” (i.e., rewarding employees for time spent
at the company, rather than for achievements) prevails. This is a culture that promotes long
working hours, long breaks for lunch, and little work flexibility, and it rewards workers who
are present and fully committed to the company all day long (Fernández-Lozano et al. 10).
In addition, there is the problem of working hours, especially in the service sector, which is
highly feminized. These working hours are organized into split working days with long lunch
breaks. This results in long working hours that are difficult to reconcile with family life, so that
many women with family responsibilities work part-time or reduce their working hours with
the consequent wage penalty (Fernández Kranz; Fernández-Kranz and Rodríguez-Planas).10
Figure 18.1 also illustrates new patterns of family formation. In the past, women moved
from their parents’ household to their husband’s home. They simply changed the source
of male dependency from their father to their husband. Now, individuals’ life trajectory
have become more complex and diverse (Billari, “Partnership” 66). For example, since
2005, it has become much more common for women to have children outside of marriage
(see Figure 18.1). In 2018, 47% of children were born to unmarried women, with off-
spring enjoying equal rights regardless of the marital status of their parents. Furthermore,
those parents who decided to formalize their relationship mostly did so in civil, rather than
religious, ceremonies, and only a minority were married in the Catholic Church (20% in
2019). As shown in Figure 18.2, young adult women (aged 35–45) are increasingly living
without a partner, in consensual unions (unmarried), or in same-sex marriages, which were
legalized in 2005 against the wishes of the Catholic Church and conservative political par-
ties. A total of 3.1% of all registered marriages in 2019 were between same-sex partners,
of which 2,630 were lesbians and 2,478 gay men.11 Since 2005, same-sex couples, as well
as unmarried cohabiting couples, have been provided with equal status to that of married
couples, including the right to have and adopt children.

100%

90%
Not living with a partner

80%

70% Consensual unions

60%

50%

40%
Marital unions
30%

20%

10%

0%
1993_I
1990_III
1985_III

1994_II

2000_III
1979_II

1984_II

1986_IV
1988_I
1989_II

1995_III

2004_II
1978_I

1991_IV

1996_IV
1998_I

2001_IV

2008_I
2009_II
2010_III
2006_IV

2014_II
2015_III

2018_I
2019_II
1976_IV

1980_III
1981_IV
1983_I

2005_III

2016_IV
1999_II

2011_IV
2013_I
2003_I

Figure 18.2 Women’s Living Arrangements (Age Group 35–45): Spain, 1976–2020.
Source: LFS microdata.

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 Patriarchy, Power, and Women’s Independence

Living alone, living without a partner, single motherhood, cohabitation, divorce, and
living in same-sex unions are part and parcel of the progressive “deinstitutionalization”
of marriage (Cherlin 848). Divorce rates have significantly increased in Spain over the last
decades. In 2019, there were 95,320 cases of annulment, separation, and divorce, which
represented a rate of 2 per 1,000 inhabitants. Marriages dissolved via divorce had an aver-
age duration of 16.5 years, while the duration of marriages that resulted in separation was
23.2 years.12 Marriage has become less frequent as the expected framework for intimate
partnerships, childbearing, and family life, and new family configurations have risen, based
on changing social norms. Non-marital unions, for instance, reproduce a more egalitarian
division of labor than marital unions. A recent study focusing on time use data indicated that
men in consensual unions are more involved in domestic and caring activities, while women
are less involved in total domestic work, than they used to be (Domínguez-Folgueras 1641).
This section has summarized the main changes in family policy and family formations
from the mid-1970s onward. In the next section, I describe women’s entry into the labor
market and its implications for the progressive decline of the male breadwinner family since
the early 1990s.

Women’s New Role in the Labor Force

Since the early 1990s, efforts achieved by political welfare reform and the feminist move-
ment have furthered the political goal of mobilizing the female workforce in Spain. The
gender gap in employment is also used as a benchmark by each European Union (EU) state
to assess national economic performance, and women’s increased participation in the labor
force has been part of the political agenda since Spain joined that organization in 1986.
Currently, the rate of employment for Spanish women still falls slightly below the European
average but has increased substantially in recent years, as illustrated in Figure 18.3.13
Many of the changes in employment patterns have resulted from the new role of moth-
ers and married women in the labor market. Married women gradually approached the
same level of employment as their male counterparts during the period between 1976 and
2007 (see Figure 18.3). However, the 2008 financial crisis truncated this positive conver-
gent trend in women and men’s employment pattern. Married women’s employment rates
stabilized and only started to recover in 2014. The 2008 financial crisis impacted the Span-
ish economy gravely and destroyed thousands of jobs in the process. Unemployment rates
escalated to an unprecedented level of 26.06% during the second quarter of 2013.14 This
financial crisis was strongly connected to the housing bubble and caused enormous job
losses for men in the construction sector. Meanwhile, women’s employment served as a
family “cushion,” as they were less affected by the crisis.
The economic recovery initiated in 2014 was again truncated by the COVID-19 pan-
demic crisis. However, this time, the crisis has impacted most families severely, female
workers in the retail and service sector in particular. Indeed, many workers have lost their
jobs during the lockdown (the number of employed individuals fell by 1.35 million between
January and June of 2020), and many were temporarily laid off or had to reduce their
working hours while receiving wage compensation (see the sharp employment decline in
2020 shown in Figure 18.3).
Today, marital status is no longer an issue for the employment of women. However,
motherhood still marks a difference in women’s employment patterns and careers and
is often associated with a more traditional division of household chores (Grunow and

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 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

100%

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

Single women Married women Single men Married men

Figure 18.3 Employment Rates (Aged Group 25–45) by Gender and Civil Status: Spain, 1976–2020.
Source: LFS microdata. Employment rates are calculated as the ratio of the employed to the working-age
population.

Evertsson). According to time use data for dual-earner couples (women 30–45 years old)
with small children (i.e., at least one 0–3-year-old child), women spend almost an extra
month (24 days) than men every year, on average, performing child care (González and
Jurado 51). Women’s “second shift” at home is especially problematic because it reinforces
gender inequalities throughout the life trajectory and constitutes a barrier for gender equal-
ity in the labor market.
In Figure 18.4, I illustrate women’s and men’s (25–45 years old) employment rates
according to the number of children they have for the period from 1976 to 2020. It is
evident that mothers have progressively joined paid work, following the line of women
without children. However, there is a gap between mothers and non-mothers that has never
quite closed. If we take the year before the pandemic, 2019, we can see that 80% of women
(25–45 years old) without children participated in paid work, and only around 50% of
women with three or more children did so (a 30-percentage-point difference). The difference
between mothers of one or two children and non-mothers was lower (an 8-percentage-point
difference) but still quite high. However, it is striking that the presence of children at home
has had almost no effect on fathers’ employment. Only fathers of three or more children
seem to have a slightly lower employment rates than non-fathers. These data points reflect
that persistent traditional gender norms govern parenting behavior to this day in Spain.
Law 39/1999 on the Reconciliation of Work and Family Life illustrates the difficulty
encountered when contravening the social expectations of motherhood. This law regulated
reduced work schedules for family reasons such as looking after children, and granted a
high level of time flexibility and protection against dismissal for working parents. Despite
fathers and mothers having the same individual entitlement, it is mostly women who take
advantage of these provisions. In 2015, 95% of workers with a reduced schedule for family
reasons (i.e., part-time parental leave) were women (Fernández Kranz 51). This gendered
effect occurred not only due to the persistence of traditional gender norms shaping parent-
ing behavior but also because persistent structural inequalities place men in a privileged
position when bargaining over family decisions such as reduced schedules (i.e., men tend to
have higher salaries and occupational prestige, while parenting does not bring much social

240
 Patriarchy, Power, and Women’s Independence

95%

85%
Women
75%

65%

55%

45%

35%

25%

15%

Childless 1 Child 2 Child 3 or more children

95%

85%

75%
Men
65%

55%

45%

35%

25%

15%

Childless 1 Child 2 Child 3 or more children

Figure 18.4 Employment Rates of Partnered Women and Men Aged 25–45 Years by Number of
Children (Childless, 1 Child, 2 Children, and 3 or More Children): Spain, 1976–2020.15
Source: LFS.

recognition). This means that partnered men are in a better position within the couple to
bargain over who remains in full-time paid work or reduces their working hours.
The introduction of women to paid work has also transformed the economic organiza-
tion of families. I have reconstructed the distribution of couples by earnings structure (age
group from 30 to 45) for the period between 1999 and 2020 in Figure 18.5.16 In 1999,
almost half of the couples (48%) lived according to the male breadwinner family model,
where the husband was the only economic provider in the household. This model, based on
a rigid gendered division of labor and on married women’s full economic dependence, rap-
idly declined during the early 1990s, and by the turn of the 21st century only represented
26% of couples. Currently, the emerging model is the dual-earner family (i.e., both partners
working in the labor market). However, these couples have been affected severely by the
recent COVID-19 recession. In 2019, 66% of couples were dual-earners, but this propor-
tion dropped to 59% during the peak of the pandemic crisis due to increased unemploy-
ment, job losses within the service sector, and women’s difficulties maintaining a job while
attending to various care-giving responsibilities.
Women’s vulnerability to economic crises reveals the enduring patriarchal structures in
Spanish society. For instance, women are the first to suffer from the symptoms of political
austerity. As argued by Gálvez and Rodríguez-Modroño, economic crises reinforce social
inequalities and the risk of poverty for women due to the privatization of the public sector,
cuts in gender equality policies, and the implementation of neoliberal employment policies
(134). The weakening of the welfare state under austerity policies has increased the demand

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 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

70
65
60
Female
55
breadwinner
50
45
% 40 Dual-earners

35
30 Both unpaid
25
20
15 Male
10 breadwinner
5
0

Figure 18.5 Distribution of Couples by Earnings Structure (Age Group 30–45): Spain, 1999–2020.
Source: LFS microdata.

for women’s unpaid domestic work, which some feminist scholars such as Gálvez, have per-
ceived as an attempt to re-impose patriarchal family norms (147). Yet other authors such
as Lombardo have argued that “feminist struggles against conservative ideologies, women’s
resistance towards ‘going back home’ and civil society mobilizations against austerity poli-
tics have so far blocked the redomestication of women, thereby contributing to maintain-
ing a public gender regime in Spain” (“The Spanish Gender” 1).17 In other words, despite
the negative consequences of the recent economic crises, women have managed to remain
in paid work and have driven the political agenda in favor of a social-democratic gender
regime (Lombardo “The Spanish Gender” 11). This theory is corroborated by the decrees
approved on October 2020 against gender inequality in the workplace, which oblige com-
panies with more than 50 employees to implement a register that guarantees transparency
in salaries (i.e., wage data disaggregated by sex of all company employees, including base
salary, bonuses, and supplemental pay). Thus, in a context of economic uncertainty, with
a substantial risk of a backlash against women’s rights due to austerity policies, initiatives
committed to promoting gender equality are still being implemented.
The figures previously presented illustrate women’s expanding role in the labor mar-
ket and the enormous impact that has had on the economic organization of couples. The
increase in dual-earner couples from 42% in 1999 to 66% by the end of 2019 was particu-
larly impressive, before the pandemic crisis affected the economy. Nonetheless, work-life
balance and gender equality in family life, which includes sharing domestic and childcare
tasks, remain as pending issues, which I will address in the final section.

Conclusion
This chapter has provided empirical evidence of the transformation of gender relations,
marriage, and families in contemporary Spain. The data presented illustrates the progres-
sive weakening of patriarchal gender norms within families and the new role of women in
society. Today, a large proportion of women participate in the labor market, and although
most tend to assume a “second shift” in the home, dual-earner couples are becoming the

242
 Patriarchy, Power, and Women’s Independence

dominant economic arrangement. According to the World Economic Forum, Spain is among
the top ten countries in The Global Gender Gap Index 2020 (the higher the position, the
closer to gender equality).18 This index measures gender-based gaps across four key areas:
Economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and
political empowerment. Spain has climbed in the ranking in recent years thanks to a signifi-
cant increase in women’s presence in political institutions. However, Spain does not score
well in other areas of gender equality. Here, I address four main issues that require urgent
attention on the part of policy makers: Gender pay gaps, family policy, gender violence,
and masculinity. These four areas of gender inequality are strongly interlinked, but I will
discuss them individually.
The first area is the gender wage gap. In 2018, women’s earnings were on average 12.2%
below those of men in Spain.19 The gender wage gap was lower (9.1%) for workers who
earned the least (in the 5th percentile of wages), and higher (16.6%) for workers with
higher wages (in the 95th percentile). The wage gap is often explained by a combination of
factors. First, men tend to be overrepresented in jobs that provide higher wage compensa-
tion because they work overtime, work night shifts, or other shift work outside stadard
work hours. Second, the persistence of the unequal distribution of domestic and care-giving
activities in the family (i.e., women being overloaded) reinforces gender segregation because
women tend to select occupations that allow them more flexibility (i.e., salaries tend to be
lower in largely feminized occupations, CEOE 2019) and are overrepresented in part-time
jobs. Third, due to the persistence of traditional parenting expectations, women are
more exposed to discrimination in the labor market (González, Cortina, and Rodríguez;
Fernández-Lozano et al.).
The second area is family policies. As we have seen, motherhood creates gender inequali-
ties in the labor market. The “motherhood penalty” persists despite significant advances in
family policy such as the parental leave system and the introduction of the “daddy quota”
(i.e., non-transferrable periods of leave reserved for fathers). Again, structural gender ine-
qualities at a societal level, such as the previously discussed gender wage gap, and strong
normative ideals of motherhood may dissuade fathers from making use of some of these
policies. As discussed previously, this is the case with working time reduction (i.e., part-time
parental leave), which is overwhelmingly used by mothers. Imaginative and well-funded
policies involving the active participation of companies are still required to encourage men’s
involvement in childcare and more particularly, in domestic unpaid work.
The third area contributing to gender gap issues is gender violence. In 2012, 13% of
women had suffered gender-based violence (GBV) in Spain (FRA 2014).20 This rate of vio-
lence againts women is rather low compared to countries like Finland and Denmark, some
of the most gender-egalitarian countries in the world, where about 30–32% of women have
suffered GBV, and it is well below the EU-28 average (22%). The lower prevalence of GBV
in Spain could be explained by the fact that union formation and dissolution occur more
often in Nordic countries (i.e., women are exposed to the risk more often), not because men
are less violent in Spain (Permanyer and Gomez-Casillas 1177). A total of 1,059 women
were killed by their spouse, ex-spouse, or current intimate partner between 2000 and 2017
in Spain.21 To place things in perspective, this figure is even higher than the number of vic-
tims of ETA terrorism (a separatist organization in the Basque Country examined in detail
by Ioannis Tellidis’ chapter in this volume), 855 fatalities between 1968 and 2010 accord-
ing to data from the Ministry of the Interior.22 Furthermore, the outbreak of the COVID-19
pandemic crisis, especially during the stay-at-home lockdown order, exposed many women

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to a greater vulnerability to IPV, which has translated into an increase in domestic violence
(Beigelman and Vall Castello 21).
The fourth area is, broadly speaking, masculinity and its social construction. Men have
an important responsibility for transforming patriarchal structures and creating gender
equality. Time use data indicate that Spanish men are more involved in parenting than in
the past (Cano 15); however, women continue to carry the greatest burden of domestic and
care-giving work. Gender inequality will not disappear until men initiate a personal change
and reflect upon the social construction of masculinity and the privileges they enjoy within
the current system of gender relations, what Connell called the “patriarchal dividend” (79).
As argued by Deutsch et al., “gender equality depends as much on the equal responsibility
of men for family work as it does on equal opportunity for women in the public world of
employment and politics” (1000).
Newly formed populist radical right parties, such as Vox, founded in 2013, espouse
an anti-feminist and anti-gender ideology, as seen in their public rhetoric and speeches.23
These speeches have had a certain social resonance because of their extremely radical con-
tent. However, they are totally anecdotal compared to the growing social awareness for
gender equality, as shown, for example, by the fact that in recent years, including those
of the COVID-19 pandemic, the women’s movement has been able to organise the largest
women’s marches in Europe.24 One can only hope that the momentum of feminist discourse
will permeate the political agenda and translate into rapid and broad social change.

Notes
1 This is not to say that women’s living conditions were particularly better before the dictatorship.
In fact, patriarchal values and misogynistic attitudes were also present. However, the dictatorship
represented an important break with the political climate that had emerged during the Second
Republic (1931–1936). As Aguado illustrates, “new legislative and social prospects, encouraged
women to fight for equality in the hope that their demands would actually be conceded. The
republican ‘new Spain’, an alternative to the anti-liberal and Catholic ‘eternal Spain’, would not
only make women visible in the public sphere and extend their rights and liberties (an aspect
that is already well known to and well researched by historians), but also offer them a social and
cultural scene that would enable them to acquire the political and linguistic skills they needed to
build a consciousness and a specific gender identity” (103).
2 This research has been supported by the ClassParent Project (PID2020–119339GB-C22/MICIN/
AEI/10.13039/501100011033), funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the State
Research Agency.
3 Ministry of Education (Retrieved from: www.educacionyfp.gob.es/).
4 “Plan de Apoyo Integral a las Familias” (2001–2004); “Ley Orgánica 1/2004 de medidas de
protección integral contra la violencia de género”; “Ley para la Promoción efectiva de la igualdad
entre mujeres y hombres” (Ley Orgánica 3/2007 de 22 de marzo). For a further discussion, see
Lombardo (“Políticas” 4–5).
5 For further details on the Spanish parental leave system, see the country report by the Interna-
tional Network on Leave Policies and Research at www.leavenetwork.org/annual-review-reports/
country-reports/.
6 Associations from civil society constitute important lobbies in favor of a gender-neutral approach
to the parental leave system as a way to break up the traditional roles that associate care with
women in Western societies. See international network PLENT (https://equalandnontransferable.
org/) and the Spanish Platform PPIINA (https://igualeseintransferibles.org/).
7 Data retrieved from the National Statistical Office (www.ine.es/).
8 See INE (2019) Encuesta de Fecundidad Año 2018. Datos definitivos. Retrieved from www.ine.
es/prensa/ef_2018_d.pdf.

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 Patriarchy, Power, and Women’s Independence

9 See INE (2018) Encuesta de Fecundidad. Datos avance (1/6) Retrieved from www.ine.es/prensa/
ef_2018_a.pdf. Spain is also known as an international destination for assisted reproduction: In
2016 40% of all such treatments in Europe were carried out in the country according to the Euro-
pean Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) as quoted by Pablo León in his
article “Why Spain Is an Increasingly Attractive Destination for Fertility Tourism.”
10 In 2020, the share of part-time work (persons aged 15 and over) among people living in a couple
with children was 25% for women and 3% for men (INE, online statistics: www.ine.es/jaxiT3/
Datos.htm?t=10929, accessed November 2021).
11 Register data retrieved from Vital Statistics (www.ine.es/).
12 Data retrieved from INE (2020): www.ine.es/prensa/ensd_2019.pdf.
13 Women’s employment rate (aged 20–64) was 62% in Spain and 67% in the Euro area of the 19
countries (i.e., Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland,
Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia,
and Spain). Employment rates were retrieved from EUROSTAT statistics (https://ec.europa.eu/
eurostat/databrowser/view/T2020_10/default/table).
14 Retrieved from LFS (Labor Force Survey), Statistics online (www.ine.es/).
15 Employment rates in the figure are calculated as the ratio of the employed to the working-age
population. Employment rates are estimated by adding the number of children in the couples’
household (from the third quarter of 1976 to the fourth term of 1998). From the first term
of 1999, the data included information about the relationship of individuals in the household,
including the number and age of the sampled mothers’ and fathers’ children. This figure combines
the data collected from 1976–1998 and 1999–2020.
16 The time series in Figure 18.4 starts in 1999 instead of 1976 as in previous figures because this
is the first year that couple data could be identified. Since 1999, the National Statistical Office
has provided the individual ID and relationship status of all the members living in the same
household.
17 The gender regime refers to “a set of inter-related gendered social relations and gendered insti-
tutions that constitutes a system” (Walby, Globalization 301). For a further discussion of this
concept, see Walby (Globalization; “Varieties of Gender Regimes”).
18 World Economic Forum (2019) Insight Report Global Gender Gap Report 2020. Retrieved
from: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2020.pdf. Note that Iceland is the most
gender-equal country in the world in first position, while the United States holds 53rd position in
the ranking.
19 This is the adjusted wage gap as estimated by CEOE (2019). This indicator reflects the net pay
gap, which results from a regression analysis when controlling for variables such as employees’
age, education, occupation, and industry.
20 IPV provides the percentage of women aged 18 to 74 who have experienced physical and/or
sexual violence by any partner since the age of 15.
21 Data available at the website of the Government Delegation against Gender Violence (http://esta-
disticasviolenciagenero.igualdad.mpr.gob.es/).
22 Ministry of the Interior, www.interior.gob.es/prensa/noticias/-/asset_publisher/GHU8Ap6ztgsg/
content/id/12522335.
23 For more information on the recent rise of this party see: Zanotti, Lisa, and José Rama.
“Spain and the Populist Radical Right: Will Vox Become a Permanent Feature of the Span-
ish Party System?”, Elections, 2 March 2020, blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2020/03/02/
spain-and-the-populist-radical-right-will-vox-become-a-permanent-feature-of-the-spanish-party-
system/
24 See: Gómez, Manuel V., and Juan Diego Quesada. “Women’s Day Marches in Spain Attract
Mass Numbers Despite Coronavirus Fears”, El PAIS, 9 March 2020 english.elpais.com/soci-
ety/2020–03–09/womens-day-marches-in-spain-attract-mass-numbers-despite-coronavirus-
fears.html

245
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

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 19
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
AND OTHER INSTITUTIONAL
RELIGIONS
The Long Road From Catholic
Monoconfesionalism to Democratic
Religious Pluralism1

Natalia Núñez Bargueño

In memory of Aurora Morcillo

On July 16, 2020, Spain held a state ceremony in Madrid in remembrance of its 28,400
COVID-19 victims. The tribute was presided over by King Felipe VI and attended by 400
people. The assembly was composed of relatives of the victims; representatives of the medi-
cal sector, police, and other essential workers; members of the Spanish national and auto-
nomic governments (with the exception of Vox, the extreme-right party); officials from the
European Union, NATO, and the World Health Organization; ambassadors and diplomats;
and representatives from a dozen religious organizations (including the Catholic Church).
Among other things, this ceremony was significant because it was the first time in the coun-
try’s history that a non-confessional homage had been organized by the state to honor the
victims of a national tragedy. Far from being a simple anecdote, this episode illustrates well
the ideal of positive secularization that characterizes the current situation in Church-State
relationships in Spain.
Religion can be a highly sensitive subject in many contemporary societies. This is doubly
true for countries like Spain, which may still be processing traumatic episodes of the past
in which religion played a significant role (i.e., the Reconquest, colonialism and the loss of
empire, the Civil War, a lengthy dictatorship, etc.). This chapter seeks to provide an account
of the evolving relationship between the Spanish state and religion over the course of the
last two centuries. It illustrates the ways in which current legal and institutional arrange-
ments have been greatly influenced by the history of Spanish nation building. After analyz-
ing the turbulence that characterized the civil-ecclesiastical relations in the nineteenth and
early twentieth century, we will summarize the key features of the alliance of convenience
that took place during General Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975). In spite of its appar-
ent success, we will show that, from the beginning, this union was marked by significant

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-22 
 The Catholic Church and Other Institutional Religions

tensions, that evolved into instances of increasing resistance in the later years of the regime.
The final section investigates the pact that facilitated Spain’s evolution from having a sys-
tem that enshrined a Catholic mono-confessional privilege during the dictatorship, moving
towards a situation in which a democratic religious plurality and religious rights became
possible. We will finish by describing the present-day Spanish religious landscape, which is
characterized by a double phenomenon: the persistence of Catholicism’s cultural and social
influence and the advancement of secularization and of religious pluralism.

From 1851 to 1953: A Century of State-Church Relations

Marked by Concordats
The State-Church relationship in Spain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can
be seen as profoundly marked by the tumultuous events leading to the signature of two
fundamental agreements: the 1851 Concordat (between the government of Queen Isabella
and Pope Pius IX) and the 1953 Concordat (signed by the Francoist state and Pope Pius
XII).2 Among other things, the period was characterized by recurrent dynastic and civil
wars, revolutions, military interventions and pronunciamientos, and popular rioting. These
events greatly influenced civic-ecclesiastical relationships well into the twentieth century.
The transition from royal absolutism to liberalism in nineteenth century Spain was also
rather turbulent. With the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars in Europe (1803–1815), ideas
associated with the French Revolution found their way into the Iberian Peninsula. In the
midst of the conflict, and under the occupation of French troops, Spaniards called for an
assembly to be held: The 1810–14 Cádiz Cortes, the first modern parliamentary assembly
in which deputies from almost all of the territories of Spanish America and peninsular Spain
were elected to participate. Although liberal legislators sought to reform the Church, they
also considered it absolutely natural that the sovereignty that hitherto had been invested
in the Catholic king could be transferred to the new political subject: The nation (de la
Cueva, Religion 278). Consequently, Spain’s first Constitution (1812) attributed to the
nation (and its corresponding state) both the responsibility for protecting Catholicism (the
state religion) and the right to intervene in religious affairs. Confirmed by the 1851 and
1953 Concordats, in general terms, this particular understanding of the State-Church rela-
tionship would remain mostly unchanged until the 1978 Constitution – with the exception
of the 1869 and 1931 texts, during the short-lived First and Second Republics, respectively.
Far from consolidating stability in the country, the end of the Napoleonic Wars marked
the beginning of a period of great turbulence, particularly in civil-ecclesiastical relations.
Identified with absolute monarchy, and as the possessor of immense riches, the Church
became the target of Spanish liberal reforms. Between 1810 and 1843, the Inquisition was
suppressed, the tithe was abolished,3 religious orders were disbanded (their properties sold
in public auction), and the ecclesiastical presence in the areas of charity work and educa-
tion was nearly dismantled. Throughout Spain the Church was at the mercy of the civil
authorities, and in some places – Madrid in 1834, Catalonia in 1835 – at the mercy of angry
crowds (de la Cueva, Religion 278). Inevitably, the intensity of these secularizing reforms
would lead to an intensification of the conflict with the Catholic Church and its supporters.
Many Catholics, including the clergy, would fervently and actively commit themselves to
the absolutist cause. During the First Carlist War (1833–40), some prelates took up arms
in the defense of a return to absolutist religious values, as well as to regain social, cultural,
and territorial governance.4

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Progressively, some of the more pragmatic prelates would come to the realization that
the Church needed to redefine its position vis-à-vis the emerging and dominant liberal state.
Similarly, in the aftermath of the reforms advanced by the Radicales (the radical liberals) in
the 1830s, and after the 1848 European revolutions, conservative liberals, or Moderados,
would start to see the Church as a significant ally in the promotion of social stability. In con-
trol of the government between 1843 and 1854, the Moderate Party opened negotiations
with Pope Pius IX, which culminated in the 1851 Concordat. This international agreement
repaired the Church-(liberal) State rupture that had taken place during the First Carlist War
and that had been intensified by the measures implemented by the Radicales. By recogniz-
ing Roman Catholicism as a state religion, thus entitled to royal protection, the Concordat
partly restored the historical hegemonic position of the Catholic Church in the country.
In addition, the Concordat granted the Church control over the educational system and
guaranteed financial support for the clergy. All these things were granted on the condition
that the Holy See5 officially recognize the legitimacy of Queen Isabel II (a liberal monarch),6
as well as accepting the already concluded public sales of ecclesiastical property, and the
curtailment of religious jurisdiction.
One of the significant issues that the Concordat failed to address is the ongoing dispute,
among different liberal factions, over the public role of the Church. The more progressive
wing of liberalism sought to further redefine and reform the Church’s place in the political
and social order. The period known as the “Sexenio democrático” (1868–74) aimed at ful-
filling many of these aspirations. Along with the separation of the State and the Church and
the abolishment of certain privileges, new measures were introduced, notably civil marriage
(in 1870) and religious freedom (in the 1869 Constitution). This unprecedent situation
provided Protestant churches with the opportunity to establish small communities around
the country (de la Cueva, Religion 281). The return to power of the Bourbon dynasty
would bring the revolutionary experience of the country’s First Republic (1873–1874) to
an abrupt end. Led by pragmatic liberal-conservative Canovas del Castillo, the new gov-
ernment attempted to simultaneously appease ecclesiastical interests and those of moder-
ate reformists. To achieve a workable compromise on the issue of religion was of critical
importance to curtail the increasing forces of political and social unrest. The agreement
was embodied in Article 11 of the proposed Constitution. This article declared Catholicism
as the official state religion, while at the same time it provided a rather limited tolerance
of religious freedom (i.e., it recognized that other religious groups had the right to engage
in private worship). In practice, the State’s accommodation with the Church and its com-
mitment to limited religious pluralism would prove to be two incompatible objectives. The
Church would constantly advocate against religious pluralism on the grounds that it under-
mined the traditional Catholic “unity” of the Spanish nation and that pluralism violated the
legal terms established by the 1851 Concordat.
The period would also be characterized by the resurgence of anticlerical-clerical confron-
tations in Spain and in other European countries (Clark, Kaiser). Coinciding with the reli-
gious revival occurring throughout the European continent, the Restoration had witnessed
a notable reestablishment of the Catholic Church, notably an increase in the participation
in male and female religious orders.7 The orders were the main providers of spiritual, social,
and educational activities and the main agents of expansion of Catholicism. Controversy
over the Church’s increasingly dominant place in Spanish society would enter a particularly
conflictive period in the aftermath of the devastating military defeat at the hands of the
United States during the 1898 Spanish-American War. The loss of the last colonies, with the

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exception of Equatorial Guinea and Ceuta and Melilla, provoked a strong national crisis
and a sharp division between the defenders of religion (clericalism) and the proponents of
secularism (anticlericalism) as they debated the adequate means to “regenerate” the nation.
In this convulsed context, republicanism, socialism, and anarchism would increase their
anticlerical activism.
A combination of pressure from the cited political forces with the development of Catalan
and Basque nationalisms plunged the Restoration (and its civic-ecclesiastic agreement) into
a profound crisis. Although the monarchy would not fall until 1931, General Miguel Primo
de Rivera’s dictatorship (1923–1931) developed a particularly foreceful and proto-fascist
identification between the nation (and the State) and Catholicism. Complacency with the
dictatorship left the Church exposed and vulnerable when the Second Republic arrived in
1931. Not only did the Republic implement the separation of Church and State and fully
recognize religious freedom (including other religions), but an array of secularizing meas-
ures were advanced, particularly in areas such as education, cemeteries, and funerals, as
well as civil relations (marriage and divorce). Additionally, the Church was further deprived
of public financing, the Jesuit order was dissolved, and all public religious ceremonies were
subject to governmental permits. As de la Cueva affirms, “Spain became one of the most
secular states in the West” (Religion 289). However, these provisions, together with the
radicalization of anti-clerical sentiments and conflict, as well as the rise of Fascism and
Communism in the international and national arenas, all contributed to creating an unsus-
tainable atmosphere of increasing social tension and hostility.
Although anticlerical violence had periodically resurfaced during the Second Repub-
lic, it was in the early months of the Civil War (1936–1939) that it would radicalize and
spread violently. It would provide the conflict with powerful religious undertones. At the
war’s end, the new Francoist state set up a dictatorship and violently purged Spain of
all its “sins.” The ensuing repression against any kind of religious or political dissidence
would be ruthless. Catholicism became the religion of the State and was granted a num-
ber of privileges. This intense identification between the nation, the State, and the Church
was known as National Catholicism. All republican legislation having been previously
repealed, the State provided the Church with financial support and significant control over
education, censorship and communications. The defeat of fascist regimes in World War
II (1939–1945) would further consolidate the role of Catholicism in the Francoist state.
In order to survive in the new international world order after the war, the regime had to
greatly curb its fascist component. Several Catholic laymen would be included as ministers
in an attempt to emphasize the Catholic nature of the regime. The ultimate objective was
to use Catholicism’s transnational networks to overturn the political isolation to which
the regime had been condemned in 1945, which kept it from forming part of various key
transnational organizations (Núñez Bargueño and Rodríguez Lago). The Cold War would
facilitate this rapprochement endeavor, as the country would be perceived by the United
States as a valuable ally in the war against Communism. After years of tense negotiations
by ambassadors Ruiz-Giménez and María de Castiella, a new Concordat would finally be
signed in 1953. The 1953 Concordat confirmed the privileges of the Church. However, it
was not only the Church that benefited from the agreement. The treaty would also prove
indispensable for garnering the international recognition desired by the regime: Just a few
months after its signature a new set of military and economic agreements were established
with the American government. In addition, the Concordat contributed to increase the
regime’s domestic legitimation. It thus assured its survival through the harsh period of

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autarky and isolationism (1939–59).8 Another advantage to the regime was obtaining the
right to appoint new bishops, as an effective means to secure Church loyalty. The sig-
nificance of this clause made it one of the most negotiated points of the Concordat. It
was only reluctantly agreed to by Pius XII. This detail points to the implicit tensions that
were already developing between the Vatican, the Spanish Church, and the Francoist State,
which would dramatically erupt in the last few years of the dictatorship.

The Religious Transition: From a System of Privilege,

to One of Rights (1962–1982)9
It is well known that social and economic changes from the late 1950s onwards would
greatly contribute to lay the foundations for the social and political transformation that
would prepare the country’s evolution towards democracy. Much less known is the Church’s
(and more broadly Catholicism’s) fundamental role in this process. As we mentioned in
the previous section, Catholic support for Francoism (and vice versa) displayed significant
instances of tension and ambivalence (Tusell; Hermet; Santa Olalla Saludes). In actual prac-
tice, as the complicated negotiations of the Concordat had illustrated, both the State and the
Church were aware that a strict identification between them was not really desirable. Their
alliance can be conceived of as a “marriage of convenience” (Relaño Pastor). Several facts
support this idea. From the onset of the dictatorship there had been significant competition
(and tension) with the Falange – the Spanish fascist party – over obtaining affiliates from
the worker and youth sectors (both the Falange and the Church desired these groups). By
the 1950s, it was already possible to detect the first, although still very marginal, signs of
“self-criticism” (auto-crítica) within the Church. Although they were voiced by a small num-
ber of prelates and lay people, these critiques would be fundamental to initiating the slow
process of “disentangling” (despegue) of the Church from the Francoist state (Montero).
While it never implied a direct confrontation with the regime, this autocrítica’s emphasis
on pastoral shortcomings significantly qualified the state’s success in handling fundamental
issues, including censorship, education, poverty, and migration.10
It is important here to point out that, contrary to what is commonly believed, Spanish
Catholicism is a rather complex and relatively heterogenous entity. It includes minority – yet
relevant – voices that preached (or pursued their apostolate action) against the grain.11 For
example, while it is true that some bishops, such as Enrique Pla y Deniel, Isidro Gomá y
Tomás, and Leopoldo Eijo Garay, collaborated with Francoism, other bishops, such as,
Francisco de Asís Vidal y Barraquer, Fidel García Martínez, and Pedro Segura, expressed
different degrees of criticism, and bishops like Ángel Herrera Oria and Vicente Enrique y
Tarancón tried to change the regime from within. Also, while the period 1945–1958 was
marked by the laymen of Catholic Action (an international catholic organization), from
1958 onward it was Opus Dei that acquired a central role within the dictatorship. The
influence of Opus Dei grew despite the suspicious view taken by Falange about the group
and their adversarial competition with the Jesuits. Opus’ “technocrats” enjoyed great influ-
ence over education, culture, and economic planning in the latter years of the regime. The
fact that a number of Catholics in Franco’s successive cabinets opposed Opus Dei greatly
qualifies any assumptions about the monolithic unity of the Church and of Catholic elites.
The position of the Vatican toward the situation in Spain would also change over time.
Whereas Pope Pius XII (1939–1958) had accepted an alliance with the Franco-regime, his
successors, popes John XXIII (1958–1963) and Paul VI (1963–1978), would increasingly

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distance themselves from Francoism and, on occasion, even confront it. The unprecedented
changes that occurred in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) would
further intensify this process. For example, religious freedom was officially endorsed by
the Vatican after the Council, forcing Francoism to modify its Fundamental Laws in order
to recognize other religious groups (1967, Law of Religious Freedom). In this context, the
Spanish Church would rapidly evolve from being an ally and beneficiary of Francoism to
becoming a powerful advocate for a peaceful transition to a more democratic society. In line
with the Council’s teachings, the reformist atmosphere that was spreading throughout the
Spanish Church manifested itself in an exemplary manner in 1971 during the Joint Assem-
bly of Bishops and Priests (Montero et al.). This historical assembly revealed the desire on
the part of a majority of the clergy to break with the authoritarianism of National Catholi-
cism (de la Cueva, Religion 21). Two years later, the Episcopal Conference (i.e. Spain’s
national assembly of bishops) formally demanded the separation of Church and State and
called for a revision of the 1953 Concordat (The New York Times “Bishops Request”).
The clergy would thus play a leading role in the opposition to the dictatorship. This
was particularly true not only for the Basque Country and Catalonia, where prelates
were particularly sensitive to the aspirations of regional nationalism, but also for those
priests who actively participated in Catholic worker organizations (de la Cueva and Lou-
zao). A considerable number of these priests were deemed dissidents and were interned
in the “Concordat prison” of Zamora, a special prison for prelates convicted of political
crimes (The New York Times “Catholic Protests Mount”). Lay Catholics also contributed
to the transformation of Spanish society. As the only legal alternatives to the falangist
non-representative union the Sindicato Vertical, Catholic organizations, and in particular
the Catholic Action Youth (JOC) and the Catholic Action Workers’ Brotherhood (HOAC),
offered relatively safe political spaces open to practices of debate and participation (Horn,
López García). In the long run these organizations contributed to the return of civil society,
thus facilitating the success of the Spanish transition to democracy. In particular, in the late
60s, activists of the HOAC cooperated with worker militants of the Spanish Communist
Party (PCE) to establish a new trade union, Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) (Babiano). As all
the developments mentioned previously illustrate, the identification of the throne and the
altar during Francoism needs to be greatly contextualized and further analyzed, as it often
was not as fusional and impeccable as the official publications and newsreels such as the
No-Do would want us to believe.
The death of the dictator in 1975 opened the way to proceed with a renegotiation of
the 1953 Concordat. Various groups, including the Vatican, a majority of the Spanish bish-
ops, the more liberally disposed supporters of the dictatorship (including Adolfo Suarez
who had been appointed president in 1976), and the opposition parties, all agreed that
the highly confessional Francoist state was an anachronism that was incompatible with
the framework of a democratic Western Europe to which Spain aspired to belong. A new
set of treaties would thus replace the Concordat.12 Negotiated shortly before and after the
adoption of the Constitution, these treaties significantly influenced the draft of the latter.
The new democratic state, and its key legal text, would have to be made compatible with
the privileges that were going to be accorded by the treaties to the Roman Catholic Church.
This situation led to a rather paradoxical proclamation of religious freedom: While no reli-
gion would have a “State character,” the Constitution stresses that the public authorities
have to consider the “religious beliefs” of Spanish society and maintain an “appropriate
cooperation” with the Catholic Church and “other” confessions (as stated in Article 16,

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Clause 3). This clause would have a significant restrictive effect on Spain’s neutrality in
religious matters, as “appropriate cooperation” with the Catholic Church and with other
religious denominations would be implemented in agreement with how the state interprets
each religious group’s relevance in Spanish society.
In general terms, the Constitution’s attempt at reconciling the Catholic Church’s tra-
ditional privileges with secular and democratic principles resulted in the former retaining
significant preferential treatment. For example, although Article 27 accepted the principle
of freedom of education, Catholic schools were the only non-public schools that initially
ensured the right to receive state subventions. In addition, the State recognized the right of
the Catholic Church to conduct its religious and administrative affairs free of official inter-
vention and would continue financing the salaries of the diocesan clergy until an acceptable
self-financing scheme could be devised.
While the bilateral agreements and the Constitution represented an intermediate solu-
tion to the problem of civil-ecclesiastical relations, they did not fully resolve all tensions. As
the apparatus of rigid social control erected by the Franco regime began to be dismantled,
moral issues became a central concern for Spanish bishops, particularly in the aftermath of
the Socialist victory in the 1982 general elections. Even the more moderate prelates began
to feel apprehensive before what was increasingly perceived as the dangers of an excessively
permissive society. Tensions over the passing of new education, abortion, and divorce laws
in the early 1980s led to a severe deterioration of civil-ecclesiastical relations (Callahan,
Church and State 510–516). As the Church consolidated its political influence as an inter-
est group, this rift has persisted and similar conflicts have continued to erupt between civil
society and ecclesiastical circles, mainly whenever the subsequent socialist cabinets have
attempted to reform the education system or the idea of what constitutes a family, as well
as sexual and reproductive choices.13

Spain’s Contemporary Religious Landscape: Navigating Pluralism and

Secularism (1982–Today)
With the 1978 Constitution Spain went from having a strong confessional state to one in
which religious freedom was accepted and collaboration with Catholicism and other faiths
was actively pursued. This new institutional situation, along with the increasing seculari-
zation of society, has afforded the development of religious pluralism (Planet Contreras
et al.). Statistics on Spain’s post-Francoist religious situation show the significant growth
of religiously unaffiliated (notably among the young) and the relative growing number of
believers of other religions. These two facts seem to point to the increasing decatholiza-
tion in Spanish society (Ruiz Andrés). Yet if one analyzes the situation in detail, a more
nuanced portrait of the religious landscape in contemporary Spain emerges. While the num-
ber of people who practice Catholicism has continued to decrease, an important majority of
Spaniards still continue to identify themselves as Catholic.14 Studies conducted by the Pew
Research Center, the Spanish Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (Center for Sociologi-
cal Research, or in Spanish CIS), and the Observatorio del Pluralismo Religioso (Obser-
vatory for Religious Pluralism) all point to this enduring influence of Catholicism as a
provider of social and cultural belonging (Observatorio de Pluralismo Religioso, 2013, CIS,
2017 and Pew Research Center, 2018). These studies show that although Catholics may no
longer attend regular church services, sacraments associated with important rites of pas-
sage, such as baptism, communion, and marriage, are still quite generally upheld. Similarly,

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attachment to Catholicism is still embedded in many cultural traditions, including popular

fiestas and national bank holidays. Almost every Spanish town has its religious processions
and an annual “patronal festival.” This situation can be seen as further reflected in the
way in which the Church and the State have also continued to be connected when facing
important lifecycle events, such as the expression of national grief.15 It therefore is not rare
to find crucifixes in some public buildings. Similarly, the Church still exercises a particular
influence in social welfare, education, and the management of heritage.16
In addition to this ongoing social presence of Catholicism, it should be noted that several
mechanisms have contributed to limit the neutrality of the state in religious affairs. First, as
we have seen, through the bilateral treaties the democratic state granted a special place to
the Catholic Church in matters of religious governance. Additionally, while Spain’s current
legal system provides a relatively strong guarantee of freedom of religion, there are signifi-
cant limitations with respect to religious minorities who are often perceived as “foreign” or
“non-national” (Magazinni 3). Although the 1980 General Act of Religious Liberty wanted
to lay the groundwork for opening relations to other religious denominations, the enjoy-
ment of such benefits was made conditional on being included in the Register of Religious
Entities maintained by the General Directorate of Religious Affairs. Further, the obtention
of a cooperation agreement with the state requires that a confession be deemed socially or
historically “rooted” in the Spanish territory (or as having “notorio arraigo” [significant
roots] in Spain).17 Based on such principles, three historic agreements were reached in 1992,
in the context of the nationwide commemoration of the fifth centenary of Columbus’ arrival
in the Americas, the end of Islamic rule of Al-Andalus (with the conquest of the kingdom
of Granada), and the subsequent expulsion of Muslim (including Christian moriscos) and
Hebraic communities from the country. The agreements were signed with the Federation
of Israelite Communities of Spain, the Islamic Commission of Spain, and the Federation
of Evangelical Religious Entities of Spain. For the first time in Spanish history, minority
denominations, which had been actively suppressed and persecuted in the past, acquired a
special status under the law. Yet these religious groups did not attain a status comparable to
the Catholic Church, which is considered the most institutionalized and historically rooted
religious organization in the country (Griera). The specific benefits granted to Catholicism
by the latter agreements (i.e., tax allocations,18 access to cemeteries, public financing, and
pensions for clergy), have not been extended to other religious groups. Furthermore, coop-
eration with other religious denominations has followed a standard framework of relations
derived from the state’s previous experience with the Catholic Church. This means that the
possibility of religious groups seeking alternative requirements or a specific treatment has
often been overlooked.
The very abstract terms in which the “notorio arraigo” criterion was defined has not
facilitated the task of including other religious denominations. Specifically, to achieve this
status, religious groups must have: a) a “relevant” number of followers (the number is
unstipulated), b) a presence in the country for “at least” 30 years, and c) a level of diffu-
sion that demonstrates “a social presence.” If a particular religious group is not granted
recognition by the Ministry of the Presidency,19 it can still be included in the Register of
Associations maintained by the Ministry of the Interior. However, inclusion in the lat-
ter register only grants legal status and does not offer any other benefits. Additionally,
multilevel governance (European, national, regional, local) is a great source of tension for
the governability of religious diversity in Spain. There is significant differentiation in the
rights of religious communities and individuals in existing regional variations (Magazzini,

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Griera). While the central government funds religious services for prisons and the military,
regional governments fund hospital services, local governments deal with other aspects of
religious life, such as the procurement of licenses to open a place of worship. Requirements
can vary widely from municipality to municipality. Similarly, the development of curricula
and the financing of teachers for religious education is the responsibility of the regional
governments, with the exception of Andalusia, Aragon, the Canary Islands, Cantabria, and
the two autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla. This complex situation often leads to the
failure of some regional governments to comply with legal requirements to treat religious
groups equally.20
The existence of a “diffused” religiosity, to use Roberto Cipriani’s term, further com-
plicates the integration of other religious groups. Cipriani refers to a form of religiosity
that escapes the radar of conventional thought and goes undetected despite the fact that
it continues to play a major role in people’s lives. The latter appears under the guise of
strongly felt moral and cultural values and a diluted sense of sacredness that can be politi-
cally exploited.21 Following other European far-right leaders (such as Marine Le Pen and
Matteo Salvini) Vox – the “new” Spanish far-right party – has defined itself as a nationalist
and “Christian” (rather than Catholic) party. It upholds a strong identity-based conception
of religion as a set of mainly conservative (but not so much spiritual) values. It is signifi-
cant that its leader, Santiago Abascal, frequently clashes with the Vatican over social and
cultural matters, including migration or the ongoing reevaluation of the country’s (and the
Church’s) role in the so-called “Conquest” of the Americas. Another aspect that proves
this cultural-identitary use of religion is the way Vox repeatedly recurs to a Reconquista
and Crusade imaginary and other related highly islamophobic tropes, including repeated
mentions of a supposed Jihadist threat, which is often conflated with a xenophobic fear of
a migrant invasion (“The hoax”).
Transnational migration from Europe, Africa, and Latin America has greatly contrib-
uted to the growth and diversification of non-Catholic religious confessions. Although the
presence of other-faith communities in the country is not new, it was only at the end of the
1980s that Spain truly became a destination for international immigration, thus increasing
the number of practicing believers and of non-Catholic religious groups. What is relatively
novel, however, is the visibility that certain religious minorities (particularly Islamic com-
munities) have recently acquired in the public (and mediatic) sphere. This is particularly
remarkable because, except in rare occasions, the management of religious diversity in
Spain prior to the 1990s did not occupy a relevant place in the political agenda.22 Since the
1992 quincentenary commemorations, and more importantly since 9/11, the 11M Madrid
train bombings, and the 2017 Barcelona attacks, diversity and immigration have gained
greater public and mediatic visibility, leading to a resurfacing of religion as a field for
heated political and cultural debate. Beyond the initial democratizing legal modifications
already discussed, the aftermath of the 11M bombings led to a transformation in the way
Spain governs religions. The state started to prioritize soft-policy tools rather than con-
tinuing with the legal approach that had previously been used. The best example of this
transformation in the governance of religious pluralism is the Ministry of Justice’s creation
of a publicly funded Fundación Pluralismo y Convivencia in 2004, which – as its name
states – is a foundation that aims at actively promoting religious freedom and diversity in
the country.
Catholicism has also recently returned to the media, political, and legal foreground,
particularly during the process of exhumation of the dictator’s body from the controversial

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mausoleum known as the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos), as well as in relation
to the Church’s child abuse scandals and leading to the celebration of a series of trials
related to crimes against “religious sentiments.” Although phenomena of mock-religious
celebrations are not new to Spain, in the last decade there have been several feminist mock
processions aimed to defend women’s rights, including the “Procession of the Insubordinate
Pussy,” the “Procession of the Holy Cunt of All Orgasms,” and the “Pussy Pride Proces-
sion.” In addition, the creation of a hashtag calling for Catholic priests to be burned (in
Spanish, #FuegoAlClero) was a trending topic on Twitter in 2020, causing great polemic.
Despite the decriminalization of “blasphemy” in 1988, Article 525 of the Spanish Penal
Code forbids the defamation of any individual’s or group’s religious sentiments, beliefs, or
practices and has recently been used in several prosecutions (Cruz). These incidents are part
of a wider ongoing debate currently taking place in the country (as well as internationally)
over the role of religion and the limits, rights, and obligations of a truly democratic exercise
of freedom of expression.23 These episodes also show the complex ways in which Catholi-
cism has yet to be woven into the fabric of contemporary Spanish life.
To conclude, this chapter has illustrated the multifaceted ways in which the history of
the State-Church relationship in late modern Spain has followed a rather crooked course
over the last two hundred years. After having enjoyed great power for several centuries,
the Catholic Church had great difficulty in adapting itself to the trials posed by 19th- and
early 20th-century liberalism. The period is marked by recurrent conflicts (between liberal-
ism and antiliberalism and anticlericalism and clericalism, as well as the different positions
existing within each particular group), and also by the signing of two Concordats: The first
aimed at finding a working relationship with a liberal monarchy, the second with a fascist
dictatorship. Yet, in spite of the country’s recent turbulent history, and of its limited religious
diversity, Spanish society experienced a spectacular transformation over the last fifty years,
particularly once democracy arrived in 1978. As Spain advanced into the 21st century, the
country has started to be faced with a more culturally diverse population; consequently,
the accommodation of religious pluralism has gained increasing political and institutional
importance. Nevertheless, despite the advancement of secularization, Catholicism still
enjoys a prevailing influence in many areas of present-day Spain’s social and political fabric.

Notes
1 The present work is part of the following research projects: “Modernidad y religión en la España
del siglo XX: entre el consenso y la ruptura” (PGC2018–099909-B-IO0, MCIU/AEl/FEDER, UE)
and “Europeísmo y redes trasatlánticas en los siglos XX y XXI” (PGC2018–095884-B-C21).
2 Concordat is a bilateral pact (with the force of international law) that is established between the
Holy See-Vatican and a country’s government. It is signed in order to regulate ecclesiastical affairs
in the territory of the latter.
3 “Tithe” refers to the one tenth of annual earnings that were until then levied as tax in order to
sustain the Church and clergy.
4 After the death of Ferdinand VII (1814–1833), with no male heir apparent, his widow, Queen
María Cristina, became regent on behalf of their infant daughter Queen Isabella II. When par-
tisans of Charles (Ferdinand’s brother, defender of absolutism, and also aspiring to the throne)
rose in revolt, the Queen Regent turned to the liberals for support. Carlists (i.e., the supporters
of Charles) continued to be an extremely ultraconservative, anti-liberal, and fanatically Catholic
force well into the mid-20th century.
5 The Holy See is the supreme governing organ of the Catholic Church. Although it is sometimes
referred to as the “Vatican” (referring to the Vatican City State), the latter was only established in

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1929 by virtue of the Lateran Treaties. It is thus anachronistic to refer to the “Vatican” prior to
this date.
6 The official attitude endorsed by the Holy See varied from great mistrust to complete rejection of
liberalism. In 1864 Pius IX issued the encyclical Quanta Cura and the Syllabus of errors. These
texts dealt a mortal blow against mid-19th-century liberal and progressive Catholicism.
7 According to Callahan, the number of male clergy increased from 1,683 in 1860 to 13,359 by
1910 and the number of nuns from 18,819 to 46,357 (Spain and Portugal 390).
8 The word refers to the situation of economic isolation and great penury that the country endured
after the Civil War and World War II.
9 (Diario 16, 2 November, 1976 cited in Callahan, Church and State, 506).
10 See, for example, Document 3, Enrique Tarnacón’s El pan nuestro de cada día Carta Pastoral
(Our Daily Bread 1951), which appears in Aurora Morcillo et al.’s The Modern Spain Source-
book: A Cultural History form 1600 to the Present.
11 I borrow the term from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 257.
12 These treaties included: a “basic agreement” in 1976 and four “partial agreements” in 1979, alto-
gether they regulated legal affairs, education, cultural and economic affairs, religious attendance
of the armed forces and military service of clergymen, and members of religious orders (B.O.E. 5).
13 Some examples of this kind of tensions under Gonzalez’s rule were: The failed attempt in 1988
to establish the self-financing scheme for the Church as envisaged by the 1979 agreements; also
in 1988, controversy over whether the celebration of the Immaculate Conception should be
a national holiday; the government’s proposal for a law reorganizing the curriculum (Ley de
Ordenación del Sistema Educativo – LOGSE) in 1990; and under Zapatero’s rule (2004–2011)
the passing of the same-sex marriage law in 2005.
14 According to a survey conducted by the governmental Center for Sociological Research (CIS),
59.2 percent of respondents identified themselves as Catholics, 2.7 percent as followers of other
religions; 10.6 percent as “non-believers,” 11.8 percent as agnostics, and 13.6 percent as athe-
ists, and the remaining 2 percent did not answer the question. The autonomous communities
of Catalonia, Andalusia, and Madrid and the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla in North
Africa contain the highest percentage of non-Christians (“2020 Report on International Religious
Freedom: Spain”).
15 Recent examples of Catholic funerals include the ones celebrated in 2004 at Madrid’s Cathedral
of the Almudena which wished to commemorate “all” the victims of the 11-M train bombings
(but did not take into account that not all victims may be Catholic or even religious), as well as
the mass organized to mark the tenth anniversary of the bombings in 2014. Similarly in 2017, a
Catholic mass was organized in Barcelona to honor the victims of terrorist attacks.
16 The Church runs significant NGOs (such as Caritas) and schools that educate an estimated quar-
ter of Spanish children. It also has registered ownership of some 20,000 buildings. In France and
Portugal, Church buildings are owned by the state (The Economist “The Lingering”).
17 In total seven religious denominations have been recognized as having “notorio arraigo,” but
not all have succeeded in signing the agreements: Protestantism (recognized in 1984), Judaism
(1984), Islam (1989), the Church of Jesus Chris of Latter-day Saints (2003), Jehovah’s Witnesses
(2006), the Federation of Buddhist Communities of Spain (2007), and the Orthodox Church
(2010) (“Notorio arraigo”).
18 Federal tax law, however, provides taxpayers the option of allocating up to 0.7 percent of their
income tax to the Catholic Church or to a nongovernmental organization (NGO), but not to other
religious groups. In 2019 the Church received €284m ($318m) (The Economist “The Lingering”).
19 The Ministry of the Presidency currently manages the Register of Religious Entities, which is
maintained by the General Directorate of Religious Affairs. Until 2020 the latter was coordinated
by the Ministry of Justice. This change marks a significant evolution in the approach of dealing
with religious minorities.
20 Data for this paragraph has been derived from US Department of State reports, 2020 and 2019.
21 This is in fact a Europe-wide phenomenon, as Olivier Roy has argued. He uses the term “secular-
ized” (or cultural, identitarian) religion.
22 A clear exception to this was the case of Protestantism during Francoism. For further information,
see Vincent.

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23 Several Twitter users and even some musicians have been put on trial for glorifying terrorism
or for insulting the king in either comments or lyrics, prompting denunciations from Amnesty
International of Spain’s repression of freedom of expression (Amnesty International “Spain:
Tweet . . .”).

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 20
SCHOOLS, SCIENTIFIC
INSTITUTIONS, AND THE
SPANISH “BRAIN DRAIN”
(1833–2023)
Jaume Claret

Spain in Liberal Times (1833–1930)

Throughout Europe and the Americas, regimes that emerged from liberal revolutions devel-
oped the first educational systems that had a national reach. This was certainly the case in
Spain, although the move was delayed by Fernando VII’s wish to resurrect the Old Regime,
and by his opposition to any political change whatsoever. Thus, until 1833, efforts by the
enlightened minority to develop education and science were thwarted as they met with the
government’s mistrust, with institutional corporatism and with the decisive weight of reac-
tionary movements, such as Carlism, absolutism, and others.
It was not until the reign of Isabel II (1833–1868), who needed liberal support to con-
tain the traditionalist party, that a minimal regime of freedom could be consolidated (Ruiz,
“El sistema” 102–107). The first legislative change in relation to education would be the
so-called Pidal Plan (1845), attributed to the government minister Pedro José Pidal. This
plan intended to develop secondary education in Spain, differentiating between an elemen-
tary level and a superior one. Students were to be taught in newly created centers called
Institutos (Institutes – a secondary level of education prior to university studies, the equiva-
lent of high school in the United States), and this basic design is still in use today. While
the first institutes were created prior to the Pidal plan, and a pioneer institute opened in
Palma de Mallorca as early as 1835, the law’s intention was to accelerate and standardize
their development. The idea was to push for a public network of middle studies, secular
and open to scientific developments, with the backing of the state’s administration. In the
balance, this plan unfolded very slowly, as it collided against the economic interests of
a consolidated network of private (religious) centers, and therefore with the ideological
opposition by Catholic sectors, as well as the constraints derived from government changes,
and above all, by budget scarcity (Ruiz, “El Plan Pidal” 28–38).
The first law regulating teaching was even more relevant to our discussion. Popularly
known as the Moyano Law (1857), after its promoter the skilled minister Claudio Moyano,
it was a milestone in Spanish education history. It was in force, under successive regulatory
developments, until 1970, when the General Law of Education was enacted. The Moyano

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Law’s 113 years of longevity contrasts with the bumpy road that came afterwards dur-
ing other attempts at legislating or reforming education. In the current democratic period
alone, there have been eight major education laws (including the most recent, which passed
in January 2021).
The Moyano Law affected all levels of education. Under an organizational chart that
was hierarchical the minister was the highest authority, atop the pyramid. He relied on an
advisory committee – the Board of Public Education – and several public inspectors, as its
policing and executive arms. The same formula was used for university districts, with the
university president at the apex, advised by a Board. The system applied also in the prov-
inces, with Boards of Public Education at the provincial and local levels, whose function
was to guarantee, at least formally, that the Ministry’s regulations were enforced.
The longevity of the Moyano Law is not proof that everything included in the letter of
the law was actually enforced, proving that it is a mistake to attribute demiurgic powers to
anything printed on official paper. Even though it was established that primary education
was compulsory and free for children aged six to nine – a measure aimed at fighting the then
extreme rates of illiteracy (in 1887, only 24.35% of girls and 37.82 of boys were literate at
the age of ten, with logical and important regional variations) – in practice the choice of fol-
lowing the mandate remained under the control of private institutions and municipalities.
In the case of secondary education, a response had to be given to the rapid increase
in demand. On the one hand and especially in some more developed regions, the Indus-
trial Revolution, social transformation, and progressive scientific-technological integration
in production processes required an update, from applied techniques to industrial, of the
old “arts and crafts” schools. These centers offered a more practical secondary education,
aimed at future craftsmen, artists and specialized workers. On the other, the new middle
classes were joining the traditional upper classes in their educational aspirations (Ossen-
bach, “Evolución” 125–126). In order to respond to these transformations, the Law estab-
lished the creation of teaching training schools that offered pedagogical courses for current
and future teachers – the first one opened in 1839 (Souto, 49–70) – and the aforementioned
public institutes, supposedly one for each province, although the previously outlined politi-
cal and economic difficulties encumbered their deployment.
University (tertiary) education encountered the same difficulties as secondary education,
as its control was retained exclusively by the state. In comparison to the universities’ found-
ing period in medieval times, their numbers had been actually decreasing – without an
accompanying positive impact on their quality. The Spanish university of the nineteenth
century had become, for the most part, a bureaucratic, discredited institution that simply
issued academic degrees. Dependent on power and strongly centralized, the University of
Madrid was the coveted destination for both the best students – doctorates could be under-
taken only there – and the more ambitious teaching staff – attaining a chair there was the
culmination of any professional career. Meanwhile, the provincial centers supplied the local
market with the minimum number of doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, and science and arts
teachers. The university model did not provide for or fund research. This underfunding was
general, and few university professors had full-time appointments, as most of them eked
out an existence through other work commitments and/or by selling of their lecture notes.
The Spanish administrative, political, and budgetary dependency, added to the notable
social uniformity of Spanish society – where religious or political minorities had almost
no presence, and where differential regionalism was still undeveloped politically – made it
difficult to create spaces of dissent from where official dogmas could be safely challenged,

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original ideas might be promoted, or foreign currents of innovation be received. Despite

Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s voluminous compilation Historia de los heterodoxos espa-
ñoles (1880–1882, History of the Heterodox Spaniards), Spanish science and knowledge
would have needed a greater number – and a greater continuity – of people willing to think
outside the box. Such a lack of ambition and willingness to innovate would only be broken
by singular individuals in times of political turmoil and/or acting from outside of official
institution, as was the case, for example, with Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who was awarded
the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1906. Such a lack of space for dissent from established sci-
entific or educational commonsense is exemplified by what happened during the so-called
“first university question” (1867–1868), when the debate around the confessional status
of the state – the consideration of the Catholic Church as the official and exclusive religion
and the resistance to the adoption of secular postulates – brought about the expulsion from
the university of professors Julián Sanz del Río, Fernando de Castro and Nicolás Salmerón
and, also, the suspension of Francisco Giner de los Ríos for being in solidarity with those
initially expelled.
The Revolution of 1868 (“La Gloriosa”; The Glorius One) and the return of freedom
of education allowed these professors to be reinstated to their universities, but only until
they were retaliated against by the 1875 Bourbon Restoration, as academic freedom was
once again curtailed. This so-called “second university question” again led to their expul-
sion. However, this time there was no solidarity from third parties toward these professors,
nevertheless, they sit back and do nothing (Lima 436–7). Influenced by the post-Kantian
idealist Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, all four of them (Sanz del Río, de Castro, Salmerón
and Giner) took advantage of the situation to create the Institución Libre de Enseñanza
(ILE, Free Institution of Education) on October 29th 1876, with Giner as its top leader; the
Free Institution was to be a kind of free university to promote a cultural and pedagogical
renewal (Escolano 199). The institucionismo became the pedagogical movement of Spanish
regenerationism, and created a fruitful space for dissent, and independent thinking.
Shortly afterwards, the unstable political context and the collective calls to modernize
the country forced the political class to reflect on Spain’s scientific and technical under-
development (retraso) and led to the creation of the Ministerio de Instrucción Pública y
Bellas Artes (1900, Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts). With the first liberal
government of the Monarchical Restoration, Giner, Sanz, de Castro and Salmeron, who
had been restituted to their academic posts in 1881, where seen as potential allies by the
new regime, given their growing prestige as highly qualified advocates for educational and
scientific development. As a result, a series of new educational institutions were created:
The National Pedagogical Museum (1882) with Manuel Bartolomé Cossío as the first direc-
tor, the Higher School of Teaching (1909), the Students’ Residence (1910), the Ladies’
Residence (1914 – a modest move toward normalizing the presence of women in the Acad-
emy), and the School-Institute (1918), among other initiatives. In addition, ILE attained an
even bigger influence on teaching and research policies. Thus, compulsory schooling was
extended (until the age of twelve in 1901, and fourteen in 1923), the Statute of the Magis-
terium was approved in 1923, among other initiatives.
Without a doubt, nothing illustrates ILE’s influence better than the creation of the Junta
para la Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas (JAEIC, Board for the Expan-
sion of Scientific Studies and Research, better known as JAE). Founded in 1907, directed by
Ramón y Cajal and organized by José Castillejo, the JAE was a “quite unique” public body:
Its range had no equivalent in Spain (Sánchez Ron, “Institucionalización” 26–29). Despite

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the dependance on state funding, its main objective was the scientific and educational
preparation of future researchers and the training of a teaching force, through economic
stipends to study abroad. In 25 years, some two thousand people from the most diverse
disciplines participated in the program and helped to regenerate and Europeanize the Span-
ish Academy (Escolano 210–213). The JAE was not the only iconic foundation dating back
to 1907: With a more modest budget and ambitions, but sharing various goals with the
JAE, the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC, Institute of Catalan Studies) was also set up in
Barcelona that same year, with
​​ a Catalan agenda and Pan-Catalanist aspirations (Roca and
Camarasa 40–46). The JAE also promoted other institutions in different fields, such as the
Center for Historical Studies and the National Institute of Physical-Natural Sciences, both
created in 1910, with Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Ramón y Cajal as their first directors,
respectively. These large centers coexisted with the other laboratories and research units
and were often linked to other regional and provincial organizations, such as the Guadar-
rama Alpine Biological Mission, the Paleontological and Prehistoric Research Commission,
the Galician Biological Mission, the Mathematical Seminar, and others (Barona 92).
All these initiatives had an undeniable impact on science and on other specific areas
of knowledge. Yet they also showed that, without political will, a thorough reform of
the Spanish university system was impossible: Many in the university community resisted
attempts at modernization and any kind of initiative that would question traditional and
bureaucratic control over the faculty and over official bodies. While there was also a minor-
ity that supported efforts at regeneration, especially the younger and/or more open-minded
faculty, the narrow margins of the law limited the scope of any initiative, despite two
attempts at university reform, one in 1898 and another in 1922 (Claret, El atroz desmoche
7–22).
The 1923 coup d’état by General Miguel Primo de Rivera ruled out any reforms from
1923 until 1930, a hiatus on the road to educational improvements. Some of the recently
implemented initiatives were abrogated, as traditional sectors seized the chance to recover
their power. Without any coherent direction, however – on account of their lack of alterna-
tive plans – almost everything froze in terms of educational reform. With the restriction of
freedoms and the increased control and distrust of education and research, it was clear that
the only interest of the regime seemed aimed at “Making Spaniards,” that is the transfor-
mation of Spanish society by enforcing a nationalist doctrine, rituals and symbols (Quiroga
110–128). This distrust towards intellectuals and the academy is best exemplified by the
case of the professor and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, first dismissed and exiled to
Fuerteventura (Canary Islands) in 1924 for his opposition to the dictatorship, and who,
shortly after, self-exiled to France.

Emergence and Destruction of the “Edad de Plata” (Silver Age, 1931–1939)

The Spanish political stalemate was not resolved until the proclamation of the Second
Republic in April 1931. The new political project allowed an intensified complicity between
the scientific-academic and the political communities, as the first was no longer limited to a
technical or advisory role, but was involved in the design, preparation, and application of
public policies (Santesmases and Romero 15). A line of continuity can therefore be traced
between the regenerationism of the Restoration and the Republican reforms, despite the
dictatorship’s interruption. The upsurge of cultural creativity that is now commonly known
as the “silver age” of Spanish science, literature, and art had its roots in the initiatives that

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emerged at the turn of the century and now thrived during the Second Republic. In particu-
lar, and for the first time in the history of Spain, a civil discourse in favor of science was
being promoted.
However, the main objective of republican reforms was primary education, since both
moderate republicanism and the Spanish left agreed in their commitment to a national
public school system (Duarte 270–3). Support for culture and schools thus became a two-
fold tool for regeneration, cultural dissemination, and the consolidation of democratic and
republican ideals. Positive changes began to take pace: In 1877, illiteracy afflicted 72%
of the population. By 1900, the number had dropped to only 64%, and by the end of the
Civil War, the Republican effort had managed to reduce the percentage to 23%. This was
a consequence of both the literacy campaigns and the creation of 7,000 schools during the
first republican period (April 1931-October 33). In parallel, the total number of school chil-
dren also increased, because age and territorial categories were broadened, and, above all,
because girls were encouraged to attend school (Holguín; Vilanova and Moreno 288–9).
The efforts on behalf of public education were accompanied by a new policy of teacher
training and improved remuneration. In 1931 alone, seven thousand new teachers were
incorporated into the school system, and in the first two years, the number of school inspec-
tors increased from 212 to 382. Other crucial initiatives included the Pedagogical Mis-
sions – literacy campaigns and bringing culture closer to the people, particularly to isolated
and needy areas, mostly by volunteer teachers, students, and artists – the first bilingual
measures in Catalonia and the creation of school councils (Escolano 204). All this work
took place in an increasingly tense political context, because after the first biennium of
progressive initiatives, the second period was dominated by the right (November 1933-
February 1936), which halted or even reversed some of these previous measures. Finally,
leftist forces returned to power with the 1936 electoral victory of the Popular Front, but
their efforts at reform were rapidly undercut by the start of the Civil War.
During the republican years the growing network of public schools was actually com-
peting with the pre-existing network of private religious schools, and the secular intentions
of its promoters raised suspicion among Catholic sectors. This was especially visible in
the secondary school system, because in addition to being a crucial source of economic
resources for religious orders – especially after the liberal confiscations of the nineteenth
century – secondary school was where the middle classes were educated, and therefore,
where ideological influence was secured. Whereas with Primo de Rivera the private sec-
tor came to serve 27% of the student body, with the Republic it fell to only 13%. This
confrontation led to the so-called “school war” between Catholics and secularists, which
reached its high point once the secular camp achieved almost 5,000 schools and 295 insti-
tutes (Escolano 208–9). The secularizing measures inflicted serious political damage for the
Republic and was clearly counterproductive, as it provided new arguments for its enemies,
and yet did not prevent the Catholic church from continuing to run schools through inter-
mediaries. Added to other secularist measures, such as the dissolution of the Jesuits, or the
right to civil marriage – previously and briefly legal between 1840 and 1875 – and divorce,
it resulted in a distancing by a sector of Catholicism from the Republic.
Despite these difficulties and before the outbreak of war, the Republican government was
able to deploy a program of educational and scientific action, although some reforms were
frustrated by the political upheaval (Molero, Historia, 26–30 and “Un intento,” 222–7).
The final objectives achieved in the university system were the inclusion of pedagogical stud-
ies within the Faculties of Philosophy and Letters, and, above all, the granting of autonomy

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to the Faculties of Philosophy and Letters at the universities of Madrid and Barcelona in
September of 1931. An autonomy that ranged from the functioning and representation
of the internal government and the configuration of the syllabi, to teaching innovation or
the recruitment of professors. However, the most spectacular measure was the granting of
autonomy to the university of Barcelona as a whole in June of 1933 (Claret, La repressió
21–35). The relevance of this reform transcended the local sphere. On the one hand, it was
clearly the model that the Republicans aspired to extend to the rest of the academic centers,
and on the other, it also personified the worst nightmares of the political right and many of
the Spanish intelligentsia. In fact, the process was plagued by parliamentary obstacles due
to opposition to the incorporation of Catalan as an educational language in the University
of Barcelona (Pérez), and by the opposition of a group of professors from the same center
who refused to lose control over the institution. The Republican changes ranged from the
most insignificant, such as the necessary plastering of damaged walls, to the most profound,
such as the renewal of the study plans or the inclusion of the Catalan language, the possibil-
ity of pursuing a Doctorate (until then the exclusive domain of the University of Madrid)
and the entry of prestigious intellectuals and scientists into the faculty. Unfortunately, these
aspirational changes were deeply affected by the political reality of the moment.
The favorable environment for education and the political involvement of intellectuals
and scientists in politics and administration helped bring about other small changes in their
respective centers. Those who had been previously awarded grants by the JAE could finally
impart the knowledge they had acquired in Spanish university classrooms and laboratories,
helping to train the new generations. However, the relative quantitative relevance of the
academic world in Spain during those years should be understood: There were only twelve
universities at the time, lessening their potential to influence the nation.
The Civil War (1936–39) forced the redirection of economic and human resources. In a
few months the war obligated the republican government to reduce teaching to a minimum
and to involve professors and faculties in the military effort, although still maintaining a
minimum of training and dissemination of knowledge. Conversely, the rebels’ priority from
the first moment was the war effort, and the only role allowed to education was that of col-
laboration in propaganda, bureaucracy and research aimed at winning the war.
These different approaches for redirecting efforts toward war were found at all educa-
tional levels. While the Republic strived to keep its commitment to education and created
specific literacy programs and cultural activities, from the rearguard to the front lines, the
insurgents were suspicious of and hostile to teachers, closed centers and returned educa-
tional pre-eminence to the more conservative Catholicism. The consequences were evident
and immediate – especially affecting female students, researchers and professors.
Although both sides committed excesses and sought to punish their opponents, the
repression on the rebels’ side was notably vicious due to its generalized nature, its forceful-
ness, and its continuity over time (Ortiz 99, 446). In the field of education, all teachers,
like all other civil servants, had to go through a political-ideological “purification process”
(to justify their past actions and demonstrate their adherence to the new regime) with-
out any kind of procedural guarantee. It was more useful to have powerful supporters
and political, military and/or ideological merit, than professional value or an established
academic trajectory. Many teachers and intellectuals became scapegoats, and even being
considered an “intellectual” was an aggravating factor in the eyes of Franco’s repression.
After a first stage of extreme violence with executions, imprisonments and generalized mis-
treatment, the repression became bureaucratized, but did not disappear and was extended

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throughout the postwar period (Claret, El atroz desmoche; Otero-Carvajal, La destrucción;

Rodríguez-López).
A study of the repression against primary school teachers estimates that almost all were
prosecuted and at least 25% received some type of sanction (Morente 221). Those who were
neither purged nor sanctioned during this harsh repression were not necessarily political fol-
lowers of the new regime. But it is important to contextualize reality and avoid falling into
interpretative simplification: There were also, as in the rest of society, supporters – to varying
degrees – of the winners, or simply neutral or even lucky people. In fact, violence against a
group was often directed and carried out by members of that same group. The consequences
of such an “atrocious cut” (to use an accurate expression used by the Falangist and president
of the University of Madrid (1951–56) Pedro Laín Entralgo to describe the purge of intellec-
tuals) is also evident in the number of exiles. The harshness of the insurgents’ repression and
the capricious geography of the coup led to a massive exile (Rubio). So many left the country
that the Unión de Profesores Universitarios Españoles en el Exilio (UPUEE, Union of Spanish
University Professors in Exile) was formed to advocate for these displaced academics (Claret,
“La Unión”). This intellectual and scientific heritage was lost to Spain, but the knowledge
often endured, as many exiles rebuilt lives and careers in the host countries throughout Europe
and Latin America – prominently in Mexico, with initiatives such as the founding of the Casa
de España in 1938 – currently known as Colegio de México – created to welcome exiled
Spanish intellectuals (Barona, El exilio). Aware of the loss, the regime often chose to erase
their memory, rewrite intellectual genealogies and, sometimes directly appropriate the jobs of
exiled, sanctioned, or assassinated teachers, acting as a pirate editor of the scientific production
of the vanquished (Mancebo 1991).

To Win the Military War, and to (Progressively) Lose

the Educational One (1939–1975)
The destruction of the Republican legacy had to be replaced, and the alternative material-
ized in the reversal of many of the policies of pedagogical, scientific, and democratic renewal
and the ideological realignment towards the rising national-Catholicism and, while the war
favored Germany and Italy, towards the fascist powers. The support between the Catholic
institutions and the dictatorship was mutually beneficial. The Spanish Church provided the
necessary personnel, material resources, international contacts, and ideological legitimacy that
the rebels needed to win the war and to consolidate their regime; while the religious power
achieved great influence in a confessionally Catholic state, as well as benefits and privileges of
all kinds. Nothing exemplifies this symbiosis better than the approval in September 1938, in
the midst of the Civil War, of a new Secondary Law, at precisely the educational level (second-
ary schools) that interested and benefited the Catholic school network the most.
As Franco’s troops advanced, crucifixes and religion returned to the classrooms. There
were fewer schools and teachers than before, access to higher education became difficult,
especially for women, and the universities reverted to hierarchical control thanks to the
University Law of 1943 (Carreras and Ruiz). For example, Ángeles Galino became the first
woman professor, but not until 1953, and Asunción Linares became the first science profes-
sor in 1961 – and the gross schooling numbers achieved by the Republic in1935 were not
recovered until 1964 (Sanz 245–9).
Research was segregated from its fomer university focus, and it went into the hands of
the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC, Superior Council of Scientific

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Investigation) created in November 1939. The CSIC assumed the powers and compe-
tences previously held by the JAE, and José María Albareda became its new strongman
and head. In addition, Albareda’s membership in Opus Dei gave this sect great influence, to
the detriment of the Spanish University and further subjecting science and research to the
National-Catholic ideology.
Despite these losses and other significant setbacks in all areas of education and research,
not all supporters of Franco’s regime remained resistant to change (Camprubí). Global
geopolitical changes and the Spanish socio-economic evolution toward developmentalism,
especially from the1950s onward, also influenced the state’s intelligentsia’s position on
research. In fact, in some areas, international isolation was never quite complete (Brydan),
thanks to remaining scientific and personal ties with foreign researchers that predated the
dictatorship, to the Catholic sphere (the concordato or agreement with the Vatican in 1953
which gave the regime some international legitimation), or to the progressive resumption,
due to the Cold War, of previously broken diplomatic relationships (the first agreements
between the United States and Spain were also in 1953). Moreover, slowly and with dif-
ficulty, a few exiled pedagogues, scientists, and intellectuals with lighter sanctions – such
as temporary disqualifications or prohibition to occupy Faculty positions – were accepted
back into public schools and universities or recently created private ones.
For their part, Falangist efforts to influence education were limited to placing portraits of
Franco and José Antonio Primo de Rivera in the classroom, to the creation of the compul-
sory “subject” of Formación del Espíritu Nacional (Formation of National Spirit), and some
assorted aesthetic and ceremonial aspects. Even within the universities, its main objective,
the establishment of the Sindicato Español Universitario (SEU, Spanish University Union),
membership in which was initially compulsory for all students, finally became nothing but a
bureaucratic entity by mid-1950. The failure of Franco’s policies to interpellate and social-
ize students into political allegiance to the regime surprised the authorities. Indeed, the
worst part of their failed indoctrination for government officials was discovering how the
new generations were progressively erasing the social division between winners and losers
of the Civil War, as both winners and losers were united by their discontent with the lack
of freedoms (Fernández-Montesinos). Gradually, the university became more and more a
space for political awareness through voluntary participation in the Servicio Universitario
de Trabajo (SUT, University Work Service), through its campaigns to bring students closer
to the world of work, which often opened their eyes to the real and precarious situation of
most of the population (Ruiz Carnicer). The university campus also became, increasingly,
a space for protests (Pradera 124): First in Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia (Álvarez Cob-
elas), then expanding to all major cities as of 1956.
In the 1960s, as the number of university students in Spain increased, the cycle of pro-
tests and repression increased as well, with frequent suspensions of academic activity,
campus occupations, expulsions of the most troublesome students, sanctions for the (few)
still-troublesome professors sympathetic to the opposition (González), police interventions
and increasingly massive demonstrations. In a clandestine meeting in March 1966 in Bar-
celona, popularly known as la Caputxinada because it took place in a Capuchin convent
(Bonet and Claret), what stood out as a significant and lasting aspect of the event was the
creation of the first Sindicat Democràtic d’Estudiants (Democratic Union of Students).
The ensuing repression could no longer conceal the Francoist failures from the students.
Nothing shows the regime’s frustration and failure better than the dismantling of the SEU in
April 1965: It was the first and only dissolution of a massive organization by the dictatorship.

268
 Schools, Scientific Institutions, and “Brain Drain”

Its very exceptionality underscores the importance and impact of the regime’s decision. The
Franco regime reacted with a singular harshness (Rúa), with punishments that ranged from
imprisonment to immediate incorporation into the army for the accused students, as well
as loss of university enrollment which, in Barcelona alone, affected more than 16,000 stu-
dents. The dictatorship treated all opposing student unions, even the more compliant ones,
as extremist organizations, which paradoxically created a self-fulfilling prophecy: The accu-
mulation of arrests and sanctions at once decimated, fragmented, and also radicalized those
same union movements (Baldó). This anomalous circle of government repression and student
disorientation continued from 1968 and until 1975 (Ysàs). The situation degraded to such
an extent that even in internal documents, the most organized sectors of the student opposi-
tion warned that the Franco regime could destroy the university system (Hernández 21).
The progressive politicization of student protests should not make us forget that their
origins were about making specific educational and social demands: Students wanted more
university autonomy, reform of study syllabi, de-massification of classrooms, democratiza-
tion of government structures, improvement of working conditions and a more defined
research policy. The demand for a research policy (more democratic, better financed and
well defined) were not a minor issue, since the official research lines were still conditioned
by the guidelines that emerged in the immediate postwar period, by the determining author-
ity of the CSIC and by the reality of limited budgets, all of it hierarchically controlled.
It is still symptomatic that the Ministerio de Educación Nacional (Ministry of National
Education) was not renamed until 1966 with the less belligerent Ministerio de Educación y
Ciencia (Ministry of Education and Science) and that until April 1976 no scientific policy
department had been created. This prolonged “forgetfulness” or negligence had obvious
consequences: In 1972 only 0.3% of GDP was invested in research, and there were no more
than 18 researchers per 100,000 inhabitants.
In this context, the final years of the Franco regime were marked by three big issues.
One was the approval of a new general law of education in August 1970. It created a
compulsory basic general education until the age of 14 and divided secondary education
between a professional training program focused on technical (non-university) degrees and
workforce development, and a baccalaureate, required to access the university system. Not
only did the new law reorganize the entire educational system, it also tried to deal with the
exponential growth of schoolchildren and high school graduates as a result of the increase
in population, and sought to meet the educational needs of a society whose socioeconomic
standards had multiplied since the post-war period. Despite best interests, the repressive
and despotic reflexes inherited from the regime survived until the end of the dictatorship in
1975, with measures such as the reduction of evaluation calls (exams) to discourage student
strikes – exhausting the calls meant losing university enrollment – or the absurd substitu-
tion of the school year (September to July) for the natural year (January to December),
respectively. Neither of these measures lasted very long.
The second issue was that of overcrowding in higher education. In the 1971–72 aca-
demic year in Spain, there were 255,000 students: 708 per 100,000 inhabitants, an impor-
tant figure, but still far from the 849 on average in OECD countries (Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development, an association of the world’s democracies). In
order to accommodate these new students, in addition to expanding existing centers and
converting into universities what had been, until then, technical schools, there were several
universities created in 1968: The University of Bilbao, precursor to the future Basque univer-
sity (UPV, Universidad del País Vasco) which would eventually be founded in 1980, as well

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as the autonomous universities of Madrid and Barcelona (UAM, Universidad Autónoma

de Madrid and UAB, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). The latter two universities were
founded on campuses far from those urban centers, following the strategy initiated by the
Brazilian military regime to reduce the impact of student protests and in order to facilitate
their control (Claret, “Perturbaciones” 156–159).
The third issue of concern is related to the second one. An increase in the number of stu-
dents also implied an increase in the need for new instructors. That need was covered with
temporary teachers, the so-called profesores no numerarios (non-permanent teachers) bet-
ter known by the acronym PNN (Límite). Between 1960 and 1971, their numbers increased
from three thousand to sixteen thousand, while tenured professor numbers stagnated at
1,500 (Claret, “La Universidad” 299–301).

The Ghosts of Spanish Science and Education, 1975–2023

Democracy has not been a panacea for Spanish education and science, but it did unlock a
situation, coinciding with the physical decline of the dictator and his regime, that threat-
ened irreparable deterioration for these disciplines. The aspiration of creating a Spanish
educational and scientific network comparable to that of neighboring countries was under-
going consolidation at a time when the Republican period as a reference point had faded
into the distant past, and the present was suffering under the legacy of Francoism through
the lingering effects of ideological conviction and genealogical adherence. In the late eight-
ies and nineties, successive socialist governments at the national level, as well as those of the
autonomous communities, devoted an important and continuous effort to the improvement
of the educational and scientific system. Among those behind these efforts were political
leaders who knew first-hand the educational and university environment and were com-
mitted to improving it. There were also other factors, such as the social (public) opinion
that increasingly though of education as a mechanism for social (upward) mobility, the
growing social prestige afforded to science, the need for the economic transformation of the
country’s business structures and the generalized desire by the population that Spain should
become a fully European country (with everything that entailed).
Before any of this could happen, deep reforms needed to be carried out. Among the dif-
ferent legislative reorganizations of the new democratic parenthesis, perhaps the General
Organic Law of the Educational System of 1990 is one of the most relevant. In the first
place, it reorganized the educational stages, establishing a free and voluntary first level for
children from 0 to 6 years old, followed by a primary and a new secondary education that
extended compulsory schooling through age 16, and two final years of baccalaureate. Sec-
ond, this education system was adapted to the new Spanish political and democratic reality.
Thus, the students’ families and the different levels of the Administration could have a more
active role in schools and high schools, in an increasingly decentralized educational system
in the hands of the autonomous governments that, in turn, allowed normalization of Cata-
lan, Basque, and Galician languages, histories and cultures. Third, as of 1982, the socialist
governments opted for a pedagogical-social perspective, strongly influenced by constructiv-
ist pedagogy, which was the main point of contention and the ultimate reason for frequent
legislative changes, coinciding with each change of political and ideological majority in the
Spanish congress (Cabrera; Puelles).
In the 1990s and 2000s there was a rapid expansion of the Spanish university map. On
the one hand, the previous provincial delegations became autonomous centers and new

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institutions were created, reaching a grand total of 93 universities (51 of them public)
in Spain as of 2023. On the other hand, there was a strong renewal – in number, train-
ing, and social extraction – of the student and faculty bodies, the most evident change
being its feminization, with 56% female students by 2020 and 42.9% females (although
only 24.9% female full professors) in the teaching force by 2019. All these universities,
new and old, together with the CSIC and the growing public network of research centers
linked to the various ministries, benefited from the different state – nine ministerial fund-
ing calls between 1988 and 2023 – and regional research and development plans, as well
as from the still-scarce Spanish private initiatives and, also, increasingly available Euro-
pean funds. Thus, between 2014 and 2015, Spain ranked fourth in obtaining EU funding
(Serratosa; Muñoz and Sebastián) and third country in Horizon Europe program funding
table (2021–2023). With the turn of the century, in addition, new contractual modalities
emerged within the national and regional plans: Contracts with names such as Ramón y
Cajal, Juan de la Cierva, or ICREA (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats,
Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) that facilitated the incorporation
of new talent or the return of academics working in other countries to the Spanish univer-
sity system. Thanks to these new policies, Spanish scientists and researchers have improved
their international mobility and visibility and have also integrated quality assurance and
control of results into their existing research methodology (peer review, competitive fund-
ing, quality agencies, integration in international networks and so on).
All of these efforts culminated in 2010, when the budget dedicated to R&D reached
1.40% of GDP, the highest historical investment effort in Spain up to then. In the aftermath
of the financial crisis that began in 2008, however, 2015 investment in R&D fell to 2006
levels, a regression that broke the trend that had been gradually bringing Spain towards con-
vergence with the rest of EU countries (Otero Carvajal, La ciencia 234–238). Paradoxically,
the COVID-19 pandemic, the financial instability and different systemic threats provoked
a unexpected European reaction and, precisely thanks to the budget boost from the EU, in
2021 Spain surpassed the previous record for investment in R&D with 1.43% of GDP.
Although it is still too early to know if this recovery will continue or will be tempo-
rary again, some symptoms are not good: The job insecurity of non-permanent teachers,
loss of competitiveness in research, budgetary difficulties in all universities and the loss of
cultural prestige for universities and academics alike, with particularly virulent attacks by
opportunistic politicians. Taken together, these conditions limit the possibilities for Span-
ish education and research to participate decisively in the next socio-economic challenges
(digitization, AI, Big Data, etc.) and impoverishes the country by not generating enough
job opportunities, all of which conspires to foster a significant brain drain among its most
highly trained professionals and scientists. Around 87,000 highly educated Spanish work-
ers emigrated to other countries in order to find work between 2007–2017, according to
the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Sociales (CEPS, Center for Political and Social Studies).
The “brain drain” has an equivalent at other educational levels as well. Today, there
is no longer an illiteracy problem, and schooling is compulsory, but Spain has the second
highest dropout rates in Europe: 13.6% in 2021, according to Eurostat. Constant legisla-
tive changes and the lack of political consensus, investment and strategical coherence are
at the roots of this failure. All this surely helps to explain the 29.3% youth unemployment
rate in February 2023, according to the OECD.
In summary, the Spanish educational and research system has historically suffered from
great fragility, due to the discontinuity of the necessary spaces for allowing dissent and

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fostering contrasting ideas. While under the absolutist and dictatorial regimes this open
attitude was simply impossible, during liberal and democratic periods there has been a
lack – still ongoing today – of will to generate a broad consensus on how to configure
educational and scientific ecosystems that would benefit the country’s citizens. Despite this
precariousness, considerable progress has been made, although often without enough con-
tinuity and sometimes as the result of personal or isolated initiatives (Sánchez Ron, El país).
Today more than ever, Spanish society needs these brief achievements – so evanescent that
Juan Pimentel qualifies them as ghosts or specters (2020) – to crystallize and consolidate
into something more permanent and solid. That society needs to break with the fatalism
exemplified by Ramón Carande’s synthetic definition of Spanish history as one of “too
many setbacks,” demasiados retrocesos.

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Científica en España, edited by Ana Romero and María Jesús Santesmases, Rubes Editorial, 2008,
pp. 329–56.
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 21
REGULATORY POLICIES
AND INSTITUTIONS OF
CONTEMPORARY SPANISH
LANGUAGE
María Florencia Rizzo

Introduction
Spanish is spoken throughout a large geographic area that includes Spain and many coun-
tries in the Americas, as well as in Equatorial Guinea and in various diasporic communities
worldwide. Its status as a hegemonic language in these territories is the outcome of long his-
torical processes. During the colonization period in the Americas, Spanish was a language
of domination at the service of the Spanish empire, and it was imposed to different degrees
and with assorted methods, depending on the ruling royal house (Arnoux and Bein). Dur-
ing Bourbon rule, Spanish served as an efficient tool to impose a strongly centralist policy
in the Iberian Peninsula, which required the Castilianization of the Kingdom at the expense
of other languages. Part of this political project included the foundation of the RAE (Real
Academia Española) in 1713. The RAE was created to safeguard the unity and purity of the
language in both the Peninsula and the overseas colonial territories.
In the Americas, after the wars of independence that took place in the early 19th century,
Spanish played a major role in defining national identity. The formation and consolida-
tion of national States required the standardization of a range of linguistic settings which
also included the continent’s autochthonous languages and, beginning in the late 19th cen-
tury, the languages brought by immigrants. In this context, particularly in the Southern
Cone, language and identity were discussed with intensity, as linguistic and cultural links to
the former metropolis were reexamined (Rama). From the latter third of the 19th century
onwards, Spain introduced a policy to establish closer ties with its former colonies. To this
end, the RAE deployed a twofold strategy of control over linguistics matters: to designate
the academics from the Americas and to create Academies of the Americas that would fol-
low the RAE’s lead (Guitarte and Torres Quintero). Many of these academies were founded
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, as a result of the RAE’s position as the tra-
ditional standardizing center for Spanish around the world, other active Spanish language
normative institutions still have very unequal influence.
In the late 20th century, economic, social, technological, and demographic transforma-
tions arising from globalization created the need to consider the international projection
of languages. For Spanish, this meant promoting actions to establish a common variety of

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-24 
 Regulatory Policies and Institutions of Contemporary Spanish

the language with a worldwide scope. Within this framework, the RAE assumed a leading
role in a renewed Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (Asociación de Aca-
demias de la Lengua Española, or ASALE), proposing a novel form of shared regulation of
the common language, jointly with other Spanish-language academies. Other agents also
sought to intervene in various areas of the development of Spanish. These included the
Cervantes Institute, which promotes Spanish as a foreign language, and the Foundation of
Urgent Spanish (Fundación del Español Urgente, or Fundéu), which focused on language
in the context of the media and Internet.
In this chapter, I will examine a set of projects and policies on the Spanish language
which intend to be representative of the Spanish-speaking world as a whole and which
were designed by institutions in Spain during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I will
also investigate some initiatives that are based on different outlooks on language issues and
have been proposed in other countries, in particular Argentina and Mexico. The chapter
takes a glottopolitical view, considering linguistic interventions and language ideologies,
understanding them as part of broader processes that exceed the linguistic plane (Arnoux
“Glotopolítica”; Del Valle “La perspectiva glotopolítica”). Glottopolitics is an approach
that studies actions on language, considering its social dimension, and relates these actions
and policies to broader processes in which they make sense. This approach considers lan-
guage not as a neutral space but as a space of tension and contention. Understanding that
language has a political dimension, glottopolitical linguistic approaches thus uncover the
many interests underpinning linguistic phenomena, paying special attention to conflict, het-
erogeneity, and displaced or silenced subjectivities.

Actions in the Field of Normative Regulation of the Spanish Language

In the 1990s, the Spanish State took a political interest in endowing the Spanish language
with international status in a scenario that fostered that type of initiative. This scenario
included favorable conditions such as the consolidation of Spain’s democracy, the coun-
try’s joining NATO and the European Union, the establishment of companies with Spanish
capital throughout Latin America, and the development of the Ibero-American Community
of Nations, among other factors. Spain’s political interests materialized in concrete actions
taken by the State to promote Spanish, among these, the organization of the Spanish Lan-
guage Congress (Seville 1992), the creation of the Cervantes Institute (Madrid 1991), and
the increase in funding for the RAE in consideration of its needs.
In this context, the RAE began to change its language policy in order to deploy and legit-
imize a proposal to share the management of the “common language” with the other mem-
bers of the ASALE throughout the Spanish-speaking region. The RAE had gone through
an unfavorable period with little activity on account of the “economic suffocation” it had
suffered under Franco’s dictatorship (Senz 218–24). At the same time, from the 1980s
onwards, the media had been playing an increasing role as normative regulatory agents
in the Hispanic context, particularly through the publication of journalistic style guides in
Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and Argentina.
The renewal of the RAE’s language policy included actions in two spheres: The nor-
mative model and linguistic management. On the one hand, the single-centered approach
based on the cultured language variety from Castille, which had endured over time, was
displaced by a “pan-Hispanic” model that proposed to include cultured norms from differ-
ent zones, without them affecting the “common language.” On the other hand, this work

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would be based on a so-called “inter-academic consensus.” This was reflected by the RAE’s
giving up of their exclusive authorship of academic works and adopting shared author-
ship with the other language academies, which would now publish them as ASALE. Thus,
the purpose of the pan-Hispanic project was to include the academies from the Americas
in the management of the Spanish language, which in this new phase would be regulated
according to a normative model that would encompass the entire Spanish-speaking world.
However, both the normative approach and the institutional relations among academies
proposed by this policy have been the object of critical studies. These studies claim that
beneath the discourse on managing the shared language democratically, Spain continues to
act as guardian of the development of the ideal standard language, at the service of certain
political and economic interests (Hamel; Del Valle “La RAE y el español total”; Paffey and
Mar-Molinero; Lagares; Lara; Lauria “L’institutionnalisation”). This asymmetry is revealed
especially in the way linguistic instruments address varieties of Spanish, in particular when
they consider uses from the Americas to be subsidiary (Lauria and López García; Fanjul;
Senz et al.; Méndez García de Paredes; Arnoux “En torno a la Nueva gramática” and “El
dispositivo normativo”; Rizzo “El discurso normativo”).
The project reformulates a pan-Hispanism that dates back to the 19th century (Del
Valle “Panhispanismo”). This political-cultural movement maintained that there was a
pan-Hispanic community consisting of Spain and its former colonies, constituted on the
basis of the common Spanish language. In the new phase of pan-Hispanism, this meant
embracing “not the uniform norm but the internal diversity” of the shared language (Del
Valle 476). In order for the proposal to acquire legitimacy throughout the Spanish-speaking
world, in particular in the Americas, a major discursive device was deployed with the aim
of promoting certain attributes for Spanish and creating a common social imaginary that
would favor the proposed language regulatory actions (Rizzo “Fragmentos del discurso”).
In this regard, a significant role was played by the International Congresses of the Spanish
Language (Congresos Internacionales de la Lengua Española or CILE), held on the initia-
tive of Spain since 1997 in different Spanish-speaking countries. The discourse used at these
events presents the idea of Spanish as a legacy shared among everyone under equal condi-
tions, and as a pan-Hispanic language whose diversity does not affect the common basis.
The CILE are co-organized by the Cervantes Institute, the RAE, and to a lesser extent, the
ASALE, in cooperation with the governments of the host countries, whose leading authori-
ties preside over the inaugural and closing ceremonies. The presence of government author-
ities and other internationally recognized figures, particularly from the spheres of literature,
journalism, and politics, draws major media attention to the events. Indeed, prior to and
during the CILE, press coverage in Spanish generally reinforces the idea of pan-Hispanism
(Paffey). Several of the main media groups from Spain and the Americas also take part
regularly in these congresses, evidencing a convergence of interests.
Indeed, the RAE, the ASALE and the media began to coordinate their work on language
regulation in order to adopt common criteria. The Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas
(Panhispanic Dictionary of Doubts, 2005) is an example of such joint work. Numerous
media organizations contributed to the project and have played an important part in legiti-
mizing pan-Hispanic policies (Marimón Llorca; Rizzo “El papel de la prensa”). The crea-
tion of the Fundéu in Madrid in 2005 should also be interpreted along the same language
policy lines. The Fundéu, which is the outcome of an agreement between the Agencia EFE1
and Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), seeks to promote, with advice from the
RAE, the proper use of Spanish in the media and – more recently – on the Internet. Since

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its creation, the Fundéu has maintained close ties with the RAE, and thereby also with its
pan-Hispanic project. Its members have participated in both organizations and established
agreements for cooperation. This association was publicly consolidated in 2020 when the
BBVA stopped sponsoring the Fundéu, and the RAE and Agencia EFE signed a corporate
framework agreement to relaunch the Foundation, which was renamed FundéuRAE.
The pan-Hispanic project is supported by a group of companies with Spanish capital and
investments in Latin America, which shows that this new phase prioritizes the logic of lan-
guage commodification, that is, considering the object language as merchandise (Heller and
Duchêne). Transnational companies such as Telefónica, Repsol, Iberia, Banco Santander,
and BBVA, among others, have provided financial backing for linguistic and cultural pro-
jects that promote the social imaginary of a pan-Hispanic community based on the “com-
mon language” as a sign of shared identity. Thus, the aim of adding economic value to the
public image of the Spanish language was to consolidate the Spanish-speaking community
as a market where the presence of Spanish capital is perceived as “natural” and “legiti-
mate” and not as part of a neo-colonial project (Del Valle “Panhispanismo” 476–77). The
relevance of the economic side of the project is reflected by the fact that these companies
often sponsor public events such as the CILE, and their directors participate in them. The
companies also finance linguistic instruments2 and market pan-Hispanic products such as
publishing initiatives and projects related to teaching Spanish as a foreign language.
The “new pan-Hispanic language policy” – as it is called by its ideologists – was offi-
cially presented at the 3rd CILE, held in Rosario, Argentina, in 2004. The document stating
the basis and justification for this policy announced the adoption of the motto “Unidad
en la diversidad” (“Unity in diversity”) to replace the motto “Limpia, fija y da esplendor”
(“Cleaning, fixing and providing splendor”), which had been used since the creation of the
RAE. But signs of the development of this policy can be traced back to before this formal
announcement was made (Rizzo “Antecedentes”).
For example, at the 2nd CILE, held in 2001, Víctor García de la Concha, director of the
RAE at that time, gave a speech titled “Declaration of Valladolid” on behalf of the ASALE.
The speech was significant for two reasons. First, it anticipated the change in the institu-
tional discourse that would become firmly established as of 2004. Second, it resignified an
existing acronym – ASALE – with the aim of presenting the entity as a single organic body
whose work was the outcome of a balanced distribution of tasks and a permanent consen-
sus (Rizzo “Fragmentos del discurso” 488–89). As mentioned, the ASALE had existed since
1951, and although it had been created to provide an institutional framework for all the
academies and to promote coordinated, equitable work among them, no significant changes
were carried out until the publication of the document Nueva Política Lingüística Panhis-
pánica (New Pan-Hispanic Language Policy) in 2004 and the aforementioned Diccionario
Panhispánico de Dudas in 2005, both co-authored by RAE and ASALE. Notwithstanding,
these achievements have not altered the fact that the situation of the ASALE still reflects
the traditional unequal hierarchy between Spain and the rest of the Spanish-speaking coun-
tries. First, even though the RAE is only one of the twenty-three member academies of the
ASALE, it figures as a separate institution and as first author on these publications, and
second, the ASALE bylaws still designate the RAE as its president and treasurer.
In short, the Declaration of Valladolid triggered the process of renewal of the insti-
tutional image of the academies, enabling the RAE to legitimize, under the pretense of
a shared purpose, its place of privilege as the main standardizing agent in the Hispanic
world. In the Americas, the academies and certain media groups have generally supported

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or complemented the pan-Hispanic project. However, other sectors – mainly universities

and scientific communities – perceive it as an expression of neocolonialism that overpowers
language sovereignty in countries with less political and economic weight, which are also
located in peripheral zones of the global economy. In this regard, there are two outstanding
lexicographical projects in countries with autonomist linguistic profiles: Mexico and Argen-
tina. In Mexico, El diccionario del español de México (Dictionary of Mexican Spanish,
2010), whose second edition was published in 2018, was the outcome of a project led by
lexicographer Luis Fernando Lara and developed by El Colegio de México. In Argentina,
the Diccionario integral del español de la Argentina (Comprehensive Argentine Spanish
Dictionary, 2009) was designed by a group of university researchers and financed by the
publisher Tinta Fresca, which belongs to the Grupo Clarín multimedia company. Beyond
the differences in the contexts in which each of these comprehensive dictionaries was pro-
duced (Lauria “El primer diccionario integral” 65–7), they both create a break with the
prevailing lexicographic tradition in the Americas since the mid-19th century, a tradition
which focused primarily on developing dictionaries that were complementary to those pub-
lished in Spain. Other actions in Argentina that deviate from the prism of pan-Hispanism
are the creation of the Museum of Books and Language in 2011 and the publication of
the Diccionario Latinoamericano de la Lengua Española (Latin American Dictionary of
Spanish Language, 2014). This is a collaborative digital dictionary promoted by Tres de
Febrero National University, which invites speakers from the region to write definitions of
the words they commonly use.
These types of undertakings, conceived and executed from non-hegemonic normative
centers, are political-linguistic projects conducted autonomously and they constitute affirm-
ative gestures of language sovereignty (thus implicitly and explicitly distancing themselves
from pan-Hispanism).

Normative Interventions in/of Digital Spaces

The increasing development of information and communication technologies and their
major impact on all spheres of people’s lives has in recent years attracted greater attention
to virtual contexts from language regulatory agents. Digital settings have become increas-
ingly important as places to ask questions and have exchanges about normative uses of
language, especially in different online dictionaries and forums, many of which are produced
by non-institutional entities such as Wordreference (Reyes and Bonnin). In this scenario,
various normative institutions such as the RAE and the Fundéu have endeavored to increase
their online presence by updating their websites, opening accounts on social media, provid-
ing free access to linguistic resources and online versions of normative works, and offering
language consultancy services. In addition, they have developed specific normative devices
intended to regulate writing and communication in general within digital contexts. These
include Escribir en Internet. Guía para los nuevos medios y las redes sociales (Writing on the
Internet. Guide for New Media and Social Networks; Fundéu 2012) and Libro de estilo de la
lengua española según la norma panhispánica (Spanish Language Style Guide According to
the Pan-Hispanic Norm; RAE 2018). These initiatives are aimed at capturing a vast, hetero-
geneous and transnational audience while privileging the principle of “unity” over the diver-
sity that the RAE theoretically considered important (Arnoux “Modos de regulación” 19).
Traditionally considered outdated and removed from reality, the RAE has increased
its presence on the Internet and across social media, as part of its modernization effort.

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In particular, its section on linguistic questions, which was launched on Twitter in 2012,
added a new dimension to its public presence. Public interaction between the RAE and
language users in a digital context means that anyone can read and comment on its state-
ments, which would have been impossible in the past. Indeed, these kinds of actions have
contributed to developing a renewed, supposedly friendlier image, in accordance with the
orientation of the new pan-Hispanic policy.
During its early years, the RAE’s Twitter service of providing answers to language-related
questions was limited to normative topics, and another source from within the organiza-
tion would respond or issue dogmatic rules, usually about spelling (e.g., “First and last
names are subject to rules of accentuation: Míriam Álvarez. Accents should not be omit-
ted,” December 1, 2012). In recent years, however, answers generally use less prescrip-
tive normative discourse (e.g., “It is recommended to avoid the use of ‘en base a’ [a form
of ‘based on’ considered unsuitable],” June 25, 2018). This latter approach is consistent
with some of the linguistic instruments published during the pan-Hispanic phase such as
la Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española (New Spanish Language Grammar, 2009),
which uses more politically correct language than did previous works (Arnoux “En torno
a la Nueva gramática”). Nevertheless, other answers – albeit fewer – are still based on cor-
rect/incorrect parameters (e.g., “The spelling adapted to Spanish from the English word
‘spoiler’ should be ‘espóiler’ . . . ,” June 26, 2018) associated to the standard language
ideology which legitimates certain canonical forms that tend to consolidate uniformity in
the language (Milroy). In either case, the criteria adopted in selecting information tend
to be heterogeneous. In general, the preference is to favor hegemonic resolutions for the
entire Spanish-speaking world based on the language varieties of the decision-makers (e.g.,
“delante de mí” (in front of me), “buenos días” (good morning), “pósteres” (posters),
“emoticonos” (emoticons), “hacia delante” (forward)) rather than on others considered
peripheral (e.g., “delante mío,” “buen día,” “pósters,” “emoticones,” “hacia adelante”)
(Rizzo “El discurso normativo” 438–44). Thus, certain linguistic forms selected according
to non-uniform criteria as being the most common or widespread in the Spanish-speaking
area are associated to “general Spanish” and preferred for fostering the expansion of the
language.
Attentive to the logic of immediacy and concision required by discursive practice in
virtual settings, early on, the Fundéu designed a set of strategies for normative intervention
intended to reach the most extensive and diverse audience possible (Rizzo “La regulación
del español”). Digitally supported and mainly intended for digital communication, the strat-
egy seeks to complement the traditional book format. In particular, the Fundéu developed
several sections on the Twitter platform, identified with different hashtags (#recoFundéu,
#Hoysehablade, #Wikilengua), in which they included recommendations on the normative
use of Spanish. Like the RAE, the Fundéu also answers linguistic questions from speakers.
Along general lines, the Fundéu positions itself as an agent that recommends or advises
(e.g., “ ‘Arcoíris’, mejor que ‘arco iris’” [‘Rainbow’ is better than ‘rain bow’], June 28,
2020). The notion of recommendation mitigates the weight of the norm (Nogueira 267),
contributing to the image of normative advisor – a friendly reference source for both pro-
fessional and non-professional writers in digital settings. However, in many publications,
the idea of recommendation disappears altogether, and the prescriptive stance becomes
accentuated and polarizing (e.g., “‘desinfectar’, no ‘sanitizar’” [‘disinfect’, not ‘sanitize’],
April 6, 2020). This stresses the idea of a homogeneous language, a common language
throughout the Spanish-speaking world, privileging a “general” or “global Spanish” and

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leaving aside existing varieties, in line with what we observed about the RAE (Arnoux “El
español global”; Nogueira).
Indeed, recent years have seen the emergence of a type of discourse focused especially
on the uniformization of linguistic norms, in accordance with demands of global mar-
kets and new technologies, particularly in digital settings, which are subject to a logic of
urgency, simplicity, and brevity in writing. The normative devices intended for linguistic
(and discursive) regulation in digital contexts, such as style guides for online versions of
daily newspapers and communication on the Internet in general, also promote a tendency
toward linguistic uniformization, consistent with “general” or “global Spanish,” which
would facilitate the action of search engines and automatic translators (Arnoux “Modos de
regulación”). According to Arnoux, the social imaginary constructed by the digital media
seeks to homogenize discursive spaces and facilitate complementarity with English, because
in cyberspace, norms are shared (e.g., short phrases with simple structure and few subor-
dinate clauses).

Actions in the Field of the Certification of Spanish as a Foreign Language

The field of teaching Spanish as a foreign language began to gain strength in the 1980s and
1990s, driven by globalization processes such as the increase in migration for education,
jobs, or tourism; the internationalization of higher education; and the establishment of
regional integrations. Certifications of language proficiency in turn activated and deployed
a large market based on foreign language lessons and courses, production of teaching mate-
rials, development of modules containing advice, exercises and examinations for candi-
dates, teacher training in foreign language, and the rise of so-called “language tourism.”
During Spain’s democratic period following Franco’s dictatorship, two closely related,
significant linguistic-political events took place, which strengthened the institutionalization
of teaching and evaluating Spanish as a foreign language (Rizzo “La actual política”). These
events were, first, the 1989 advent of the first internationally valid examinations certify-
ing proficiency in Spanish – the Diplomas of Spanish as a Foreign Language (Diplomas de
Español como Lengua Extranjera or DELE), initially under the responsibility of the Min-
istry of Education and Science. The second event was the 1991 creation of the Cervantes
Institute for the international promotion and teaching of Spanish as a foreign language.
During subsequent years, there were some changes in the management of these certifica-
tions – with the addition of Salamanca University and the recently created Cervantes Insti-
tute as participants – and DELE centers were set up in different countries around the world.
Thus, at the beginning of the 21st century, the DELE were the only internationally
valid language examinations in the Spanish-speaking world. Subsequently, however, Latin
American universities created their own certificates, with different interests and scopes: The
Certificate of Spanish: Language and Use (Certificado de Español Lengua y Uso or CELU)
in Argentina in 2004 and the Certificate of Spanish as an Additional Language (Certifi-
cación del Español como Lengua Adicional or CELA) in Mexico in 2007.
In Argentina, the initiative arose within a context of strengthening political and cultural
ties among the Mercosur countries, especially with Brazil. Meanwhile, Brazil deployed a
campaign promoting Spanish as an economic resource (Del Valle and Villa) that prioritized
agents and “products” from Spain – in particular the Cervantes Institute and the DELE
certificates – with respect to those from other Spanish-speaking countries. Conceived in
coordination with the Certification of Proficiency in Portuguese (Certificado de Proficiência

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em Língua Portuguesa para Estrangeiros or CELPE-Bras) developed in Brazil, which has

been in use for several years), the CELU was the outcome of an agreement signed by the
Inter-University Consortium that focused on teaching, evaluating and certifying Spanish
as a Second and Foreign Language. The Consortium originally consisted of three national
universities: University of Buenos Aires, National University of Córdoba, and National
University of the Litoral.
In Mexico, the CELA examination was designed by the Center of Spanish for Foreigners
(Centro de Enseñanza Para Extranjeros or CEPE) of the Autonomous National University
of Mexico, within the framework of its policy of internationalization of higher education
(García García). Its starting point was an agreement signed in 2002 with the University of
Salamanca, which was academically responsible for the DELE (Nieto). With a design ini-
tially based on the model of the DELE examinations, the CELA contrasted sharply with the
CELU project, which from its inception displayed autonomy from the enterprises in Spain.
It is worth noting that since its creation, the CELA has coexisted in the CEPE with other
local certificates for academic purposes offered by the same center and has received very
few candidates (CEPE).
Although right from the start, the Cervantes Institute became a dominant agent in the
field of teaching Spanish as a foreign language, its actions in recent years have adopted the
guise of the pan-Hispanic project (Rizzo “La actual política” 136–37), i.e., the institute
proposes shared leadership including teaching “all varieties” of Spanish. The most visible
outcome of this orientation was the 2016 emergence of a new certificate: The International
Evaluation Service of the Spanish Language (Servicio Internacional de Evaluación de la
Lengua Española or SIELE). The words of Daniel Hernández Ruipérez, Rector of the Uni-
versity of Salamanca at that time, during the presentation of the new exam at the 7th CILE,
summarize the new direction taken: “The SIELE has the virtue that the unity of academies
of the Spanish language that was revitalized in all countries through the pan-Hispanic pro-
ject, is now seconded by the institutions that teach Spanish: the Cervantes Institute and the
universities of the Spanish-speaking world.”
The SIELE is promoted as a pan-Hispanic certificate that represents different varieties
of Spanish. However, the trainers’ guide specifies that lower-level tasks (A1, A2, B1) use
“international Spanish” or “neutral variety.” Thus, this “neutral variety” has considerable
presence given that it is used in three out of the five levels evaluated. The “international
Spanish” option is linked to the normative model described previously, which has become
more widespread in recent years pursuant to the demands of the digital world. There is a
tendency to promote “general” Spanish (also called “global” or “international”), stripped
of regional features, in order to achieve linguistic expansion and reach a broader audience.
In contrast to the other certifications considered, the SIELE has a commercial profile.
This is evidenced by the fact that its administrative and business management is handled
by the company Telefónica Educación Digital. Another feature distinguishing it from other
exam proposals created in national spheres is the fact that it is jointly managed by institu-
tions from three different countries: The Cervantes Institute, the University of Salamanca,
the Autonomous National University of Mexico, and the University of Buenos Aires. The
certifying institutions hold significant legitimizing power – to the extent in which they
determine who can be considered competent speakers of a certain language and what level
of knowledge they possess (Santos). Thus, the inclusion of universities from two normative
centers of importance, located in Mexico and Argentina, expresses the search for legitima-
tion of business-oriented, globally reaching enterprises such as the SIELE by reinforcing the

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idea of harmony and shared management proposed by pan-Hispanism – but only among a
few agencies and overseen by Spain.

Conclusion
In this chapter I have analyzed a series of actions intended to regulate and promote Spanish
internationally, which respond to the political and economic interests of the institutions
that endorse them. Despite the discourse of shared management and consensus proposed
by pan-Hispanism, the linguistic ideology linked to the standardizing tradition historically
developed in Spanish-speaking areas is still anchored in the center-periphery relationship.
This deepens unequal linguistic distribution because it tends to privilege one linguistic vari-
ety – the purported “legitimate language” – above the rest, thereby enabling it to acquire
international visibility. Although agencies in Spain, which set themselves up as legitimate
actors for intervention in the language, claim that their projects are representative, there is
often tension with other non-hegemonic proposals that seek to arbitrate the linguistic space
in benefit of autochthonous interests.
Actions on languages are part of broader processes subject to transformations at dif-
ferent levels – national, regional, global. In recent years, concern regarding the expansion
of the Spanish language demanded by globalization processes – in which the relationship
with English is always present in different ways – has generated a movement towards
linguistic simplification and uniformization that cancels out differences, in the search for
a variety that would be all-embracing. This trend to unification seen in pan-Hispanism
can also be observed in practices in other spheres such as legal, administrative or busi-
ness (Arnoux “Modos de regulación” 17–8), and expresses the political will to build a
linguistic space that will guarantee the expansion of global markets involving the Spanish
language.

Notes
1 Agencia EFE is the first and largest news agency publishing in the Spanish language, and one of the
most important globally. In 1981 it created the Department of Urgent Spanish (Departamento de
Español Urgente or DEU) to promote the proper use of Spanish in the media by unifying linguistic
criteria. Based on the DEU and its guiding principles, the Fundéu was later created in 2005.
2 To mention a few examples, the Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas (Panhispanic Dictionary of
Doubts, 2005) was sponsored by Telefónica; the Santander Bank has provided financing since
2007 for development of the Corpus de referencia del español del siglo XXI or CORPES XXI
(21st Century Reference Corpus of Spanish); and Fundación Repsol sponsored the Diccionario de
americanismos (Dictionary of Americanisms, 2010).

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 22
PRISON ABOLITION IN SPAIN
The Weight of History, the Debate,
and the Future1

Aurélie Vialette

Why is it so hard to imagine a world without prisons? Prison abolitionists are oftentimes
considered utopian thinkers; they are treated as people who fail to recognize that human
beings are wrongdoers-in-the-making who must be subjected to discipline, in theory and
in practice. Yet the title of Angela Davis’ famous 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete? asks
a straightforward question, one which has been dividing experts for years. “The prison,”
Davis affirms, “is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives” (9),
the unquestionable natural solution for actions considered dangerous or threatening, but
also for those which fall within the broad category of the non-normative.
In this chapter, I argue that to support abolition in the contemporary period, one needs
to examine the nineteenth-century penal system. I interrogate the reasons both behind the
lack of support for abolitionism in Spain today and why there is a strong opinion in favor
of penal institutions. I contend that the contemporary understanding of prisons as sites for
the cure and redemption of individuals is a legacy of nineteenth-century prisoner reform
(Monlau 821, 833). I analyze the debates about both incarceration and its intent, while
problematizing the role of contemporary Spanish penal institutions in achieving decarcera-
tion. Research on penal abolition requires several methodological approaches: A reading
of theoretical texts about the issue, an analysis of both legislation and concrete initia-
tives undertaken by government and justice institutions, and in-person discussions with
participants in this debate. As such, this chapter relies on interviews I have conducted
with justice professionals, academics, and activists. I show that the abolitionist move-
ment is almost nonexistent in the Iberian Peninsula and that only scattered academic and
government initiatives towards decarceration have been undertaken. Nevertheless, these
initiatives have opened the door to debates about the necessary transformation of the jus-
tice system. I show that one such initiative, a collaboration between the Consejo General
del Poder Judicial (General Council of the Judiciary) and the Fiscalía General del Estado
(Federal Attorney General) called Talleres de justicia restaurativa or Talleres de diálogos
restaurativos (Restorative Justice Workshops or Restorative Dialogues Workshops), has
the potential to establish alternative methods to confront crime. These methods, based
on dialogue and social responsibility, would positively impact recidivism rates. Further-
more, I analyze what punitive populism implies, and throughout the chapter, what the steps

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-25
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

towards decarceration would be. As I demonstrate, the vocabulary used in the twenty-first
century to support decarceration reproduces the one that nineteenth-century liberal jurists
and reformers created on hygiene and empathy but also religion and paternalism. I finally
conclude that this vocabulary might be a barrier to a true transition to a society without
cages.

The Weight of Nineteenth-Century Penal Institutions

in the Current Spanish Prison System
If prison abolition is an almost non-existent movement in contemporary Spain, it is because
the vision of the citizens’ right to liberty has been conditioned historically. Nineteenth-century
reformers’ projects centered on prisoners as individuals, and not on society or the collec-
tive’s responsibility towards them. This has had an impact on the politics of incarceration
of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, resulting specifically in a
belief in reform and redemption for prisoners through punishment and isolation. A mor-
alizing discourse accompanied the reform movement in the second half of the nineteenth
century and animated discussions on the importance of addressing the bodies of the prison
population. The treatment of prisoners’ bodies was a moral issue that had theoretical and
political implications. According to Michel Foucault, criminals are jailed not because they
need punishment but rather because of the necessity to ensure their presence in an assigned
place during a specific time. The use of prisons as a response to a given infraction is not so
much one of retribution but of the time that people spend in freedom vs the time they are
incarcerated. In modern societies, human beings are deprived of their lived time as a punish-
ment. For Foucault, imprisonment is neither penitence for nor vengeance against the one
who has acted contrary to social norms, but instead, it is set up for the defense and protec-
tion of society (Société 68–73). Thus, imprisonment becomes linked to social utility and not
just to the crime itself. Therefore, starting in the nineteenth century, reformers and writers
alike became interested in linking the discourse of punishment to a discourse of the utility
of citizens and their possible rehabilitation, oftentimes based on the idea of redemption
as well. Jurist, slavery abolitionist, and writer Concepción Arenal (1820–1893) criticized
this orientation of prisoner reform when she highlighted the functional problems of penal
institutions and affirmed that offenders did not operate outside of society but that society
itself offered them the means to offend: “El penado no brota de una manera espóntanea,
sin tener antes del delito relaciones con la sociedad” (“The convict does not spontaneously
spring up without having a relationship with society before the crime;” Estudios 42). For
Arenal, economic and social factors are relevant points of entry into understanding crime
and its treatment in society – an argument abolitionists use today.
Indeed, the lower social classes (the poor, the working class, prostitutes, vagrants, and
gypsies), considered a social and political threat, were a target of such imprisonment poli-
tics in the nineteenth century. Their very presence contaminated bourgeois spaces of social-
ity, which was a justification for caging them. Foucault’s concept of “social dangerousness”
explains the justification for the establishment of a coercive apparatus that disciplined bod-
ies whose actions and modes of life did not correspond to the status quo (The Punitive 183).
The nineteenth-century politics of social order and cleansing generated what twenty-first–
century lawyer and activist Alicia Alonso has termed “punitive populism” (Interview).
Punitive populism means that policymaking is driven by public support for severe criminal
justice policies such as incarceration and harsh punishment (Wood 1). Punitive populism,

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according to Wood, is historically present in countries that have had an increase in prison
populations, such as the U.S. or the Western world in general. Punitive populism can be
seen in our contemporary world, affirms Alonso, in the many social problems that are
resolved through the prison system – environmental, local, violence, and immigration,
among others (Interview).
The legacy of nineteenth-century penal reform is one of the main hindrances to a flour-
ishing abolitionist movement. Yet studying nineteenth-century penal reform debates can
illuminate the position that prisons are on the road to obsolescence. Indeed, source mate-
rials from the United States, Spain, and other European countries reveal that concerns
regarding prisoners’ labor, treatment, and education, along with recidivism and overcrowd-
ing were then, as they are today, the main objects of discussion in the field (Gülhan; Actes
des douze congrès). Angela Davis’ statement that the “prison has become a black hole into
which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited” (16) is patently verifiable in the
nineteenth century and underscores how certain bodies were treated and were considered
disposable in a booming industrial world. For example, positivism’s scientific character
and epistemology were pivotal in discussions about penal reform and the Spanish state’s
strategies to regulate the public sphere. Positivist thinking and knowledge stemmed from
social medicine, hygiene, penal law, and scientific techniques developed by the police. The
objective was to build a public sphere made up of trustworthy citizens fully able to partici-
pate in the construction of the modern nation. Those who did not fit this mold were con-
sidered deviant. Deviance encompassed prostitution, criminality, non-normative subjects
(queer and disabled), and the racialized other. Disciplinary discourses on bodies considered
deviant were activated to avoid social disorder in a society governed by bourgeois norms
(Tsuchiya, Marginal Subjects 14–18).
Concretely, nineteenth-century positivism and hygienism allowed for the creation of
policies to counter what was perceived as social contamination. The Spanish Penal Code of
1848–1850 and its criminalization of “vagancia” (“vagrancy”) helped maintain the bour-
geois social order; vagrancy laws swept up members of social groups rejected by the incipi-
ent industrial society, particularly beggars and prostitutes. Our imprisonment techniques
are a continuation of those implemented in the nineteenth century and the arguments that
justified their implementation at that time are still current. Today, we are still too depend-
ent on post-enlightenment policies of incarceration; a belief in prisons as sites of reform,
strongly ingrained in nineteenth-century intellectuals, politicians, and jurists, which relied
on the privation of liberty as a model of punishment. After the first Spanish penal code was
promulgated in 1822, the privation of liberty became the predominant sentence (Trinidad
Fernández 133).
In Surveiller et punir, Foucault explains how the use of prisons in modern societies went
from being an exceptional condition to a common feature in which anyone who does not
conform to established norms is susceptible to incarceration. The French intellectual devised
the idea of the “carceral archipelago” to explain the way multiple elements and institutions
in modern societies form a global network in which men and women live under a form of
surveillance. This surveillance has one objective – to normalize. In this process of surveil-
lance, discipline is fundamental and is implemented in the carceral archipelago through the
existence of prisons, psychiatric hospitals, schools, and the army. These institutions aim
to form and reform people, with the objective of eliminating the presence and existence of
the social enemy – the deviant, the one who does not conform to societal norms. Society is
described as an archipelago, a network of institutions through which power is exerted. By

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using the metaphor of the carceral archipelago, Foucault implies that the technique of the
penitentiary is applied to the daily life of the entirety of the social body and allows for its
continuous surveillance and correction (Surveiller 305–7).
Surveillance and correction were keywords of the penitentiary system then, and they
are now. As a matter of fact, the focus on both has to do with how the bodies of prisoners
can adapt to a norm seen as necessary for rehabilitation. Numerous questions arose, and
still arise, from the considerations of prison reform through the implementation of this
system of surveillance and correction, especially how to treat prisoners’ bodies, once jailed.
Should they be completely isolated during their stay in prison? Should they work? Should
they communicate with other prisoners, with benefactors? Should this contact start from
the beginning or be progressive? A look at the panopticon reveals the centrality of the idea
of reform in the nineteenth century. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), an English philosopher
and legal adviser, and his followers all over the world including in Spain, believed that the
panopticon could modify conduct, emancipate prisoners, and stimulate reintegration. The
panopticon was an architectural and philosophical method that put surveillance at the
center of a project of reform and discipline of prisoners’ bodies. The idea was to impose
normalized conduct on those bodies by instilling in them the idea that they were under
constant surveillance.
Bentham’s influence in Spain was unprecedented, for instance in the Cortes of Cádiz
(Ramos Vázquez 186). The nineteenth-century saw the construction of panopticon “model”
prisons around the globe, from the Prison de la Santé in Paris (opened in 1867) to the
Lecumberri in Mexico City (construction began in 1888, opened in 1900), to the cárcel
Modelo in Madrid (opened in 1884) and in Barcelona (construction began in 1888, but it
opened in 1904 due to budgetary issues). Jacobo Villanova y Jordan, Bentham’s Spanish
translator, used the idea of rebirth to address the advantages of the panopticon for Spain’s
penal reform. In his Cárceles y presidios (1834), he affirmed that this architectural model
would reform the lifestyles of prisoners, “después de una tan rígida educación, los presos
acostumbrados al trabajo, é instruidos en la moral y en la religión, perderán sus hábitos
viciosos por la imposibilidad de continuarlos, y volverán á nacer para la sociedad” (“After
such a rigid education, the prisoners, accustomed to work and educated in moral and reli-
gious matters, will lose their dissolute habits due to the impossibility of continuing them,
and they will be born again in the eyes of society;” 81). The metaphor employed by the
author, “volverán á nacer,” is powerful. The baptism metaphor (Juan 3:4) implies that
the individual is welcomed and offered a new start within the community. Furthermore, it
has implications for the social body, which is itself renewed through the baptism of new
members.
It is critical to understand that this approach to prison sentences has defined the methods
of coercion used in our contemporary world. In the nineteenth century, capitalism was a
powerful force shaping society. Working-class revolts were raging across Europe and many
forms of subjection were devised to confront this problem and transform workers into
docile subjects in the service of the market. Moreover, the bourgeoisie as a social class had
an interest in imprisonment as a primary form of punishment, which restricted individual
rights and liberties and purged from social spaces the presence of individuals who made
those with cultural power uncomfortable. Incarceration, within the preeminent panopticon
model, was a welcome option. What was at stake then, the efficacy of the prison system and
its apparatuses for controlling the working classes, is still at stake today.

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Prison and Punishment in Contemporary Spanish Society

The practice of caging people relies on a variety of governmental spheres and institutions,
which work in concert to create a culture that aligns disobedience and punishment, which,
in turn, conditions our behavior. In a broad sense, this is what prison abolitionism fights
against. The movement highlights a culture of punishment exercised through, not only the
justice system, the police, psychiatric hospitals, or schools, but also through immigration
enforcement. In Spain, Centros de Internamiento de Extranjeros (CIE; Immigration Deten-
tion Centers), like those in Algeciras or Madrid, are sometimes said to be worse than most
jails, as well as sites of human rights violations (Rodríguez Martínez). These centers are
proof that imprisonment, restraint, and technologies of discipline are not limited to the
penal system, as Foucault rightly demonstrated in the 1970s (Surveiller 160–200).
Prison abolitionism asserts that offenses do not exist in a natural sense. Abolitionists
point out that actions considered criminal in the past would be accepted today, demon-
strating that offenses are social constructions validated by penal law at a precise moment
in history (Lecumberri and Restrepo, ¿Se puede terminar? 29–31, 151). What the prison
system has created is a society that relies upon incarceration in response to so-called devi-
ant conduct. And this conduct, abolitionists argue, is heavily dependent on the vagaries of
a particular epoch, which alone demands that we entirely rethink the type of society and
human relationships we wish to build and foster. An obvious example is how homosexual-
ity, bisexuality, and gender nonconformity were considered pathological and criminal in
Spain until 1978 when Adolfo Suárez’s government put a stop to this framing by making
changes to the penal code.
On July 17, 1954, during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, the Boletín
Oficial del Estado (Official State Bulletin) published an amendment to articles 2 and 6 of
the 1933 Ley de Vagos y Maleantes (Vagrancy and Miscreants Law). By targeting citizens
whose conduct was deemed to be of the “más bajo nivel moral” (“lowest moral level;”
4862), these changes were designed to protect society by specifying that homosexuals
should be separated from the rest of the population and sent to agricultural penal colonies
or special institutions. A reading of the Ley sobre Peligrosidad y Rehabilitación Social
(Dangerousness and Social Rehabilitation Law), published in 1970, reveals that homosexu-
ality was still considered something to be cured through reeducation and that homosexuals
were not allowed to reside in specific neighborhoods or have access to some public spaces
(12552–3). Examples such as these should provide an impetus for the government to not
only examine the existing penal code but also to begin to seek alternatives to the current
prison system. Yet part of our perception that prisons are a necessary component of social
order is the fact that we do not believe that human beings are capable of caring for and
governing themselves. This is of utmost importance given that self-care and self-governance
are linked to the governance of others, in exactly the sense of “governmentality” meant by
Michel Foucault in The Hermeneutics of the Subject – caring for oneself contributes to our
concerns about justice (72).
Foucault, going back to Plato’s Socratic dialogues in Alcibiade, explains how the care
of oneself (“s’occuper de soi-même,” L’herméneutique 44) is dependent on the capacity to
govern others and be governed at the same time (“gouverner les autres;” “être gouverné;”
L’herméneutique 44), which explicitly implies a pedagogical approach to the self; it stems
from the recognition of one’s ignorance of oneself. To take care of oneself, one must learn
to take time to practice access to the self, which ultimately will lead to access to truth.

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Indeed, Foucault focuses on the care of the self as a process through which human beings
access truth. This begs a simple question: What does it mean to take care of oneself? This
question is instrumental because it allows for an understanding of what good governance of
others is. The knowledge to govern others can only be accessed through a genuine concern
(“souci;” L’herméneutique 51) for oneself for which listening and truth-telling are central
elements.
I would like to propose that Foucault’s focus on listening and truth-telling in his approach
to the care of the self is particularly relevant if we want to explore the Talleres de justicia
restaurativa or Talleres de diálogos restaurativos in contemporary Spain. It becomes fur-
thermore instrumental to understand how a knowledge of oneself leads to a knowledge of
justice. The talleres were founded on two key principles; the ability of human beings to set
rules of conduct for themselves and to undergo a transformative process through personal
introspection, including a genuine analysis of the self, and thorough communication with
others. Potentially, restorative justice could provide a path to decarceration in Spain. Yet
I find that the rhetoric on which the talleres are based is, surprisingly, too paternalistic and
too closely aligned with religion, to its ideas of redemption and forgiveness, to become a
legitimate model of decarceration, as my analysis will reveal.
“Restorative Justice” first appeared in Spain as a reference in a normative text in Law
4/2015 (of April 27), which explains and establishes the status of the victim of a crime.
Introduced as a practice in penal institutions in 2016, the goal of restorative justice has
been to center on the victims with the intention of repairing the harm done to them. In this
process, the perpetrators hold themselves accountable, attempt to repair the harm done,
and accept the community’s participation in the restorative process. It is not designed to
improve the conditions of incarceration of the perpetrators, nor does it question the exist-
ence of the penal system or penal institutions (Taller 6). Instead, restorative justice requires
the perpetrators to reflect on their crime, demonstrate a desire for reparation, and restore
a sense of peace for the victims. Perpetrators are encouraged to take responsibility for their
actions, show empathy, and communicate their repentance. The victims engage in the pro-
cess by expressing the real impact of the crime on their lives, which, ideally, will empower
them and offer closure.
Restorative justice uses mediation as a pedagogical tool: Victims and perpetrators meet
to make amends, receive pardon, and reflect on and understand the crime’s impact on the
victim. Mediation is one proposition that demonstrates how punishment is in the process of
being rethought in twenty-first–century Spain. It has been supported by both Spain’s Con-
sejo General del Poder Judicial (General Council of the Judiciary), the constitutional body
governing Spanish justice, and independent groups.2 The program on Intrajudicial Media-
tion, headed by Judge Ana María Carrascosa Miguel, also promotes mediation as a tool
for justice. According to Carrascosa, the practice of mediation allows for a strong public
commitment to peaceful conflict resolution through education. The program also includes
alternative methodologies for punishment in law school curricula, as well as conflictology
(GEME website). Conflictology is the science of conflict through the study of concepts like
crisis, violence, and problems, to resolve conflict. Ultimately, the objective is the transfor-
mation of the individual, which would engender the abandonment of lawbreaking habits.
Ideally, this program would reduce recidivism.
In my interview with Florencio de Marcos Madruga, a judge responsible for prison
oversight in Valladolid and a leader in the Spanish restorative justice movement, I came
to understand that despite its long history in Spain (with, for instance, victims of ETA

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terrorism) restorative justice workshops and dialogues are considered experimental. They
take place in only two Spanish cities, Seville and Valladolid, and only with prisoners who
are in the middle or final phase of incarceration, respectively (Interview). I was impressed
by de Marcos’ commitment to both victims and perpetrators, and by his efforts to facilitate
peace among them, yet it became clear that he does not question the logic of incarceration.
Given his role as a judge, an integral part of the penal system, it is, in the end, unsurprising.
I learned that there is no database of victims and that de Marcos is the sole custodian of
all the files for Valladolid. He usually begins the process by contacting the victim by mail.
The letter is friendly and devoid of legalese. He provides a phone number for victims to
contact him with any questions about the program or simply to discuss it. He also includes
a brochure with information about the restorative justice process. Before the process begins
several steps must be completed. First, victims who agree to participate meet with the judge
and two mediators. De Marcos explains the program to them and emphasizes that their
participation is strictly voluntary. If all agree to move forward, they begin by examining the
victim’s experience of the crime. The mediators then evaluate if a restorative encounter is
appropriate. Ideally, it is, but that is not always the case. If the conference does take place,
perpetrators and victims meet and express themselves. The goal is to reach an understand-
ing, sometimes a compromise. For example, perpetrators can commit to participating in
social actions such as addressing school kids about their experiences. Interestingly, this was
the first example de Marcos gave, and one that is often given by prison abolitionists who
insist that education should be the starting point for the creation of a society without cages.
Before the conference, perpetrators write to the victims, describing their experience of the
crime and taking responsibility for their actions. De Marcos reiterated that victims only
receive the letter if they choose to, since their protection and comfort are paramount. The
primary objective of the program is that the victim obtain satisfaction from the conference.
The second objective is providing a demonstration of empathy, and this is the objective
that the judge focuses on because it is, according to de Marcos, that which re-socializes
perpetrators.
It seemed significant that de Marcos differentiated between the program’s objectives
and his own focus, as a judge, on the second objective regarding empathy. The program
includes elements that would support decarceration and alternatives to incarceration; and
increased empathy is certainly one of the components which, abolitionists believe, would
lead to a better society. Another is giving a voice to offenders, which might be liberating for
them and thus lead to, not only an acknowledgment of the impact of their crime but also
to a sense of belonging and being listened to. To Foucault’s assertion that truth-telling and
listening go together for knowledge of the self and self-care, I would add that being listened
to is also part of how self-knowledge can contribute to an understanding of justice and
wrongdoing. In that sense, it is unsurprising that the non-profit association, which works
with the interned, is called Asociación para la mediación y la escucha (AME; Association
for Mediation and Listening). According to de Marcos, when working with the incarcer-
ated, this association provides mediators who first look for their sincerity, second, at how
they have come to terms with their offense, and third, how they wish to express themselves
to the victims (Interview).
The goals of restorative justice are reeducation, reparation, and with these in place, to
avoid recidivism and foster reintegration into society (Taller 12). The concept of transfor-
mation is an integral part of this approach, and as explained in the book Taller de diálogos
restaurativos, the program makes room for “procesos personales y sociales transformativos,

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responsabilizadores y reparadores” (“transformative personal and social, responsiblizing,

and reparative processes;” 12). In addition, one of the innovative aspects of the talleres is
to attend to the feelings of the interned and make room for the growth process. Sessions
begin with facilitators asking each participant what they have found, in all the discussions
and work to date, to be the most important or productive for them. Sessions end with a
15-minute activity during which each attendee can verbalize how they felt with respect to
the discussion topics and what they learned during that day’s taller (58). The simultaneous
focus on both the prisoners’ feelings and their on-going learning is truly innovative.
As a result of the positive outcomes of the pilot program in Valladolid, components of
the program could, according to de Marcos, legitimize and open a space for debates about
decarceration. First, restorative justice gives importance to feelings and affects as a crucial
component of reform in our society of punishment. Second, it implies a redefinition of the
crime: It personalizes the crime as something done to individuals and not the state. By high-
lighting the relationship between crime and human relationships, the talleres could impact
future behavior, and in the long run, redefine our approach to punishment. Criminologist
and jurist Myriam Tapia Ortiz mentions that many of the programs put in place by Spain’s
penitentiary institution would benefit from practicing restorative justice. She mentions pro-
grams such as those that tackle gender violence or drug addiction (Taller 7). Participation in
talleres can count toward a community service sentence, or “Pena de Trabajo en Beneficio
de la Comunidad” (TBC, “Work in Benefit of the Community”) based on article 25.2 of
the Spanish Constitution, which stipulates that the goal of a sentence is to reintegrate those
who have committed an offense.3
Yet restorative justice could only become a path toward future decarceration if it is
able to shake off its paternalistic and religious language. For now, it is too heavily linked
to rhetoric of penitence and pardon. In the prologue of Taller de Diálogos Restaurativos
Myriam Tapia Ortiz explains: “El arrepentimiento es de igual forma que el perdón un sen-
timiento noble, que libera, que permite seguir adelante” (“Repentance is, like forgiveness, a
noble feeling, which liberates, which allows us to move forward;” 6). In a post-dictatorial
Spain that successfully achieved the separation of Church and state (two institutions that
governed together during Francoism), the Judiciary’s insistence on religious concepts like
repentance is cause for consternation.
I discussed restorative justice in my interview with Ana Arranz Sanz, lawyer, and Alicia
Alonso Merino, lawyer and abolitionist scholar and activist. Lawyers who participate in
rethinking punishment in the 21st century offer another perspective on the decarceration
debate, and actively contribute to it by playing a role in specific initiatives. Both, Arranz
Sanz and Alonso Merino have worked with immigrant advocacy groups, prison aboli-
tion initiatives such as “No Prison,” and for the implementation of Centros de Inserción
Social (CIS; Social Integration Centers) in several Spanish cities such as Alcalá de Henares,
Madrid, and Málaga, among others. These centers use restorative dialogue as a tool for
rehabilitation and reentry into society (González Rivero Taller 36).
During our conversation, Arranz Sanz mentioned that the restorative approach to decar-
ceration has not been widely adopted. Alonso Merino, for her part, affirmed that restorative
justice per se is not enough: It focuses on individual causes and ignores structural ones, for
example in the economic realm. For her, as long as inequalities persist and policies of wealth
redistribution are severely limited or non-existent, decarceration will only be a pet project
and never a reality. Real alternatives to prison can be created and must be implemented
in the legislative realm. For instance, the legalization, regulation, and decriminalization of

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drugs would effectively empty prisons and provide the state with a regulatory framework
for their control. The first step towards decarceration consists of thinking of short-term
solutions to change our current paradigm (Interview).
Organic Law 1/1979 (General Penitentiary), Article 59.1 of Title III “Del tratamiento”
(“On Treatment”) insists on the fact that the penitentiary experience must include reed-
ucation and promote social rehabilitation: “El tratamiento penitenciario consiste en el
conjunto de actividades directamente dirigidas a la consecución de la reeducación y rein-
serción” (“Prison treatment consists of a set of activities directly aimed at the achievement
of re-education and reintegration;” 23184). Centros de Inserción Social (CIS) were con-
ceived to that end. They have helped individuals convicted and sentenced to prison terms
of less than 5 years to reintegrate and reenter society more easily and more successfully,
according to Arranz Sanz (Interview). The development of these centers addressed several
issues created by the prison system. For instance, by allowing individuals to come and
go from prison, CIS reduce social and work-related exclusion. Royal decree 190/1996,
issued on February 9, 1996, established the rules for an open prison regime managed by
penitentiary institutions. Articles 83 to 87 articulate types of progressive reintegration into
society, including follow-up programs, evaluation of activities, norms for the organization
of the centers utilizing an open regime, etc.4 Social exclusion can be acute when a person
completes a prison sentence, and these centers combat this problem. Instead of cells, CIS
have rooms; individuals, depending on their penitentiary status, can leave in the morning
for work; they can also attend workshops held inside the center. CIS have also proven to
improve recidivism rates.5
Parallel independent approaches, more radical than those created by governmental
institutions, have recently been undertaken in Spain. The 2015 Jornadas Antipunitivistas
(Anti-punitivist Conferences) organized by Salhaketa Nafarroa are one example of this, as
are Cruz Negra Anarquista’s (Anarchist Black Cross) initiatives. Salhaketa Nafarroa is an
anti-prison and anti-punitive association, created in 1988. Its members defend the rights of
imprisoned people and look for alternatives to carceral institutions. The Anarchist Black
Cross is a global organization with a strong network presence in Spain, called Federación de
Grupos de Cruz Negra Anarquista Península Ibérica e Islas (Federation of Anarchist Black
Cross Groups of the Iberian Penisula and Islands). The organization fights against politics
of oppression and punishment and promotes the liberation of prisoners. Its goal is the abo-
lition of the prison as an institution and the development of alternatives to this system. It
also advocates for and provides legal and economic support to prisoners, along with edu-
cational initiatives for both prisoners and the public. Decarceration advocacy groups also
exist, particularly the Observatori del Sistema Penal i Drets Humans (OSPDH; Observatory
of the Penal System and Human Rights) at the University of Barcelona, with Iñaki Rivera
Beiras as its current director.6 Lastly, Paz Francés Lecumberri is one of the few abolitionist
academics in Spain. Francés Lecumberri and Diana Restrepo Rodríguez published a critical
book in 2019, entitled ¿Se puede terminar con la prisión? Críticas y alternativas al sistema
de justicia penal (Can We End Prisons? Criticism and Alternatives to the Penal Justice Sys-
tem), in which they explain that prison is a phenomenon that reveals a tendency toward
“penal hyperinflation.” By penal hyperinflation they refer to an excessive penalization of
human conduct. In addition, these scholars criticize the work of NGOs and other groups
with a financial stake in in-prison rehabilitation programs (7). For instance, Cofraternidad
Carcelaria de España (CONCAES; Spanish Prison Fraternity or Spanish Prison Fellowship),
a non-profit association that is an accredited member of Prison Fellowship International,

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uses restorative dialogue in prisons but adopts the discourse and initiatives of the judiciary.
In addition, Restrepo Rodríguez has pointed out that Prison Fellowship International is a
Christian NGO with members in other countries, including Latin America, that operates in
private prisons as well. These affiliations present conflicts of interest that constitute a threat
to sincere restorative dialogue. Yet, in the document I just analyzed, the Taller de diálogos
restaurativos: Responsabilización y reparación del daño, which offers the rationale and
pedagogical documents for restorative dialogue in Spain, CONCAES appears as one of the
sponsors of the initiative – its logo is at the beginning of the book. It, thus, a situation that
is more complicated than it seems.
Francés Lecumberri and Restrepo Rodríguez believe in a more radical form of restora-
tive justice: Consensual justice, which utilizes restorative tools as a response to violence.
Consensual justice is a system that aims for pacific coexistence and the full development
of individuals’ autonomy without the imposition of punishment, rewards, or recognition
(Restrepo Rodríguez 1). Concretely, it supports direct agreement or negotiation between
two individuals, avoiding any external conduit. This method proposes that the other should
not be conceived of as an antagonist. A conflict is perceived not as a competition but as a
dialogue (3). Mediation in this process is possible, says Restrepo Rodriguez, but it must be
done without paternalism. As we have seen, the language of restorative justice is sometimes
too religious and paternalistic. Consensual justice is based on five elements: consensus,
non-mandatory restoration, negotiation as a tool, the recognition of oneself and of the
other, and an idea of communal justice estranged from binary logic (20–24). It radicalizes
two aspects of restorative justice: Punishment and dialogue. Consensual Justice promotes
an anti-punishment philosophy and uses dialogue to generate consensus (16). In this pro-
cess, the emphasis is on the idea of communal construction and collaborative work, for
which tools such as negotiation and words are central (20). During my interview with
Restrepo Rodríguez and Francés Lecumberri, I was of course interested in the importance
given to words and language as it relates to an awareness of the self and others in the con-
sensual process – language, as we recall with Foucault, is how we access the self through
agency in our relationship with others (L’herméneutique 56).
For these academics, the COVID-19 situation intensified the need for abolitionism to be
a natural response to repressive measures undertaken by the Spanish government, such as
the 2015 Ley Orgánica de Protección de la Seguridad Ciudadana (“Ley Orgánica 4/2015”)
or to the government’s deployment of punitive, COVID-19-related measures. These meas-
ures have had an impact on the abolitionist collectives’ ability to denounce the injustices
taking place inside the prisons. It was evident in my interview that the COVID-19 pandemic
had created new challenges for abolitionists. On the one hand, citizens’ obedience to restric-
tions does not align with the ideological perspective that abolitionism promotes. And on the
other hand, the control of public spaces and citizens’ actions outside of their homes entails
a politics of intimidation that works against the construction of networks to fight against
state oppression in public spaces and in prisons (Interview).

Conclusion
Penal institutions are a direct link between the modern and the contemporary in that
the modalities of contemporary penal laws can be located in the modern period. The
nineteenth-century politics of punishment and prisons have defined contemporary history.
A historical perspective helps us to better understand why we take the prison system for

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granted. A narrative justifying and naturalizing its use has been reinforced since the eight-
eenth century. This move has also entailed having jurists and intellectuals concentrate on
the question of prison reform – a point criticized by abolitionists, among them Angela
Davis, who writes that strategies of decarceration have always been marginal (20). We
can and should question the nineteenth-century prison system which continues to be the
operative model to this day. If the nineteenth century was a time during which an emphasis
was placed on the reform of the incarcerated, individuals who would be born again after
their prison stay, twenty-first–century abolitionists emphasize the reform of the collective,
changing society to resolve the social tensions that they identify as the root of crimes and
offenses.

Notes
1 I would like to thank Blanca Rodríguez-Velasco for her help in securing interviews with lawyers
and judges in Spain while I was doing research for this piece.
2 The website of the General Council of the Judiciary explains that it “is a constitutional colle-
giate, autonomous body, composed of judges and other jurists, who exercise government functions
within the Judicial with a view to guarantee the independence of the judges during the exercise of
the judicial function before everybody.” All translations are my own unless noted otherwise.
3 The Spanish Constitution is available online.
4 On royal decrees and the penitentiary, see Arial Mayoral and Ferrero Gil, p. 6.
5 On CIS, see Arial Mayoral and Ferrero Gil.
6 For more information on the Observatori, see their webpage.

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 23
SPORTING INSTITUTIONS
The Structures of Spanish Sport Across the
Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Andrew McFarland

Introduction
In the past 130-odd years, sport has grown from a novelty to an important part of Spanish
culture and society and one of the country’s most well-known activities internationally. Key
to this success has been the development of strong institutions, primarily through private
entrepreneurship and some limited government partnerships, that have embraced local,
regional, and national identities, and now have an international impact. One need look no
further than contemporary government reports to support the almost ubiquitous nature of,
predominantly private, sporting institutions across Spain today. Since 2013, Spain’s Minis-
try of Culture and Sport has produced the Anuario de Estadísticas Deportivas (Almanac of
Sport Statistics) which collects analytical data on sporting activity. Its 2019 edition spanned
224 pages and collected information on jobs, businesses, family spending, domestic and
foreign travel, and dozens of others measurable activities (Anuario 7–13). All told, the
report identified 67,512 officially sanctioned clubs spanning more than 66 different sports
ranging from football and basketball to activities as varied as fishing and taekwondo (Anu-
ario 25, 113). Football (soccer in the United States) dominates with 21,148 of these organi-
zations, but that represents less than on third of all organizations and there is significant
variety amongst them. Beyond just clubs, the most recent comprehensive analysis of sports
installations and fields counted 255,250 such structures in 2005. Not only has that number
doubtless gone up in the decade and a half since, but it does not include auxiliary buildings
for training and preparation, such as dressing, showering, specialized medical attention,
and structures necessary to facilitate mass audiences at competitions (Anuario 189). In the
last few decades, this investment has produced regular sporting success for a country with
only the fifth-largest population in Europe. Demonstrating this range, La Liga and Liga
ACB are among the world’s top football and basketball leagues, respectively. Moreover,
Spain hosts one of the three premier cycling tours in that sport, it was the first country on
continental Europe to hold a Ryder Cup in golf, hosted America’s Cup competitions in sail-
ing, and has consistently produced world-class tennis players for the past thirty years. Spain
also sits at the center of international pelota, the traditional sport of the Basque Country

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-26
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

played on a (usually) indoor court facing a wall with hand, wooden racket, strung racket,
and wicker basket versions).
This article strives to explain key features of Spanish sport’s institutional development
over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the form that
many of these institutions have taken. The first section seeks to identify several periods of
institution building and the dominant societal issues and interactions that shaped each.
Prior to the Civil War, there was an initial phase of introduction and foundation in the
1890s through the 1910s, followed by a shift towards commercialization and professional-
ism pioneered by football in the 1920s and 30s. After the Civil War, the Franco govern-
ment used sport to promote a normalized depoliticization of the country and to serve as
distraction for the masses. That produced several decades of growth across the sporting
spectrum, as long as organizations stayed within the socio-political bounds established by
the regime, epitomized by Real Madrid’s success in Europe – which the government happily
allowed to reflect back on itself. The second section begins with the 1970s and 80s when
sporting incomes and participation grew as the Transition to democracy allowed institu-
tions to assert more controversial political and ideological positions leading to the return
to prominence of active rivalries such as Real Madrid C.F. versus F.C. Barcelona. Since the
1990s, Spanish sporting institutions have carved out larger international footprints that
have allowed for further growth and impact. Lastly, the chapter turns to the historical ten-
dency of Spanish sporting institutions to be multi-sport organizations. While not unique,
this has played a significant role in Spanish sports history over time, enabling organizations
to carve out large civic and regional identities, and significantly shaped the institutional
landscape. This analysis should provide an initial framework for understanding Spanish
sport’s institutional growth into today’s dominant cultural and economic force.

Periods of Institutional Growth: Pre-Civil War and the Franco Period

Understanding institution building from a historical perspective requires identifying general
stages to establish a framework within which to work. In this case, doing so helps identify
and connect sport’s growth and interaction with the larger national experience, particularly
the introduction and growth period prior to the Civil War (1890–1936), a second more
politically conservative and muted expansion during the Franco era (1939–1975), and then
an explosion of activity from the Transition to democracy onwards (1975-present). These
are broad categories subject to large deviations and significant variation based on different
sports and regions. Generally, football, cycling, and gymnastics in Catalonia, the Basque
Country, and Madrid, went through changes first and other sports and regions followed a
decade or more behind.
The pre-Civil War period can be split into two main subdivisions regarding institutional
development. First came a period of introduction, initial club foundations, and the growth
of national level organizations that spans the 1890s through 1910s. After slow introduc-
tions to modern sport from groups outside Spain, by the end of the 1890s football, gym-
nastics, and cycling had all founded initial institutions in Barcelona, Bilbao, and Madrid.
Middle class Spaniards founded the clubs that became F.C. Barcelona, Real Madrid, Ath-
letic de Bilbao, and the Sociedad Gimnástica Española, the latter of which then estab-
lished executive committees in sixteen cities, not including several similar but independent
organizations across Catalonia (McFarland, “Reception” 536). National and regional
organization developed with gymnastics enthusiasts, establishing the national Federación

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Gimnástica Española by 1898 and holding its first national festival and conference later
that year in Barcelona. Football clubs organized the foundational Copa del Rey in 1903,
and in Catalonia, cycling produced the nation’s first regional tours between 1908 and 1912,
followed by the first attempt at a national one in 1913 (López, “Failed” 547–69). Journal-
istic institutions developed in conjunction with these clubs, most notably Barcelona’s pio-
neering Los Deportes in the 1890s as a first major organ for various sports organizations,
followed by Mundo Deportivo in 1906, as the first commercially successful and enduring
sports publication.
This early period then reached a second phase in the 1920s and 1930s when football
transitioned into a mass entertainment business and new sports added to the breadth of
amateur sporting activity. Football clubs began building stadia, coordinating with rail com-
panies, and catering to mass audiences. This in turn led to the normalization of the practice
of paying football players, the acceptance of professionalization in 1927–8, and then the
foundation of La Liga in 1929 to pay the players’ salaries. These institutional developments
completed the sport’s transition from a middle-class pursuit into a mass activity largely run
by the old middle-class players, but now meant for an increasingly working-class audience.
To facilitate this, football clubs associated themselves with local and regional identities to
build support and rivalries against organizations representing other groups. Thus, Barça
(F.C. Barcelona) developed as the primary team in that city and the standard bearer for
Catalan identity, while Real Madrid did the same in the capital and developed a connec-
tion to Spanish nationalism, even as Athletic Bilbao consolidated support in the Basque
capital, and regular rivalries between them became popular (McFarland, “Team” 14). In
cycling, the Madrid newspaper, Informaciones, organized the first iteration of the Vuelta
de España in 1935 and openly used it to promote conservative, ultra-nationalist political
motives (López, “Sport, Media” 635–57). Basketball also established a foothold as enthusi-
asts founded the national Federación Española de Baloncesto (FEB) in 1923. F.C. Barcelona
Bàsquet was founded in 1926 and Real Madrid Baloncesto followed in 1931, as the largest
football clubs offered basketball sections, and a few independent teams like Club Joventut
de Badalona also appeared in the 1930s (McFarland, “Team” 14).
Within the Franco period several stages can be identified as well, starting with a sharp
retrenchment of conservative institutional control, followed by a long period of sport-
ing growth, and then ending with the increasing return of independent action by sport-
ing organizations. During the period of autarky and extreme economic impoverishment
immediately after the Civil War, the Franco government consolidated numerous important
industries and forced conservative family and religious norms on the population. Sport
offered a distraction from the often harsh reality of everyday life and a chance to return
to some semblance of the normalcy that existed prior to the War, within the bounds of the
de-politization of the public sphere that the regime had imposed. La Liga resumed play
promptly for the 1939–40 season with great success. It expanded from 14 to 20 teams in
the top-flight between 1941 and 1971, adding a third division in the 1940s, and a wealth
of regional leagues were also approved by the Real Federación Española de Fútbol (RFEF)
(McTear, “How 90 Years”). Most famously, Real Madrid won the European Cup six times
between 1955 and 1966, dominating the earliest years of organized European club com-
petition, and establishing itself as one of the premier sporting institutions in football. The
club maintained a strong, pro-Castilian, Spanish identity and came to be regarded pub-
licly as informal “sporting ambassadors” for the Spanish state in that period. Nonetheless,
the most advantages the club received from the government came through its longtime

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president Santiago Bernabéu’s personal connections, rather than from official government
support as many assume. In the 1960s, RFEF sought to capitalize on Real’s success by bid-
ding to host the 1966 World Cup, and while this effort failed, the national federation did
build the connections with FIFA to eventually host a World Cup in 1982.
It should be noted, that the Franco government also asserted censorship rights over
the leadership of clubs and their publicly promoted identities. For example, they banned
Anglicized names in 1940, forcing teams to adopt “club de fútbol” (C.F.) instead of “foot-
ball club” (F.C.) for the next several decades. Government officials also reorganized the
institutional leadership and muted the regional identity of some clubs, with Atlético de
Madrid offering one of the most famous examples. Originally founded as a club for the
capital’s Basque community, after the war it faced massive financial and membership short-
falls because of the devastation wrought upon the Basque Country for joining the Repub-
lican side. As a result, in 1939 the club directors accepted a merger with Club Aviación
Nacional, an organization founded two years earlier by Nationalist officers in the Spanish
Air Force and which offered financial support and political clout (Parry). They renamed the
team Club Atlético Aviación, created a mixed board that included both military and club
executives, and infused the team with Air Force players. The board also used their connec-
tions to hire as manager Ricardo Zamora, once the nation’s most famous goalkeeper and a
Nationalist connected to Espanyol de Barcelona (which then went by the hispanicized name
Real Club Deportivo Español) and Real Madrid. Zamora had survived the war – despite
being imprisoned in Barcelona at its start – because of his football connections (McFarland,
“Zamora”). His addition added a potent symbol of football normalcy and Nationalist iden-
tity to the reconstituted club. He left after six years, the Air Force connection ended in 1947,
and the club name and symbols reverted to their original ones (Parry), but the Basque con-
nection had been mostly scrubbed as well in the process. This left Atletico with an identity
as essentially the capital’s working-class club, in opposition to Real Madrid’s middle-class
affiliation. Through such processes, regional institutional identities were tamped down to
an acceptable level, allowing them to be, at worst, a non-threatening outlet for political
dissention.
Sports journalism institutions similarly emphasized on-field play as an apolitical activity
and established a conservative slant off the field, one that whitewashed inconvenient details.
The origins of Marca, arguably Spain’s preeminent sports publication, offers an example of
this process. Founding editor Manuel Fernández Cuesta established it in December of 1938,
just before the Civil War ended. The publication initially included pro-Nationalist propa-
ganda regularly and became part of the Prensa del Movimiento, a collection of publications
controlled by the Ministerio de Propaganda (Carreño). With this official backing, Marca
rose swiftly to become the leading sports publication in Madrid, with in-depth coverage of
Real Madrid first and foremost, and it permanently reshaped the country’s sports journal-
ism landscape.
Government and press forces also combined to reshape institutional identities through
a collection of “historials” or early club histories published in the immediate aftermath of
the Civil War. Produced by Ediciones Alonso, this series titled “Publicaciones Deportivas”
included at least twenty separate works covering eighteen clubs, along with volumes on
the history of the league as a whole and the matches of the national selection (Fielpeña,
inside cover). This included works dedicated to all of the first division clubs in 1939–40,
including newcomers like Murcia F.C., Hercules F.C., and Atlético Aviación, and even fad-
ing legacy clubs like Arenas de Guecho. Ediciones Alonso published these histories very

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quickly between 1940 and 1944, by recruiting known sports journalists with established
expertise in the football community, such as J.J. Ajanuelo (Erostrabe) on Real Sociedad,
J.L. Lasplazas to cover Barcelona, and Manuel Rosón (whose pseudonym was “Un Vet-
erano”) for both Madrid clubs. These authors offered fans a connection to football prior to
the Civil War in both their topics and personal reputations and bolstered the strength of the
institutional voices of football journalism as La Liga relaunched its on-field product. This
continuity must have been significantly valued by the authorities because Rosón had been
the last editor of the newspaper El Liberal prior to the war, yet with a change of his pseu-
donym to the somewhat charged “Un Veterano” the government allowed him to survive
and continue in a public role (Fordero 61–2). Nonetheless, the “historials” received both
formal and informal censorship. Informally, inconvenient details where whitewashed in the
stories they told with focus placed heavily on individuals and sporting milestones with few
connections to larger politics mentioned. For example, Rosón’s account of Real Madrid’s
history simply notes that its founders started playing at a “local colegio” and even repeats
this vagueness about Real in his account of Atlético de Aviación’s history (Veterano, “40
años” 7–12; Veterano, “Athletic” 7). In so doing he twice omits that the school was in fact
the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE), one of the most important pillars of the liberal
community in the country and a leading progressive educational institution in Europe. This
was an extremely inconvenient detail for a club increasingly connected to the government’s
centralized, conservative, Spanish identity and offers a reminder of how much more com-
plex the histories of most institutions are than their branding. More official censorship can
be implied from the involvement of General Moscardó, president of the Consejo Nacional
de Deportes, in the Publicaciones Deportivas project (Veterano, “40 años” 3). By the late
1930s, the conservative Moscardó had become the Regime’s leader in developing sports
programs for the Falange Española. He also played a lead role in reviving La Liga and other
sporting institutions and his initiative sparked the production of the series, even leading
Ediciones Alonso to dedicate it to him (Berhaus 233–4).
With football strongly reestablished, other sports began growing institutional roots dur-
ing the Franco period as well. Basketball offers perhaps the best example, having only a
few outposts prior to the Civil War and those often focused on it as a women’s sport. The
1940s and 50s brought significant growth with a group of Madrid secondary school gradu-
ates founding Club Estudiantes in 1948 (“Historia”). Additionally, Saski Baskonia, split
off from the football club it had formed within in 1952, and Ademar Basket Club’s forma-
tion came in 1953 before eventually growing into Baloncesto Málaga (“Club”). Combined
with the pre-war foundations, this growth established most of Spanish basketball’s historic
clubs and led the Federación Española de Baloncesto (FEB) to hold a national competition
in 1947 and start the Liga Española de Baloncesto in 1957 (Casanova). Because basketball
had been introduced to Spain largely as a girls sport, women’s teams grew as well, started
their own national competition only seven years later in 1964, and have held it in some
form ever since. This far outstripped the development of other women’s sports in Spain
(other than possibly tennis) in organization and longevity, outperforming particularly foot-
ball where the effort to establish a women’s league languished until 1988. By 1964, then,
Spanish basketball had its core clubs in place, held an annual male competition for close to
a decade, and begun a women’s league, completing all of its core institution building.
Cycling also experienced a boom in this period, though it had already been one of the
nation’s sporting pioneers. The early Vuelta prior to the Civil War had acquired a moder-
ately conservative identity that positioned it well for a revival in 1941 and 42 when the

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Franco government’s Ministerio de Educación y Descanso directly coopted it as a nation-

alist tool (López, “Sport, Media”). Despite this official support, the Vuelta struggled for
the next decade as a mostly insular event, until El Correo Español-El Pueblo Vasco, the
leading newspaper in Bilbao, took over its organization in 1955. El Correo had been an
important conservative voice, but also a pro-Basque separatist newspaper prior to the war,
which the new government then combined with the official newspaper of the fascist Falange
afterwards. El Correo running the Vuelta, then, aligned the event with both conservative
nationalism and with the Franco government. Yet it did so while also maintaining the com-
mon cycling practice of a newspaper organizing key national competitions. The partnership
worked and through the late 1950s and 60s the race increasingly attracted media coverage,
foreign stars, and became one of the three great tours of the cycling world, along with the
Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia.

Periods of Institutional Growth: Democratic Period

By the early 1970s, most sporting institutions had experienced substantial growth during
the stability of the Franco period and established their most important features, however the
government’s political requirements and difficult interactions with the international commu-
nity capped that growth and freedom. The Transition to democracy from 1975 to 1978 tore
down those barriers and spurred further expansion by actualizing a full range of political
identities for organizations to embrace, as well as offering a full reintegration into Europe
with Spain considered as a cultural equal. Club leaders often sought to recast or assert
national, regional, and local identities, at times in coordination with local governments now
allowed by the new democratic constitution to engage with such movements. The Real Fed-
eración Española de Futbol (RFEF) continued its efforts to host a World Cup and struck a
deal when they failed in 1966 that allowed them to host the 1982 event. With Franco now
dead, a new constitution, several elections completed, and one thwarted coup attempt on
23-F 1981, Spain suddenly found itself hosting the massive international 1982 event as a
new political entity and managed to organize it successfully. João Havelange, the head of
the International Olympic Committee (IOC), visited Barcelona for one of the matches at F.C.
Barcelona’s stadium, Camp Nou, and came away impressed enough with the organization
and renovations that he agreed to support the city’s subsequent Olympic bid (Simón 954).
A decade later in 1992, the Barcelona Olympic Games came to fruition and earned full
appreciation within the international community of Spain’s ability to organize such a mas-
sive event. The Games were obtained through the influence of Juan Antonio Samaranch, a
conservative Catalan who served as Minister of Sport under Franco and then as president
of the International Olympic Committee, and whose career also embodied the institutional
maturity of Spanish sport. The Barcelona Games, themselves, offered a mix of contrasts
with Samaranch representing the successes of the Franco era, while the host city vibrantly
reasserted its own Catalan cultural identity after decades of repression (Hargreaves). Fur-
ther, the event benefited from excellent timing and logistics, such as its favorable location
in Western Europe that allowed for live television broadcasts across Europe and the United
States. As only the second Summer Games after the boycott era, the event also benefited
from universal national participation and the first open acceptance of professionalism,
which brought in high profile athletes and media attention, epitomized by the U.S. basket-
ball “Dream Team” (Solanellas). The city used the event to build up and revitalize its port
and beachfront, establish facilities for an array of sports still used today, and it also sparked

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local academic research into the event and on sport more generally that continues three
decades later. All in all, the Barcelona Games offered a perfect combination of institution
building that launched Spain as a host for future events, highlighted the tension between
Catalonia and the larger nation, spurred athletic training in individual sports to new heights
in the ensuing decades, and became an international model for the institutional ideal of
hosting an Olympic Games.
Football entered a golden age in the democratic era as well, led, as always, by Real
Madrid C.F. and F.C. Barcelona. Over the twentieth century, the two clubs increasingly
cast themselves as sporting avatars of conservative, Castilian, Spanish nationalism (Real
Madrid) and Catalan regional identity (Barça), largely because both recognized the finan-
cial benefits of embracing those identities and the rivalry, as they tapped into deeply held
political passions. This turned biannual, league football matches into proxy battles between
the nation’s two most powerful identities that had waxed and waned in importance histori-
cally based largely on the Catalan’s political freedom to wave regionalist flags and express
their side of the rivalry openly. By the 1990s, the embrace of democratic freedoms allowed,
and commercialization encouraged, both teams to emphasize this rivalry, while digital
broadcast satellites and then the internet publicized it beyond Spain. This brought their
competitions, dubbed El Clásico, into full bloom and turned them into two of the most rec-
ognized sports organizations on the planet. Demonstrating this phenomenon, when Barça
organized its centennial anniversary in 1999 they included a friendly match on April 28th
against the Brazilian national team. The game brought together many of the best players
of a generation and saw several switching sides at halftime, underlining the club’s interna-
tional importance. Similarly, in the summer of 2017 and after years of regular tours in the
Americas, Real Madrid and Barcelona held a friendly version of El Clásico at Hard Rock
Stadium in Miami, Florida (Kaufman). Across an ocean from the two club’s homes, 35,728
fans came out just to watch the teams practice and then almost double that number paid to
watch the match itself (Kaufman). Earlier that season, the two La Liga clashes of El Clásico
had garnered 400 million viewers worldwide, more than twice the audience of the 2017
Super Bowl and several times the population of Spain itself (Kaufman).
The Spanish national team also reached the peak of the sport around the same time by
winning its first World Cup in 2010, the European Championships in 2008 and 2012, and
by asserting a clear national style of play with the “tiki taka” passing game. However, this
again brought internal divisions because the tiki taka style developed within Barça and fea-
tured largely Catalan players, calling up longstanding regional divisions within the national
team, even if success papered over those differences for a generation. Nonetheless, by the
2010s RFEF, La Liga, and its various clubs had become one of the most important and suc-
cessful national collections of institutions in its field on the planet, something no other fully
international activity in Spain could reasonably claim.
In the 2020s, this success spread to women’s football with the Spanish national team’s
2023 World Cup victory in Australia and New Zealand coupled with Aitana Bonmati’s
selection as UEFA 2022–23 Women’s Player of the Year. Unfortunately, this success also
highlighted the institutional challenges that remain when RFEF president Luis Rubiales
kissed player Jennifer Hermosa at the trophy presentation, which sparked anger, called up
coach Jorge Vilda’s problematic treatment of the players over many years, and launched
demands for reform that eventually led to both men’s removal and at least some deeper
changes. These events highlighted how far Spanish women’s sport has come in recent dec-
ades, but also the insidiously powerful institutional forces that still treat it as secondary.

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Cycling and basketball showed similar institutional growth in the national and interna-
tional spheres during this time. After the Vuelta de España’s successful revival in the 1950s
and 60s, cycling struggled somewhat in the 1970s due to regular terrorist threats from
ETA and the Basque nationalist movement. Importantly, the Vuelta had long been spon-
sored and organized by the conservative Bilbao newspaper El Correo, which had connec-
tions to the fascist Falange Española that became increasingly problematic as the Franco
Regime faded. As a result, El Correro backed out of the Vuelta in 1979 and organizers
replaced their sponsorship with Unipublic, a company founded in 1975 that specialized
in running sporting events. This professionalized how the race was planned and enabled
it to gradually expand (“About Unipublic”). Then in 2014, the international organiza-
tion Amaury Sport, which runs the Tour de France, the Dakar Rally, and other events,
purchased Unipublic. This purchase leveraged an international sporting conglomerate to
further expand the Vuelta’s profile and brought Spain’s most important cycling race to the
international level of institutional organization. All told, most Spanish sports became rec-
ognized participants on the international level in this period as fully developed institutions
from the top to the bottom.

Multi-Sport Organizations
Much of sports’ growth over a century of history has been underpinned by the development
of multi-sport organizations that have regularly nurtured and “spun off” groups interested
in new sporting endeavors. Such organizations helped sports survive in Spain when they
were new by sharing resources, bringing related groups together, enabling a larger public
profile, and increasing attendance. Once sport became common, housing multiple sports
allowed a few organizations to become dominant forces representing their community, city,
or region on the national stage. Most famously, this takes the form of Real Madrid and
F.C. Barcelona, but examples abound such as Athletic Bilbao and Real Sociedad developing
as the foremost standard bearers of Basque identity, Sevilla F.C. and Real Betis Balompié
representing, respectively, the elite and working-class communities of that southern city,
and R.C.D. Espanyol drawing support from Barcelona’s non-Catalan speaking citizens as
early as the 1920s. Some of this role has faded in recent decades as the costs of a multi-sport
model have risen, leading most teams to concentrate heavily on football alone. Instead,
many organizations have diversified their off-field activities around a smaller number of
sports by expanding in-house media, youth programs, and even educational programs that
continue the tradition of clubs offering significantly more than just a few teams on the field.
Since football dominates the sporting landscape, it has produced the largest of these mul-
tisport organizations with Real Madrid C.F. and F.C. Barcelona dominating professional
basketball, building multisport complexes, and becoming mass entertainment companies
that operate multiple sporting and media endeavors under a collective brand identity. The
origins of this go back to their foundations and early development in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. As already mentioned, early clubs in the 1890s and early 1900s
essentially consisted of groups of middle-class friends who formed organizations and had to
register with their regional governments under the 1887 Ley de Asociaciones (McFarland,
“Founders” 95). This required them to establish constitutions and boards of directors to
receive official government standing, while also making them heavily reliant and responsive
to their memberships. As a result, while clubs commonly formed around a primary sport,
usually football, gymnastics, or cycling, they also regularly developed subsections dedicated

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to other activities that garnered member interest. These included a wide variety of activi-
ties such as excursionism (usually day trips via bicycle to the country), mountain climbing,
track and field, swimming, and others. Sometimes a section dedicated to such activities
broke off and founded its own group, other times interest waned and the group disbanded,
but just as frequently it stayed within the larger membership. For example, founded in
the late nineteenth century, the Sociedad Gimnástica Española (SGE) played a key role in
establishing the national gymnastics federation and growing sport generally in the pre-Civil
War era. By 1921, the SGE included sections dedicated to gymnastics, cycling, football,
fencing, boxing, fighting, track and field, mountaineering, swimming, and art. It regularly
held festivals that brought multiple sporting competitions together to produce larger events
that received funding by the Madrid mayoral office (Sevilla 24). Much the same could be
said about Narcisso Masferrer’s Gymnasium Solé in Barcelona that served as the mailing
address and organizational meeting place for several dozen sporting organizations in the
1890s and early 1900s (McFarland, “Early Barcelona” 585).
Another version of the multi-faceted nature of Spanish sports organizations can be seen
in activities beyond the field in this early period. Most significant football matches on the
club level involved a banquet for their visitors before or after the match, and new sports
were often high society social events. For example, when Club Natació Barcelona held an
early swimming competition on 6 September, 1908, according to the newspaper El Poble
Català, the event brought out “many beautiful and elegant ladies” to a beach illuminated
by electric lights that produced a “picturesque effect for the race” (Permanyer 43). After
a series of races and a water polo match, the night ended with a society ball and a night
of dancing. Thus, the event offered a range of activities for both men and women, as well
as new technology like electric lighting at the beach, and ultimately it relegated the actual
swimming competition to only one amongst a variety of entertainments.
Once clubs had succeeded in building an identity within a specific community, they often
strove to serve all of those community’s sporting needs under one umbrella organization.
Founded as a daughter club to Athletic de Bilbao, the early Atlético de Madrid offers an
excellent example of this process as it came to serve as a community center for a significant
portion of the Basque community in the capital. Through this position, Athletic helped
introduce the capital’s first formal footrace in the early 1900s, then built an early tennis
center where members’ wives and daughters could play in the 1910s, held dances, and grad-
ually added sections dedicated to polo, track and field, rugby, Basque pelota, and there was
even a group of members interested in American baseball prior to the Civil War (Veterano,
“Athletic” 13–7). While women were not accepted as full members, this initiative did let
them compete recreationally in the sports deemed most socially acceptable and gave them
limited access to an increasingly important social locus, a small step, but a step nonetheless.
Thus, Atlético evolved into a complex institution serving multiple interests.
This tendency continued during the Franco era when resources were scant and clubs
offered useful umbrellas under which new activities could grow and spread. From the 1940s
and 80s, Real Sociedad hosted sections dedicated to men’s and women’s basketball, hand-
ball, and field, roller and ice hockey, some of which came and went sporadically (“Sec-
ciones históricas”). Similarly, Real Madrid and Barcelona grew swiftly into not only the
two dominant Spanish football clubs, but also the nation’s dominant basketball ones as
well. In both organizations, basketball constitutes their second most important activity
with purpose-built indoor arenas to support those teams. Over its history, Real Madrid
has offered several dozen sections dedicated to different sports with the majority existing

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during the Franco era. To support this, Santiago Bernabéu developed the club’s first Real
Madrid Sports City (Ciudad Deportiva) starting in 1957, purchasing land for the project in
northern Madrid, bringing it to completion in 1963 (García 322–5). The complex started
with multiple football fields, track and field facilities, and extensive tennis courts before
adding basketball courts, an ice rink, and swimming pools over the subsequent two decades
for both competitive practice and the recreation of club members and their families. More
than anything, the Ciudad Deportiva provided Real Madrid with modifiable facilities that
dozens of groups within the club could use. Nonetheless, the costs of building the Santiago
Bernabéu stadium, its subsequent expansions, and the Sports City proved hard to sustain
and led the club to start reducing the number of sports it supported to improve competitive
success in those it continued (“El Madrid” 43). By 1976, the club only maintained teams
in ten different sports and today it only supports men’s and women’s football, and men’s
basketball despite several attempts to revive old sections (“Otras” 114).
With the coming of the democratic period and its massive overall growth in sports
organizations, much of this multi-sport activity faded as single-sport organizations had the
resources to chart their own path. Like Real Madrid, numerous football clubs eliminated sec-
tions focused on other sports or reduced them to social activities for members, but there have
been important exceptions where clubs have held onto this legacy. In other cases, organiza-
tions have instead expanded their operations surrounding football producing a profusion of
training grounds, sports cities, museums, media organizations, and community foundations
that often serve similar roles in maintaining the organization’s place in their community.
Real Sociedad in San Sebastian offers an example of a smaller club that continues to
focus on more than football alone. In 2020, it maintained official sections for field hockey,
track and field, pelota, fishing, scuba diving, and an official “veterans” football section for
ex-players that both plays in senior competitions and participates in social projects in the
community (“Menu”). Through these subdivisions, Sociedad actively supports the Basque
national sport of pelota, as well as ocean-based activities that are intrinsic to its culture
as a port city and gives back to the local community directly. On a grander scale, Barça’s
claim to being “more than a club” epitomizes this multi-sport legacy by emphasizing that
the organization embodies Catalan identity and values across a swath of activities, not
simply one football team. Besides football and basketball, today the club sustains profes-
sional teams in handball, futsal (somewhat similar to indoor soccer in the USA), and roller
hockey, amateur programs in track and field, field hockey, rugby, volleyball, wheelchair
basketball, and figure skating, and numerous other purely recreational sports for club mem-
bers like ice skating (“Deportes Amateurs”). Surrounding and supporting these sporting
activities, the club has established units to promote their brand. For example, in Camp
Nou, Barça’s massive stadium, they built a museum for the general public filled with memo-
rabilia and nostalgic calls to past eras, established an archive within the museum in 1994,
and then launched Barça TV in 1996 (“About Us”). Then, in 2014 Barcelona’s membership
approved the massive Espai Barça project – currently underway – to expand Camp Nou,
tear down and rebuild their basketball and ice arenas, create a new stadium for youth teams
and training, and establish a supercomputing center to optimize team planning and media
endeavors (“What it is”). The multi-million dollar project bills itself as revitalizing the areas
around its main facilities in Les Corts and its training facilities at Sant Joan Despí (near, but
outside of Barcelona) and the club has worked with Barcelona’s urban planning authorities
to improve traffic flow, expand green spaces, and produce a car free hub around the Camp
Nou. All of which demonstrates that F.C. Barcelona today is a multi-sport organization,

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with substantial investment in media promotion and community development, and illus-
trates the concept of being “more than a club” under a collective regional brand identity.
Similarly, the new Ciudad Real Madrid begun in 2004 offers that club similar facilities near
the capital’s Barajas Airport, complete with a television station and housing and schooling
for youth players. In fact, most first division clubs now have similar, if smaller, facilities
capable of supporting a main squad and half a dozen or more lower-level football teams for
different ages and genders that are becoming almost mandatory for an institution to sustain
a claim to a large civic or regional identity.
Many Spanish clubs have been flirting with a new competitive activity by embracing
eSports in recent years, particularly EA Sport’s FIFA Soccer competitions. eSports consist of
video game players who compete as individuals or teams in leagues and tournaments, like
athletic competitions. They have become their own billion-dollar industry complete with
professional players and other hallmarks of modern sport. F.C. Barcelona has created an
eSports division that, as of 2020, maintained two teams based in different games with the
conscious goals of “building a leading section that will help take the brand to countries like
the US and China” (“Barça eSports”). In fact, much of La Liga embraced this effort with
the creation of eLaLiga in 2017. It started with only ten independent teams, but by 2020
fourteen La Liga clubs and nineteen from the second division had sponsored eLaLiga teams
(García) and Atlético de Madrid even sent Koke, their team captain, out to headline the
press event welcoming their new virtual players (“Atletico eSports”). In many ways, this
turn to eSports represents a perfect synergy of the past and present because it adds a new
competitive and increasingly professional section to many football clubs, but also one that
echoes the sport they play on the field.
Over one hundred and thirty years of history, Spanish sports institutions have gradually
grown from amateur, middle class, foundational organizations into some of the most suc-
cessful private institutions in the country, with impressive international profiles. Driving
this growth has been a multi-sport organizational model that allows for powerful identity
creation and which increasingly merged effectively with modern marketing and corporate
strategies. This organizational strategy offers flexibility to change over time with segments
fading and others growing while keeping the larger brand name strong locally, regionally,
nationally, and internationally. Essentially, this approach has allowed many Spanish sports
clubs to mirror multi-national corporations and attain as much success as any sporting
organizations in the world in the twenty-first century.

Works Cited
“About Unipublic.” Unipublic. https://www.unipublic.es/en/about-unipublic. Accessed 11 Sept. 2020.
“About Us.” FC Barcelona: Centre de Documentació. https://www.fcbarcelona.com/en/card/1614588/
about-us. Accessed 11 Sept. 2020.
“Barça eSports Keeps Going.” F.C. Barcelona, 14 Mar. 2020, https://www.fcbarcelona.com/en/club/
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 24
FOOTBALL AND POLITICS IN
MODERN SPAIN
FC Barcelona and Real Madrid
in Historical Context

Alejandro Quiroga

On October 1, 2017, disturbing images emanating from Barcelona indicated that Spain was
facing a moment of deep crisis. The staging of an independence referendum organized by
the Catalan government provoked a violent reaction from the Spanish security forces. Tel-
evisions and webpages worldwide showed police hitting voters with batons and dragging
them from polling stations by their hair. Meanwhile, Futbol Club Barcelona (also Barça)
and Unión Deportiva Las Palmas played a La Liga match in an empty Camp Nou after
the Catalan club’s request for the match to be postponed due to unrest was rejected. Early
in the day, FC Barcelona president, Josep Maria Bartomeu had called Catalan president,
Carles Puigdemont, asking for advice regarding the possibility of suspending the game on
security grounds. After the match, Bartomeu lamented the “lack of freedom of speech”
in Catalonia and justified playing in an empty stadium as a gesture “so the entire world”
could see “the abnormality of the situation” they were experiencing (“Jugamos” 8).1 Along
the same lines, the Barça board of directors stated that they had decided not to allow sup-
porters into the stadium as a way to protest against the “lack of liberty” and “repression”
suffered by Catalans. The communiqué explicitly condemned “the indiscriminate use of
violence against defenseless people in order to deprive them from their rights to vote and
to express themselves” (“El Whatsapp” 8). Four hundred miles away, that very same day,
Real Madrid supporters staged a protest against the independence referendum at the San-
tiago Bernabéu Stadium. Before and during the match between Real Madrid and Reial
Club Deportiu Espanyol de Barcelona (the other premiere league team from the Catalan
capital), local fans displayed thousands of Spanish flags while chanting Viva España, in a
demonstration of Spanish nationalism organized by grass-root groups via social media (“El
Beranabéu” 21).
The events of October 1, 2017, show the profound connections between soccer and
politics in Spain. The incidents at the Camp Nou and Santiago Bernabéu stadiums also
seem to fit into the traditional narrative which characterizes F.C. Barcelona as the football-
ing representation of the freedom loving, democratic Catalan people and Real Madrid as
the authoritarian, centralist, Spanish nationalist club par excellence. This rather cliched
view of both clubs has been promoted for decades by journalists and academics alike.2 In

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-27 
 Football and Politics in Modern Spain

what constitutes a deeply ahistorical analysis, this hegemonic narrative attached invariable
political attitudes and immutable identities to soccer clubs. The following pages question
this hegemonic narrative by analyzing the long-term historical transformations of F.C. Bar-
celona and Real Madrid and by tracing the changing and varied political identifications of
both club directors and fans along Spain’s recent history. The chapter demonstrates that
both of these clubs’ executive boards tended to support the political status quo in Catalonia
and Spain, mainly because of the conservative leanings of their upper-class directors, but
also due to the frequency with which politicians were part of said boards. As for the sup-
porters, the majority of Barça and Real Madrid fans have followed the changing political
positions of their boards in different historical moments. Yet the social diversity of the sup-
porters has allowed for pro and anti-establishment currents within both clubs. Overall, the
chapter shows that football clubs do not have an intrinsic political identity but, rather, they
adapt to changing historical contexts.

Restoration, Dictatorship, Republic and Civil War (1899–1939)

In 1899, the Swiss sportsman and businessman Hans Gamper founded F.C. Barcelona. In
its initial years, roughly 50% of the club’s players were foreigners residing in Barcelona, but
Gamper and some other members of the board soon developed a close relationship with the
leaders of the powerful Lliga Regionalista – the hegemonic right-wing Catalanist movement
led by the businessman Françesc Cambó (Serapiglia 146–7). Thus, Catalan became the
club’s official language, and the Catalan flag was incorporated into the F.C. Barcelona coat
of arms. In 1919, F.C. Barcelona publicly backed the pro-autonomy campaign organized
by the Lliga Regionalista and some supporters began to display the Catalan flag (the seny-
era) at the Les Corts stadium. In the early 1920s, Barça supporters occasionally engaged in
clashes with Real Club Deportivo Español fans, the latter Barcelona-based club considered
anti-Catalanist (Colomé 171–2).
Barça’s association with the Lliga Regionalista has to be understood against the back-
drop of a rising regionalist movement controlled by Barcelona’s bourgeoisie that was to
dominate Catalan politics in the first decades of the twentieth century. The Lliga’s asso-
ciation to F.C. Barcelona also happened in an era of amateur football (1900–1920), prior
to the professionalization of the sport, when the social significance of soccer was limited
(Giulianotti). Yet the “Catalanization” of F.C. Barcelona was hastened by the repression
suffered under the Primo de Rivera Dictatorship (1923–30). In accordance with its sym-
bolic and linguistic policies, which forbade all regional ensigns and established Spanish as
the only language in public institutions, the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera banned the
Catalan flag in the Les Corts stadium and forced the club to use the Spanish language for
its public announcements (Quiroga, Making Spaniards 50). On March 1925, the Spanish
anthem was booed at Les Corts as a sign of protest. The military authorities of Barcelona
reacted by closing the stadium for six months and forcing Hans Gamper to resign from
the club’s presidency. However, this attempt at repression backfired and unintentionally
increased the role of F.C. Barcelona as a Catalanist institution. Many saw the linguistic leg-
islation and the sanctions as a direct attack on the club and the number of F.C. Barcelona
members (socios) increased considerably as an act of opposition to the military regime.
Additionally, fans displayed Barça flags at Les Corts as a substitute for the banned Catalan
emblem, hence intensifying the symbolic overlap between the club and Catalonia (Shobe
336). Despite this tide of pro-Catalanist sentiment in the club, following Gamper’s forced

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resignation, Arcadi Balaguer, a member of the Catalan industrialist elite and a friend of
both Primo de Rivera and King Alfonso XIII, became the next F.C. Barcelona president.
During Balaguer’s term in office (1925–1929), Barça went through a highly successful run
in sporting terms, while detaching itself from Catalanist connotations, at least at the insti-
tutional level, if not at the level of the fans (“Arcadi Balaguer”).
Following Primo de Rivera’s resignation, F.C. Barcelona backed the 1931 pro-autonomy
statute campaign and remained close to the Catalanist movement throughout the Second
Republic (1931–39). But the arrival of democracy to Spain also meant a change in the
relationship between Barça and Catalan politics. In July 1935, Josep Suñol, member of
Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) and MP in the Spanish parliament, became
president of F.C. Barcelona. For the first time in the history of Barça a politician was in
charge of the club. The association between football and politics entered a new dimension.
The fact that Suñol was a left-wing republican nationalist also implied a shift from Barça’s
traditional link with right-wing regionalists during the Restoration and with pro-Spanish
monarchists during the last years of the Primo de Rivera Dictatorship. Nonetheless, the
direct affiliation with ERC, the hegemonic party in Catalonia during the Second Repub-
lic, meant that F.C. Barcelona continued to relate to the dominant political force in the
region. The Spanish Civil War was to provide yet another dramatic twist to the history of
F.C. Barcelona. In August 1936, Josep Suñol was captured by a group of Francoists when
his chauffer inadvertently crossed into rebel-controlled territory in the Madrid mountains.
Both the club president and his driver were shot dead on the spot. Suñol was assassinated
because he was a left-wing Catalan nationalist MP, not because he was Barça’s president,
but his death was nevertheless presented as evidence of the long-lasting hatred by fascist
Spanish nationalists toward the F.C. Barcelona and what it stood for. For Barcelonistas
(club fans), Suñol became the “martyr” president (“Josep Suñol”).
Unlike Barça, Real Madrid was founded by Catalan monarchists. In 1902, brothers Juan
and Carlos Padrós, two businessmen from Barcelona, decided to honor Alfonso XIII ascent
to the throne by organizing a football competition in Madrid. The club created for the occa-
sion was named Madrid Foot-ball Club, and the competition would eventually become the
Campeonato de España. The social composition of Madrid F.C. supporters was mesocratic
from its very origins. Small businessmen, modest industrialists, public servants and military
officers were among the first members of the club. The connection with Spanish nationalism
was also present from the start, as Madrid players wore a belt with the national colors until
1915. In 1920 the club was granted the royal title of “Real,” which strengthened its monar-
chical connotations (González Calleja, El Real Madrid 280–2). Primo de Rivera’s dictator-
ship provided the right political context for Real Madrid to grow massively in sporting and
financial terms. The monarchist Spanish nationalism displayed by the club was in perfect
sync with the ideology promoted by the dictatorship and allowed the club’s directors to
approach Madrid’s political and financial elites, who gladly paid for the construction of
the Chamartín Stadium in 1924 (González Calleja, El Real Madrid 282). As in the case of
F.C. Barcelona, in the first three decades of the twentieth century, it was club directors who
approached the political and financial elites, rather than the other way around.
As in the case of F.C. Barcelona, the Second Republic signaled a shift in this trend. In
1935, Rafael Sánchez-Guerra, a republican politician of the center-right of the political
spectrum, became president of Madrid C.F. When elected to the club’s presidency, Sánchez
Guerra was also the General Secretary of the Presidency of the Second Republic and the
right-hand man for president Niceto Alcalá Zamora. In office, Sánchez Guerra dropped the

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price of tickets to a single peseta and, to the horror of the right-wing elites that had run the
club until then, introduced a policy of one-member-one-vote for the first time in the club’s
history (Lowe 42). Sánchez-Guerra’s democratization drive was in line with a previous
“republicanization” of the Madrileño club. Early in the Second Republic, Madrid C.F. had
dropped the “Real” title and incorporated a republican purple stripe to its emblem. The
democratization effort was also well aligned with soccer’s massive growth during the early
modern football era, as the popular classes increasingly followed the game. In the first half
of the 1930s football had definitively ceased to be the preserve of a few well-to-do gentle-
men. By 1936, Madrid C.F. had well over 6,000 members. Among them it is possible to dif-
ferentiate four groups: An aristocratic elite; a large mass of moderate middle- and working
class socios; a good number of left-wing members who had joined during the Republic and
a significant number of apolitical members (Bahamonde).
The Spanish Civil War radicalized Madrid C.F.’s shift to the left. In August 1936,
Pablo Hernández Coronado, the club’s secretary, and some other employees declared that
Madrid was a “democratic club with a roll-call of socios who are clearly Republicans
and Left-wingers,” and whose obligation was “to fight against fascism” (Lowe 45). These
directives ended up “self-confiscating” the club. The auto-incautación of the club meant
that Madrid C.F. opened all its facilities “to all those who are heroically defending the
democratic Republic against fascism,” and the move also turned Hernández Coronado into
the de facto club president (Lowe 45). It also implied the use of the Chamartín Stadium
for parades, gymnastics festivals and the training of the so-called “Sporting Battalion.” In
this war context, the Madrid F.C. soon fell into the orbit of the Spanish Communist Party,
which promoted Colonel Antonio Ortega Guitiérrez to the presidency of the club via the
Federación Deportiva Obrera (Worker’s Sports Federation). Ortega was a political com-
missar in charge of the Republican secret police who worked closely with the NKVD (the
Soviet secret police) during the war (García Candau 136). He used Madrid C.F. to support
the Republican war effort and for political propaganda, but Ortega also trumpeted the
particularly resilient behavior of the Madrileños against the Francoist forces (Lowe 46–7).
Once the Francoists entered Madrid in 1939, former club president Rafael Sánchez-Guerra
was sentenced to life in prison. Antonio Ortega was captured in Alicante and shot by the
rebels. The Real Madrid never acknowledged Ortega as a legitimate president and opted for
quietly forgetting about Sánchez-Guerra altogether.

The Franco Dictatorship (1939–1975)

Like its Italian and German counterparts, the Francoist regime brutally imposed a fascist
political system and used sports as an instrument of indoctrination. The Falange-controlled
National Board of Sport became the supreme institution to regulate sports and General
José Moscardó, a military officer with little interest in physical exercise, became its leader.
Moscardó’s initial plans included the absolute subordination of sports to the Francoist
state, and football was no exception. Members of the Falange were parachuted into the
executive boards of all first division clubs as players were commanded to give the fascist
salute and sing the Falangist anthem Cara al sol before matches started (Quiroga, Football
32–3). In the case of F.C. Barcelona, three Falangists were included in the club’s manage-
ment committee in charge of purging the club after the war. Moreover, due to its previous
links to Catalan nationalism, the club was made to go through a process to “expiate its
guilt,” inspired by the Catholic proclivities of the Franco dictatorship. Thus, on June 29,

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1939, F.C. Barcelona played a highly symbolic friendly match in Les Corts against Atlético
de Bilbao. At this event, Francoist leaders proclaimed the greatness of the new Barça and
also of the new Barcelona, now liberated from Marxism and separatism. In the pompous
words of Falangist poet Ernesto Giménez Caballero, that match “sealed the club’s return
to the unitary flock at a moment when the air smelled of flowers and empire” (qtd. in
Solé, 23).
Despite its economic difficulties, F.C. Barcelona’s successes on the field soon came with
the arrival of its new chairman Enrique Piñeyro, Marquis of Mesa de Asta, commander
of Franco’s army and former aide-de-camp for general José Moscardó. On June 21st,
1942, Barça defeated Atlético de Bilbao with a 4–3 in the Copa del Generalísimo final at
Chamartín Stadium. The team’s return to Barcelona was met with widespread celebrations.
Players and members of the Barça board of directors had to visit the Church of the Merced
(Basílica de la Merced), to pay tribute to the Patron Saint of Barcelona with a mass as well
as a Salve Regina (the Marian hymn of the “Hail, Holy Queen”). Afterwards the club’s
leadership and players visited the General Captaincy, the civil government, the military
government, the provincial government and the City Council, where they were cheered
by hundreds of supporters (Ors 7). The penultimate tribute took place at F.C. Barcelona’s
grounds. Finally, the team and the executives attended a dinner offered by the civil governor
and provincial head of the Falange, Antonio Correa Véglison, who talked about fostering
the greatness of F.C. Barcelona as a way to enhance Spain’s greatness (Ors 7).
The Francoists also took over Madrid F.C. after the war. The club was in a dire situation
with Chamartín Stadium in ruins, its offices damaged by the Francoists’ sustained bom-
bardment of Madrid, and large sectors of the membership displaced, imprisoned, injured
or killed during the war. In addition, the Francoists thoroughly purged Madrid C.F. per-
sonnel and players and many thought it was about time to close the club down. In 1939,
Madrid C.F. president, General Aldolfo Meléndez, resisted the pressures to merge the club
with Atlético Aviación (eventually Atlético de Madrid) and the plans to create a unified
Madrid team with totalitarian tendencies were postponed (González Calleja, Deporte y
poder 283–4). In 1941 Madrid C.F. recovered its “Real” title and, interestingly, kept the
republican purple stripe in its emblem alleging it was the color associated with Castile’s flag
in medieval times. Political intromission was again heightened in 1943, when Real Madrid
faced F.C. Barcelona in the Generalísmo Cup semi-final. The Catalans won the first leg 3–0,
but Barça was fined with 2,500 pesetas for its fans’ misbehavior. The game at Chamartín
ended with an implausible 11–1 victory for the Real Madrid. The local club was also sanc-
tioned for the improper behavior of its supporters. Additionally, the Francoist authorities
fined both clubs 25,000 pesetas, which led to the resignation of both the Barça president
Enrique Piñeyro and his counterpart, Real Madrid president Antonio Santos (Relaño, Naci-
dos 76–107).
Following the Nazi defeat in World War II, the Franco dictatorship went through a
domestic “de-fascistization,” but the regime’s political use of football remained. In the
1950s, Catalan Francoists instrumentalized F.C. Barcelona to promote their own brand
of Spanish nationalism. This regionalized Spanish patriotism featured Catalan symbols,
folklore and, to a lesser extent, language, as key elements of the Francoist political project.
The Camp Nou’s inauguration in May 1957 is a case in point of how the dictatorship
used F.C. Barcelona to promote a Francoist regionalized Spanish nationalism. Barça, the
club’s magazine, then spoke about the “many colles (groups of supporters) that came from
different parts of the region” with hundreds of participants who ended up creating “a

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monumental anella (ring)” before the 50,000 that gathered for the inauguration (“Inaugu-
ración” 3). The celebration also included a mass given by Monsignor Narciso Jubany and
presided by a statue of La Moreneta (the Virgin Mary of Montserrat, also the saint patron
of Catalonia), as well as the presence of José Solís, Secretary-General Minister of Falange,
and José Antonio Elola Olaso, the Falange’s National Delegate of Physical Education and
Sports (“Inauguración” 3.). All in all, the inauguration of the Camp Nou was an attempt
at creating a kind of spiritual communion around F.C. Barcelona with dancers dressed in
regional costumes, large masses of people presided over by wooden figures of the Mare
de Déu (Mother of God) and Falangist authorities, a spectacle much to the taste of 1950’s
Catalan Francoists.
Catalan symbolism was likewise present at the inauguration of the Camp Nou, in the
gigantic parade composed of members from “two hundred Catalan clubs” and also dozens
of F.C. Barcelona supporter clubs (“Celebraciones” 5). To round off the parade, there was
the arrival at the stadium of the “four athletes who finished the relay that had started in
Gerona, Tarragona, Lérida and in our own city, thus symbolizing the brotherly regional
union” (“Celebraciones” 5). After the mass and parade, there was a performance by the
choir Orfeó Gracienc, as well as the Municipal Band of Barcelona and the “dansaires” of
the “esbarts” (dancers of Catalan folk groups). The ceremony closed with the solemn rais-
ing of the Spanish flag, followed by a friendly match between the Barça and a team from
Warsaw (“Celebraciones” 5). Like in other Spanish regions, the dictatorship was willing to
co-opt symbols, institutions and dances with old regionalist and sub-state nationalist con-
notations and re-use them as elements for its pro-Spain project.
Francoists instrumentalized the Real Madrid in a different manner from the way they
used F.C. Barcelona. In June 1955, the regime granted the club the Yoke and Arrows Cross (a
civic and military award created by Falange), following its victory at the Latin Cup in Paris,
and began to integrate Real Madrid into the dictatorship’s diplomatic and propaganda net-
work. In subsequent years, Real Madrid was turned into the unofficial ambassador of the
Franco dictatorship. The association of the Merengues’ (the popular nickname for the club)
international success with the prestige of Spain and its government was repeatedly heralded
by the regime’s mass media, while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Secretaría Gen-
eral del Movimiento (the Falangist Party) placed Real Madrid at the center of the so-called
“sporting embassies” (Castañón, “El lenguaje” 60). The Real Madrid was often invited to
tour abroad and the team frequently met with expatriate communities when playing away
games of the European Cup. Yet this exercise in soft power had its limits, as Republican
exiles sought to undermine the Francoist propaganda efforts. When Real Madrid played the
final of the first European Cup in 1956, for instance, some among the hundreds of exiles
who went to support the Spanish team at the Parc des Princes displayed Republican flags. In
the 1966 European Cup final, once again, some Real Madrid supporters displayed Repub-
lican flags at Heysel Stadium in Brussels (Quiroga, Football 37, 45). The implications of
these gestures were clear: These Republican supporters backed Real Madrid because it was
a Spanish team and yet they were simultaneously openly anti-Francoist.
The Francoists also used the Real Madrid for domestic purposes. In this era of soc-
cer, broadcasting the European Cup triumphs of the Madrileño club through press, radio
and television broadcasting became a central part of the regime’s propaganda efforts. The
strategy was to promote football as a way to foster a sort of “escapist culture” (cultura
de evasion) (Carr 272). Seeking to turn Spaniards into uncritical consumers that would
not question the political status quo, the Francoist government mobilized a great array of

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propaganda means, in particular TV resources, to present both the Real Madrid and the
Spanish national team as by-products of a modernizing dictatorship that had embraced
the Western capitalist model (Bonaut 108–9). The affinity between the dictatorship and
Real Madrid also implied the widespread belief that the Merengues were the “team of the
regime,” a belief reinforced by the presence of its dictatorial president (Santiago Bernabéu),
its Francoist supporters, and its control of the Spanish Football Federation – which habitu-
ally assigned benevolent, biased referees to assist the club in achieving victory. Although
it should be evident that not all Real Madrid supporters backed the Franco dictatorship,
for members and supporters had different political sensibilities, it is certain that the Franco
dictatorship’s approach to the Real Madrid fostered a relationship of mutual convenience,
as both the government and the club benefited from their close rapport (González Calleja,
“El Real Madrid” 291).
In the early 1970s, as the decline of the dictatorship and the Real Madrid came hand in
hand, the political use of the Madrileño club also diminished. Yet the international image of
Real Madrid was by then inextricably bound to the dictatorship, as shown when the team
was received in Turin with placards calling them “fascists” (Shaw 89–94). Interestingly, F.C.
Barcelona was also associated with the dictatorship, as the Italian team S.S. Lazio refused
to play them in Rome during the first leg of the 1975 European Cup. The Lazio’s refusal
was in protest for the Franco dictatorship’s execution of three members of the left-wing
radical FRAP (Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patriota) and two militants of ETA (the
Basque terrorist separatist Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) in late September 1975. Some journal-
ists in the Italian press justified the boycott arguing that the F.C. Barcelona’s president,
Agustí Montal, and the board of directors had traveled to Madrid the previous year to give
General Franco the Medalla de Honor de las Bodas de Platino del Club, a commemorative
medal celebrating the 75th anniversary of the foundation of Barça (Relaño, “El Barça”).
As a matter of fact, most of the club’s directors were in good terms with the dictatorship in
the last years of the Franco regime, and such explicit expressions of loyalty to the regime
were not uncommon. Thus, the appointment of Carlos Arias Navarro as Prime Minister in
December 1973 was celebrated by Barça magazine as the culmination of “a long career at
the service of our homeland in positions of great responsibility, displaying in all of them his
proven loyalty and faithfulness to the fundamental principles that underpin the National
Movement and towards the Leader and the Prince of Spain” (“Arias Navarro” 3).
The Barça directors’ support for the dictatorship did not prevent F.C. Barcelona from
becoming a symbol for Catalonia and for anti-Francoism in the eyes of many supporters.
When in 1968 the president of the club, Narcís de Carreras, former secretary of the Cata-
lanist leader Françesc Cambó and a great admirer of Francisco Franco, defined Barça as
“more than a club,” he was referring precisely to the fact that F.C. Barcelona transcended
sport and achieved a social dimension that other teams did not have (Quiroga, Football
43). In 1971, journalist Luis Bonet insisted on the popular identification between F.C. Bar-
celona and Catalonia: “For most Catalans, being a member of ‘Barça’ or a mere supporter
of the club is practically an act of love for Catalonia” (Bonet 23). Crucially, this also
applied to many of the Spanish immigrants who reached Catalonia in the 1950s, 1960s and
1970s and found F.C. Barcelona as an established vehicle of social integration into Catalan
society. Supporting Barça allowed inhabiting a shared identity that linked many Culés (a
popular nickname for the club’s fans) with Catalonia and anti-Francoist views, regardless
of their actual place of birth. But this Catalan identity associated with F.C. Barcelona did
not necessarily imply anti-Spanish sentiment. The mere fact that many of those who joined

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the chorus of praise for Barça were Spanish-speaking Catalans, some born outside Cata-
lonia, shows us an implicit differentiation between a political Spanish nation, represented
by Francoism, and the Spanish nation understood in cultural terms. For example, the fact
that singer Manolo Escobar was the author of such patriotic hits as ¡Que viva España! was
not seen to be in contradiction with his declared love for F.C. Barcelona (Quiroga,“Spanish
Fury” 519).

Transition, Democracy and Globalization (1975–2017)

Following the death of General Franco, F.C. Barcelona acquired an important role as a
conduit for Catalanism and democratization. In 1976, the club occupied a leading position
in the Congrés de Cultura Catalana, an association that gathered over 1,500 agencies from
across different sectors of Catalan society to promote the vernacular language and the res-
titution of autonomous regional governments. On the 20th of February 1977, hundreds of
Barça and Athletic de Bilbao supporters paraded onto the Camp Nou pitch with senyeras
and ikurriñas (the Catalan and Basque flags, respectively) before a league match between
F.C. Barcelona and Athletic (Quiroga, Football 130). On the 13th of April of the same year,
the club’s general assembly passed a resolution declaring that “Catalonia was prepared to
forever live free and in harmony with the other people of the Spanish state, under equal
conditions in a real democracy” (Santacana 310). During the assembly, the club president
represented the F.C. Barcelona as a “Catalan institution par excellence” and demanded a
statute of autonomy for Catalonia, thereby following the club’s nationalist political tradi-
tion: “Let me publicly declare that F.C. Barcelona is in favor of the statute for our peo-
ple . . . like the Barcelona supporters were in 1932. Up with Barça. Up with Catalonia”
(Santacana 242–51).
Catalan politicians also showed interest in associating themselves with Barça. Josep
Tarradellas, the exiled president of Catalonia, returned to Barcelona on the 23rd of
October 1977, and visited the Camp Nou the following week. Before the Barça vs. Las Pal-
mas match, a group of children with big sign boards formed the sentence “Welcome home,
President” in front of a huge senyera, displayed in the middle of the pitch. The Catalan
anthem, Els Segadors, was played on the Camp Nou loudspeakers and the public waved
thousands of senyeras, while president Montal honored Tarradellas with the club’s gold
medal. The ceremony presented an entwined representation of F.C. Barcelona and Catalo-
nia at both symbolic and discursive levels. “My dear president: Barça and you are one and
the same, you both personify the best virtues of our people,” Montal told Tarradellas. “Our
club is great because it always remained loyal to Catalonia,” replied the president of the
Generalitat (Satancana 252–3).
Real Madrid went through a process of institutional “de-Francoistization” during the
transition years. Following the death of Santiago Bernabéu in 1978, Raimundo Saporta, the
club’s number two, famously declared:

Real Madrid is and has been apolitical. The club has always been so powerful because
it has been at the service of the State’s backbone. When it was founded in 1902, the
club respected Alfonso XIII, in 1931 the Republic, in 1939 the Generalísimo, and
now it respects His Majesty Juan Carlos. Because Real Madrid is a well-behaved club
and loyally complies with the institution in charge of the nation.
(Gómez 61)

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Saporta coherently contextualized Real Madrid’s changing nature and linked the club
to the Spanish nation, rather than to a specific political regime. In doing so, he also sought
to detach the Real Madrid from Francoism, fully aware of the fact that the association of
the club with the dictatorship was counterproductive in the new political context. Some
Real Madrid players took more decisive actions to disassociate themselves from the Franco
dictatorship. In January 1976, at a time when the only trade union allowed was the Fran-
coist Sindicato Vertical, Real Madrid’s Amancio Amaro and Athletic de Bilbao’s José Ángel
Iríbar called the first meetings to unionize professional footballers and improve their work-
ing conditions. Two years later, amid fierce opposition by the Real Federación Española de
Fútbol and the clubs, the Asociación de Futbolistas Españoles was founded. Perhaps more
relevant in terms of explicit political commitment was the fact that Real Madrid players, led
at the time by Vicente del Bosque, donated money to, and expressed their solidarity with, a
number of workers’ strikes in Madrid (Peinado 204–5). The case of Paul Breitner, the Ger-
man player with Maoist beliefs who gave half a million pesetas to the solidarity fund of the
workers of the Standard factory in Madrid, became well known. The club’s directors sum-
moned Breitner but decided not to sanction the German player and, unsuccessfully, tried to
bury the issue (Relaño “Un no gol”).
Since the return of democracy, Real Madrid has been run by right-wing Madrileño social
elites eager to obtain a preferential treatment from politicians, but not very keen on a
full-scale subordination to the state, let alone to regional or municipal government. After
the death of Santiago Bernabéu in 1978, the presidency of Luis de Carlos (1978–1985)
meant a transition period but, overall, Real Madrid continued to be run in the old style
(as it had been in prior years), like a “small state,” even as its directors insisted on denying
that any special bond had existed between the club and Francoism. A gradual adoption of a
corporate business model came with the presidency of Ramón Mendoza (1985–1995), who
continued to project an elitist Real Madrid identity in contrast with Atlético de Madrid’s
popular character (González Calleja “Deporte” 110–2, 120; Rodríguez 721). This move
towards a multinational company business model was initially a fiasco. By the late 1990s
Real Madrid was on the verge of bankruptcy. In the twenty-first century, president Flor-
entino Pérez, a former politician of the conservative Unión de Centro Democrático and
a construction tycoon, turned the Real Madrid into a global brand. This transformation
took place as the game entered a post-modern era characterized by the commodification
of the sport and directed by the interests of television. Pérez also kept strong connections
with different state, regional and local administrations, in a recurrent trade-off of favors by
which politicians got membership cards and the public exposure by virtue of being linked
with the Real Madrid, in exchange for tax exemptions, construction permits and business
advantages (González Calleja “Deporte” 110–2, 120, 123–4).
The commodification and globalization of the game in the post-modern era also trans-
formed the relationship of supporters with their football clubs. A new middle-class fan
emerged, highly educated, cosmopolitan and critically distant, in part due to the changing,
globalized business strategies which pushed tickets prices upwards. Also related to the com-
modification of the game was the larger teams’ attempts to appeal to national and global
audiences, hence distancing themselves from their local communities. In the 2000s, Real
Madrid summer tours in Asia and America were part of a strategy to gain international
markets. Fully aware of the fact that the club’s biggest stars often had nothing to do with
Madrid, the club invoked the idea of a global imagined community of Real Madrid admir-
ers to create a sense of loyalty between the players and the club. In the telling words of

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Florentino Pérez: “Madrid is our headquarters, but the world is our home” (Castillo 31).
Interestingly, although this universalist identity promoted by Pérez was based on vague,
corporation-like values, such as the “search for excellence” and the “will to win,” it did
not alienate Spanish fans form the club. A significant part of the Spanish Real Madrid fans
found no contradiction between projecting a global identity and fostering an image of the
club as Spain’s representative. In 2012 Real Madrid and the Spanish government signed
an agreement for the club to promote tourism in the country. Real Madrid thus resumed
its role as Spain’s ambassador, although in this case the Madridistas were not endorsing a
dictatorial regime. Still, Real Madrid’s connections with the Spanish nation had some limits
and Florentino Pérez removed the Spanish flag from the Real Madrid jersey, arguing that
the club was “ ‘universal because it has fans all over the world and not only in our city or
country” (García 10). This is not to suggest that Florentino Pérez and most members of
the Real Madrid board of directors were not associated with conservative sectors of Span-
ish politics and society. They were affiliated particularly to the right-wing People’s Party
(Partido Popular, or PP). But the very fact that Pérez made no official statement about the
2017 pro-independence referendum, or the political situation in Catalonia for that mat-
ter, was very telling of his preferences for keeping a low political profile, as the best man-
ner to maintain his privileged business position with different local, regional and national
administrations.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, F.C. Barcelona had a more intense relationship
with politicians than did Real Madrid. The autonomous government led by Jordi Pujol
(1980–2003) reinforced the bond between F.C. Barcelona and right-wing Catalan national-
ism. Pujol himself was keen on emphasizing the idea that “Barça was the emblem of Cata-
lonia” and he appeared in all title celebrations at Palau de la Generalitat, together with F.C.
Barcelona players (Duch 162). Still, the link between Barça and the political establishment
of Catalonia should be qualified. F.C. Barcelona president Josep Lluis Núñez (1978–2000),
always presented himself as an independent, non-political candidate and kept up a difficult
relationship with Convergència i Unió (CiU, Pujol’s right-leaning political party) and the
Catalan government. In 1988, for example, TV3 and Avui, both media forms controlled
by CiU, launched a campaign to oust Núñez and openly back Ricard Huguet, leader of the
opposition forces at Camp Nou (Burns 372). Some analysts have pointed out that Núñez
never acted against the Catalanist component of Barça through his mandate, but instead
he avoided turning the club into the active agent of Catalanism that it had been in the past
(Badía). Núñez’s successor and former vice-president, Joan Gaspart (2000–2003), made no
secret of his political leanings for the pro-Spanish People’s Party.
Perhaps more importantly, F.C. Barcelona kept on being a means of integration for first-
and second-generation immigrants who had few sympathies for Catalanism but could still
join the Catalan imagined community regardless of their ethnic origin by supporting Barça.
Additionally, F.C. Barcelona had hundreds of peñas (supporters’ clubs) outside Catalonia
by the end of the 1990s (Quiroga, Football 140. These non-Catalan Barcelonistas were
mainly united by their anti-Real Madrid feelings (Duch 173). To the eyes of some of these
non-Catalan Barça supporters, Real Madrid could still represent Francoism and political
centralism, yet for obvious reasons these Barcelonistas were not Catalan nationalists (Cen-
tre d’Estudis d’Opinió).
The politization of F.C. Barcelona was to increase notoriously under the presidency of
Joan Laporta (2003–2010). A young lawyer well-known for his past in a small secessionist
party, Laporta was able to successfully identify Barça with Catalonia and reproduced the

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two main pillars of the Catalanist narrative: The idea that the Catalan nation was the vic-
tim of long-term injustices perpetrated by Spain/Castile/Madrid and the self-representation
of the Principality as a democratic and modern oasis in the desert of a backward state. At
times the club president’s idealized discourse about F.C. Barcelona seemed to take sentences
straight from the script of the 1995 film Braveheart: “Barça embodies the epic that guides
the search for freedom of oppressed peoples,” he declared in an interview (“Laporta”).
More importantly, Laporta embarked upon a program “to re-Catalanize” F.C. Barcelona.
This meant incorporating the Catalan flag on the back of the team’s shirts; removing the
Spanish flag from La Masia (the club’s training academy); hosting the Correllengua (a meet-
ing of different associations for the defense of the Catalan language); displaying a banner
at the Camp Nou in support of the 2005 statute of autonomy; acting as the speaker of a
number of Catalanist associations; and proposing that new Barcelona players should take
Catalan language classes (Duch 156). The program of re-Catalanization turned Laporta
into the darling of the pro-independence movement for a while, but there were reservations
among many Barça fans form outside Catalonia (Quiroga, Football 142–3).
Like many other European teams, Barça sustained strong economic and symbolic ties
to its national home, while gradually displaying more global characteristics in marketing,
fan-base and labor recruitment from the late 1990s onwards (Giulianotti and Robertson
xv). And similarly, to Real Madrid, Barça increased its media power and multimillion-euro
revenues globally in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Under Laporta, the club
targeted further the Asian and American markets, incorporated sponsors on the F.C. Barce-
lona uniform and increased the international exposure of the team and its merchandising.
At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Barça had 92 supporters’
clubs outside Spain and the F.C. Barcelona Foundation worked in aid projects in Africa,
America, Asia and Europe (“Alianzas”).
President Sandro Rosell (2010–2014) maintained the internationalization policy while
initially attempting to reduce the process of Catalanization implemented under Laporta.
Yet, as support for independence significantly grew in Catalonia in the early 2010s, Rosell
revised his policy. On September 10, 2012, the day before Catalonia’s national day (la
diada), F.C. Barcelona announced that the colors of the football team’s away uniform were
to be those of the senyera for the 2013–14 season. Additionally, the stripe with the Catalan
flag in the home uniform was to be enlarged and extended to the front of the jersey. The fol-
lowing month Rosell defended the nation’s right to self-determination at the F.C. Barcelona
general assembly and signed a document backing the international recognition of Catalan
national teams (Quiroga, Football 145). President Josep Maria Bartomeu (2014–2020)
adopted a similar stance, trying not to alienate non-Catalan fans but still supporting the
right of self-determination. In May 2017, F.C. Barcelona declared on Twitter its backing for
the celebration of the October 1 referendum. As already mentioned, on October 1, 2017,
Barça played on an empty stadium to protest against the “lack of freedom of speech” and
the “repression” suffered by Catalans.

Conclusion
Spanish football and politics have been closely related since the beginning of the twentieth
century. The dynamics of this connection have been historically determined by different
political regimes and changing footballing eras. The amateur era of football in the first dec-
ades of the century coincided with a time when both F.C. Barcelona and Madrid C.F. sought

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to associate themselves with the political elites of Catalonia and Spain respectively. As
football professionalized and became a mass phenomenon, the trend changed as politicians
became presidents of F.C. Barcelona and Real Madrid during the Second Republic, creating
a closer association between soccer and politics. The Franco dictatorship epitomized the
state’s control of football clubs in Spanish history. In its early years, the regime imposed fas-
cist directors and presidents and used both F.C. Barcelona and Real Madrid for propaganda
purposes. Later in the Franco regime the image of Real Madrid became entangled with the
dictatorship, as football entered the intermediate modern era. In the late 1960s and early
1970s, some in the anti-Franco opposition saw F.C. Barcelona as a symbol of democratiza-
tion and Catalanism, while local Francoist elites ran the club.
During the transition to democracy, the bond between Barça and Catalan nationalism
grew, as Real Madrid tried to depoliticize its links with the dictatorship. In the post-modern
era of football, F.C. Barcelona and Real Madrid became global brands with millions of inter-
national fans, yet the political connotations of both clubs have remained strong, despite a
changing historical context. Barça kept their association with the establishment’s Catalan
nationalism represented by CiU. When in 2012, conservative Catalanists declared their sup-
port for secessionism, F.C. Barcelona gradually followed suit. In contrast, Real Madrid did
not openly support party policies but established connections with national and local politi-
cians of different administrations to exchange favors. At the same time, the signing of a busi-
ness deal with the People’s Party government to promote internationally the image of Spain
had obvious political connotations and goals. The protest of Real Madrid fans against the
Catalan independence referendum on October 1, 2017, was the expression in a football sta-
dium of a new Spanish nationalism with specific anti-Catalan independence features, one that
had led to the display of millions of Spanish flags all over the country in the previous months.
Some might see the display of Spanish flags at the Bernabéu as the “natural” product of the
long history of rivalry between Barça and Real Madrid, but the truth of the matter is that the
very form and shape of the protest was created by the specific historical context of the time.
After all, historical contexts, not linear readings of the past, have determined the changing
relationship between football and politics at every point in time over the last 120 years.

Notes
1 All translations are my own unless noted otherwise.
2 Among the journalistic books, see, for instance, Burns 1999; Gómez 2007; Miravitllas 2013. An
important exception to this crude approach in Lowe 2013. Among the academic works, see Shaw
1987; Crolley and Hand 2002; Goldblatt 2006.

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arcadi-balaguer-1925-1929. Accessed 30 Nov. 2023.
“Arias Navarro Nuevo Presidente del Gobierno.” Barça, no. 946, 1974, p. 3.
Badia, Jordi. “Barça Is not Catalonia.” El País, 9 Nov. 2012, online version.
Bahamonde, Ángel. El Real Madrid en la historia de España. Taurus, 2002.
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Bonet, Luis. “Cataluña.” ABC, 1 Jun. 1971, p. 23

Burns, Jimmy. Barça. La pasión de un pueblo. Anagrama, 1999.
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“Celebraciones.” Barça, no. 73, 1957, p. 5
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tiago Segurola. Editorial Debate, 1999, pp. 169–74.
Crolley, Liz, and David Hand. Football, Europe and the Press. Frank Cass, 2002.
Duch, Salvador. Futbol, metàfora d’una guerra freda. Proa, 2005.
“El Beranabéu también vota.” Mundo Deportivo, 2 Oct. 2017, p. 21
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Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió. La imagen de Cataluña en España. Eudox, 1999.
García Candau, Julián. El deporte en la Guerra Civil. Espasa Calpe, 2007.
García, César. “Real Madrid and Public Relations: Applying the Circuit of Culture to Organizational
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franquismo.” Política y Sociedad, vol. 51, no. 2, 2014, pp. 275–96.
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“Jugamos a puerta cerrada como protesta.” Mundo Deportivo, 2 Oct. 2017, p. 8
“Laporta: ‘El Barça representa la épica que guía a los pueblos sometidos hacia la libertad’.” Público,
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Lowe, Sid. Fear and Loathing in La Liga. Yellow Jersey P, 2013.
Miravitllas, Ramón. La Función Política del Barça. Catarata, 2013.
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Atlético de Bilbao por 4 a 3.” La Vanguardia Española, 23 Jul. 1942, p. 7.
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 PART 4

Bodies and Identities

 25
FRANCO’S INSTITUTO DE
ESTUDIOS AFRICANOS
Spanish Colonial Science, and Local African
Responses*

Benita Sampedro Vizcaya

El “test” número 15 de la escala de YERKES consiste en contestar algunas preguntas

difíciles. . . . [E]n ocasiones, aún después de asegurarnos bien de que habíamos sido com-
prendidos, no daban respuesta ni buena ni mala, siendo el silencio la única contestación.
Y aquí es en donde se ponía a prueba nuestra paciencia.
(“Test” number 15 of the YERKES scale consists of answering a few difficult ques-
tions. . . . [S]ometimes, even after making sure that we had been understood, they gave
neither a good nor a bad answer, silence being the only response. And this is where our
patience was tried.)
(Beato González and Villarino Ulloa, Capacidad mental del negro 20)

Biomedical and scientific interventions played a pivotal role in the colonization of Africa:
The centrality of medical projects and public health initiatives in the process of European
territorial expansion, from the late nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth, can-
not be underestimated.1 In the Spanish Territories in the Maghreb and the Gulf of Guinea,
biomedical technologies and research into public health, epidemiology and – by the 1940s
and 1950s – psychometry and psychology, all served as instruments of colonial production
and colonial control.2 This chapter will revisit how colonial scientific knowledge in these
fields was produced, the history of some of the institutions in Spain which were established
to support such initiatives during the Franco dictatorship, and how the body of scholar-
ship they generated was brought back into circulation in metropolitan Spain for popular
consumption and legitimation purposes. We will also unveil some of the local resistance
mechanisms, mobilized both under (and against) the scrutiny of the colonial medical scien-
tists, and finally, we will point to some contemporary reckonings of this colonial past and
the ways in which African authors today address the memory of these former interventions.
Biomedical discourses and practices put to work some of the inherently colonial elements
of twentieth-century medical science, which privileged bodily markers such as gender, race,
ethnicity, age group, kinship relations, and cultural and environmental determinism in cat-
egorizing difference and otherness. Furthermore, the purpose of colonial public health was
seldom purely medical. It was an additional tool of the colonial administration, intimately

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-29
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

linked to ideological and pragmatic outcomes. In Francoist Spain, colonial sciences and
medicine occupied a critical place within a larger political framework, although investment
in public health was only proportional to the expectations of economic and propagandis-
tic returns. Colonial health, along with pedagogical and scientific experimentation in the
Spanish territories in Africa (similarly to all other European colonial contexts) was not an
end in itself, but rather a prerequisite for administrative efficiency, and was simultaneously
embedded in imperial propaganda campaigns.3 As Frantz Fanon observed, “in the colo-
nies, the doctor” – and, we might add, any human health scientist – “is an integral part of
colonization, of domination, of exploitation” (241). However, local responses to colonial
biomedical demands, regimes of testing, tracing, and categorization, also merit a central
role in any comprehensive study of colonialism today. In this light, we will suggest that the
history of Spanish medical, anthropometric, and scientific bodily and cognitive testing in
Africa illuminates not only the power of the colonial order and its imperial agents but also
their limitations, their inadequacies, and their failures.
To illustrate this argument, we will assess the ostensibly scientific character with which
the Francoist regime wanted to imbue the Spanish colonial enterprise in Africa, through
the creation – in 1945 – of the Instituto de Estudios Africanos (Institute for African Stud-
ies), known by the acronym IDEA, a Madrid-based branch of the Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas (Superior Council of Scientific Research). The IDEA was directly
sponsored and subsidized by the Dirección General de Marruecos y Colonias (General Direc-
torate for Morocco and the Colonies), and overseen by General José Díaz de Villegas,4 who
reported directly to Franco’s cabinet and wrote endorsements and prologues for many of the
Institute’s publications. The Institute encompassed the disciplines of geology, physical and
human geography, edaphology, ethnology, archaeology, art, botany, anthropology, medi-
cine, pharmacology, entomology, history, economics and law, as well as Arabic, Moroccan,
and Hebraic studies (Bandrés and Llavona, “Psicología y colonialismo en España (II)” 155).
Summarizing the IDEA’s place within the larger political and scientific state apparatus, Luis
Calvo Calvo observes how it responded to the Afro-imperialist approach of the Franco
regime, eager to emulate the colonial politics of other European nations (171).

The IDEA: Francoist Scientific Production in the Service of Colonial Interests

The IDEA gathered an ad hoc network of Spanish “experts” (almost exclusively male)
who often held professional appointments in the African territories or were commissioned
for a scientific expedition. Over the years, the range of experts included an eclectic ros-
ter of human health professionals, anthropologists, historians, geographers, geologists,
and educators. The IDEA was in existence from 1945 to 1966. Its core mission was to
generate a compendium of scientific knowledge related to Spain’s African colonies which
would inform political, economic, and military decisions on colonial matters; it also served
propagandistic purposes in the form of popular science. It approved for publication 325
book monographs, issued under the CSIC/IDEA label, and oversaw two periodical pub-
lications. The first of these, intended for a general audience, was a monthly journal that
had been in existence since 1924 under the name Revista de tropas coloniales (Journal of
Colonial Troops) and had been relaunched in 1942 as África: Revista española de coloni-
zación (Africa: Spanish Journal of Colonization) before falling under the auspices of the
IDEA three years later. This publication would outlive the IDEA, and even the last Spanish
colonial possessions in Africa, remaining in circulation until 1978, three years after Spain

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relinquished the Spanish Sahara.5 With strong military links from the outset, it served as
an organ for the dissemination of colonial propaganda on political, military, and cultural
matters. The second periodical publication was the more scholarly inclined Archivos del
Instituto de Estudios Africanos (Archives of the Institute for African Studies), whose 81
quarterly issues appeared from 1947 to 1966.
Scholars such as Luis Calvo Calvo, Enrique Gozalbes Cravioto, Cécile S. Stehrenberger,
José María López Sánchez, and Alba Lérida Jiménez have all provided critical reassess-
ments of the history, role, and political purchase of the IDEA. For Gozalbes Cravioto, the
fact that this was the only Spanish institution with the means to finance research, fieldwork
and expeditions under the Franco regime speaks to the entanglement between political and
scientific designs during this period (163). Stehrenberger points to the IDEA’s totalizing
aspirations: Enabling Spanish colonialism in Africa to manifest a fantasy of “total knowl-
edge” (683). She indicates that among its intended audiences were colonial administrators,
missionaries, and colonial settlers but adds that their publications, and their public lectures
and exhibitions in Madrid, also served to manufacture a consensus about the colonial pro-
ject amongst an otherwise largely skeptical or indifferent Spanish audience. The IDEA was
intended to generate financial support at home, and legitimation for the Francoist regime
from the international community.

Intelligence Tests and the Limits of Testing Projects

In the area of human health sciences alone, the IDEA’s publications encompassed yellow fever,
leprosy, cannibalism, physical anthropology, dermopapillary impressions, and psychology,
among a wide range of other bioscience fields. But the dubious apex in the proliferation of
this scientific corpus is the production of colonial psychology and psychometrics, resulting
in egregious titles such as Vicente Beato González and Ramón Villarino Ulloa’s Capacidad
mental del negro. Los métodos de Binet-Bobertag y de Yerkes para determinar la edad y
coeficiente mental aplicados al negro (Mental Capacity of the Negro: The Binet-Bobertag
and Yerkes Methods for Determining Age and Mental Coefficient as Applied to the Negro;
1944),6 and Ricardo Ibarrola’s “Aportación al estudio del nivel mental de los indígenas
de Guinea” (“Contribution to the Study of the Mental Level of the Indigenous People of
Guinea;”1951). Replete with graphs and charts, the fieldwork studies that preceded these
publications had been primarily conducted in schools and orphanages across the Spanish
Territories of the Gulf of Guinea and presented the ostensibly scientific results of hundreds
of tests, forced upon children and teenagers between the ages of six and twenty, without
their consent, but rather with the authority and coercion that a colonial system grants its
agents. These scientific publications of the IDEA categorized and compared data analysis
related to vision, hearing ability, memory, and attention, among other criteria, but also
verbal and non-verbal IQ variables. As Nancy Rose Hunt asserts, “colonial states governed
through technologies of numeracy, screening, diagnosis, and security” (7); however, while
exercising violence over bodies and intellects, this same colonial numeracy also became
repetitive and purposeless, and was fundamentally ill conceived.
In practice, these scientific projects exemplified the expansion of biomedical and anthro-
pological interventions into a new realm, that of the educational system, to assess colo-
nial children and teenagers’ potential as a prospective workforce. Capacidad mental del
negro – a book widely referenced today by scholars and activists as the epitome of the
ignominy of Spanish racist scientific tradition – is in fact only the best known of a larger

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bibliographical corpus of heavily racialized colonial bio-knowledge, published by the IDEA.

The co-authors, Vicente Beato and Ramón Villarino, were Spanish doctors of the Servicio
Sanitario Colonial (Colonial Health Service) assigned to Fernando Poo (today Bioko) dur-
ing the late 1930s and early 1940s: Beato worked in maternity and pediatric medicine at
the hospital in Santa Isabel (today Malabo), while Villarino was head of the island’s health
service. Like all their peers, they took full advantage of these positions of power to issue
publications using their patients’ cases as scholarly data, surely another form of medical
extractivism. Beato proudly reports, in colonially inflicted utterance: “Todo el presente
trabajo ha sido elaborado con el material humano infantil de la Isla: material que alcanza
aproximadamente a 1.500 niños de distintas edades” (24) (“All this work has been elabo-
rated with the human child material of the Island: material that reaches approximately
1,500 children of different ages”). This form of extractivism is not only mirrored, but also
literally placed on the map by the colonial iconography displayed on the first modern map
of the island of Fernando Poo which the Spanish colonial administration commissioned
from the Claretian missionaries in 1944 (Figure 25.1).
Detailed medical records of child and adult patients were recorded and published by
colonial doctors for the purposes of scientific argumentation, including doctoral disserta-
tions. Some of the monographs issued by the IDEA contain questionnaires of the tests
carried out and the tabulated results, or records of patients’ diagnoses collected by the
practitioners. Very seldom do these treaties include patients’ reactions, emotions, or direct
testimonies, not least because colonial medical relationships were standardized and suf-
fused by contempt for the patient. Upon his return to Spain in 1941 after serving two terms
as colonial doctor, Vicente Beato published his doctoral thesis, Contribución al estudio del
desarrollo somático-morfológico del niño en Fernando Poo y causas que influyen en su
anómala evolución: Urgente necesidad de un servicio de puericultura (Contribution to the
Study of Childhood Somatic-Morphological Development in Fernando Poo and the Causes
Which Influence Its Anomalous Evolution: Urgent Necessity of a Childcare Services). As he
acknowledged, neither his study nor the intended childcare unit were purely altruistic but
structural mechanisms at the service of the colonial plantation economy. In his view, invest-
ment in maternal and child healthcare were a prerequisite to counterbalance a purported
demographic decline and increasing labor demands:

Nos encontramos . . . con un problema que constituye una constante preocupación

de la Política Colonial: la falta de braceros para la explotación de la Colonia. . . . Lo
que en algunas épocas del año . . . toma el oscuro tinte de una grave angustia. . . .
Problema que nace . . . de la absoluta necesidad que se tiene del bracero negro para
la explotación de las tierras africanas. Sin él no sería posible la obtención de todas las
riquezas que encierra este Continente salvaje. (18–19)
We find ourselves . . . with a problem that constitutes a constant concern in Colo-
nial Policy: the lack of braceros [laborers] for the exploitation of the Colony. . . .
Which at some times of the year . . . assumes the dark tint of serious anguish. . . . The
problem arises . . . from the absolute necessity of black laborers for the exploitation
of African lands. Without them, it would not be possible to obtain all the riches that
this wild Continent contains.

Since the 1930s, infertility became a growing scientific field in the production of colo-
nial medical knowledge regarding Africa. Colonial infertility generated what Nancy Rose

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Figure 25.1 Map of the Island of Fernando Poo, Misioneros Hijos del Inmaculado Corazón de
María.

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Hunt has termed reproductive worry: “From Uganda to Cameroon, reproductive worry
often turned into distorted scares. Whether in moralizing figments or fretful angst, fear ran
contrary to reproductive realities. So, asking whether a colonial infertility scare was veer-
ing toward fact, fiction, or fantasy – and when, how and in whose minds – is important”
(12–13). Beato’s (de)population concerns exemplify advocacy for a medical specialization
in the service of the colonial labor system, in response to pressures from the plantation
elite: “La Puericultura es el medio esencial para la consecución de los dos fines fundamen-
tales que han de independizarnos totalmente de las Colonias vecinas: elevar al máximo el
número de nacidos vivos y reducir al mínimo la mortalidad infantil” (214) (“Childcare is
the essential means of achieving the two fundamental goals that will make us totally inde-
pendent from the neighboring colonies: maximizing the number of live births, and minimiz-
ing infant mortality”). His holistic plan, allegedly modeled after one previously displayed
in Lagos (Nigeria), included hygiene and education campaigns, and involved the concerted
efforts of the health, educational, and religious systems: dispensaries, schools, missions, and
orphanages, as charted in the island’s map previously. It is in this context that his thesis
announces the forthcoming book Capacidad mental del negro:

Nos hemos limitado, en colaboración con VILLARINO, a un estudio de la capacidad

mental y la memoria del niño indígena, empleando para ello los “test” elaborados
por BINET y YERKES para su aplicación en Europa. Naturalmente que los hemos
modificado en la medida necesaria al ambiente y a la comprensión del indígena . . .
los resultados obtenidos serán expuestos en un trabajo que preparamos. (102–103)
(We have limited ourselves, in collaboration with VILLARINO, to a study of the
mental capacity and memory of the indigenous child, using the “tests” developed by
BINET and YERKES for its application in Europe. Naturally, we have modified them
to the extent necessary for the environment and the understanding of indigenous
people . . . the results obtained will be presented in a study that we are preparing.)

The methodology through which these tests operated, adopted and adapted by the
IDEA-sponsored doctors, was clearly of questionable scientific value: Most of these stud-
ies rested largely on faulty evaluation of skewed results, based on illegitimate scientific
premises, mediated by the experts’ own limitations in understanding local cultural, lin-
guistic, and environmental criteria and behavioral patterns, compounded by short-sighted
preparation. Furthermore, by the early 1940s these tests – designed for military and civil-
ian purposes decades earlier by French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911) and United
States eugenicist Robert Yerkes (1876–1956) – had already been widely challenged by the
international scientific community. Yet the IDEA experts used them uncritically throughout
the 1940s and into the 1950s, and on a massive scale, with colonial African children. They
embarked on a project of numerical and bodily control, recording on index cards data of all
the school children they could identify, registering their names, birthdates when available
(estimating them if not), and the scores assigned to their measurements and test responses.
They inscribed these children as subjects of study for colonial rational planning, reducing
them to a number locked in grids that displayed demographics, the age range of maximum
workforce potential, and purported mental capacity.
However, these IDEA experts also met with a wide array of forms of local resistance.
These included multiple strategies, such as well-documented mass absenteeism from school
on testing days, and individual acts of defiance. Some children would deliberately frustrate

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their examiners by refusing to provide any answers in the time allocated for each trial,
despite the immediacy of aggression and the imbalance in power dynamics:

no daban respuesta ni buena ni mala, siendo el silencio la única contestación. Aquí

es en donde se ponía a prueba nuestra paciencia, la cual habíamos de acumular para
ganarnos la voluntad y la confianza del muchacho, lo que, de otra parte, conseguimos
en la mayoría de los casos. . . . [C]ada prueba venía a durar de cuarenta y cinco a
sesenta minutos, y deliberadamente ponemos el tiempo para que el lector disculpe el
hecho de que en ocasiones nuestra paciencia fracasara, en cuyo caso lo echábamos
todo a rodar, pues, naturalmente, a la más mínima voz o gesto era imposible con-
seguir nada de aquel muchacho. (Beato and Villarino 20–21)
(they gave neither a good nor a bad answer, silence being the only response. This is
where our patience was tried – we had to muster it to gain the child’s will and trust,
which, on the other hand, we achieved in most cases. . . . [E]ach test lasted forty-five to
sixty minutes, and we consciously mention the time so that the reader will excuse the fact
that sometimes our patience failed, in which case it was a lost cause, because, naturally,
at the slightest raised voice or gesture it was impossible to get anything from that child.)

Schoolchildren’s voices, acts, or attitudes towards this form of forceful testing are hard to
trace in authoritarian and authoritative texts of the kind produced by the IDEA scientists,
separated from their examiners as these children were by layers of age, authority, linguistic
differences and, above all, coercion. Children, often of a very young age, had few instru-
ments at their disposal to counter the weight of colonial male authority figures armed with
scientific paraphernalia, raiding schools and orphanages with the full weight of the admin-
istrative apparatus that typically accompanied these medical tours, including authorization
from local colonial authorities, technologies of measurement and bodily intervention, and
the presence of the Colonial Guard to monitor the operation and to ensure the scientists’
success. Fanon reminds us that “the colonized person who goes to see the doctor” – the
scientist in this case – “is always diffident. He answers in monosyllables, gives little in the
way of explanation, and soon arouses the doctor’s impatience” (234).
The central premise in Beato and Villarino’s book Capacidad mental del negro, stated from
the outset, is unambiguous: “La materia prima que más interesa en nuestros territorios es el
hombre. . . . ¿Qué trabajo es capaz de desarrollar?” (14) (“The raw material that most inter-
ests us in our territories is the human being. . . . What work is he capable of performing?”);
“Nosotros queríamos saber: ¿a qué edad cronológica corresponde la mayor capacidad mental
del negro?” (17) (“We wanted to know: to what chronological age corresponds the greatest
mental capacity of the negro?”); “creemos no sea posible una colonización real sin conocer
perfectamente cómo es y qué es capaz de hacer el pueblo sobre el cual recae la acción colo-
nizadora” (22) (“We believe that real colonization is not possible without knowing perfectly
what the people on whom the colonizing action falls on are like, and what they are capable of
doing”). Touring all of Fernando Poo’s state-run and religious missionary schools for boys and
girls in April and May 1940, Beato and Villarino managed to conduct a total of 434 full tests
on 273 boys and 146 girls between the ages of seven and twenty and on a small pool of fifteen
European children for comparative purposes. Results were classified by “chronological age,”
“mental age,” “mental state,” and IQ. Their chronological age never matched the other catego-
ries. A typical case was thus reported: “edad cronológica 16, edad mental 10.9, estado mental
5.3, C.I. 0.78” (25) (“chronological age 16, mental age 10.9, mental state 5.3, IQ 0.78”).

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Predictably, perhaps, girls were consistently assigned dramatically lower scores: “en la
raza de color el varón da siempre una puntuación mayor que la hembra, puntuación que
aumenta con la edad, alcanzando el máximo a partir de los once años” (50) (“in the colored
race, male subjects always score higher than female ones, a score that increases with age,
reaching its maximum from the age of eleven”). In the narrative analysis accompanying
the test results, the doctors provided the presumed ethnicity of those tested but did so both
inaccurately and clumsily, fusing ethnic and broader place of origin or regional categoriza-
tions: Bubi, Gabon, Kamerún, Annobón, Combe, Corisco, Pámue. They incorporated data
on tests performed to Fernandinos (a social rather than an ethnic group) “de los tenidos
como ‘intelectuales de la raza de color’ ” (57) (“among those regarded as ‘intellectuals of
the colored race’ ”) and deemed that their scores were no higher than those of other groups,
despite enjoying distinct social and economic privileges. Beato and Villarino further con-
cluded: “no hemos dejado de estudiar algún mulato de ambos sexos, sin que lográsemos
resultados mejores que en los de raza de color puros, pese a que alguno convivía con el
padre (de raza blanca)” (60) (“we have also studied some mulattoes of both sexes, without
having achieved better results than in the case of pure colored people, despite the fact that
some lived with their father (who was white)”).
Their twenty-part tests, each composed of multiple questions and exercises, were admin-
istered over the course of two consecutive full days, primarily to students but also to a few
teachers and healthcare workers, whose jobs were dependent on the colonial administra-
tion. Questions were either clearly subjective or culturally determined: “¿Cuál es la más
bonita?” (49) (“Which one is the most beautiful?”), displaying “unas láminas en las cuales
hay pintadas unas caras de mujer de distinta belleza” (49) (“some single sheets on which
are painted the faces of women of differing beauty”). They also included visual perception
tests (“diferencia de rayas desiguales;” “difference of uneven stripes”); questions related
to the linguistic conceptual universe of the student (“Decir las palabras que se ocurran en
3 minutos;” “Say the words that come to mind in 3 minutes”); and open-ended questions
(“¿qué harías si vas a la escuela?” “what would you do if you go to school?”).
The tests – while carried out entirely in Spanish – were utterly dependent on listening
comprehension, reading, and writing ability. Furthermore, the vocabulary terms children
were given as prompt for their writing assignments were unlikely to spark students’ engage-
ment and were culturally or age-inappropriate: “periódico” (“newspaper”), “portaplumas”
(“penholder”), “tintero” (“inkwell”), “carpeta” (“folder), “cepillo de ropa” (“clothes
brush”), “reloj despertador” (“alarm clock”), or sensation adjectives such as “aterciope-
lado” (“velvety”). The presumed correct answer to each exercise had been predetermined
beforehand by the testing doctors, further limiting the horizon of possibility on the part of
the tested subject. Yet Beato and Villarino never seemed to question their own ability and
suitability for the task, pointing instead to the students’ “desconocimiento de nuestro idi-
oma” (“ignorance of our language”), while ironically being ignorant of even the name of
the mother-tongue their subjects might have spoken in this plurilingual context, having to
resort to their assistants for translation.
The charts with the test results listed all the schools where tests had been administered,
the number of students formally registered in each of them, and the number of students
who completed the full two-day test. The level of absenteeism speaks for itself: 20 out of
86, 33 out of 144, and 27 out of 130 are the numbers of students who returned to school on
the second day. In some of the mission schools the proportion of absenteeism was slightly
lower: at the Escuela de Religiosos de Santa Isabel, of 250 students registered, they were

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Figures 25.2 and 25.3 Beato and Villarino. Capacidad mental del negro (105, 107).

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Figures 25.2 and 25.3 (Continued)

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able to perform 101 tests to children ages nine to twelve. The absenteeism was higher in
girls’ schools: At the Escuela Oficial de Niñas de Santa Isabel, with 105 registered, only 15
showed up for the test; at the Escuela Oficial de Niñas de San Carlos, with 57 registered,
only 5 (all of them “Europeas”) attended; at the Escuela Oficial de Niñas de Rebola, with
103 registered, only 19 took the test.
Beato and Villarino close their book Capacidad mental del negro with a final chapter
on representative types of writing, reproducing seven writing samples of test assignments.
These samples include at the top of the page the name, last name, ethnicity, school or town,
and age of the student and have been graded by the book’s authors, in ascending order of
presumed quality, as type I to VII. Yet the responses crafted on the page by each student can
be read in a way quite different to the examiners’ intention: as testimony to the randomness
and poor conceptualization of the tests themselves. The students have been attentive; their
penmanship is stylish and neat; the grading appears to be unreliable, even arbitrary. My
reproduction of these writing exercises here, despite their identifiable markers, is intended
as a testimony of these students’ resilience in the face of coercive regimes of knowledge
marked by acute power and gender asymmetries.

Psycho-Technical Tests as New Biopolitical Colonial Tool

In the summer of 1949, the IDEA established a “comisión de psicotecnia” (“psychotechnics
commission”) and subsequently funded a new scientific expedition to the Spanish Territo-
ries of the Gulf of Guinea with experts in this field. The Instituto Nacional de Psicotecnia
(National Institute of Psychotechnics) had been recently created in Spain as a biopolitical
tool of the Francoist state. It was now ready to test its potential for colonial purposes. In
charge of the commission was Ricardo Ibarrola, head of the National Institute, tasked with
conducting research in the “continental” region of the Spanish Guinea, which the Claretian
missionaries had mapped shortly before their arrival, in 1942 (Figure 25.4).
Ibarrola carried out a program of psychotechnical tests among Fang communities in and
around the cities of Niefang and Evinayong, located at the center of this map. The subjects
of his testing were school children and local members of the Colonial Guard. Teachers and
other local colonial authorities acted as liaisons. He spent July and August 1949 in the
area and managed to conduct 339 full tests, each consisting of an eight-part examination,
among children ages eight to fifteen. He also conducted 100 tests among adults. However,
he dismissively excluded girls from his project: “Las pruebas han sido realizadas exclusiva-
mente en varones, pues entre la población escolar predominan éstos extraordinariamente
sobre las niñas y además la posibilidad de comprensión con ellos es mucho más fácil” (10)
(“The tests have been carried out exclusively on males, since among the school popula-
tion boys predominate extraordinarily over girls and, furthermore, the possibility of under-
standing is much greater with them”).
Ibarrola presented his results in a public lecture, “Aportación al estudio del nivel mental
de los indígenas de Guinea” (“Contribution to the study of the mental level of the indige-
nous people of Guinea”), at the IDEA Institute in Madrid in February 1950; it subsequently
appeared in published format in an issue of Archivos del Instituto de Estudios Africanos in
1951. While the analysis of his results is permeated with preconceived notions and nega-
tive comparisons with Spanish children, he is positively impressed, and almost puzzled,
by the outcome of the visual tests: “agudeza visual normal. . . . En el territorio de Guinea
es excepcional encontrar algún indígena que no vea perfectamente” (11) (“normal visual

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Figure 25.4 Map of Continental Spanish Guinea, Misioneros Hijos del Inmaculado Corazón de
María.

acuity. . . . In the Guinean territory it is exceptional to find an indigenous person who does
not see perfectly”). His conclusions are, however, replete with internal contradictions: he
asserts that these children’ critical judgment and imagination is much lower than that of
white Europeans but praises their skills in the design and crafting of complex artifacts, and
the ease with which they build sophisticated instruments:

la extraordinaria habilidad manual que manifiestan estos niños y que conservan los
adultos . . . se manifiesta de un modo evidente en la construcción de sus juguetes
que llevan a cabo ellos mismos. En la figura 10 aparece una ballesta, flechas y carcaj
construidos de médula y dotados de un funcionamiento perfecto. . . . En la figura 11
se ha fotografiado una pequeña bicicleta . . . dotada de todos los detalles y piezas que
integran una bicicleta de construcción mecánica; ésta fue construida por un niño de
doce años que invirtió en ello una sola tarde. (28)
(the extraordinary manual ability that these children show and that adults
retain . . . is clearly manifested in the construction of the toys that they build them-
selves. Figure 10 shows a crossbow, arrows, and quiver built of pith, all perfectly
functioning. In figure 11 a small bicycle has been photographed . . . equipped with all
the details and parts that comprise a mechanically-produce bicycle; this one was built
by a twelve-year-old boy who invested a single afternoon on it.)

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Figure 25.5 R. Ibarrola, “Aportación al estudio del nivel mental de los indígenas de Guinea” (27).

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Ibarrola saw as his mission laying the groundwork for a reform of the colonial edu-
cational system. The sector of the population he tested were allegedly proven to be “mal
dotados para la elaboración del pensamiento abstracto y las operaciones mentales de orden
lógico y mostrando en cambio buenas aptitudes de inteligencia práctica y habilidad man-
ual” (28) (“poorly gifted in the articulation of abstract thought and mental operations of
a logical order and showing instead good aptitudes for practical intelligence and manual
dexterity”). The colonial educational system, in his view, should therefore be redesigned,
offering the basic rudiments of education while focusing on training in essential trades.
Racial determinism was to be applied to the division of labor: “la formación en nuestra
Colonia de grupos de obreros bien cualificados . . . sería de gran utilidad y rendimiento en
la misma ya que el elemento blanco que allí acude no suele poseer preparación y aptitud en
oficios manuales” (29) (“the training in our Colony of groups of well-qualified workers . . .
would be of great use and value since the white element that goes there does not usually
have preparation and aptitude in manual trades”). As Andreas Stucki observes, Ibarrola
presumed that an “extraordinary ability for handicraft” was innate in all Africans “whose
talents were simply awaiting to be exploited” (141); his culturally biased psychotechnical
tests were “another indication of the permeable boundaries between cultural and scien-
tific racism. . . . In a time when a skilled workforce was needed in the colonies, Ibarrola’s
‘results’ came close to being self-fulfilling prophecies” (141).
Ibarrola’s studies asserted exactly what the measurement tools and defining criteria
were intended to prove, reinforcing preconceived notions of racial inferiority and gender
bias. His follow-up essay, “Problemas educativos en las colonias, consecuentes a las difer-
encias raciales” (“Educational problems in the colonies, derived from racial differences”),
published by the IDEA in 1956, relied on the same dichotomies of colonial racism. More
than a decade after Beato and Villarino’s experimentation, the experts hired by the IDEA
still failed to grasp the fallacy – both conceptually and in terms of linguistic factors,
familiarity, and behavioral conditioners – of equating intelligence with the response to an
instruction.

Final Remarks
The studies by Vicente Beato, Ramón Villarino, and Ricardo Ibarrola formed only a small
part of the expansive corpus of Francoist racial scientific production. Similar publications
were issued well into the 1960s, under the auspices of the same state-funded institutions
that promoted these treatises. As Bandrés and Llavona remarked, numerous IDEA publi-
cations continued to reinforce the arguments advanced by Beato and Villarino in Capaci-
dad mental del negro. Further psychometric studies published by the IDEA include Jesús
de la Serna Burgaleta’s El niño guineano. Estudio antropométrico y psicotécnico del niño
negro (The Guinean Child: An Anthropometric and Psychotechnics Study of the Negro
Child; 1956), which analyzed data from 424 school children. Although he was critical
towards discourses based on the supposed inferiority of the black “race,” he argued that
any IQ difference could be remedied with the proper pedagogy. His somewhat more pro-
gressive or humanistic approach served, however, to reinforce the presumed effectiveness of
education as a useful colonizing tool. Heriberto Ramón Álvarez, like Burgaleta, a teacher
and administrator in the colonial educational system, had also questioned the validity of
the tests on conceptual, linguistic, and environmental grounds. He advocated for a peda-
gogical redirection of the colonial school system, taking into account local aptitudes and

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professionalization in Historia de la acción cultural en la Guinea española, con notas sobre

la enseñanza en el África negra (History of Cultural Action in Spanish Guinea, with Notes
on Teaching in Black Africa) from 1948. Challenges to these tests also emerged from within
medical circles: the missionary doctor Ave María Vila Coro, who served at the dispensary
of the Catholic mission of Nkue-Fulán from 1944 to 1953, engaged with the polemic of
the children’s intelligence tests that had been carried out, especially among the Fang, in her
doctoral dissertation (1952). She was critical of both the methodology and the conclusions
of those treaties and resisted, from outside the official apparatus of the colonial health or
educational systems, the IDEA experts’ prescriptions, pointing instead to the detrimental
health conditions that arrived to the region with colonization.7
The publications emanating from the IDEA promoted biological racism and imposed
racial, gender, and class stereotypes in relation to Africa while also revealing the experts’
limitations in scientific training, methodology, and up-to-date research standards. Sup-
ported by state resources, the IDEA commissioned and disseminated a large corpus of
scholarship aimed at legitimizing the Spanish colonial project in Africa, scholarship which
in turn informed colonial state policy. Francoist imperial ideologies, nurtured within these
circles, codified differences between Spaniards and Africans in racial and evolutionary
terms. This corpus of scholarship fell squarely within the parameters of historical determin-
ism and was considered obsolete in other imperialist countries but passed unquestioned in
Franco’s Spain. This is particularly true of the studies on anthropometry, physical anthro-
pology, human biology, and phenotyping. As Richard Cleminson contends, the promotion
of technical and professional education to enhance productivity was a common strategy in
both Iberian dictatorships, domestically and abroad in the African colonies.
The scientific treaties themselves are opaque regarding local resistance, power, and
agency. As Florence Bernault articulates it, “In the colony, imaginaries and the underneath
of domination often crystallized in swift moments that left no tangible traces, or only faint
ones” (19). The point is to imagine, with this limited written evidence, the distress at the
constant scrutiny, its immediacy, its repetitiveness, and its duration, among children and
adults alike. The mode of parsing this scientific repertoire of the IDEA also suggests the
importance of envisioning new ways of shaping the school experience in the formerly colo-
nized territories. This is a process that several contemporary artists and writers from these
territories have already initiated, a case in point being the film director Pedro Mba in his
opera prima Orígenes y descendencia (2017) (Origins and Descendants). It is – in Mba’s
view – no longer useful, or even effective, to revisit this archive of colonial school interven-
tions without tethering it to the present, enabling new generations of children to reassem-
ble their own past, and to articulate it in their own terms. For his part, Donato Ndongo
Bidyogo proposes in his novel Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra (1987) (Shadows of Your
Black Memory) an emancipatory history, narrated from the perspective of a child under the
colonial school system in the city of Niefang in the 1950s (the city and school that Ricardo
Ibarrola’s tests assailed in that period). Finally, Juan Riochi Siafá’s multivocal memory
project La historia de Guinea Ecuatorial a través de sus protagonistas (2020) (The History
of Equatorial Guinea through Its Protagonists) presents one among several recent testimo-
nial narratives attempting to give prominence to childhood experiences in a colonial and
postcolonial setting, including the revisiting of the colonial school system. In stark contrast
with the tests conducted by the IDEA experts across the colonial maps outlined previously,
these contemporary projects put into question the politics of testing, charting, categoriz-
ing, comparing, colonial control of bodies and minds, assessments of labor potential, labor

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enforcement, and plunder, envisioning them as futile exercises of domination, exploring

instead the possibilities of redrafting a new history.

Notes
* Acknowledgements: This chapter is deeply indebted to the work on this subject by Rosa Medina
Doménech and Cécile S. Stehrenberger. I wish to also acknowledge the guidance provided by my
sister, María José Sampedro Vizcaya, whose academic expertise in neuropsychology helped me to
elucidate the genealogy of the discipline in relation to some of the texts analysed here.
1 For a brief sample of scholarly work in this field on other African colonial contexts, see Megan
Vaughan (1991), Francisco Javier Martínez Antonio (2012), Nancy Rose Hunt (2016), and Flor-
ence Bernault (2019).
2 For further inquiry on the role of colonial public health in these territories, see Medina Doménech
(2009), and Sampedro Vizcaya (2016 and 2018).
3 For studies on the role of colonial public health as propaganda during the Franco regime, see
Medina Doménech and Menéndez Navarro (2005); Martínez Antonio (2009), and Tabernero et al
(2017).
4 Established in 1925, the General Direction of Morocco and Colonies was run by Díaz de Villegas
from 1944 to 1968; in 1956 it was renamed as Dirección General de Plazas y Provincias Africanas
(General Direction of African Overseas Provinces).
5 The Spanish Protectorate of Morocco ended in 1958, the Spanish Territories on the Gulf of Guinea
became independent in 1968, and Spanish Sahara in 1975.
6 Originally published in 1944 by the General Direction of Morocco and Colonies, the book was
reprinted by the IDEA in 1953.
7 For the role of Vila Coro as a Spanish female doctor in Río Muni, see Sampedro Vizcaya (2024).

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Álvarez García, Heriberto Ramón. Historia de la acción cultural en la Guinea española, con notas
sobre la enseñanza en el África negra. CSIC/IDEA, 1948.
Bandrés, Javier, and Rafael Llavona. “Psicología y colonialismo en España (I): la inteligencia del negro
guineano.” Psychologia Latina, vol. 1, no. 2, 2010a, pp.144–53. https://psicologia.ucm.es/data/
cont/docs/29-2013-04-25-art11.pdf
Bandrés, Javier, and Rafael Llavona. “Psicología y colonialismo en España (II): en busca del cociente
intelectual del negro.” Psychologia Latina, vol. 1, no. 2, 2010b, pp. 154–62. https://psicologia.
ucm.es/data/cont/docs/29-2013-04-25-art12.pdf
Beato González, Vicente. Contribución al estudio del desarrollo somático-morfológico del niño en
Fernando Poo y causas que influyen en su anómala evolución. Urgente necesidad de un servicio de
puericultura. Diana artes gráficas, 1942.
Beato González, Vicente, and Ramón Villarino Ulloa. Capacidad mental del negro. Los métodos
de Binet-Bobertag y de Yerkes, para determinar la edad y coeficiente mental, aplicados al negro.
CSIC/IDEA, 1953.
Bernault, Florence. Colonial Transactions: Imaginaries, Bodies, and Histories in Gabon. Duke
UP, 2019.
Calvo Calvo, Luis. “África y la antropología española: la aportación del Instituto de Estudios Africa-
nos.” Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, vol. 52, no. 2, 1997, pp. 169–86. https://
dra.revistas.csic.es/index.php/dra/article/view/363
Cleminson, Richard. “Iberian Eugenics? Cross-Overs and Contrasts Between Spanish and Portuguese
Eugenics, 1930–1950.” Dynamis, vol. 37, no.1, 2017, pp. 89–110. https://scielo.isciii.es/scielo.
php?script=sci_abstract&pid=S0211-95362017000100005
Gozalbes Cravioto, Enrique. “El africanismo del primer franquismo: la Revista África (1942-1956).”
Miscelánea de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos, vol. 64, 2015, pp. 149–68. https://digibug.ugr.es/
handle/10481/34232
Fanon, Frantz. “Medicine and Colonialism.” The Cultural Crisis of Modern Medicine, edited by John
Ehrenreich. Monthly Review P, 1978, pp. 229–51.

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Hunt, Nancy Rose. A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo. Duke
UP, 2016.
Ibarrola, Ricardo. “Aportación al estudio del nivel mental de los indígenas de Guinea.” Archivos del
Instituto de Estudios Africanos, vol. 5, no. 18, 1951, pp. 7–29.
Ibarrola, Ricardo. “Problemas educativos en las colonias, consecuentes a las diferencias raciales.”
Archivos del Instituto de Estudios Africanos, vol. 9, no. 18, 1956, pp. 7–29.
López Sánchez, José María, and Alba Lérida Jiménez. “CSIC Scientists and Scholars in Africa: Visual,
Colonial and Scientific Action.” Culture & History, vol. 12, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1–17.
Martínez Antonio, Francisco Javier. “La medicina y la sanidad en el Protectorado Español en Marrue-
cos. Apuntes iconográficos.” Awraq, vol. 5, no. 6, 2012, pp. 135–56. http://www.awraq.es/indice/
resumen-palabras-clave.aspx?a=81
Martínez Antonio, Francisco Javier. “Imperio enfermizo: la singular mirada mórbida del primer fran-
quismo en los documentales médicos sobre Marruecos y Guinea.” Medicina e Historia, no. 4,
Cuarta época, 2009, pp. 1–16.
Mba, Pedro, director. Orígenes y descendencia. 2017.
Medina Doménech, Rosa, and Alfredo Menéndez Navarro. “Cinematic Representations of Medical
Technologies in the Spanish Official Newsreel, 1943–1970.” Public Understanding of Science, vol.
14, 2005, pp. 393–408. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16402492/
Medina Doménech, Rosa. “Scientific Technologies of National Identity as Colonial Legacies:
Extracting the Spanish Nation from Equatorial Guinea.” Social Studies of Science, vol. 39, 2009,
pp. 81–112. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19569426/
Ndongo Bidyogo, Donato. Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra. Fundamentos, 1987.
Riochi Siafá, Juan, ed. La historia de Guinea Ecuatorial a través de sus protagonistas. Diwan May-
rit, 2020.
Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita. “Gender, Colonialism and the Archive: A Spanish Female Doctor among
a Fang Community in 1940s Río Muni.” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 36, no. 4 (Winter),
2024, pp. 130–149.
Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita. “Health, Raciality and Modernity in Colonial Equatorial Guinea.” Post/
Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic, edited by Jerome C. Branche. Rout-
ledge, 2018, pp. 51–74.
Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita. “La economía política de la sanidad colonial en Guinea Ecuatorial.”
Éndoxa, Series Filosóficas, vol. 37, 2016, pp. 279–98. https://revistas.uned.es/index.php/endoxa/
article/view/16614
Serna Burgaleta, Jesús. El niño guineano. Estudio antropométrico y psicotécnico del niño negro.
CSIC/IDEA, 1956.
Stehrenberger, Cécile S. “Saberes para dominar y gobernar. El Instituto de Estudios Africanos.” Guinea
(des)conocida. Lo que sabemos, ignoramos e inventamos sobre el pasado y el presente de Guinea
Ecuatorial, edited by Juan Aranzadi and Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida. UNED, 2020, pp. 679–702.
Stucki, Andreas. Violence and Gender in Africa’s Iberian Colonies. Feminizing the Portuguese and
Spanish Empires, 1950s-1970s. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Tabernero, Carlos, et al. “Colonial Scientific Medical Documentary Films and the Legitimation of
an Ideal State in Post-War Spain.” História, Ciências, Saude – Manguinhos, vol. 24, no. 2, 2017,
pp. 349–69.
Vaughan, Megan. Curing Their Ills. Colonial Power and African Illness. Stanford UP, 1991.
Vila Coro, Avemaría. “Natalidad, mortalidad, morbilidad y desarrollo del niño pamue en la Guinea
Continental Española.” Doctoral Dissertation. Universidad de Madrid, 1952. https://eprints.ucm.
es/id/eprint/53623/

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 26
BOATS, BODIES, AND BORDERS
Migration, Dispossession, and Patera
Literature in Spain

N. Michelle Murray

Peninsular critic Yeon-Soo Kim writes that the bodies of shipwrecked migrants first arrived
in Spain on November 2, 1989, having perished during the arduous journey from Africa
to Europe (206). The migrants had braved the seas in pateras – small fishing boats unfit
for transcontinental travel. These precarious patera voyages shed light upon the enormous
risk migrants assume in search of a better life within Europe. News outlets were essential
to sharing these stories. As Kim points out, “In the midst of an insensitive and compas-
sionless political reaction to the problem of ‘patera’-related deaths, the role of the press in
Spain has been vital in the dissemination of information regarding the scope of the calamity
immigrants face” (207). Photographs of dead migrants frequently accompany news reports,
serving as visual materials documenting the horrific realities some African migrants expe-
rience in the Mediterranean. Even as they transmit the drastic measures taken by some
migrants while in pursuit of a European dream, these images also form part of a corpus of
materials focused on Black suffering, thus creating a bleak portrait of African existence.
Shipwrecked migrants in pateras conjure up Hannah Arendt’s chilling conceptualization
of the European interwar refugees who were both stateless and “rightless”; she argues that
these humans were eventually considered “scum” and thus disposable (Decline 267). For
Alberto Canales, within rigid nationalist formulations, migrants immersed in risk can sym-
bolize an apocalyptic invasion of near-dead beings; they undergo what he terms a “zombi-
ficación . . . al ser cosificados en objetos de consumo, y de su (re)conversión en amenaza
para la sociedad y la soberanía del Estado” (“zombification . . . upon being objectified into
items of consumption, and then re-designed as a threat to society and state sovereignty”;
13).1 Cultural productions must engage with the harsh representational violence integral to
portraying pateras, navigating the difficult terrain of acknowledging the dehumanization
intrinsic to the patera as a mode of transport without eroding the humanity of African
protagonists.
It is my contention that the symbolic significance of the patera is rooted in its repre-
sentation of dispossession. While dispossession usually refers to the loss of property, I use
the term here to describe far more profound, personal losses brought about by clandestine
migration to an area hostile to undocumented foreign workers. The loss of the former
homeland is the first dispossession that migrants endure. Next, migrants face the loss of

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-30 
 Boats, Bodies, and Borders

rights, the loss of safety, and, to a certain extent, the loss of personal autonomy insofar as
they lose the right to define themselves once they enter the destination. The patera symbol-
izes these deprivations and risks, specifically, the clandestine travel of those who lack what
the state deems appropriate documentation, the lack of safe passage in a seafaring vessel,
and the loss of life – the ultimate sacrifice some migrants make in an effort to improve their
conditions.
This chapter explores what I term patera literature through three understudied novels:
Cristina Cerezales Laforet’s Ulises y Yacir (Ulises and Yacir; 2016), Miguel Angel Díaz
Palarea’s La patera verde (The Green Patera; 2003), and Fernando Lalana’s El paso del
estrecho (The Strait Passage; 2005). While I provide an overview of more widely cited
literary works featuring pateras, in focusing on these lesser-known texts, I aim to expand
knowledge about patera literature and the ways the entire corpus conveys the dynamics of
dispossession outlined previously. I also reference Mario Gastañaga’s Náufragos: Pateras
en el estrecho (Shipwrecked: Pateras in the Strait; 2001), which serves as an explicit coun-
terpoint as this text differs from the others in the study insofar as it assumes a more hostile,
nationalist approach to migration. While Pateras en el estrecho does not share in the mes-
saging and style of the other works studied in this chapter, the book is nevertheless useful
in enabling me to craft a multifold analysis of representations of migration, pateras, and
dispossession in recent Spanish literature.
Pateras appear in twenty-first–century texts to highlight Spain’s unique Mediterranean
position – which it shares with other states situated at the southern maritime borders of
the Schengen area, namely Greece and Italy. While the first pateras arrived in the late
1980s, in the early 2000s, patera-related deaths continued to assail Spain and its cultural
landscape. Under the leadership of prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (in office
from 2004–2011), the government debated and then enacted a regularization law (Royal
Decree 2393/04) that legalized approximately 600,000–800,000 migrants living in Spain
without citizenship or resident protections. At the same time as these debates about immi-
gration proliferated, various authors examined these topics through literary works, fre-
quently invoking the symbol of the patera to depict the most dangerous aspects of African
migration to Spain.
Patera literature effectively draws attention to the migration crisis in the Mediterranean
for a European audience and frequently aims to urge European nationals to take a political
stance with regard to the issue of migration. The Mediterranean boats have taken center
stage in plays like La playa (The Beach; 2004), Friday (2011), and Cifras (Figures; 2012).
Pateras also appear in poetry, such as the innovative graphic poem Como si nunca hubieran
sido (As Though They Never Were; 2018), which denounces collective desensitization to
the Mediterranean boat crisis. Testimonial works by African writers Mamadou Día (2010)
and Rachid Nini (2002) both assert that the patera symbolizes the profound difficulties
migrants confront in Europe. For their part, Spanish authors Nieves García (2002) and
Benito Gerardo Muñoz Lorente (2003) use images of shipwrecked migrants in their nar-
ratives in an indexical fashion to unite word and image in powerful texts that convey the
horror of death that often awaits migrants who attempt to traverse the Mediterranean in
these precarious vessels. Gendered depictions of women traveling in pateras and mothers
losing their children occur in the short story “Fátima de los naufragios” [“Fátima of the
Shipwrecks”] (1998) and in the novels Los trenes de marzo (11-M) (The March Trains
[3/11]; 2008) and Las voces del estrecho (Voices from the Strait; 2016). These narratives
use both the vulnerability that society ascribes to women and the sacrifices associated with

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motherhood to convey the struggles confronted by migrants from the Global South as they
venture north.
Ulises y Yacir, La patera verde, and El paso del estrecho all focus on humanizing migrants
who journey to Spain and experience tremendous losses in the patera. These dispossessions
are inextricably linked to the patera as a representational mechanism that evokes dispos-
session. Much like the stories noted previously about women – especially mothers – the
three narratives use migrant children as protagonists to stir compassion in the reader. The
assailed or dead body linked to the patera gestures toward more than personal losses for
the child-protagonists who arrive in Spain and must carry on after surviving trauma. As
in other narratives that express trauma, ambiguities, and silences transmit to the reader an
experience that s/he may never fully comprehend.2
The tensions of representation in patera literature resonate with Lauren Berlant’s theo-
rizing of “cruel optimism,” which she defines as something one wants that actually opposes
one’s own ability to thrive (Cruel 1). Berlant notes that an array of relations manifest cruel
optimism, including ideologies of upward mobility and the desire for the political itself
(Cruel 4), two phenomena apparent in the novels under study, which represent African
children attempting to better their life through migration. In each story, the traffickers
piloting pateras eject all the passengers from the boat while attempting to evade police
detection near the Spanish coast. The child-protagonists witness suffering and death at
sea, narrowly escaping this fate themselves. In Ulises y Yacir, Ulises travels from Madrid
to Zahara de los Atunes (near Cádiz) to visit his terminally ill caregiver Dorotea, a former
nanny. She introduces Ulises to Yacir, whose babysitter and sister died in a patera; Yacir’s
losses extend beyond the initial voyage as the boy’s father dies of an illness shortly after they
arrive in Spain. The friendship he forms with the younger and shier Ulises enables Yacir to
mourn and overcome these tremendous losses. Indeed, Dorotea insists to Ulises that Yacir
“te necesita. . . . Él no lo sabe, pero yo sí” (“He needs you. . . . He does not know it, but
I do”; Cerezales Laforet 20). Dorotea aims to redirect Yacir’s depression into a friendship
with Ulises, a middle schooler in the midst of finding himself, hoping the young Moroccan
might regain his happiness in the process. With these sentiments, Dorotea also suggests
Ulises’s savior status: She relies on his abilities to save another rather than Yacir’s fortitude
to overcome his circumstances as a grieving child migrant. Indeed, the story largely assumes
Ulises’s perspective and his own epic path of self-discovery through his friendship Yacir.
In El paso del estrecho, the trafficker who casts Mustafá, the main immigrant char-
acter, into the sea is explicitly denominated a negrero. This term is also used for early
modern traders involved in chattel slavery, thus connecting twenty-first–century pateras to
the slave-trading boats of the Black Atlantic.3 Although his grandfather dies in the ocean,
Mustafá is saved by El Chirlas, a young smuggler out on his boat that same night. In an
unexpected turn of events, we learn that El Chirlas is actually a sixteen-year-old girl named
Violeta who has been posing as a male to make life as a petty criminal more bearable. The
uncle who raised her and controlled their smuggling ring has died, leaving her alone, much
like Mustafá. Unsurprisingly, the two begin an intimate relationship during an extraordi-
nary trip to Zaragoza, where they travel in pursuit of secret Moorish book from the Middle
Ages. In El paso del estrehco, intimate attachments serve to mitigate the sting of death and
melancholia. For instance, when Mustafá laments that he has no papers and is, thus, no
one in Spain, El Chirlas corrects him, insisting “Sí eres alguien, eres mi amigo” (“You are
somebody, you are my friend”; Lalana 40). As in Ulises y Yacir, migrant subjectivity and
legitimacy remain connected to having special significance for a Spanish character. While

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Mustafá experiences loss, Violeta finds herself: she will abandon her masculine disguise,
and she will begin to embody gendered norms of womanhood and form part of a national
family because of her experience with a grieving migrant.
La patera verde diverges from the other two examples. In asserting the autonomy and
strength of the migrant characters, the book emphasizes their perseverance rather than
the positive intentions of a European. What’s more, La patera verde crafts a revolutionary
genealogy wherein the migrant-protagonists form part of a global movement to further
progressive ideals that the novel links to the Spanish Civil War. La patera verde narrates
the intense journey of a Moroccan teenager named Chafik and El Ezza, an Algerian girl
aged approximately 9–14. While local authorities apprehend all the other migrants in their
patera, Chafik and El Ezza are able to hide and eventually reach Gran Canaria. The two are
taken in by a kind, elderly farmer named Juanito, who shares with them his own personal
history of exile in Argentina and Venezuela during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and
the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975). While every single text alludes to Spain’s troubled
medieval history with the Maghreb – an issue I will address later – La patera verde differs
by also invoking Spain’s twentieth-century history of the Civil War and Republican exile
to suggest that progressive citizens and African migrants are united in an ongoing strug-
gle against fascism, ultra-nationalism, and xenophobia. The shared losses of vanquished
Republicans like Juanito and clandestine migrants in the twenty-first century creates a gen-
erative affinity that transcends borders. As those who have experienced migration, violence,
exploitation, and even death, the characters in La patera verde all endure a harrowing
dispossession that began with the loss of the national home.
The loss of life in the patera is a traumatic form of dispossession. In Ulises y Yacir, Yacir
loses his caregivers in the patera. Yacir’s dispossession extends to a mystical level: He has
the ability to abandon the known world and travel to dream-worlds on another metaphysi-
cal plane, losing himself and this world in the process. Yacir confesses to his friend,

Oía voces extrañas dentro de mi, y veía cosas que no veían los demas. Empecé a
comentarlo con mi madre, pero ella se asustaba y no quería hablar de eso. Así que lo
guardé para mí hasta que conocí a Yamal. . . . Él aprendió en Akorán en el desierto,
y ahora me está guiando a mí. (Cerezales Laforet 145–146)
I heard strange voice inside of me, and I saw things others did not see. I began to
tell my mother, but she got scared and did not want to talk about it. So, I kept it to
myself until I met Yamal. . . . He learned in the desert in Akorán, and now he is guid-
ing me.

Here, Yacir explains that his patera companion, Yamal, who is coincidentally Dorotea’s
dear friend, helped him to understand his mystical experiences. Even Yacir’s special mys-
tical gifts remain beholden to Dorotea since she has introduced him to the person who
taught him to use this power. Thus, even in this supernatural instance, a white, European
savior figure must unlock the full potential of a migrant character. Later, Yacir admits that
he can enter Ulises’s dreams (Cerezales Laforet 167). Yet this ability is also dubious, as it
ultimately operates to give Ulises a person who completely understands him and can even
access him during his unconscious states. Ulises who once felt alone and abandoned now
has an extraordinary friend provided by his beloved caregiver, Dorotea.
In El paso del estrecho, the child-protagonists Violeta and Mustafá are both dispossessed
in the traditional sense, losing their homes, yet they also risk losing their lives because

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of organized criminals and the officials who protect these criminals. Having witnessed it
themselves, Mustafá and Violeta know that Solanas routinely ejects migrants from his
boat, leaving many to drown. Solanas does not want Mustafá and Violeta to inform the
authorities of his criminal, murderous activity and relentlessly pursues the young couple
who could expose him. Tellingly, while the child-protagonists’ loss of their homes and risk
of losing their lives relates to their immersion in a dangerous underworld, it is El Chirlas/
Violeta’s work in this sector that places them in danger, rather than Mustafá’s, thus shift-
ing literary conventions that often associate migrants with criminality.4 Mustafá becomes
collateral damage merely for migrating to Spain with his grandfather. Lieutenant Eleuterio
Mohedano, the civil guard handling the case is consistently surprised by Solanas’s ability
to locate the teens with ease. He eventually learns that corruption within his own home
is to blame. He admits, “Era mi suegro quien estaba detrás de la red de tráfico de inmi-
grantes a la que pertenecía Solanas. En cierto modo . . . él fue el responsable de todo” (“It
was my father-in-law who was behind Solanas’s immigrant trafficking network. In a way,
he was responsible for everything”; Lalana 210). The father-in-law spied on Lieutenant
Mohedano to aid Solanas in his plot to murder the children. With this literary maneuver, El
paso del estrecho demonstrates that corruption is insidious and far-reaching, particularly
when it comes to the immigration question, existing in the very home of the civil guard
lieutenant – indeed, at the heart of the law. These corrupt characters reflect global dynam-
ics wherein Europeans profit handsomely from migrants’ journeys and troubles, while the
foreigners suffer and even die attempting access Spain.
El Ezza from La patera verde experiences the most violent dispossession of all the chil-
dren in these narratives. The hearing to regularize her visa status goes awfully awry when a
person claiming to be her aunt appears in court and states that she will assume custody of
the child. El Ezza insists she does not know the woman, but the court sides with the stran-
ger anyway as she is also Algerian and has skilled and influential lawyers. Here, the reader
sees both the ways Spaniards exploit the legal system and how migrant criminals exploit
those who arrive from their shared nation of origin. Juanito is so distraught over the girl’s
kidnapping that he lashes out, leading officials to find him in contempt of court and enact
a restraining order to keep him away from El Ezza, supposedly for her own protection.
A crime syndicate gains full control over the child and forces her to work in a cocktail bar
(Díaz Palarea 129). What begins as grueling child exploitation antithetical to Western labor
laws evolves into forced prostitution. This separation order is the first example in which
the reader sees that Juanito is not a savior, rather, he is one who has embarked on a similar
journey as the Maghrebian children and continues to suffer because of rigid nationalist
ideologies reminiscent of fascism. Indeed, Juanito has lost El Ezza in a dynamic of dispos-
session that now implicates him in the same patera voyage wherein El Ezza and Chafik’s
fellow Maghrebian travelers lost their lives and their freedoms.
El Ezza’s rape occurs at the hands of Próspero Fariña Couto, who uses the aliases El
Jefe and Boss and is “un pez gordo de la política y las finanzas, con más dinero que agua
con eso de las inmobiliarias y los negocios de tierras para hoteles” (“a bigwig in politics
and in finance, with money to burn, from his real estate and land deals for hotels”; Díaz
Palarea 26–27). This characterization references the overdevelopment of Spain’s coastal
areas and the links between real estate and criminality, especially during the early 2000s
housing and economic crises. Indeed, not only have Boss and his associates seized Juanito’s
migrant ward, they also want to seize his lands to profit from them. Having referenced the
Spanish Civil War and Juanito’s exile, the novel continues exploring dangerous real estate

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development occurring during the democracy. Such projects displace and ruin local popu-
lations, in this instance, Juanito, who corrupt officials attempt to dispossess of his rustic
homestead. El Ezza’s dispossession thus remains entangled with that of Juanito, who, as
a dissident was once persecuted for his ideology, and now he is targeted for his property.
The ages of the protagonists are also pivotal to their dispossession. In Who Sings the
Nation-State, Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak examine migration, belong-
ing, and politics. They contest Arendt’s theorizing of the political as a public realm that
contrasts with a dark, private realm where enslaved people, children, and disenfranchised
foreigners tend to be exploited as they labor in the reproduction of material life (Arendt
Human 64; Butler and Spivak 14). Butler argues that “politics, rather, presupposes and
excludes the domain of disenfranchisement, unpaid labor, and the barely legible or illegible
human” (Butler and Spivak 15). The child-protagonists in question make these tensions
apparent in their struggle to survive in Spain. The adults controlling their world do not care
for them, and they explicitly seek their ruin. Such is the case of the traffickers like Solanas
in El paso del estrecho; crime bosses and powerful elites in La patera verde; and even par-
ents like Ulises’s mother, who attempts to limit her son’s stay in Cádiz and thus unwittingly
undermines his budding friendship in Ulises y Yacir.
Butler points out that being “dispossessed” does not lead to being outside of the politi-
cal realm (Butler and Spivak 5); hence, migrants ostensibly deprived of rights in one place
still find themselves beholden to the legal, political, and social constructions of the receiv-
ing nation. The stateless are still bound to state power in its most violent and atrocious
configurations; and the patera is the vehicle through which that power becomes clear in the
narratives in question. When ejected from the patera, the characters experience a primary
and crucial dispossession, with the migrant children losing their loved ones and nearly los-
ing their lives. This singular event brings about even more dispossessions upon reaching
Spanish soil.
In Who Sings the Nation State? Spivak asserts, “Arendt theorized statelessness but could
not theorize the desire for citizenship” (Butler and Spivak 74). While Arendt charts inter-
war states’ responses to the stateless, she never discusses how the stateless can exact agency,
even if it is through Berlant’s cruel optimism. The child-protagonists all want to belong, and
their non-belonging is a clear byproduct of their age and citizenship status. Their desire for
citizenship, to be political and social agents, is intertwined with the dispossession integral
to clandestine migration and the protagonists’ youthful hope.
The novels both allude to cruel optimism and stir compassion in the reader. Berlant is
useful at this juncture for her theorizing of compassion as intrinsically distant; she notes,
“compassion is a term denoting privilege: the sufferer is over there” (“Compassion” 4).
Marjorie Garber emphasizes this point, stating that

From the fourteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth, the word (deriv-
ing from Latin com, together, and pati, to suffer) was used to describe both suffer-
ing together with one another, or “fellow feeling,” and an emotion felt on behalf of
another who suffers. In the second sense, compassion was felt not between equals but
from a distance – in effect, from high to low.
(20)

This distance is palpable in patera literature, particularly in a scene in Ulises y Yacir when
Dorotea asks Yacir’s (Moroccan) friend Yamal to explain to her their shared ability to

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travel to transcend the earthly realm. Yamal responds, “Es una cuestión que no se puede
explicar, hay que vivirla, y solo se puede realmente compartir con alguien que también lo
ha vivido. Al principio, además, es algo que asusta” (“It’s a matter that one cannot explain,
you must live it, and it can only really be shared with one who has experienced it. Besides,
at first, it is scary”; Cerezales Laforet 54–55). With this powerful quote, Yamal signals a
key difference and a separation between the Moroccans and the Spaniards rooted in their
mystical abilities. This difference brings the migrants into a realm that is sacred and super-
natural, and thus, impossible for the world at large in a maneuver that suggests the incom-
mensurability of Maghrebian subjects and the Spanish cultural landscape, a falsehood that
mystifies the centuries of contact in the Mediterranean space. Furthermore, this difference
surmises patera literature in general and the novels under study more specifically. The adult
readers are generationally distanced from the child-protagonists, and as the intended read-
ers are Spanish nationals, they perceive migrants through geographical and social distances
ostensibly elided in the very act of migration. The reader will never fully grasp the terrify-
ing realities borne out of the patera. Just as the desires for citizenship and for sociopolitical
agency remain unfulfilled for the protagonists, the reader similarly has only received partial
and fragmented knowledge about the horrors of the patera journey.
Violence is the principal mechanism through which the texts convey the vulnerability
and risk of clandestine migration via patera. In addition to the brutal ejection from the
boat, in Ulises y Yacir, Yacir’s debilitating travels to other realms replace the violence evi-
dent in the other novels. Once Ulises begins to take part in these escapades, they improve.
Yacir claims, “Las otras veces me agotaba porque acababa siempre con experiencias raras.
Me alegro de que hayas venido conmigo, si llego a estar solo no habría podido sujetarme
en el tiempo” (“The other times, it exhausted me because I always ended up having weird
experiences. I am happy you came with me, had I gone alone, I would not have been able
to get a hold of myself in time”; Cerezales Laforet 239). Here, friendship with Ulises lessens
the debilitating self-dispossession intrinsic to mystical travels to alternate planes and, once
again, the young Spaniard serves as a savior figure for the Maghrebian migrant.
In El paso del estrecho, Mustafá and Violeta are assaulted together, again obliterat-
ing the national distinctions that separate them and showing their shared vulnerability.
Once Violeta reveals she is a girl, a detail she hid for her protection, it raises the specter
of gender-based violence. In another instance, skinheads transmit the threat of racial vio-
lence. For part of Violeta’s journey to Zaragoza, she relies on the help of another migrant
friend, Ahliú. When Solanas chases Ahliú and Violeta, Ahliú sees a group of skinheads that
he uses as a distraction. Despite placing himself in mortal danger, he saves Violeta from
Solanas by creating chaos. As Ahliú points out, “Ha estado bien lo de los ‘rapados,’ ¿eh?
¡Quién te iba a decir . . . ! ¡Ja! ¡Un grupo de nazis te ha salvado la vida! ¡Ja, ja!” (“The
skinheads bit was great, eh? Who would ever guess . . . Ha! A group of Nazis saved your
life. Ha, ha!”; Lalana 148). In this astonishingly lighthearted scene of neo-Nazi intimida-
tion, Violeta again shares in the vulnerability of a migrant, who insinuates that despite her
whiteness, white supremacists nevertheless threaten her life. With this framing, the novel
problematically suggests that the violence of the skinheads is innocuous in comparison to
the greater threat of the crime boss Solanas. Through these passages, the novel suggests
that xenophobic and/or racist street violence, terrible as it is, pales in comparison to struc-
tural problems, that is, governmental collusion with organized crime networks created to
capitalize upon the dispossession of the global poor. The spectacular nature of El paso del

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estrecho also becomes clear here, wherein everyday violence of white supremacists – which
is not uncommon for many migrants – seems like less of a problem than enraged gangsters’
machine guns.
In La patera verde, El Ezza and Juanito also endure violence. The ages of the victims are
a key element to emphasize the atrociousness of their attacks. In La patera verde El Ezza is
identified as being between 9 and 14 years of age; for his part, Juanito is at least 80, although
we cannot be entirely sure of his age either. With these ambiguities, the novel again fails
to satisfy readers who want to apprehend the protagonists’ struggles. The reader’s literary
dispossession connects somewhat to the protagonists’ sense of loss and lack. Referring to
narratives about the Holocaust, Dana Amir describes “the struggle to extract meaning from
a lack of meaning” (96). Amir refers to the impossibility of adequately capturing or under-
standing traumatic events that reflect a collapse of signifiers. Patera literature must similarly
transmit lack to readers, in an attempt to convey the unfathomable losses that clandestine
migrants endure in the Mediterranean boats.
When Juanito learns that El Ezza’s kidnappers are forcing the child to work in a bar,
he vows to regain custody. The aged farmer fails; and Boss’s cronies beat him savagely at
the bar where El Ezza works. He links this defeat to the one he lived during the Civil War,
stating “Rememoró su precipitado viaje hasta América y se dijo en voz alta . . . cuando
militaba en la CNT y los falangistas . . . aquella aciaga noche del verano de 1936 fueron
en mi captura” (“He remembered his hurried trip to America and said to himself aloud . . .
back when I was active with the communists and the fascists . . . on that dark night in the
summer of 1936 tried to capture me”; Díaz Palarea 126–127). The pain Juanito feels when
he is attacked for defending El Ezza resurrects his own personal and national losses as a
republican fighter during the Spanish Civil War forced into exile in South America. Juan-
ito’s beating, moreover, further demonstrates the extent to which he is not the savior in the
story. El Ezza herself will ameliorate her situation and orchestrate the conditions by which
this transnational family may persist.
El Ezza avenges herself in remarkable fashion. She castrates and murders her oppressor,
sending an anonymous letter and the genitals to the town’s mayor, in an ashtray shaped
like a green patera. El Ezza knows the mayor and his councilors at City Hall are complicit
with Boss. Using the green patera accessory, a representation of the very vehicle that once
operated to bring about her dispossession, the girl assumes agency in ending her abuse/her
abuser and making her retribution known to those who empowered him. She even contests
her own criminalization, signaling the authorities as the true criminals in this ordeal. Recall-
ing the row he caused during El Ezza’s legalized kidnapping, the government officials blame
Juanito for Boss’s murder. When he is arrested, Juanito receives another savage beating,
this time by officers attempting to elicit a confession. The elderly man remains detained by
the authorities until El Ezza liberates him with her declaration. As in El paso del estrecho,
El Ezza and Juanito’s attackers are criminals and corrupt authorities who come together
to pose a threat to society – here, a diverse entity composed of both citizens and migrants.
Without absolving locals from their part in everyday racism – as the readers hear their racist
sentiments – La patera verde is rich in explicitly shedding light upon the structural mecha-
nisms that oppress and dispossess clandestine migrants who access Europe via patera.
Through the violent scenes examined previously, pain enters into the framework of the
dispossession I have been tracing as an essential component of patera literature. From the
viewpoint of the characters, their pain as victims avows the power of their oppressors

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(Scarry 37). And from the viewpoint of the reader, the pain of these migrants is impossible
to access and share. Scarry writes,

So, for the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that “hav-
ing pain” may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to
“have certainty,” while for the other person it is so elusive that “hearing about
pain” may exist as the primary model of what it is “to have doubt.” Thus pain
comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that
which cannot be confirmed. Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its
unsharability.
(4)

The impossible transmission of the experience of pain is a salient feature in the text that
also distances the reader from the traumatized protagonists for whom s/he may feel com-
passion from a privileged position. Once more, the narrative discourse transmits dispos-
session by emphasizing the extent to which the viewer may never fully comprehend the
tragedies migrants endure. Juanito, a migrant himself, averts these distancing dynamics by
telling harrowing tales of his boat voyage and his life in South America as an exile during
the Franco era. These parallel journeys in La patera verde serve to create a unique, shared
genealogy of dispossession, migration, and suffering.
The migrants are also dispossessed in relation to history. As Martinican philosopher
Frantz Fanon points out, “legends, stories, history, and above all historicity” about Black
people precede him and affect how Europeans perceive him (84). In a similar fashion, past
encounters with the Maghreb lead to nationals misrecognizing today’s migrants. Conceived
of as Moors, as medieval North African invaders, cultural discourse frequently portrays
today’s Maghrebian migrants in relation to this past. As Daniela Flesler argues in The
Return of the Moor, in representations of migration in contemporary Spain, we find “new
images of the ‘Moor’ . . . influenced by past ones, as both historical and fictional ‘Moors’
coexist in the same symbolic paradigm in the Spanish cultural imaginary” (3–4). Such is the
case with patera literature, wherein present migrations frequently serve to gesture toward
Spain’s past encounters with the Maghreb.
In Ulises y Yacir, “maurophilia” or love of the Muslim Other, is an Orientalist literary
mechanism that generates distance for the reader, who perceives the Maghreb in an epic,
mystifying fashion.5 This technique emerges through the supernatural mysticism of Yacir’s
impossible voyages. El paso del estrecho is similarly mystifying and spectacular, with a more
overt connection to the past. Mustafá informs Violeta that he has come to Spain to travel
to Saraqusta (Zaragoza) to find the Libro de las Profecías de Saraqusta (Book of Prophecy
of Zaragoza), a medieval book his ancestors hid in the Alfajería Palace, an eleventh-century
Taifal site. In El paso del estrecho, Moors literally return, per Flesler’s formulation, and
access their former holdings. The book ends with an epilogue in which university professors
cannot adequately explain the book’s origins or meaning. Shrouding the text in mystery
understandable only to Maghrebian migrants like Mustafá further stereotypes Moors, and
their supposed present-day heirs, who are all mystical beings whose primary role in Spanish
culture is one that is supernatural, or put another way, impossible.
La patera verde wholly disrupts narrative conventions around Spain’s medieval, Moor-
ish past in using the medieval term godos (goths) and framing the godos as the threat rather

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than the moros. During an argument about pateras in a bar, a server echoes Juanito senti-
ments to a patron:

No te das cuenta que el problema no está en el las pateras que vienen por el mar. . . .
Los peligrosos son los que hablan español que vienen a quedarse . . . godos, que ya
nos han colonizado de nuevo; controlan todo y algunos alcaldes les hacen la pelota
para que les voten. (69)
Don’t you realize the pateras that come by sea are not the problem. . . . The
dangerous ones are those who speak Spanish who come to stay . . . goths, who are
colonizing us again; they control everything, and some mayors kiss their ass so they
vote for them.

This statement is an explicit allusion to the mayor who receives his former business partner’s
remains. Moreover, these assertions denounce that enterprising Spaniards who overdevelop
the land are the ones that invade the Canary Islands, rather than Maghrebian migrants
wrongfully figured as medieval Moors attempting to conquer the Iberian Peninsula. As
Flesler shows, the racial slur moro is ubiquitous and used to describe North Africans in
Spain; the discursive shift to godo in La patera verde shatters the reader’s expectations
to create richer connections among Juanito, El Ezza, and Chafik. In fact, throughout the
novel, the corrupt officials and criminals are the only characters who use the derogatory
term “moro/a,” which Boss repeats as he rapes El Ezza (22–24). These distinctions evince
the Spanish nationals’ hostility toward the country’s new arrivals from the Maghreb and
strengthen Juanito’s alignment with the dispossessed foreigners he shelters.
Standing in sharp contrast to these three narratives is the novel Náufragos: Pateras en
el estrecho. The novel includes photographic images and maps to emphasize that it is doc-
umenting the reality of migration it portrays. The text begins praising the work of the
civil guard and marines who patrol the coasts and protect migrants at the Spanish border
(Gastañaga 16). The book denounces both immigrant aid organizations such as Algeci-
ras Acoge (Gastañaga 26) and migration, denominated “una avalancha” (an avalanche;
Gastañaga 26) or a maritime “invasión” (Gastañaga 26, 32) of “trabajadores ilegales”
(“illegal workers”; Gastañaga 27) carried out with pateras (26, 27). While the text alludes
to globalized capitalism in considering the migrants workers – albeit “illegal” ones – it nev-
ertheless prioritizes the dubious purity of the nation-state, while ignoring the extent to which
this entity has been historically diverse and avails itself of cheap, exploited, and largely for-
eign labor to persist. The book, however, explains collective repudiation of migrants in the
following way, “Estas actitudes sin ser propiamente racistas, pues no parten de la creencia
en una superioridad de unas razas sobre otras, manifiestan inseguridad ante el inmigrante y
por ello denotan cierto rechazo” (“These attitudes, without being exactly racist, since they
do not stem from a belief in the superiority of some races over others, manifest insecurity
in the face of the immigrant and thus, denote some rejection”; Gastañaga 27). Náufragos
even justifies xenophobic violence readily denounced in the other texts with the following
quote: “La invasión galopante de inmigrantes traería a ultranza el auge de estas ideologías
de tendencia racista, lo cual podría provocar una involución de los valores sociales deses-
tabilizando los sistemas democráticos” (“The rampant invasion of immigrants would bring
an extreme rise in racist ideologies, which could cause the implosion of social values, desta-
bilizing our democratic systems”; Gastañaga 41). In this work, it is the migrants who stoke

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extreme ideologies by abandoning their homelands and making nationals feel uncertain
about their position.
Náufragos teeters on uniting Spaniards and foreigners through the character of Gerardo,
who insists his journalistic work in the Middle East and military duties in the Gulf War
have transformed him into “un árabe más” (“yet another Arab”; 32). Unlike the other
texts, this configuration is irrefutably hierarchical, with Gerardo reporting on and, in his
military capacity, killing the local population rather than sharing in their experiences. The
dispossessed in Náufragos are undoubtedly Spaniards, who are supposedly losing socio-
political significance in a late capitalist, post-national context. Indeed, Náufragos implies
that unchecked migration abrogates what Ernest Gellner terms the nationalist principle
in allowing foreign bodies to invade the Spanish state, with dastardly effects that oper-
ate to destabilize and weaken Spanish society. Despite its objectionable and misguided
stance, Náufragos shares important characteristics with other patera literature. This cor-
pus of texts almost invariably focuses on dispossession, violence, and precariousness, and
even within the nationalist logic of Naúfragos, Spaniards are dispossessed, violence against
immigrants’ bodies becomes a logical consequence of migration, and precariousness alludes
to collective anxieties about a weakened nation-state.
Patera literature inheres in a necessary discussion of dispossession and of the state of the
nation-state. At the same time, patera literature must depict Africans trapped in the snares
of geopolitical maneuvers that threaten their livelihoods without succumbing to dehu-
manizing portrayals that would cast them as objects (Fanon); inscribe them into historical
returns (Flesler); or present them as scum (Arendt), zombies (Canales), or the dizzying
array of denigrating terms that appear in each novel. In these works, we see the faultiness
of the nation-state and the calculated nationalistic splitting that ought to divide popula-
tions remedied through proximity and/or shared dispossession and pain. In the narratives
under study, friendship and intimacy operate to unite migrants and nationals, even if these
representational paradigms contain some problems, as shown in my discussion of Ulises y
Yacir and El paso del estrecho.
La patera verde radically aligns migrants Chafik and El Ezza with Juanito in their shared
economic precariousness, risky boat journeys, and savage violence. While the other texts
insinuate affinities among their national and migrant child-protagonists, La patera verde
powerfully depicts these parallels. One poignant quote succinctly conveys the posture of
the novel: “Es sorprendente que un pueblo que ha emigrado se esté convirtiendo ahora en
fascista; hay que ser solidario con los recién llegados en busca de un mundo mejor” (“It’s
surprising that a people who have emigrated are now becoming fascist; we should be in
solidarity with the newcomers looking for a better life”; Díaz Palarea 71). This controver-
sial utterance immediately elicits vociferous debate, with detractors labeling the speaker a
“shitty progressive” (Díaz Palarea 71). Through this declaration, however, the book brings
into focus its radical unification of migrants and nationals in their shared experiences of
migration, reactionary nationalism, and globalized corruption. Taken together, the three
novels evince what Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou theorizes in Migrants and Militants.
Indeed, Badiou argues that migration sheds light upon the

confrontation between global modernity in the form of an arrogant and ultimately

criminal oligarchy on the one side and, on the other, the archaism of an understandable

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nationwide reaction, driven by that part of society whose little privileges, long in
place, are being threatened by the deployment of contemporary capitalism.
(16)

Badiou suggests that Europeans must expatriate themselves along with their migrant coun-
terparts, claiming “we must, like them, have no other political homeland than the one
demanded by our common work” (19). Much like Badiou’s proposal, the corpus of texts
I denominate patera literature use the boat as trope not only to depict the horrors of migra-
tion, but also to foreground dispossession as a central feature of migration. Dispossession
unfolds as a shared, transnational experience for critiquing globalized capitalism and its
attendant nationalist hierarchies and dehumanizing forces.

Notes
1 All translations are mine, unless noted otherwise.
2 See Amir, Caruth, Shwab.
3 For a detailed analysis of the term negrero, see Surwillo.
4 Tracing a trajectory of migrants in Spanish cultural production, Daniel Gier notes that in initial
representations of immigrants, “sus apariciones suelen ser fugaces y casi siempre conectadas al
mundo de la droga, la prostitución, el crimen, o el fracaso humano” (qtd. in Rivera Hernández
38). For more about the alleged association between migration and criminality, see Aramburu and
Coleman.
5 See Fuchs, Said.

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matic Testimonsy. Routledge, 2019.
Aramburu, Diana, and Jeffrey K. Coleman. “Special Focus Introduction. Set Up and Shut Out: Immi-
gration and Criminality in Contemporary Spanish Fiction.” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Lit-
erature, vol. 43, no. 2, 2019. doi:10.4148/2334-4415.2101.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 1958. U of Chicago P, 1998.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Schocken Books, 2004.
Badiou, Alain. Migrants and Militants. Translated by Joseph Litvak, Polity P, 2000.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011.
Berlant, Lauren. “Compassion (and Withholding).” Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an
Emotion, edited by Lauren Berlant, Routledge, 2014, pp. 1–14.
Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Spivak. Who Sings the Nation State? Seagull Books, 2007.
Canales, Alberto. “Pateras Z: La zombificación de la inmigración norteafricana en las Voces del Estre-
cho.” LL Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1–13.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Díaz Palarea, Miguel Ángel. La patera verde. Centro de la Cultura Popular Canaria, 2003.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam MarkMann. 1967. Pluto, 2008.
Flesler, Daniela. The Return of the Moor. Purdue UP, 2008.
Fuchs, Barbara. Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain. U of Penn
P, 2009.
Garber, Marjorie. “Compassion.” Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, edited by
Lauren Berlant, Routledge, 2014, pp. 15–29.
Gastañaga Ugarte, Mario. Náufragos: Pateras en el estrecho. Amarú Ediciones, 2001.
Kim, Yeon-Soo. The Family Album. Bucknell UP, 2005.
Laforet, Cerezales. Ulises y Yacir. Planeta, 2016.

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Rivera Hernández, Raúl Diego. “Ansiedades de frontera en dos novelas policiales españolas sobre la
inmigración.” Kamchatka, vol. 2, 2013, pp. 37–56.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978. Vintage Books, 1994.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. Oxford UP, 1985.
Shwab, Gabriele. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. Columbia
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ford UP, 2014.

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 27
RACIAL OTHERS IN SPAIN
The Articulation of Shifting Identities in the
Works of Amazigh/Berber-Catalan Writer Saïd
El Kadaoui Moussaoui

Cristián H. Ricci

Since 2004, Catalan presses have been publishing Moroccan-Amazigh/Riffian voices who
write in Catalan and Spanish and have lived in Catalonia since childhood.1 Amazigh/
Riffian-Moroccan authors such as Saïd El Kadaoui Moussaoui, Laila Karrouch, Jamila
al-Hassani, Karima Ziali, Safia El Aaddam, and bestseller Najat El Hachmi show the pro-
cesses by which literary writing may be interpreted as a form of migration in itself, as a
journey of the mind, as an itinerary of discovery. Their narratives embark on a journey,
constantly negotiating their native and adopted cultures while keeping a critical view of
the feeling of unhomeliness. Upon arriving in Catalonia between the ages of eight and ten,
these authors have integrated into employment, education, and Catalan society. Yet their
sense of unhomeliness is not solely inherited from their immigrant parents; it also arises
from cultural disparities, particularly in terms of religion. Equally significant is the impact
of how they are perceived by Catalans who do not share Maghrebian origins. Their trans-
gressive narratives disrupt power structures by creating literary sites that transcend national
boundaries, thus echoing Achille Mbembe’s and Sarah Nuttall’s ideas about Afropolitanism
and Léonora Miano’s concept of Afropean Soul (2008). Their identities vary according to
their class status, the gendered version of their testimony, and their place in the genera-
tional and immigration lines. Beyond the insightful readings, among others, of Carmen
Sanjuan-Pastor, Kathryn Everly, Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo, and Marta Segarra, as well as my
studies about Maghrebian immigrant writers in the Iberian Peninsula (particularly about
El Hachmi’s narrative), scholarship currently lacks a wider discussion of issues related to
Amazigh/Berber ethnicity, religion, nationhood, and diaspora in Saïd El Kadaoui’s works.
This chapter addresses these omissions by exploring his approaches, as a first-generation
Amazigh-Catalan writer, to selfhood concerning home (national and domestic) and his
ambiguous feelings of belonging, positing plausible reasons for his compulsive textual reli-
ance on these questions. I will focus on three novels: Límites y fronteras (Limits and Border-
lands; 2008), Cartes al meu fill. Un català de soca-rel, gairebé (Letters to my Son. A Catalan
Through and Through, Almost; 2011), and NO! in 2016.2 Límites y fronteras primarily
delves into the themes of exclusion and racism. Similarly, NO! focuses on self-exclusion
and communal confinement. Cartes skillfully strikes a balance between these two novels.

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-31
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

El Kadaoui lends the protagonist’s voice to his son, representing a significant population of
children born from mixed marriages between Moroccans and Catalans who grapple with
“social hypochondria” (NO! 195). Additionally, Cartes pays homage to The Buddha of
Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi’s iconic novel.
El Kadaoui solidifies the ongoing literary and ideological pilgrimage of Moroccan intel-
lectuals and translators to the Iberian Peninsula, a journey that commenced in the 1970s
and 1980s. El Kadaoui justifies his imperative to write Cartes with the statement, “Obrir
la ment i el cor per fer lloc als nens que . . . tenen cognoms d’altres indrets i que són tan
catalans com qualsevol alter” (16), which translates to “Opening hearts and minds to make
room for children who have surnames from other places and who are as Catalan as anyone
else.” In doing so, he reflects on the susceptibility of younger generations to extremism and
obscurantism, expressing concern about the radicalization of immigrant children. Expand-
ing on these themes, El Kadaoui delves into the construction of immigrant identities in his
essay Radical(es). He openly critiques societal tendencies to trivialize or disguise aspects
such as religion, family, roots, origins, inheritance, and the yearning for belonging to a
group. While recognizing the distinction between fiction based on personal experiences
(autofiction) and autobiography in realist literature, El Kadaoui’s characters bear notable
resemblances to the author and his role as a psychologist. Consequently, El Kadaoui’s
autobiographical work serves as a guide for brown-skinned, Muslim, and European youth,
offering insights into navigating the complexities of their multifaceted identities and fos-
tering an understanding of their interdependence with locals and other immigrant ethnic
groups.
El Kadaoui’s autobiographical approach in his novels is supported by confessional mon-
ologues in which various forms of masculinity and assertions of autonomy are explored
vis-à-vis social commitment. Hence, the three novels here analyzed are at odds with the
expectations and demands of a readership eager for Orientalist approaches, such as those
in Laila Karrouch’s novels De Nador a Vic (From Nador to Vic; 2004) and Que Al-là em
perdoni (May Allah Forgive Me; 2021), both sponsored by the Department of Culture of
the Generalitat de Catalunya to promote “multiculturalism.” On the contrary, particularly
in Límites y fronteras and NO!, El Kadaoui’s narrative is closer to typical Western nar-
ratives reflecting male crises ranging from adolescence to middle age à la Henry Miller.
It follows that the ongoing concerns of El Kadaoui’s male characters and the testimonial
nature of their thoughts and dialogues often go hand in hand with Hanif Kureishi’s macho
aphorism, “How do you like to write? With a soft pencil and a hard dick – not the other
way around” (Intimacy 62). At the time, the narrator of NO! identifies himself as “a slave
to my bank and my dick” (96). However, to be clear, the text describes, not prescribes; that
is, while it portrays a form of contemporary masculinity, it remains far from promoting
it. I note, therefore, that this approach is not completely out of keeping with the desire to
recover a world – alive in the memories of young adult immigrants – that fosters reflections
on belonging and identity struggles. Individuals are necessarily defined in relation to com-
munity, gender identity, ethnic and religious group. In this regard, their autobiographical
mythologies of empowerment are often mediated by a desire to rewrite the official history
told by those holding the cultural capital, such as parents and imams, on one side, and
Catalan/European institutions (school, peers, employment, music, and media celebrities),
on the other.
In delineating the identities of his characters, El Kadaoui elucidates his personal cultural
connections to Catalonia by utilizing its language as a means of integration. Additionally,

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he highlights the friendships he cultivated, aligning himself with an “imagined commu-

nity” of Moroccans or Europeans of Moroccan descent who reject the notion of a “solid
identity” (Cartes 29) and eschew “identity assertions” (NO! 197). Emphasizing the impor-
tance of appreciating their Amazigh language and history, El Kadaoui advocates for Riffian
immigrants to be receptive to other languages and alternative perspectives on the world (44,
61). He shares common worldviews within this paradigm with other Amazigh intellectuals
and writers, such as Dutch-Riffian Abdelkader Benali and Hatim Bouazza. In this context,
like other nationalists, El Kadaoui and his counterparts appeal to the primordial, essential,
and enduring qualities of group membership. However, they differ in their perspectives on
how Amazigh identity can coexist or clash with broader national identities, as outlined by
Katherine E. Hoffman and Susan G. Miller (5).
Marianne David and Javier Muñoz-Basols assert that narratives from the diaspora give
rise to “a multitude of sub-narratives, each one unstable and specific to place and moment,
each a distinct and idiosyncratic language system of pain and hardship with its own his-
tory and tradition, its own socioeconomic and political underpinnings” (xvi). Within El
Kadaoui’s narrative, the conflict doesn’t revolve so much around the migrant characters’
awareness of their diverse composition as it does around the challenge of comprehending
all the components of that composition. For El Kadaoui’s immigrant characters, express-
ing their true selves with certain individuals necessitates leaving some of their identitarian
traits shelved and, in some cases, even hidden. Conversely, these shelved aspects become
the only ones that can be shared with other individuals. Consequently, El Kadaoui affirms
that he writes to demystify others’ misconceptions about Imazighen: “He volgut aportar
el meu granet de sorra per fer més complexa la mirada d’aquells que t’envolten, netejar-la
d’alguns prejutgis innecessaris i evitar així alguns maldecaps” (“I wanted to add my two
cents worth to shed light on those around you, clean up some unnecessary prejudices, and
avoid misunderstandings”; Cartes 97). What he advocates instead is to transform the lit-
erary work into a forum of cosmopolitan claims by challenging one- or two-dimensional
representations of other selves, cultures, beliefs, and practices: “Somos también aquello que
no somos. El libro que llevo dentro quiere explorar este no lugar que también conforma
un lugar. El espacio de las probabilidades imposibles” (NO! 40) (“We are also that which
we are not. The book that I carry inside wants to explore this nonplace that also takes up
a place. The space of impossible probabilities”). The intention is to leave behind hyphen-
ated designations and look at writers who, within or outside national borders, engage in
conversations that transcend tribal, national, ethnic, and cultural borders. Thus, the main
character of NO! elucidates his intention: “Matar a la familia, matar las lealtades de grupo
y hacerlo mediante la escritura: ese es mi anhelo” (42) (“Killing the family, killing group
loyalties, and doing it through writing, that is my desire”).
The remaining question is how Amazigh displacements are reflected in migration litera-
ture. The answer might be found in Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands: “[T]he past
is a country from which we have all emigrated” (12). This refers to an abstracted notion of
home, a desire for origins lost and for an ideal setting for nostalgia and memory, a place
where migrancy itself becomes a new location to be inhabited, a conduit to a new form of
self-writing and imagining (Merolla and Ponzanesi 3). The search for identity is carried
out in the unfamiliar intersections and interstices that displacement creates between self
and other in space, language, and time: “Through this process, however, displacement and
defamiliarized voices and visions are repositioned at the centre of narratives that assume
universal significance” (Merolla 51). The narrator’s intention is to free himself from the

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mandate of others and to explore new horizons: “Es en el decepcionar, en el sorprender,

en el transgredir y en el subvertir donde se halla la semilla de ese nuevo ser que anhela-
mos. . . . Déjenme ser aquello que no soy, traten de abrirme paso, déjenme ser un hombre
sin más mochilas que las mías y me conocerán mejor” (NO! 120) (“It is in disappoint-
ing, surprising, transgressing and subverting that the seed of that new being for whom
we yearn is found. Let me be that which I am not, try to let me go forward, let me be a man
with no other backpacks than my own, and you will know me better”). El Kadaoui then
makes it clear that nationhood is always evolving and that self-fashioning relies on finding
alternatives to the ostensible certainty of home that, in Sri Lankan novelist Ambalavaner
Sivanandan’s words, consists of “looking not to roots in some place but to resources within
ourselves for our understanding of our place in society” (16).
Thus, El Kadaoui subverts and consolidates the discursive construct “migrant” by using
creative/productive stereotypes that interact with and subvert the social imaginary and
dominant discursive representations suggested by Europeans about North Africans (par-
ticularly Moroccans/Imazighen) and vice versa. In several passages of NO!, the narrator
plays with the stereotype about the size of the African male penis or a purported (but
ultimately false) European cosmopolitanism. An example of Riffian authors’ tendency to
incorporate stereotypes into their fiction can be observed at a farcical Moroccan wedding
in Madrid when the narrator spoils the fun of a Spaniard enraptured by the spectacle:
“Él prefería disfrutar de una boda de otra cultura y yo, en cuanto pude, le recriminé que
utilizara tan a menudo la expresión ‘vuestra cultura.’ Aquello era nuestra incultura” (NO!
130) (“He preferred to enjoy a wedding from another culture and I, as soon as I could,
reproached him for using the expression ‘your culture’ so often. That was our ignorance”).
In this context, Límites y fronteras emerges as a neo-existential novel, embarking on
a circular journey between Morocco and Catalonia. The central character experiences
a psychotic breakdown, giving rise to a dichotomy between a Moroccan-sick and a
European-normal identity. The melancholic protagonist perceives the world as a theatrical
production directed by the capriciousness of fate, leading to a diabolical game. Svetlana
Boym contends that nostalgia is a distortion fostering a loss of meaning in those afflicted
by this state of mind, blurring the lines between past and present and real and imagi-
nary events (4). The existential nature of the novel allows the text to mirror the narrator’s
psyche – markedly incoherent, fragmented, and discontinuous. The narrative skips from
one subject to another, altering moods, often leaving ideas unspoken, questions unan-
swered, and problems unresolved. The impact of the novel lies in its insistence, compelling
readers to delve into the disturbed mind of the narrator, sharing the intimacy of his afflic-
tion. Throughout the narrative, the protagonist, Ismaïl, undergoes a transformation from
viewing himself as “the prince of the Berbers” (13) to confronting the reality of being an
Amazigh who identifies strongly with Catalan culture.
Hence, it is crucial to underscore that his sentiments toward Morocco are characterized
by affection and disdain. He consistently experiences a sense of not fully belonging due to
his conviction that immigrants inevitably depart from their homeland and leave a part of
themselves behind. This is reflected in his references to Arabs as encroachers on Amazigh
identity and Castilians as intruders on Catalan identity (14–18).3 Ismaïl is grappling with
his dual personality, viewing his madness as a liminal realm where the mind and soul
exist separately from the body. Confined to a psychiatric clinic, he finds solace in reading,
prompting him to analyze and write about the colonization processes imposed by Europe-
ans on the Arab-Muslim world. In this exploration, Ismaïl understands that “crossing the

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border” is not a mere transition but a metamorphosis, initiating an inner struggle that chal-
lenges his resolve. The border becomes a dynamic space, in constant flux between adjacent
worlds, where languages and cultures don’t flamboyantly mix but naturally permeate each
other, giving rise to a hybrid reality. El Kadaoui articulates the idea in Cartes: “Trencar
les cadenes, desafiar l’ordre establert i repensar el món, sense detestar-lo ni voler ocupar el
lloc d’aquest centre. Tot això m’ho ha donat la meva condició de marroquí crescut a Cata-
lunya” (106) (“Break the chains, challenge the established order, and rethink the world,
without detesting it or wanting to occupy its center. All of this has been given to me by my
condition as a Moroccan raised in Catalonia.”).
Ieme van der Poel opines that Moroccan-Amazigh writers who write in Dutch and Cata-
lan have settled in Europe and have no plans of ever returning to Morocco. However, “that
does not prevent them from revisiting the North African country where they have their
roots in their works of fiction. . . . Their works are indeed part of the literary history of the
European country they now consider their own, in the language of which they have chosen
to write” (222). Then, van der Poel, following Leslie Adelson’s study on German literature
of migration, argues that Riffian migrant literature is not a meeting of two cultures but an
evolution that is taking place within European culture itself and that affects readers’ views
on the relationship between past and present. Hence, “instead of trying to find ‘traces
of home’ in diasporic writing, critics must consider these texts as ‘imaginary sites’ where
cultural orientation is being radically rethought” (222). In the section “MI TÍO ESCRI-
TOR” (“MY UNCLE THE WRITER”) of NO!, the main character idealizes the figure of
Riffian-Tangerian writer Mohamed Chukri. To this character, Morocco is a wild landscape,
a rugged terrain full of weeds, and its people are equally wild and rough. Although Chukri
himself represents a kind of green sprout in an uncultivable and rocky terrain, the pro-
tagonist of NO!, struggling to visualize the sordid nature of Chukri’s narratives, feels that
Morocco can only be some “fiction” (NO! 30). In other words, the narrator implies that,
for him, Morocco is a hazy place, a locus under construction that he is still trying to deci-
pher through his fiction, after having lived so many years in Catalonia. El Kadaoui’s texts
thus yield at least two perspectives: One is an attempt to somehow improve the situation
of his fellow citizens through a type of writing that analyzes cultures from a liminal space,
while the other tries to turn that which causes uneasiness in daily life (religion, injustice,
violence, patriarchy) into a parodic escape valve. In the case of religion, for instance, El
Kadaoui (just like Najat El Hachmi) considers the imposition of hijab on women and the
new readings of the Qur’an imported from the Persian Gulf, for example, as acts of physi-
cal, social, and sexual abuse.
In NO!, the anonymous main character is not considered to be split between the two
cultures and does not even consider returning to Morocco permanently: “No tengo un
país al que regresar. Y, a la vez, tampoco pertenezco – y te diré más, no quiero pertenecer
del todo – a este” (172) (“I don’t have a country to go back to. And, at the same time,
I don’t belong either – and I’ll tell you more, neither do I want to belong completely – to
this one”). The protagonist is a literature professor, “a specialist in peripheral identities”
(17), and an admirer of Hanif Kureishi and Philip Roth. The novel is written in an episto-
lary style in which the protagonist narrates his daily life to an upper-class friend who has
decided to return to Casablanca to see his children grow up there in order to “ahorrarles
la hiriente experiencia del racismo” (30) (“spare them the hurtful experience of racism”).
El Kadaoui’s character portrays the contradictions and feelings of Maghrebian immigrants’
children with biting humor, anguish, and anger. Despite benefiting from the opportunities

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presented in Europe, the individuals of this second generation, much like other Catalans of
modest backgrounds and immigrants from various regions and countries, experienced disil-
lusionment with the identitarian rhetoric and cultural relativism of Catalan political and
cultural elites. They felt a lack of acceptance as true Catalans and encountered challenges
in accessing equal opportunities in employment, health, and education. The novel explores
the motivations behind the migratory journey, portraying it as both a parental directive and
a perceived chance for social advancement. Consequently, immigration becomes a means
for immigrants to distance themselves from their Moroccan roots. However, when faced
with rejection from Catalan society, the protagonist endeavors to rediscover his identity
within the Moroccan community and through clandestine romantic entanglements with
other North African migrants. Yet he realizes that associating with individuals with similar
“broken lives” (20) only intensifies his disillusionment.
Furthermore, in Límites y fronteras and NO!, El Kadaoui transforms established literary
conventions, including irony, Orientalism, and the ethnographic novel. Both novels give
rise to a cultural and multilingual phenomenon that reshapes the substance and structure
of contemporary European immigrant literature. Departing from conventional victimhood
or escape narratives, they shift their focus to mental health and sexuality beyond the con-
straints of religious norms and the rise of fundamentalist Islamic ideologies originating
from the Persian Gulf. Some of the concerns held by writers such as El Kadaoui, Najat El
Hachmi, and Hatim Bouazza are experimenting with language, creating literary communi-
ties of resistance, and freeing the imagination. Iain Chambers understands writing as not
necessarily involving a project intent on “penetrating the realm” to recite it but rather as
attempting to extend, disrupt, and rework it; it involves a certain distancing between our-
selves and the contexts that define our identity (14). In this context, the migrant’s position,
both here and there, provides a privileged position to reflect on both societies.
It is not in vain that the protagonist of NO! proposes, on several occasions, to write
two parallel stories, like a game of mirrors, in which the story of an immigrant family is
contrasted with that of the same family in Morocco. El Kadaoui thus tries to contrast the
simultaneous dimensions of exile that Edward Said addresses, but without the contrapuntal
axis that unites them. Chambers, like Abdelkébir Khatibi in “Maghreb Plural,” also under-
scores the partiality and partisanship of language: it speaks for someone and from a specific
place; it constructs a particular space, a habitat, a sense of belonging and of being at home
(24). El Kadaoui combines both impulses, crucial to forging a discourse adequate for the
multiple tactics required for a successful postcolonial praxis. For this reason, I consider El
Kadaoui’s literary project to be significant: It goes beyond the merely multiculturalist view
of the social situation to render a possible development of Afro-European identities that is
free from political considerations as well as critically engaged in feelings of unhomeliness
and exclusion. After all, this project consists of writing beyond the theoretical, academic
discourse of educated white scholars and looking instead at the people being written about.
Rethinking migration necessitates a fresh perspective on concepts such as belonging,
community, and civic recognition. This involves challenging the notion that migrants navi-
gate between two separate and coherent worlds and that they introduce or become part
of literary systems that are uniquely and strictly localized (Walkowitz 534). Hence, I am
interested in exploring new shapes of collective histories of migration in El Kadaoui’s nar-
ratives that can shed some light on Sneja Gunew’s argument that “minority writers . . . are
invariably confined to the issue of their ‘identity’ . . . even in a poststructuralist world of
decentred subjectivity. . . . Their ability to produce ‘textuality’ or to play textual games is

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rarely countenanced” (72–3, qtd. in Louwerse, “Nymphs” 9). Similarly, new concepts of
belonging, divided identity, resistant emotion, relationality, and even Catalanness can be
subversively drawn. Thus, in NO!, the protagonist becomes obsessed with the authenticity
of his message and the use of direct and stark language, showing the uninhibited hetero-
doxy with which the foreigner confronts the Other’s language.
El Kadaoui writes within classical European aesthetics but, on the other hand, he leaves
a record of the influence of Moroccan oral literature: “Narrar una historia donde el peso
recaiga en ella y el lenguaje esté a su servicio, sin que sea un protagonista más” (54) (“Nar-
rating a story in which the weight falls on her and the language is at her service, without her
being just another protagonist”). He later realizes “de lo indecentemente europeo de clase
media que soy, por una parte, y lo tribal que soy, por otra, intoxicado por un pensamiento
mágico e infantil” (165) (“how shockingly European middle-class I am on the one hand
and, on the other, how tribal I am, intoxicated by magical and childish thinking”).
Ismaïl, in Límites y fronteras, undertakes his first return to Morocco through the read-
ing of Fatema Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. With this text,
he discovers that “la palabra” (123) (“the word”) is the best instrument for freedom.
However, his world of traditionalism restricts that freedom, particularly that of women.
Therefore, the protagonist wonders where these Moroccan women are, whether at wed-
dings perpetuating traditionalism or fighting to make Morocco a progressive, evolving,
open country (Límites 123–126). Morocco thus becomes “el contenedor donde descarga
toda [su] mierda” (Límites 145) (“a container where he unloads all his [the narrator’s]
shit”). In NO!, the narrator calls traditionalisms “analfabetismo estético. . . . Un vacío que
es estéticamente más abyecto aquí en Europa que en los propios países musulmanes. . . .
[A]quellos que partieron en busca de un mejor futuro, hoy someten a sus tribus a las leyes
incomprensibles de las tradiciones; todo ello, tamizado con la exclusión y la reclusión en
los guetos europeos” (129–30) (“aesthetic illiteracy. A vacuum that is aesthetically more
abject here in Europe than in Muslim countries. Those who left in search of a better future
now submit their clans to the incomprehensible laws of tradition; all of it sifted through
the exclusion and confinement of European ghettos”). Fadia Suyoufie has pointed out Arab
intellectuals’ ambivalence toward rejecting tradition (the turath) or embracing it, even if
with the purpose of reworking it (219; qtd. in Civantos 27). Muhsin al-Musawi comments
that “Although strongly committed to social realism, Arab novelists have recently devel-
oped a new outlook that leans heavily on historical accounts and popular lore” (259).
El Kadaoui’s reconstruction of past turmoil and conflict (tradition and religion haunting
immigrants in the host country) is close to contemporary realities, thus provoking readers
to question that very past. Whereas cosmopolitan claims imply an ethical imperative, El
Kadaoui negotiates between artistic integrity and the pull of social conscience, between
poetic sensibility and critical reason. In this sense, al-Musawi concludes that, through inter-
textuality, enchassement and the reenactment of the past, contemporary novelists have
been able to question the complacent view of history as too sacred to be questioned (259;
qtd. in Civantos 27).
A close look at Islamic feminism is evident in NO!. At times, it descends into mockery
and irritability, particularly when aimed at women who advocate for their freedom by
inundating their speeches with discussions “sobre el feminismo del profeta y las lecturas
feministas del Corán” (NO! 23) (“about the prophet’s feminism and the feminist read-
ings of the Qur’an”). While Islamic feminists rant about the “literalistas intransigentes y
machistas” (NO 23) (“uncompromising and chauvinist literalists”), they point out the lack

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of spirituality of young Moroccans “embaucados” (“duped”) and “secuestrados” (“kid-

napped”) by the false sense of freedom in the West. The character rejects the Islamic femi-
nist discourse based on the readings of the Ulema Tariq Ramadan, “un concepto vacío,
una suerte de huida hacia delante” (23) (“an empty concept, a kind of headlong flight”),
and proposes instead a close reading of Algerian philosopher Mohammed Arkoun’s works
about modernity and the readjustment of the Shari’ah:4 “El dosier de la modernidad, como
tantos otros, está esperando que lo desempolvemos, dijo con socarronería Arkoun, pero
no está en la agenda de ninguno de los dirigentes musulmanes hacerlo. Sigamos, pues,
acusando al resto del mundo de nuestro fracaso” (NO! 63) (“ ‘The dossier of modernity,
like so many others, is waiting for us to dust it off,’ Arkoun said with sarcasm, ‘but it is not
on the agenda of any Muslim leaders to do so. Let’s continue, then, blaming the rest of the
world for our failure’ ”).
In sections “ASOCIACIÓN SOCIOCULTURAL” (20–27) (“SOCIOCULTURAL
ASSOCIATION”), “POLÍTICA” (112–114) (“POLITICS”) and “GENEALOGÍA DEL
REGRESO AL ORIGEN” (144–146) (“RETURN-TO-ORIGINS GENEOLOGY”), the
protagonist meticulously scrutinizes the views of Islamic feminists along with those of their
partners/spouses, finding them full of a false spirituality and tribal paternalism, all with
the approval of Catalan progressive parties and the Muslim Council of Catalonia, “un
nido de gente cerrada” (149) (“a nest of closed-minded people”). More specifically, the
author warns against the danger of falling prey to cultural relativism and questions Islamic
feminism, feminist decolonization, and the “dangerous friendships” between the relativist
left and Wahhabi/Salafi Islam.5 In the end, the “good intentions” of Catalan political par-
ties include using the influence of the community’s most outstanding members to promote
their electoral objectives. As a culmination of the associationist experience, he comes out
of the “espacio sucio, estéticamente abyecto, makzeniano” (NO 26) (“dirty, aesthetically
abject, Makzenian space”) feeling dejected by the idea of being Moroccan.6 Consequently,
El Kadaoui is acutely aware of the pitfalls any exotic/Moroccan-native/Catalan opposition
harbors; he exploits the potential offered by this binary position to its fullest through his
writing.
He also upsets Western readers by exaggerating preconceived notions about the East to
the point of paroxysm: sexual perversion, oppression of women, fake religious piety, super-
stitious silliness, and jihad hysteria. In this regard, the story of a Spanish “converso” told
by the narrator-protagonist in NO! is paradigmatic: the European converso is intrigued
upon learning the reason for the narrator’s agnosticism, having had “la dicha de haber
nacido musulmán” (87) (“the joy of being been born a Muslim”). While the converso is
disturbed by the narrator’s inability to grasp the benefits of Islam and the youth’s hatred
of the Qur’an, he moreover defends the use of women’s hijab; the narrator, on the other
hand, is disturbed by the impertinence of the Western layman, who dares judge him but
seems unable to distinguish spirituality from religious dogma: “La copia es con frecuencia
más categórica que el original. El converso no duda, cree saberlo todo” (89) (“The copy
is often more categorical than the original. The Converso does not hesitate, he thinks he
knows all”).
El Kadaoui, as a diasporic writer, lives with the obsession of existing nowhere, “un
extranjero en los dos países” (Límites 193) (“a foreigner in both countries”). He touches on
rebellion against religion and family tradition. Like Menippean satire writers, he employs
sharp irony to establish a distinct separation between the fictional world he constructs
and the actual realm immigrants inhabit. This satirical element primarily manifests in his

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narrative through the lens of social class. In the novel NO!, the social standing of immi-
grants significantly influences the portrayal of both main and secondary characters. The
first social class comprises individuals endowed with financial means, exemplified by the
narrator’s friend with whom he maintains regular correspondence. This character, allowed
to study in Europe, is the offspring of a Moroccan businessman and a member of the tradi-
tional Istiqlal party. The second class consists of the economically disadvantaged, engaged
in labor such as construction, mining, and fruit gathering, a group the narrator views as
decadent (NO! 56). The third group encompasses individuals like the narrator himself, who
migrated to Catalonia as children or were born there, navigating a challenging path that
ultimately leads either to university studies or jihad, “unos extremos que a veces se chocan
y otras se funden en un abrazo de oso” (NO! 57) (“certain extremes that at times collide
with each other and other times meld in a bear hug”).
Furthermore, El Kadaoui’s novels expose the clumsy coexistence of tradition (amulets,
fetishes, witchcraft, initiation rites) with embedded Western political approaches. Such
critical yet comic passages are absorbed in the text satirically, ridiculing not only the new
Moroccan politics (largely made up by technocrats in a context of regional tensions with
Algeria and the Sahrawi territory) but also its original Western forms, thus simultaneously
expressing the disillusionment of the postcolonial era and overcoming the “rhetoric of
blame” against the West (Said 19). In NO!, the protagonist travels to Marrakech with
a couple of friends who are amazed to see so much beauty and poverty coexist in that
city, “LA MAGIA ORIENTAL DE MARRAKECH” (68) (“MARRAKECH’S ORIENTAL
MAGIC”), “de aquel lado de la frontera, en el lugar más artificioso y turístico, quieren
hablar de la verdad, de la sensibilidad de la paradoja, de los contrastes con las propias ideas
y valores” (71) (“on that side of the border, in the most artificial and touristy place, they
want to talk about the truth, the sensitivity of the paradox, the contrasts with their own
ideas and values”).
For the protagonist, this false sentimentalism is the greatest of all deceptions. How-
ever, instead of confronting his friends, he plunges into the dichotomous paradise of magic
carpets, European homosexuals, and corrupt police officers until he is overcome by the
mixture of the atavistic and postmodern realities offered by daily life in Marrakech. It is
then that the narrator decides to write a book “de gente con una relación con la religión
meramente ritualista, sin la profundidad de la experiencia religiosa elaborada y culta” (69)
(“about people with merely a ritualistic relationship with religion, without the depth of an
elaborate and cultivated religious experience”). He also includes naive, light, and insub-
stantial European characters: “gente culta y compleja respecto a países como el nuestro”
(69) (“learned and complex people in comparison to countries like ours”), that “consume
miseria como consume porno” (70) (“consume dire poverty just as they consume porno”).
Ismaïl’s journey in Límites y fronteras reveals his attitude towards his homeland and,
through reading Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novels, the virtues of the westernmost country in the
Arab world. Thus, Ismaïl proposes a “renaissance” of Moroccan culture, believing that
progress is not exclusive to the Global North. His key word is democracy, a concept that
in Morocco does not reflect what is practiced; this encourages dependence on Europe,
denial of personal progress, and disrespect for the nation’s laws and institutions (Límites
191–194). In this regard, El Kadaoui and Najat El Hachmi share two major themes with
other African literatures: (1) the clash between modern lifestyle and tradition, (2) the need
to reconcile the past with the present, using literature as an agent of social transformation
and agreeing that, even if the idea of European modernity cannot be validated, neither can

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the “new” African democracies that are as deceitful as previous ones. This making and
unmaking of African reality through corruption, incompetence, unemployment, mercenar-
yism, bureaucracy, and violence brings forth the depiction of an “Afro-Western” political
parody in which there is a clear questioning of the authenticity of the Moroccan transition
process into a modern nation-state shaped after “democratic-civilized” Western models.
Aligned with the Lebanese-French author Amin Maalouf’s vision of promoting universal
values while resisting confinement to a singular identity (Límites 101, 117), El Kadaoui’s
messages, akin to those of El Hachmi, emphasize the necessity of challenging limiting uni-
formity and the dominance of ideological and cultural hegemony. This encompasses any-
thing that impedes the flourishing of diverse linguistic and intellectual expressions. Saïd El
Kadaoui, along with other Amazigh/Riffian-Moroccan diasporic authors in Europe, such
as Najat El Hachmi, Karima Ziali, Safia El Aaddam, Hatim Bouazza, Abdelkader Benali,
and Rachida Lamrabet, transcends the confines of conventional knowledge. Moreover, they
appropriate the elements that European societies utilize for identity formation and adeptly
reclaim and subvert their own languages and literatures – a remarkable achievement.

Notes
1 Amazigh is the correct term for “Berber,” the indigenous people of northern Morocco and Algeria,
whose main language is Tamazight, not Arabic. Imazighen is the plural of Amazigh. The Rif or Riff
is an Amazigh region in northern Morocco. Its capital, Nador, is 16 Km away from Spanish enclave
Melilla. As of today, there are over 200,000 Riffians in Catalonia.
2 El Kadaoui also published Selfis in 2019, a youth novel written in catañol (Catalan-Spanish), coau-
thored with Ricard Ruiz-Garzón; and Radical(es), an essay on identity in 2020.
3 Likewise, Najat El Hachmi is Jo també sóc catalana (I am Catalan Too; 2004) addresses the simi-
larities between the marginalization of the Imazighen and their language in Morocco and compares
it to the marginalization of the Catalan language in Spain during the Franco regime (27). However,
as Marta Segarra rightly points out, “it is more realistic to consider that Catalan is more often a
dominant language that marginalises the social integration of immigrants of all origins; it is not
only necessary to learn it, but also to speak it as well, because, as is well known, accent, or certain
accents also represent a discriminatory factor” (77).
4 Shariʿah is the Islamic legal code for religion and morality; it deals with many topics addressed by
secular law including family, politics, and economics. Shari‘ah varies among Muslim countries.
5 Najat El Hachmi’s narrative frequently explores the themes of cultural relativism and the rejection
of Islamic feminism. See Ricci, Cristián H. “Najat El Hachmi: Away from Patriarchy, Hijab and
Cultural Relativism.”
6 The Makhzen refers to the Moroccan central power and is usually in line with its authoritarian
character.

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 28
WOMEN IN THE STREETS
8M Feminist Protests in Spain

Eva Anduiza and Sabina Monza

On March 8, 2018, the first ever women’s strike took place in Spain. Compliance was a
success qualified as “historical” by trade union leaders, with some estimations pointing to
approximately 6 million workers participating in it. But even more extraordinary were the
massive feminist protests that took place that same day across the country. The convening
power of the organizers was impressive, with hundreds of thousands of people (mostly
women) marching all over the country. March 8, 2018, proved a huge achievement of
mass mobilization. The date represents not only a quantitative landmark but also a qualita-
tive leap forward in visualizing the struggle for women’s rights in Spain. Feminist claims
emerged with force into the public arena, transforming their demands, particularly around
issues related to gender violence, into a pressing political matter. At the same time, although
several other factors must be taken into account to understand the rise of the far right in
Spain, these feminist mobilizations triggered the well-known backlash effect that ultimately
contributed to the growth of the far-right party Vox, which on December 2018 gained seats
to the Andalusian regional parliament and in 2019 entered the national lower house, the
Congreso de los Diputados (Congress of Deputies). In this chapter we describe the context,
development, and implications of these protests.

The Background
Three elements must be highlighted to understand the massive women’s protests that took
place in Spain in 2018. First, Spain is a country with a very high level of political protest
compared to other European countries (Torcal et al. 332–333). Attending demonstrations
reached particularly high levels after the Great Recession (Portos 182). Feminist activists
built on years of mobilization experience which made the public ready to take the streets.
Second, these massive feminist mobilizations took place at a moment when the Spanish
party system had started a major transformation. Mostly as a consequence of political
discontent produced by the management of the economic crisis, new parties had appeared
a few years before, providing confirmatory evidence for Baldez’s idea that women are more
likely to mobilize in times of political realignment (254). Third, the trial for a gang rape
case that begun in the autumn of 2017 and the #MeToo movement acted as triggers that

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-32 
 Women in the Streets

highlighted the relevance of sexual violence against women in motivating this wave of
global feminist mobilization.

Taking the Streets

Spain, much like other Southern European countries such as France or Greece, is a nation
that traditionally has elevated levels of political protest. According to the European Social
Survey, slightly less than 10% of interviewed European citizens recall having been in a
demonstration in the past 12 months, a figure that has remained relatively stable since the
ESS began to be conducted in 2002. In Spain, however, this percentage is twice as high,
and can, on occasions, even reach 30%. The aftermath of the Great Recession was one of
those moments during which demonstrations peaked due to the confluence of the economic
recession, the harsh austerity measures imposed by the European Union, the emergence of
several major corruption scandals, and consequently, the diminishing trust in political lead-
ers and established parties.
On May 15, 2011, massive protests took place all over Spain, mobilizing 130,000 peo-
ple in 58 cities. The conveners were a grassroots citizens’ organization called Democracia
Real Ya! (Real Democracy Now!). The movement later became known as the Indigna-
dos (Outraged) and eventually extended to other countries (as exemplified by the Occupy
movement). Indeed, the15M was an exceptional mass demonstration in that no parties or
trade unions were behind its organization. Social platforms and online networks replaced
the traditional channels of mobilization, such as official calls by trade union and parties.
The new staging required no formal membership; participants were actively online, flexible,
and agile and used digital media channels with intensity, making these protests qualitatively
different to any previous ones and particularly attractive to younger citizens, more educated
and less politically involved (Anduiza et al. 10). This new form of mobilization and protest
organization through social media was one of the legacies of the 15M taken up by the 8M
movement (Galdón Corbella 9).
The relationship between the 15M and the feminist movement is nuanced and complex,
and it goes beyond what we can describe in this chapter (for an in-depth analysis, see, for
instance, Cruells and Ezquerra). Suffice it to say here that feminists were present, but in
spite of the progressive goals of the 15M, they struggled to make their messages heard and
they encountered considerable resistance. The emphasis on the 99% was not easily compat-
ible with demands by women and minorities (Flesher Fominaya 4). At the same time, 15M
was a space that facilitated the emergence of new feminist perspectives beyond traditional
feminist organizations that continued to mobilize intensely, for example, against the PP
government attempts to restrict reproductive rights around 2014.

Realignment
The initial impact of the Great Recession on the political system took the form of an elec-
toral punishment against the ruling party. In late 2011 President Rodriguez Zapatero from
the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Socialist Party) called for national elections
and the conservative Partido Popular (PP, Popular Party) won with an absolute majority.
But the crisis was not only economic; it was also political (Vidal 262). In the following
2015 general elections both major parties obtained their worst electoral results ever, add-
ing up to just over 50% of the votes. The process of intense political mobilization that the

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15M represents induced by dissatisfaction with austerity, inequality, politicians, and parties
ended up being an opportunity for a major process of realignment. This realignment was
based on elements of demand (as shown by record levels of political dissatisfaction among
the public) but also on a generating supply, in the form of a group of political entrepreneurs
ready to launch new political projects. This combination of demand and supply produced
the rise of the left-wing party Podemos (We Can) and its different regional partners, as well
as the growth of Ciudadanos (Citizens), a pro-Spanish center-right party, ending three dec-
ades of a nation-wide two-party system in which PSOE and PP took turns being in power.
Baldez’s argument that women mobilize because they are left out of the political realign-
ment process could certainly apply to Spain (254). While Podemos has tried to incorporate
some feminist demands and perspectives, it still struggles with an “ethos of hegemonic
masculinity” and with a set of informal gendered practices that hinder women’s participa-
tion (Kantola and Lombardo 12). The party subscribed initially only those women’s issues
that generated the greatest consensus among the broadest population (for example, gender
violence) while overlooking the most controversial topics (such as prostitution or surrogate
pregnancies). Neither Podemos nor Ciudadanos used the term “feminism” in their 2015
electoral programs.

La Manada: Trigger or Signal?

Within this context of political upheaval, a shocking case of sexual violence triggered an
intense reaction of moral outrage in the Spanish public. On July 7, 2016, a group of five men
who called themselves La Manada (The Wolf Pack), including a member of the military and
a civil guard, raped an 18-year-old woman during the traditional San Fermin celebration in
Pamplona. In addition, they recorded the crime and shared the videos on a social network.
Their trial took place in November 2017, just after the #MeToo movement – probably
the most far-reaching social media campaign against sexual harassment ever – shook the
world’s social networks, following a tweet posted by actress Alyssa Milano. The identity of
the victim of La Manada was disclosed during the trial, which generated social media reac-
tions of solidarity – including hashtags #YoSíTeCreo (I do believe you) and #Noestassola
(You are not alone) – as well as some spontaneous support rallies that prepared the way for
a massive 8M mobilization.
In April 2018, only a few weeks after the first massive feminist 8M marches, the Provin-
cial Court of Navarra convicted the five men of sexual abuse but did not accept the rape
(sexual aggression) charges. The culprits were freed on bail in June 2018, pending a revision
of the case by the Supreme Court. Numerous organizations, notable social and political
figures, and representatives of almost all the political parties expressed their disagreement
with the Provincial Court’s decision. Feminist groups called for new protests and a new
hashtag #Cuéntalo (Say it) appeared in social media for women to express their experiences
of sexual aggressions, gathering over 50,000 tweets in two weeks. In June 2019, the case
was finally reviewed by the Spanish Supreme Court of Justice and sentenced again. This
time, the verdict was rape. Between the time of the rape and that of the final Supreme Court
sentence, the two largest 8M feminist marches of 2018 and 2019 had taken place.
This case can clearly be interpreted as a trigger event that produced moral outrage, which
in turn can be a powerful motivation for the mobilization of protests, as it has happened
in other countries (Chaudhuri and Fitzgerald 625). The trial was for once seen as a case of
institutional betrayal (Smith and Freyd), making evident the unacceptable normalization of

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sexual violence and the limitations of a justice system biased against its victims. The shock-
ing facts of the case were twisted and minimized throughout the legal proceeding, and this
was ultimately considered unacceptable by society. In addition, the impact of the case on
social media certainly helped to make visible the feminist movement’s demands regarding
violence against women (Larrondo et al. 218)
Cases of rape are, unfortunately, far from extraordinary, and although the character-
istics of this case were very visible and certainly staggering, the moral outrage required a
breeding ground. Things had been changing in Spain before this case set social networks on
fire and generated spontaneous protests. Spain had moved swiftly from Franco’s dictator-
ship and its deeply ingrained traditional Catholic values toward becoming a country with
a public opinion that displays relatively low levels of gender-based stereotyping and seems
quite conscious of women’s issues (European Comission). This is not to say that Spaniards
are necessarily much more favorable to accepting change regarding the role of women in
society, as action and reaction keep opposing each other dynamically in relation to feminist
demands. It merely points to the fact that the recent feminist protests were not only trig-
gered by the moral outrage induced by this case of sexual violence and institutional betrayal
but that the moral outrage itself was an indicator that the Spanish society was ready to
produce the massive turnout seen in the 2018 and 2019 feminist protests.

The Protests

8M-2018: “If We Stop, the World Stops”

With deep roots in the ritual demonstrations for women’s rights held every year on March 8
since the 1970s, and more recent links to the 15M mobilizations and the protests against
the restriction of abortion rights attempted by the Popular Party in 2014, the feminist pro-
tests of March 8, 2018, stand as a historical landmark. Spain was following in the footsteps
of other successful international mobilizations, such as the Women’s March after Trump’s
inauguration, or the Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) massive marches against domestic vio-
lence in Argentina.
The organization began just after March 8, 2017, under the slogan “Towards the femi-
nist strike.” The Spanish feminist movement that, along with those of 50 other countries,
convened the International Women’s Strike in 2017, proposed a feminist strike and mas-
sive marches for March 8, 2018. The 8M Commission – founded in 1977 – functioned as
the national coordinator that held meetings on the 8th day of each month in various cities
throughout the country. The dozens of feminist assemblies converged together at several
state meetings that took place in different Spanish cities. The organizing 8M Commission
was a powerful, horizontal, cohesive yet autonomous, nation-wide assembly of women,
with precise claims and no partisan or institutional affiliation. Participation was open to
any feminist group that respected the Commission’s code of ethics and the guide of good
practices. At the state level, the 8M Commission was organized and divided into six specific
commissions: Communications, meeting organization, education, international, migration
and anti-racism, and coordination.
The call justified the strike on four major areas: Care, labor, consumption, and educa-
tion. The conveners offered several possible practices for carrying out these four types of
strikes. Regarding the proposed care strike, it was suggested that women would not to be in
charge of taking children to school, washing clothes, preparing food, or cleaning. In terms

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of the labor strike, it was admitted that there were many women who would not be able to
strike for various reasons, such as domestic workers, undocumented migrants, employees
of small businesses or women with irregular contracts. In the case of the consumer strike,
it was proposed that women restrained from buying or consuming any product or service
beyond the essential ones, avoiding buying feminine hygiene products and making other
purchases, particularly in shops where women suffered from precarious working condi-
tions. Finally, in relation to the student strike, the Commission encouraged women to skip
classes, to actively inform other women about the strike, and to organize protest actions
such as pickets or parades.
The 8M Commission manifesto was structured along four axes: Gender violence, bodies
(control of sexual and reproductive life), borders (human mobility, racism, and xenopho-
bia), and the economy. In addition, the commission on migration and anti-racism gener-
ated its own arguments to analyze all these issues through the racial/ethnic dimension. The
manifesto highlighted the linkage between capitalism and patriarchy in the oppression of
women, and their association with generating poverty and wars. It also underscored the
need to fight against climate change, to preserve the planet’s biodiversity, and to support
people’s food sovereignty. The manifesto included the rejection of the commodification of
women’s bodies and issued a call to end racism and exclusion. It also emphasized women’s
struggles in connection to a “long genealogy of women” that preceded contemporary ones,
highlighting their resistance during the Spanish Second Republic, the Spanish Civil War, as
well as their struggles against colonialism and imperialism.
The manifesto stood for diversity and plurality: Of race, culture and ethnicity, sexual
orientation, gender identity and expression, urban or rural life, dedication to work or care
(of a woman’s own family – her children, her elder ones, her relatives in need), and so
forth. It called for an end to the “aggression, humiliation, marginalization and exclusion”
of women; the “daily, invisible, domestic violence” that women suffer simply because they
are women; and the “oppression due to sexual orientation and identity” (Comisión 8M).
More specifically, the manifesto demanded full equality of rights and living conditions, and
full acceptance of women’s diversity.
It also demanded an effective “State Deal” against domestic violence, and the right to a
public, secular and feminist education, namely free from hetero-patriarchal values, as well
as the creation of an education system in which the gender perspective would be main-
streamed for all disciplines. The manifesto also requested the admittance of all migrants to
the country, whether they left their home countries for political or economic reasons. The
document denounced the budget cuts in those sectors that most affect women (the health
system, social services, and education), and identified corruption as an aggravating factor of
the crisis. It criticized the current patriarchal justice system and the serious repression and
restrictions against women’s rights.
The use of social networks to spread information and facilitate communication played
a fundamental role in the success of March 8 (Fernández-Romero et al.). There were
debates online about the best way to carry out the strike, how to make it easier for most
women to participate, and what should be the role of men the day of the strike, among
other questions. The success in convening people through social networks was largely
the result of decentralization. It was made possible by the ability of many individual
online accounts and feminist associations to disseminate their own content. However,
the 8M Commission’s website provided materials, such as posters, computer graphics,
ideas for banners, information brochures, and leaflets, and some talking points for local

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organizations and individual participants. The 8M Commission centralized its social

networking through corporate accounts. They had almost 22,000 followers on Twitter,
more than 17,000 on Facebook, over 1,800 on Telegram and more than 1,200 on Insta-
gram. Some regional assemblies also had their own accounts, especially on Facebook and
Twitter. While the national account gave priority to its own content, conveying specific
information and calling for mobilizations, the regional profiles contributed with their
own arguments and discussions, giving preference to content created by other feminist
organizations.
In addition, different groups of professionals and working women joined 8M and dis-
seminated their own initiatives through social media. Using individual accounts in social
networks, they all expressed their own reasons to join the strike. An independent initia-
tive was promoted by several well-known women journalists, who released the manifesto
#LasPeriodistasParamos (#WomenJournalistsStop), providing heightened visibility for the
8M strike. Signed by over 8,000 journalists, they intended to give support to the 8M strike
while exposing the male oppression that particularly affects the media sector, including the
salary gap, the glass ceiling, labor precariousness, sexual and labor harassment, and male
dominance in talk shows and opinion programs. They also criticized the biased approach
in domestic violence reporting and the tendency to blame the victim. They cast light on the
unbalanced distribution (with regards to gender) of family and care responsibilities that
burdens women journalists far more than their male counterparts. Not only did women
journalists and editors support the strike, but prime-time TV programs were also canceled,
and women presenters had to be replaced, and if they were not, a space was left empty in
order to evidence their absence. As a result, in many media outlets, no female voice was
heard throughout the day. Many other professional groups followed the initiative with
their own hashtags and manifestos. The messages spread through the social networks and
united many women that shared similar experiences at work. They all expressed their con-
cern about women’s struggles in different fields, the structural inequalities they experience
when compared to men, and, consequently, the reasons why they supported and joined the
8M strike.
The feminist movement attracted so much support that the unions were ready to back
the strikes. Minority unions such as the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT, General
Confederation of Labor) and Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT, National Labor
Confederation) or the Inter-Union Confederation, among others, called for a 24-hour
strike, which provided indispensable legal coverage for the feminist strike. The two most
important trade unions in the country, Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT, General
Workers’ Union) and Comisiones Obreras (CCOO, Workers Commissions), joined with
partial, two-hour strikes. The Students’ Union and other youth organizations also called for
the feminist strike to extend to high schools and universities.
According to the organizers, the 8M-2018 strikes were a resounding success. In fact,
although the 24-hour strike did not seem to be massively supported, the unions UGT and
CCOO trade unions counted more than six million workers who had participated in par-
tial strikes throughout the day. Not surprisingly, there were huge differences between the
organizers’ figures on strike participation by different working sectors and the lower official
figures. The day ended with massive participation (see Table 28.1) in rallies held in more
than 120 cities. The marches were full of posters, banners, performances and songs that
expressed a multitude of demands. They mobilized almost the same number of people that
had protested on all issues throughout an entire year in Spain.

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Table 28.1 Official Estimated Participation in the 8M Marches (2016–2020) in Some Spanish Cities.

Madrid Barcelona Sevilla Valencia Valladolid Bilbao

2016 5,000
2017 40,000
2018 170,000 200,000 30,000 80,000 14,000 60,000
2019 350,000 200,000 50,000 120,000 25,000 50,000
2020 120,000 50,000 20,000* 4,000 52,000

Notes: * In Sevilla there were two marches; both are included in this count. Sources: Our elabora-
tion with data from government sub-delegations, police forces, Newtral, Madrid 8M Commission
(Regueira; Melchor; Virizuela; Silva et al.; Cabanes; Cela; Gómez and Aunión; El Diario)

8M-2019: “We, Together”

The 8M-2019 exceeded the successful results of the previous year and the expectations
of the conveners, the media and public opinion. In terms of organization, the 2019 call
was the continuation of 2018, but with even greater levels of decentralization. The 8M
Madrid Committee published the main preparatory document, which included the same
four axes of violence, bodies, frontiers, and economy. As far as demonstrations, participa-
tion increased significantly in most cities, and the turnout in Madrid doubled that of the
previous year. These protests, however, took place in a different context defined by the pres-
ence of Vox, a far-right party that had splintered off from the PP in 2013. Vox had entered
the Andalusian regional parliament three months before the 8M-2019 march and was, at
that time, campaigning for the April 2019 general elections.
In the midst of the feminist mobilizations, Vox’s leaders focused their national campaign
by attacking the feminist movement, which they characterized as “supremacist feminism.”
They considered the 2018 feminist call “an absolute failure” and, only a few days prior to
the feminist protests of 8M-2019, they proclaimed their own anti-feminist mottos: “I am
not a victim because I was born a woman,” “I want to free myself from your ideologi-
cal burka,” “I celebrate being a woman the other 364 days of the year,” and so on (La
Vanguardia). On the same wavelength, the ultra-Catholic, ultra-conservative, right-wing
extremist association Hazte Oír (Make Yourself Heard) had been intensifying its cam-
paigns and public interventions opposing gender diversity, the protection of minorities,
sexual education at school, and other issues defended by the feminist movement. In 2018
and 2019 they distributed pamphlets claiming to “Protect children from indoctrination in
gender ideology” to parents at the entrance of schools.
The feminist movement replied to the reactionary wave. Against the nativist “nosotros
primero” (“we first”) of the extreme right, Spanish feminism offered a “nosotras juntas”
(“we together”) (Comisión 8 de Marzo del Movimiento Feminista de Madrid). Recalling
the success of the previous year, they acknowledged that the changes that had effectively
taken place in Spain were still very limited. The 8M-2019 proposed strike considered the
broad range of inequalities and precariousness, but the conveners also attached substantial
importance to the issues of race and migration, the threat represented by the rise of the
extreme right, the patriarchal justice system (as evidenced by the first sentencing of the La
Manada case), and the LGBT-phobic groups that were becoming increasingly present in the
media – all issues that had gained relevance throughout the previous months.

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8M-2020: The “Feminist Revolt”

In 2020, after two consecutive years of remarkably successful 8M events, the degree of
mobilization experienced somewhat of a slowdown. Feminist organizations had not cel-
ebrated any state-wide meetings since the previous year. There were recurring discussions
and internal debates that were publicly exploited, which disrupted the sense of unity that
had been evident in previous years. Disagreements emerged in relation to the consideration
of prostitution, and of gender self-determination. An indicator of this conflict is the fact
that the Feminist Party led by the iconic feminist Lidia Falcon O’Neill (who opposed legisla-
tion that would allow changing registered sex on the basis of gender self-identification) did
not attend the 8M demonstrations for the first time in its history, in order to express her
disagreement with the marches including the defense of this point.
In addition, 8M-2020 was held on a Sunday, after the spread of COVID-19 had begun.
Consequently, the organizers decided that, instead of a strike, they would launch a “femi-
nist revolt,” letting the different territories organize themselves as they preferred. The four
axes on which the argument of the feminist revolt was based remained as in previous calls.
The variety of activities that were planned along a month or during a day, according to each
8M territorial commission, resulted in marches in every Spanish city. That year, neither
the UGT nor CCOO, the main national unions, called for a labor strike. Overall, people’s
participation in the demonstrations was less than in 2018, especially when compared to the
great success of 2019 (see Table 28.1).

The Women in the Streets

Discerning who and why people demonstrate or strike is key to understand the nature of
these protests and their political significance. We can analyze who (and why) participated
in the 8M mobilizations by looking at survey data from the POLAT panel (Hernández
Pérez et al.). Sociodemographic characteristics and the level of resources and social con-
nectedness, as well as ideological motivations, are expected to play a role in the decision to
participate, as they typically do. Figure 28.1 represents the effect of some of these factors
on the likelihood of participating in the 8M protests (either by joining the strike and/or
the demonstrations), in 2018, 2019, and 2020 based on a logistic regression analysis (see
Appendix for full model). The figure shows how women were more likely to participate in
these protests than men, as were younger people, which is to be expected. But the analysis
also shows that the protests were relatively transversal in terms of other sociodemographic
characteristics such as education. In 2018 people with just compulsory education were even
more likely to participate than people with college education, all other things being equal.
Other resources also played a moderate role. While past experience in demonstrations
and regular consumption of political information were important predictors of participa-
tion, social media activity had a smaller effect. We only see an effect of becoming an active
Twitter user in the past year for the 2018 demonstration (possibly as a consequence of the
#MeToo and #Cuéntalo campaigns). This suggests that not all the effect of social media at
the individual level is direct, but rather, it is mediated by personal interactions that end up
attracting to the protests people that may not necessarily be very active in social media.
The main explanatory factors that determined participation in these protests were atti-
tudinal and ideological predispositions in terms of left-right orientations, levels of sexism,
and increasingly, the presence of a feminist identity. Ideological self-identification with the

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Figure 28.1 Effect of Different Characteristics on the Likelihood of Turning Out in the 8M Protests
(2018, 2019, 2020).
Source: Our elaboration from POLAT DEC Panel data (Hernández Pérez et al.). Dots represent the coefficient
(see Appendix for the full model) for the effect of each independent variable (on the Y axis) over the likelihood
to participate on the 8M protest (demonstration and/or strike). The zero line represents the null hypothesis of
no effect (as well as reference categories in categorical variables). Point estimates with their respective confi-
dence intervals (99%) to the right (left) of this red line represent a positive (negative) effect. All variables have
been recoded and range between 0 and 1 so that the magnitude of their effects can be compared. L. refers to a
lagged independent variable (measured on the previous wave one year earlier). D. refers to the change in the
measure with respect to the previous wave.

left, and even more importantly, low levels of sexism (measured as modern sexism follow-
ing the battery created by Swim et al.; Swim and Cohen) were the key predictors for turning
out in the 2018 protests. Their effect decreased, though, and neither of these factors was a
significant predictor of participation for the 2020 protests. In turn, identifying as a feminist
became increasingly relevant as an explanatory factor of participation in these protests, and
in 2020 it was the only key attitudinal predictor with a significant effect. The ideological
and attitudinal motivations gave way to the more identitarian ones (see Figure 28.1). This
can be understood if we consider that attending these protests can reinforce feminist identi-
ties and the more restricted nature of the 2020 protests.

After the Protests

The 8M feminist protests of 2018 and 2019 were outstanding mobilization processes in
the history of a country, Spain, with an important tradition of protest participation. The

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protests were extraordinary not only because of the massive turnout, but also because
of their transversal nature. Inheriting social media-based mobilization strategies from
the 15M, and also from an important tradition of long-haul feminism, these 8M protests
attracted women (and some men) with very different socioeconomic backgrounds. The
merit of such protests in terms of the success of their mobilization cannot be overstated.
For some, these protests revealed that feminism had become hegemonic, transcending
important political divisions (Juliana). We would perhaps not go that far. While participa-
tion was indeed not conditioned by education, it was clearly driven by ideological and atti-
tudinal motivations. Even if feminism is no longer clearly stigmatizing, it continues to elicit
a certain ambivalence. While the level of mobilization in 2018 and 2019 was extraordinary,
it also generated a significant backlash. We see this reaction at the systemic level with a
growing far-right party with an explicitly sexist and anti-feminist discourse that was not
as visible before the protests and also at the individual level with increasing average levels
of sexism and lower levels of feminist identification following the 2018 and 2019 massive
protests (Anduiza and Rico).
These women’s protests, as other protests, follow their own up-and-down cycle. The
backlash effect they have generated hinders the possibility that the issues around them are
perceived as valence, ones on which there is a broad shared societal consensus. For example,
in the previous decade, the need of specific measures to fight gender violence, made vis-
ible by the publication of official data (see https://violenciagenero.igualdad.gob.es/), elicited
ample social and political agreement. However, such large agreement has declined with Vox
now openly claiming that there is no such thing as gender violence. At the time of writ-
ing these words, Parliament had approved legislation guaranteeing sexual freedom (Ley
Orgánica 10/2022, de 6 de septiembre, de garantía integral de la libertad sexual), clearly
inspired by the case of La Manada. This law included many important aspects regarding
attention to victims of sexual violence, as well as the disposition that all sexual conducts
preformed without consent were to be considered aggression and not abuse. The law gener-
ated extraordinary turmoil by unintendedly reducing the penalties and producing the release
of several thousand sexual offenders (United Nations), including the same La Manada per-
petrators, and, therefore, it had to be revised. Other issues such as prostitution, surrogate
pregnancies, or gender quotas remain less salient but also generate important divisions both
in parties and public opinion. The urgent approval of sexual identity self-determination
legislation (Ley 4/2023, de 28 de febrero, para la igualdad real y efectiva de las personas
trans y para la garantía de los derechos de las personas LGTBI) has also made visible deep
internal divisions within the feminist movement, with intense debates and very high levels of
hostility, especially visible in social media spaces. The complex nature of the issues feminism
addresses, its current internal divisions, and the limitations and generalized demobilization
imposed during the pandemic make the prospects for feminist mobilization in Spain in the
short term unlikely to repeat the historically unprecedented levels of 2018.

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 APPENDIX

Table 28.A1 Logistic Regression Models for Participation in the 8M Protests.

(1) 2018 (2) 2019 (3) 2020

Sex (ref male)

Female
Age (ref 18–29) 0.801*** 0.695*** 0.504*
(0.144) (0.149) (0.207)
30–39 years old −0.565** −0.748*** −0.885**
(0.203) (0.215) (0.310)
40–55 years old −0.737*** −0.691*** −0.534*
(0.186) (0.192) (0.264)
Education (ref compulsory)
Secondary 0.172 0.405* 0.373
(0.170) (0.185) (0.256)
College −0.397* 0.184 −0.0152
(0.171) (0.175) (0.249)
Consumption of political news 1.344*** 0.843** 0.409
(Index 0 to 1 based on TV, TV shows, (0.293) (0.304) (0.402)
radio, newspapers, internet, lagged)
Has participated in a demo in the last 1.507*** 1.912*** 1.945***
6 months (lagged)
(0.170) (0.145) (0.203)
Has become a FB user 0.228 −0.00222 0.0586
(0.177) (0.183) (0.238)
Has become a Twitter user 0.625** −0.157 0.236
(0.213) (0.224) (0.295)
Left-right self placement −1.882*** −1.178** −0.864
(11 point scale recoded 0 to 1, lagged) (0.401) (0.429) (0.559)
Modern sexism −2.198*** −1.566*** −0.369
(Index based on Swim et al. recoded 0 (0.465) (0.460) (0.645)
to 1, lagged)

(Continued)

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 Women in the Streets

Table 28.A1 (Continued)

(1) 2018 (2) 2019 (3) 2020

Feminist identity 0.531 1.256 ***
1.972***
(11 point scale 0 to 1, lagged) (0.465) (0.460) (0.645)
Constant −0.594 −2.168*** −3.741***
(0.392) (0.424) (0.614)
N 1438 1583 1385

Notes: The dependent variable includes participation in either the strike or the demonstrations (1) vs
neither (0). Standard errors in parentheses. * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001. Evidence described
here comes from three waves of the POLAT DEC panel survey fielded in 2018, 2019 and 2020. The
same sample of citizens (selected with quotas of sex, age 18 to 55 years, and education) was inter-
viewed online in May each of these years. The first wave analyzed includes 1990 individuals. Attri-
tion (380 individuals between 2018 and 2019) was compensated with a refreshment sample of 417
in 2020. We also use a previous wave (fielded in May 2017) with no information on 8M protests but
useful measures of all explanatory factors for lags and first differences.

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 29
COLONIAL GENDERINGS
Fluid Identities in the Maghreb

Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo

Morocco and the Maghreb at large captured the imagination of Western artists that pro-
jected onto the Arab world their own orientalist image of a land of sexual and moral trans-
gressions since the eighteenth century. Despite their ambivalent position as both Europe’s
ethnic others and Western colonizers, Spanish writers wholeheartedly participated in the
depiction of a passive Orient, ripe for colonization. In this chapter, I explore the understud-
ied role that the process I refer to as “the queering of the Orient” played in both render-
ing the Arab other as colonizable and providing an imaginary in which non-heterosexual
identities could gain representation. The feminization of the Orient as a passive culture
that would welcome the advances of the virile Western nations simultaneously provided
cultural representation for queer identities allowing for those in the West to “go native,”
claiming the colonial stereotype as a signifier of their own gender identity. My analysis
traces the different translations of the Arabic classic Alf Layla wa Layla, known in English
as the The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night,1 one of the most significant texts
in the ambivalent queering of the ethnic other that prepared the ground for what was later
known as the Scramble for Africa.2 Historian Robert Aldrich has argued persuasively that
homosexual subcultures can contribute to erode the white male authority around which
colonial discourses are built as much as they can (unwillingly) contribute to its expansion.
This chapter aims to trace this ambivalence in the reception of the Arabian Nights in Spain
within the wider context of European orientalism. I will first analyze the editions of this
work throughout its different European iterations, gradually narrowing my scope to con-
sider their significance in contemporary Spanish queer cultural production.
In 1885, Richard Burton published his “Terminal Essay” which appeared at the end of
his ten-volume translation of Alf Layla wa Layla, the Arabic version of the Persian Hazâr
afsâna that was composed in the ninth century (both of which are primary sources for the
different iterations of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night).3 In the section
devoted to pederasty (the term commonly used to refer to homosexuality at the time), Bur-
ton identifies a geographical fringe that he names the Sotadic Zone. This area stretches from
the Southern Mediterranean to India where it broadens out “embracing all China, Turk-
istan and Japan.” According to Burton, its inhabitants have in common the fact that they
are not only omnivorous, but also “omnifutuentes.” The “systematic bestiality” of those

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-33 
 Colonial Genderings

living in this area “is equalled [sic] only by their pederasty,” he argues (“Terminal Essay”
238). In this essay, Burton is mainly concerned with male homosexuality. He is hesitant to
characterize all individuals within this area as equally lustful. He makes a careful distinc-
tion between ethnic groups and geographic regions in North Africa:

As in Marocco [sic] so the Vice prevails throughout the old regencies of Algiers,
Tunis and Tripoli and all the cities of the South Mediterranean seaboard, whilst it is
unknown to the Nubians, the Berbers and the wilder tribes dwelling inland.
(“Terminal Essay” 224)

In a second essay, “The Biography of the Book and its Reviewers Reviewed,” published
in the last volume of his Supplemental Nights, the additional six volumes that completed
his translation of the tales, Burton responded to those like the Pall Mall Gazette that had
criticized the overtly sexual depictions that appeared in his translation. In it, he warned his
critics that “[r]espectability unmakes what Nature made” (“The Biography of the Book”
323) and that while “savages and barbarians” are able to relieve the mind through the
body, civilized people were hopelessly perverse in that they live in “a rustle of (imaginary)
copulation” (“The Biography of the Book” 323). This second essay seems to contradict
the first one in that it describes all “primitive people” as “omnifutuentes,” not only those
within the Sotadic Zone.
The intention of the “Terminal Essay” or “The Biography of the Book” cannot be deci-
phered in isolation or by placing the texts against each other. The remarks contained in
the section on pederasty come across as an ambivalent moralizing disclaimer that at once
vindicates the sexual mores of those within the Sotadic Zone while also describing them as
pathological. The first essay aims to designate the geographical limits of the Sotadic Zone
while acknowledging that the sexual interests of their inhabitants vary widely even within
its frontiers. Berbers, the original inhabitants of large areas of North Africa do not partici-
pate in the homoerotic behavior observed in the Arab population, according to Burton. His
comments in the second article seem to abandon the attempt to delimit a geography of “the
vice,” expanding the category of “omnifutuentes” to include all primitive peoples.4 It also
doubles down on his initial suggestion that what his translation does is to open the doors
to a richer form of sexuality for the puritan, civilized West. One could argue that Burton’s
effort to understand the different iterations of homosexuality across cultures had matured
by the time he published the second essay, abandoning geographical markers and replac-
ing them with a loose notion of historical evolution, but as I will explain in the following
section, Burton was trying to come to terms with the fact that the sexual behavior that
he had observed only seemed to become biologized and ethnicized to the Western eye in
some geographical areas. In trying to reconcile the already existing myths about the greater
homoerotic nature of some cultures over others with the idea of a primitive sexuality, Bur-
ton’s argument exposed the gaps in colonial ideology, rebelled against Western puritanism,
and contributed to colonial discourse by providing more coherent and seductive narratives
that ultimately supported colonization. Burton’s commentary on Victorian representations
of Arab sexuality did not seek to articulate an anticolonialist position but rather to iron out
the kinks of this orientalist discourse.
Burton’s “Terminal Essay” as well as his comments in “The Biography” managed to
polarize the reception of the One Thousand Nights throughout Europe between those that
advocated for a sanitized version of the text and consequently favored the French edition

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by Antoine Galland, and those that preferred a much more direct depiction of the sexual
prowess of its multiple characters and opted for Burton’s edition. Despite being published
in serial form for a limited number of subscribers, Burton had sensed the demand in West-
ern societies for this type of orientalist, homoerotic narrative. There is a clear before and
after in the reception of the tales in the West that hinges around the publication of Burton’s
translation. Burton’s commitment to provide thorough, annotated translations of Arabic
and Indian sexual treaties is not to be perceived as a radical break with previous efforts to
produce scientific knowledge about Africa and the Orient, but rather as an acceleration of
the type of rationalization of the Orient that prepared that part of the world for continued
colonization. To that point, Burton’s depiction of the Sotadic Zone identifies the important
role that biopolitics play in the colonization of Africa and Asia and reveals the disturbing
power that queering the Orient can have in rendering it submissive. Much has been written
about the patriarchal imagery that supports imperialism presenting the occupying army as
hyper-masculine while feminizing the nation that is to be conquered.5 Burton’s queering of
the Orient should be understood within this paradigm, but it emphasizes the homoerotics
of colonial conquest over the more traditional heterosexual dynamics that tends to charac-
terize most imperial narratives.
Far from being an oddity, Burton’s queering of the Orient quickly gained popular-
ity among readers at large precisely because it did not represent a departure from tradi-
tional imperialist discourse, but rather its further consolidation. Between 1898 and 1904,
Joseph-Charles Mardrus, a French physician, poet, and translator born in Cairo from a
Catholic family of Armenian descent, published his Les mille et un nuits. As the editors indi-
cate, Mardrus’ edition aimed to make the Arabian tales available to a larger audience than
the two or three hundred subscribers that had had access to Burton’s translation (Mardrus
ix). Madrus’ rendition of the tales preserved the more graphic aspects of the existing stories
and added material of his own that emphasized the homoerotic elements that were already
present in previous versions. In his introduction, Mardrus puts forth the idea that

les peuples primitifs . . . appellent les choses par leur nom, – et ne trouvent què con-
damnable ce qui est naturel, ni licencieuse l’expression du naturel. . . . D’ailleurs, il est
totalement ignoré de la littérature arabe, ce produit hideux de la vieillesse spirituelle:
l’intention pornographique . . . ils rient de tout coeur, là où le puritain palperait du
scandale. (Mardrus xxi)
Primitive people call things by their name, – and they do not find anything wrong
in what is natural, nor natural expression licentious. . . . Besides, pornographic inten-
tion, that awful product of spiritual old age, is completely alien to Arabic litera-
ture. . . . And they laugh heartily about what the puritan perceives as a scandal.6

Mardrus’ introduction reiterates the arguments presented by Burton in his “Terminal

Essay” and “Biography of the Book,” but without his hesitations. For Mardrus, there is
still a clear gap between the sexuality of the Arabs and that of the average Westerner.
Mardrus’s translation is particularly relevant to our understanding of the reception of
the tales in twentieth century Spain because it was precisely his French translation that
Vicente Blasco Ibañez selected, when he translated Scherezade’s story into Spanish. An
earlier translation into Spanish from the German edition prepared by Gustav Weil between
1837–1841 had been published in 1855 by a secretive “Sociedad de Literatos” (“Literati

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Society”). Weil’s translation had enjoyed moderate success with four consecutive editions.
Burton himself considered his rendition of the tales to be appropriate, but as Jorge Luis
Borges indicated in his own review of the different translations published in his collection
of essays Historia de la Eternidad in 1936, Weil’s translation did not go beyond a mere lit-
eral parsing of the manuscripts he had consulted, it did not provide a recreation of the text
that could connect with a European imaginary (Borges 411–412). Mardrus’s edition, on
the other hand, was clearly seeking to establish a connection with Orientalism through its
most recent iteration: symbolism. It is no surprise that Blasco Ibañez, who was fascinated
with symbolism, chose Mardrus’s edition for his indirect translation of the tales. Mardrus’s
queering of the Orient fits well with the infatuation of Spanish Modernismo with exotic
landscapes and particularly well with the homoerotic aesthetic that Nicaraguan poet Ruben
Dario advocated for in Los Raros (1896). The Spanish edition of Mardrus’ translation
includes a prologue by Guatemalan modernista Enrique Gómez Carrillo in which the latter
highlights the fact that, unlike Galland’s, these are “cuentos más serios, más crueles y más
intensos” (“more serious, more curel and more intense stories”). Gómez Carrillo argues
that if Mardrus has added anything to the translation this is “la parte humana; es decir, la
pasión, los refinamientos y el dolor” (“the human side; in other words, passion, refinement
and pain”; 9–10).
Mardrus’s introduction and Gómez Carrillo’s prologue represent a paradigm shift in
the way that the queering of the Orient is deployed in this text. If Burton had identified a
sexuality beyond the confines of Western geography and morality, Mardrus had stream-
lined the concept by expanding the Sotadic Zone to include all primitive people, while at
the same time claiming that same ambiguous sexuality for himself. Symbolists and mod-
ernistas were not satisfied with merely delineating the alien sexual territory that Burton
had identified, they also toyed with the idea of being part of it. This is evident at the very
end of Mardrus’ introduction, where he transforms the primitive Arab into a bohemian
dandy: “L’Arabe est un instinctif, mais raffiné et exquis. Il aime la ligne pure et la devine,
irréalisée” (“The Arab is instinctive, but refined and exquisite. He loves the pure line and
discerns it, unrealized”; xxiii).
If Burton had played at “going native” as a way of staging his familiarity with the
Arab world, for the symbolist and modernistas, “going native” afforded an acceptable way
to codify their own ambivalent sexuality. Sylvia Molloy has written eloquently about the
ambivalent categorization of the modernista as a poseur, someone who supposedly pre-
tends to act queer only for the purpose of gaining popularity in the literary field.7 Molloy’s
subtle analysis suggests that the “pose” is not a question of performance, but of represen-
tation. The key issue here, according to Molloy, is: “cuál es la pose o serie de poses que
a la vez señalan una identidad e inconfundiblemente revelan su impostura” (“what is the
pose or series of poses that simultaneously point to an identity and unmistakably reveal its
imposture”; 51). Lacking a clear cultural code with which to express their own queer sexu-
ality, many of these modernistas adopt a pose, a placeholder, that tentatively gives them a
visibility they are repeatedly denied. Representation is ultimately never accomplished, but
as Alan Sinfield indicates the important thing here is to recover

el momento de indeterminación. No es que la idea que tenemos hoy de ‘el homo-

sexual’ se disimulara tras estos silencios, como una estatua debajo de una sábana,
plenamente formada y pronta a ser revelada. (cited in Molloy 51)

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the moment of indeterminacy. It is not that the idea we have today of the “homo-
sexual” was disguised behind these silences, like a statue covered with a sheet, fully
formed and ready to be revealed.

This moment of indeterminacy is also visible in the imbrication of gender identity and
colonialist discourse. The expression “going native,” so often used to simultaneously
describe the emulation of non-Western peoples and homosexuality, is the pose that reveals
how the queering of the Orient could provide modernistas temporary visibility. Emancipa-
tion from strict heterosexual gender rules, however, went side by side with colonial domina-
tion, as I have mentioned before. No other Spanish writer embodies the dual emancipatory/
dominant dynamics that the trope “going native” represents better than Isaac Muñoz. In
a conversation with literary critic, translator, and poet Rafael Cansinos Assens, Muñoz
tells him:

Amo los besos que sangran, el placer que es como un dolor, la pasión infinita que sólo
se conoce en Oriente, y que no distingue sexos. Yo en Marruecos tengo una novia y un
efebo, soy un alma hermafrodita. . . . Yo necesito el Oriente, sensual y pagano a pesar
de Allah, el bello Oriente, donde reinan los poetas y la vida es un cuento fantástico de
Las mil y una noches. (Assens 78)
I love the kisses that bleed, the pleasure that feels like pain, infinite passion that can
only be known in the Orient, and that does not distinguish between the sexes. I, in
Morocco, have a girlfriend and an ephebe, I am a hermaphrodite soul. . . . I need the
Orient, sensual and pagan despite Allah, the beautiful Orient, where poets rule and
life is a fantastic tale from the One Thousand and One Nights.

If the character of the primitive dandy is a tentative persona, a pose, for Mardrus or Gómez
Carrillo, in Muñoz the pose is taken to a higher level. The Orient becomes not only a land
where the bohemian can find a primitive version of himself but the only source of sensual
and cultural vigor in the face of what he perceives as the inevitable decadence of the West.
Muñoz is a case in point of how two apparently opposite discourses, the discourse of arabo-
philia and the Africanist discourse of colonial expansion can not only coexist but feed off
each other. Muñoz, simultaneously, perfected his “native” persona while developing his
career as a journalist specialized in the colonization of Morocco by Spain. He published
numerous articles in the daily El Heraldo de Madrid in which he discusses the best possible
strategy for Spain to secure its interests in North Africa. In one of his first articles for the
Heraldo, Muñoz explains:

El comercio es el factor indicador y regulador de la potencialidad de un país, y las

colonias no han de ser sino receptáculos de fuerzas que a su vez recojan y difundan las
energías motrices. . . . El Mogreb [sic] no es más que una realidad económica, y sólo
desde este punto de vista se puede estudiar con atención. (1)
Commerce is the key indicator and regulator of the potentiality of a country and
the colonies are to be nothing more than the receivers of force that in turn gather and
disperse the driving forces. . . . The Mogreb [sic] is nothing more than an economic
reality and only from this point of view can it be carefully studied.

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Muñoz’s cold analysis of the commercial potential of the Maghreb, finds orientalist expres-
sion in his novels where his fascination with sadomasochistic rituals and violent rape barely
disguises an imperialist allegory. In La fiesta de la sangre (1909), for instance, the main
character thinks out loud:

Viéndola como muerta, yo pensaba en el divino goce de desposarse con una virgen,
amarla fieramente toda una noche, y matarla con nuestras propias manos á las prim-
eras luces del amanecer. (73)
Seeing her lay as dead, I thought about the divine please of marrying a virgin, mak-
ing love to her fiercely the whole night, and killing her with our own hands at dawn.

The standard orientalist fantasy of the colonial domination of a female Maghreb is compli-
cated in Muñoz’s novel by the fact that El-Arbi, the main character, is not a European but
a Riffian and that his sexual infatuation with the virginal Kamar alternates with a strong
homoerotic longing for Hameido, also a warlord and ally of the main character. El-Arbi
appreciates in Hameido the fact that he rules his people “con su sonrisa femenina de candor
y de seducción,” not with an iron fist, but with “sus manos, largas y puras como de mujer,
y que, sin embargo, curvaban el hierro con su esfuerzo suave” (“with his female smile of
candor and seduction . . . his long and pure hands like those of a woman, that were, how-
ever, able of holding the sword effortlessly”; 59–60). As disconcerting as Muñoz’s queering
of the Orient in this and other novels can be, complete with long descriptions of sado-
masochistic rituals performed by the Aissaouas Muslim mystics, his orientalist modern-
ismo is strikingly coherent with his clear-headed analysis of colonial strategy. Literary critic
Amelina Correa Ramón points out that during World War I, Muñoz initially embraced the
conflict as a possibility to revitalize the decadent European society while seemingly having
no interest in the central question at the time: Whether Spain should align itself with the
allies or the Germans. Muñoz defines both of them in one of his articles as “dos formas
igualmente pletóricas y tiránicas de la civilización europea” (“two equally plethoric and
tyrannical forms of European civilization”; cited in Correa Ramón 514). Instead, Muñoz
focuses his attention on the Middle Eastern and North African peoples that are involved
in the war studying “las circunstancias que los llevan a intervenir, las condiciones de su
alianza, o las posibles consecuencias que pueden devenir” (“the circumstances that make
them intervene, the conditions of their alliances, or the possible consequences that may
result”; 514). He disdains the hypermasculine rhetoric that informs the escalation and final
confrontation that led to World War I and turns his attention to how the different nations
across the Maghreb can be seduced into alliances that may be favorable to Spanish interests.
Muñoz’s response to World War I and, in general, his approach to colonization is clearly
informed by the doctrine of peaceful penetration and indirect rule developed by Mare-
chal Joseph Gallieni, a doctrine that Louis Hubert Lyautey, resident general in Morocco,
would develop further. The tache d’huile or “oil stain,” as Lyautey named it, consisted in
deploying well-informed political negotiation tactics with the locals backed up by military
support, rather than the other way around. Christian Gury has argued that their brilliant
military doctrine was informed by their understanding of colonial politics as a game of
seduction and not of domination by brute force. Gury explains that Gallieni and Lyautey,
both of them homosexuals, had found in each other not only a confidant but also a bright
mind ready to approach war games from a different angle (28–31). Muñoz was clearly

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receptive to the military innovations brought about by Lyautey. In his collection of essays
En tierras de Yebala (1913), Muñoz praises the work of “[e]l ilustre Lyautey, alma suprema
de la gigantesca obra francesa en el Mogreb [sic]” (“the illustrious Lyautey, supreme soul
of the giant French project in the Mogreb [sic]”), and encourages Spanish politicians and
military leaders alike to “rectificar la actual política y abandonar para siempre nuestros
legendarios y funestísimos procedimientos de colonización” (“rectify the present policy and
abandon forever our legendary and nefarious methods of colonization”; 69, 74).
It is far fetched to argue that homosexuality alone could result in a subversion of colo-
nialism, as Aldrich does. Cultural historian Susan Martin-Márquez has demonstrated how
deeply homoerotic tension informed the daily lives of Spanish legionnaires in Morocco and
how it pervaded the ultra-violent prose of Spanish Fascist writers like Luís de Santa Marina.
The writings of Gallieni, Lyautey, and Muñoz, however, provide a nuanced example of how
a different affect resulted in a different approach to colonial endeavors.
The twentieth century would still see another Spanish translation of the tales. Rafael
Cansinos Assens published in 1955 what many, including Jorge Luis Borges, consider the
best Spanish edition of the classic. This new edition was published in Mexico while Cansi-
nos Assens lived in his exilio interior (internal exile) in Spain. His translation includes a
three hundred and sixty-three page long “Estudio crítico literario de Las mil y una noches”
(“Literary, critical study of the One Thousand and One Nights”), an encyclopedic attempt
to settle many of the questions that surround the history of the tales and its multiple edi-
tions. In this study, Cansinos devotes a whole section to the supposedly pornographic
nature of the tales. Mimicking the polyphonic structure of the tales, he provides two per-
fectly symmetrical answers to the question of their perceived obscenity. Cansinos reiterates
the argument presented by Mardrus that what scandalizes a European audience is perceived
as natural in the, for him too, primitive Arabic world. He argues that “[l]as historias de
tipo wildeano – digámoslo así – que figuran en Las mil y una noches son cuentos para hacer
reír” (“the stories a la Oscar Wilde – to call them something – that appear in One Thou-
sand and One Nights are tales to make others laugh”; 102). He seems to vindicate Western
decorum as a logical consequence of cultural evolution, but he also suggests that Western
civilization will one day embrace the carefree sexuality of the Arabs:

Se ha necesitado un proceso muy largo para llegar a establecer las reglas del buen gusto
que rigen sobre la humanidad vestida, y no menos largo habrá de ser el inverso, pues
esas cosas naturales han llegado a no serlo y mucho tiempo ha de pasar hasta que no
recobremos la suficiente naturalidad para ver naturalmente esas naturalidades. (104)
It has taken a long time to articulate these norms of good taste that rule the clothed
humanity, and the reverse process will have to take an equally long time, because
those natural things have ended up not being so and it is going to be a while until we
recover enough naturality to see these natural things naturally.

Cansinos’ playful explanation suggests that the West will eventually embrace as modern and
emancipatory what it today perceives as licentious. In his opinion, the moralistic condem-
nation of the obscene does not begin in the West until the eighteenth century, when Euro-
peans, according to him, learned to identify as obscene what up to then had been perceived
as natural. The attentive reader may have noticed that Cansinos seems to offer the main
elements for a simplistic foucauldian reading of the tales: The idea that the West developed
a bourgeois notion of sexuality at odds with the pre-Enlightenment Arab one. The return

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to a carefree sexuality that Cansinos foresees is to be understood as an emancipation of the

West from its own restrictive morality. With the benefit of hindsight, one could even argue
that Cansinos’ comments prefigure Juan Goytisolo’s Reivindicación del Conde Don Julián
(1970). Detaching sexual practices from any essentialized notion of humanity or cultural
tradition is a first step towards undertaking a “tarea de sicoanálisis nacional a través de la
lectura del discurso colectivo tradicional sobre el islam en nuestra literatura y en nuestra
historia” (“a psychoanalytic cure through the reading of the traditional, collective discourse
about Islam in our literature and our history”) as Goytisolo describes his project in this
novel (37–8). For Goytisolo, the demonization of non-procreative sex and the demoniza-
tion of the Moor go hand in hand. The Spanish foundational myth of the rape of Florinda
la Cava by King Rodrigo is explained in precisely those terms:

Estamos ante una variante de la fábula del pecado original y el paraíso perdido en
la que, en vez de la manzana, el señuelo del Maligno habría sido la belleza de una
doncella y el papel de Adán correspondería al último rey visigodo: por culpa de éste,
los españoles habrían perdido para siempre su inocencia y, a sus ojos, el moro invasor
simbolizará el mal, el pecado, el castigo. (Goytisolo 41)
This is a fable of original sin and paradise lost in which, instead of the apple, the
bait for the devil would have been the beauty of a damsel and Adam would be played
by the last goth king: because of him, Spaniards lost their innocence forever, and in
their eyes, the Moorish invader symbolizes evil, sin, and punishment.

Goytisolo’s reading of the legend of Florinda la Cava as a Spanish foundational myth is

valid in as much as it highlights the reification of the Judeo-Christian myth of the original
sin that the tale enacts. The contraposition of an Arab primitive sexuality, however, versus
a Judeo-Christian demonization of the flesh is more problematic because it prefigures the
contraposition of a prudish Judeo-Christianity against a hedonist Islam that Goytisolo will
exploit throughout his work, thus reifying a subversive version of Burton’s Sotadic Zone.
Once more, the analysis of the history of the evolving versions of Alf Layla wa Layla
provides a possible way out of this complicated maze. Literary critic Kamram Rastegar
explains that Alf Layla wa Layla was initially considered a “representative of what in
pre-modern and early modern Arab and Iranian elite intellectual contexts would be consid-
ered a rather minor popular literary genre” (272). The tales were far from being understood
as a foundational text within the canon of Arab literature. In fact, they circulated orally,
and Arabic editions were not printed until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Rastegar
identifies four major Arabic editions: the Calcutta (I), Breslau, Calcutta (II), and Bulaq
editions. Although it is tempting to dismiss the late publication of the Arabic editions,
and instead attach cultural authenticity to the oral transmission of the tales that these edi-
tions supposedly contribute to fixate in a printed text, Rastegar indicates that none of the
first three Arabic texts were based on a single manuscript. The two Calcutta editions were
based on different sources, the claims of authenticity of the Breslau edition were proven to
be false, and the original manuscript on which the Bulaq edition was supposedly based has
never been found. Furthermore, Rastegar suggests that we should account for “the possible
effect of the eighteenth-century European editions (which largely derive from Galland’s
text) on the contents or organization of the Arabic print editions” (277). This implies that
the oldest and most complete edition of the tales would be the one prepared by Galland.
Rastegar’s point is not to suggest that many of the tales that would make it into Galland’s

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text did not exist as oral literature throughout the Persian and Arabic world but that their
recompilation in one book of presumed cultural coherence is a process that began with the
eighteenth century European editions and continues throughout the nineteenth century, as
Arabic and European editions lean on each other.
This palimpsestic process indicates that the land of homoerotic desire that Burton’s
Sotadic Zone supposedly represents exists only in the minds of Western orientalists. If my
critique of the editions of the tales qua supposed encounter of radically different under-
standings of sexuality indicates anything, it is that this queering of the Orient in prepara-
tion for colonization, is also a futile attempt to preserve the dream of an impossible virginal
land, untouched by foreign hands. The belief that discourses of sexuality are produced
in the metropolis and only then exported to the colonies or that deviant sexual practices
appear first in the colonies and are then imported to the metropolis are clearly blind to the
constant exchange of ideas that circulate between East and West, between colonizing and
colonized nations. As anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler comments:

If desire is about both externalization and mimesis as so much of the philosophical

literature on desire suggests, then no political story is more relevant to the production
of western desire than colonialism, itself the quintessence of a process in which the
mirroring of bourgeois priorities and their mimetic subversion played a defining role.
(192)

Stoler’s insight destabilizes not only orientalist descriptions of Arab and Eastern culture as an
endless Sotadic Zone, but also helps us provide a more nuanced account of the opposite idea:
That the concept of homosexuality has been brought to the Arab world by Westerners, as
Joseph Massad argues in Desiring Arabs, an otherwise highly revealing study of homoerotic
desire in the Arab world. Massad’s insightful critique of how gay rights, like human rights,
can be invoked as justification of neo-colonial policies, fails to acknowledge that, just like
Westerners (like the modernistas I referred to before) may gain recognition by appropriating
orientalist representations of masculinity, Eastern individuals may also seek to gain recogni-
tion by appropriating Western representations of masculinity. I am not trying to downplay
the power imbalance that has surrounded East-West relationships, but rather to return a nec-
essary degree of agency to Arab peoples in this process of cultural exchange. To return to the
case of Sherezade’s tales that I have been using as the main thread in this chapter, the multiple
editions of the One Thousand and One Nights should not be seen as reiterated attempts to
either cover or unveil homosexual or obscene desires as if they represented a terra incognita
but rather as a negotiation by which such desires are constituted within the power strug-
gles between East and West. Rastegar has coined the term “transactional texts” to refer to
works like Alf Layla wa Layla and its Western counterparts that “mark the encounters and
exchanges between social and cultural fields with differential value systems” (271).
My analysis has, so far, emphasized the productive nature of the multiple editions of the
Arabic Nights inasmuch as they function as transactional texts, as artifacts that allow for
the negotiation and articulation of new identities. Sherezade’s inexhaustible ability to enter-
tain the king night after night is a good allegory of our psychological need to constantly
reinvent ourselves, to keep our identitarian narratives going, of how power struggles deeply
inform our most intimate desires and our search for representation. For the last section of
this paper, I will consider Goytisolo’s 1980 novel Makbara, a loose adaptation of the Arcip-
reste de Hita’s Libro del buen amor (c. 1330–43), a text that invites speculations about the

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true nature of Spanish sexuality and its imbrication in the multicultural politics of its time
not unlike Alf Layla wa Layla.
Goytisolo is not interested in reproducing the different episodes of the Spanish classic,
but rather in framing his own meditation on sexual and cultural identity in the intricate
and convoluted maze of textual and sexual references that complicate the Arcipreste de
Hita’s own compilation of stories. The main questions that have plagued scholarly inter-
pretations of this supposedly seminal text in Spanish literature will remind the reader of
the questions visited by Burton and others centuries later: Is the Arcipreste trying to teach
his readers about the difference between devout love and carnal love? Is he inciting them
to forget the traditional, Judeo-Christian demonization of sexual love and embrace sensu-
ality? What is the original source of Iberian erotics? Is it the literatura goliardesca or the
picaresque tradition of the Arabic maqamat? In Makbara, Goytisolo’s main character is a
Sub-Saharan immigrant that chronicles his multiple metamorphosis into a myriad different
persona although he ultimately remains an ethnic and racialized other. Critics have praised
the radical and subversive multicultural perspective that Makbara presents. Literary critic
Jenine Abboushdi Dallal celebrates not only the “radical ruptura con las convenciones
de la novela” (“the radical rupture with the aesthetic practices of the novel”), but also
“las prácticas estéticas del bilingüismo y, en este caso, el multilingüismo” (“the aesthetic
practices of bilingualism and, in this case, multilingualism”; 39) through which, as she
explains, “Goytisolo obliga al lector a participar en complejos y perturbadores procesos
de paso o tránsito cultural, lingüístico y sexual que no son identificables como familiares
o ajenos” (“Goytisolo forces the reader to participate in complex and disturbing processes
of passing or cultural, linguistic, and sexual transit that are not identifiable as familiar or
alien”; 39). Abdoushdi’s celebration of Goytisolo’s postmodern identitarian erotics remains
unclear, however, about the politics that derive from such disturbing processes of passing
or cultural, linguistic, and sexual transit. Abdoushdi is right to state that Goytisolo keeps
the reader on edge, but defamiliarization is not the only technique deployed in this novel.
Disturbing passages, like the ethnographic description of the self-mutilating rituals per-
formed by the main character, that can be read as a critique of the coloniality of knowledge
that accompanies imperialist practices are preceded and followed by segments in which the
encounter with the ethnic other is highly eroticized. This is problematic because it is the
ethnic othering that is perceived as erotic. Cultural studies critic Paul Julian Smith argues
that Goytisolo’s autobiographical novels combine an explicit critique of Eurocentrism with
a sexualization of subaltern others “reduced to the medium through which the self realizes
his fantasies, transcends his own singularity” (37). This ambivalent eroticization of the
colonial encounter (and of the fetishization of the working class ethnic other) that Smith
critiques is not unique to Goytisolo or Morocco, as David Villaseca points out, Jaime Gil
de Biedma’s chronicle of his experiences in the Philippines presents a similar case. His reit-
erated references to the “omnifutuente” nature of the Philipinos in his deviant memoir of
his experiences as a top executive of the Compañía de Tabacos de Filipinas in Retrato del
artista en 1956 (Portrait of the Artist in 1956) is a clear example of this. In this novel, Gil de
Biedma explains that in the Spanish colony “not everybody is gay but everybody is game,”
echoing Burton’s “Terminal Essay” (52). One could argue, like Robert Richmond Ellis has
done, that the voice of Goytisolo (and by extension Gil de Biedma’s)

is never truly gay because it is uttered only in the context of the subject/object dual-
ity of heterosexual ideology. Were it gay, it would on some level transcend the

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heterosexual/homosexual binarism. It would elucidate a particular sexual orientation

not in opposition to the other.
(60)

Certainly, one can try not to participate in the coloniality of desire that Goytisolo and
Burton traded in, but can one’s desires escape the power struggles that generate them in the
first place? I cannot think of a better answer to this existential riddle than Angel Vázquez’s
often quoted conversation with Jane Bowles:

Jane, odio a los efebos de esta playa de Tánger, a la que el rico turismo anglosajón ha
convertido en un prostíbulo dorado y al aire libre. Lo mío son: militares ya maduros y
sin graduación, curas a la española, barrigudos y catetos, y muy en particular: los que
riegan las calles de noche, encapuchados en sus uniformes amarillos. (Sanz de Soto 38)
Jane, I hate the ephebes of the beach of Tangier that the rich Anglo-Saxon tourism
has turned into a golden, open-air brothel. I am into mature, rankless soldiers; potbel-
lied, analphabet, Spanish priests; and, most of all, the guys that water the streets at
night with their hoods and yellow uniforms.

Vázquez’s fine irony, seemingly refusing to succumb to the eroticization of the colonial other
only to reveal his own ardent desires for the two bastions of Spanish oppression (the military
and the Catholic Church) suggests that Goytisolo’s repeated efforts to break free of moral
impositions to find new uncharted territories of desire are ultimately futile. Interestingly, Goyt-
isolo returns to the funerary theme of Makbara in a later novel, La cuarentena (Quarantine;
1991), in which he describes an eerily soothing escape from the social and moral constraints
that tormented him during most of his life. If Makbara, which means “cemetery” in Arabic,
offered a gallery of the narrator’s thousand and one unsuccessful attempts at putting together a
viable identitarian narrative, La cuarentena embraces the Islamic belief in the barzaj or the lim-
inal state between life and death, a place where bodily constraints can finally be transcended.
Luz López-Baralt contends that Goytisolo’s personal barzaj is no other than the literary space,
where he can at will bend the rules of time and space. But, in view of his repeated, unsuccessful
efforts to break out of the coloniality of desire in all his other novels, one is tempted to interpret
the novel as Goytisolo’s own appropriation of Muslim theology for the purpose of exemplify-
ing the Freudian dynamics of Eros and Thanatos. Desire creates the necessary tension for life
to be meaningful, but only Thanatos puts an end to the pain that Eros unleashes.
The story of the multiple editions of Alf Layla wa Layla reveals the important role that
the queering of the Orient played in making colonization possible, while also providing an
orientalist vocabulary that allowed for the representation of queer identities. It also helps
contextualize Spanish claims of cultural proximity to the Maghreb in the larger context
of European Orientalism. Muñoz or Goytisolo’s efforts to seek a primal source of identity
in the Maghreb, often perceived as idiosyncratic of the Iberian imaginary, turn out to be
deeply informed by the European queering of the ethnic other, unable to escape the power
struggles from which they were generated.

Notes
1 This is the title of the English translation by John Payne that began to be published in 1882.
The first English translation titled The Arabian Nights Entertainments (1706–1721) based on the

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French translation by Antoine Galland (1704–1717), the first one to appear in a European lan-
guage. The title, like the tone and content of the translations, would go through a series of changes
that I explain in detail in this chapter.
2 Western commercial and military expansion into African has been a constant throught the history
of the continent, but the partition or scramble for Africa that takes place in the second half of the
nineteenth century and early twentieth century was greatly informed in the case of North Africa by
the cultural representation of its peoples as sexually passive.
3 Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) was a British consul and explorer who authored several ori-
entalist translations of works from Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit. Burton translated the Kamasutra
(1883) and also worked on a translation of the Arabic sex manual The Perfumed Garden of Sen-
sual Delight, a translation that was destroyed by his wife shortly after his death. He founded with
others the Anthropological Society of London in 1863, which published the journal Anthropologia
with the intention of exploring social norms and human sexuality across cultures, but its findings
proved to be too shocking for the prudish Victorian society of his time.
4 I don’t think that Burton is condemning homosexuality when he refers to it as “the vice”; he is
certainly striking an ambivalent pose by advocating for more liberal sexual mores and reiterating
homophobic nomenclature.
5 See Edward Said’s Orientalism, Frantz Fanon’s Black Faces, White Masks.
6 All translations are my own unless noted otherwise.
7 Molloy’s article was a response to the polemic generated by Alberto Acereda in which he speculated
about a possible homosexual relation between Ruben Dario and Mexican writer Amado Nervo,
based on correspondence recently discovered in the Hayden Archive at Arizona State University.

Works Cited
Abboushdi Dallal, Jenine. “El Acto de pasar de Makbara.” Quimera: Revista de Literatura, no. 179,
1999, pp. 35–39.
Acereda, Alberto. “Nuestro más profundo y sublime secreto: los amores transgresores entre Rubén
Darío y Amado Nervo.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, vol. 89, no. 6, 2012, pp. 895–924.
Aldrich, Robert. Colonialism and Homosexuality. Routledge, 2003.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Los traductores de las mil y una noches.” Historia de la Eternidad. Obras Com-
pletas. Vol I. Emecé Ediciones, 1996, pp. 397–413.
Burton, Richard. “The Biography of the Book and Its Reviewers Reviewed.” Supplemental Nights to
the Book of the Thousand and One Nights With Notes Anthropological and Explanatory, vol. 6,
Private Print by the Burton Club, 1888.
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 30
UNRAVELING TIME
Queer Future and Trans Entanglement
in Veneno

Dean Allbritton

Spanish cultural icon and media figure Cristina “La Veneno” Ortiz Rodríguez was a polemic
figure, rising to television stardom in the mid-1990s in late-night talk shows like Esta noche
cruzamos el Mississippi (Tonight We Cross the Mississippi) and La sonrisa del pelícano
(The Pelican’s Smile) with a burst of vibrant energy, quick wit, and saucy storytelling. Her
portrayal in the eponymous television series Veneno, created by Javier Calvo and Javier
Ambrossi in 2020, showcases these characteristics while exploring how her life and legacy
afforded representational space for the LGBTQ community – particularly trans women – in
Spanish media today. Showcasing the evolution and transformation of La Veneno, the series
makes a case for reading trans identities through a fantasy of the future yet to come, and it
highlights the possibilities of storytelling oneself into the life one has long dreamt of. This
chapter tugs at those threads, considering how minority affinities, painful transformations,
and relational entanglements are represented in Veneno and how these become interlocking
narratives and imperatives for a better, more inclusive future. In this manner, transgender
identities are fleshed out instead of flattened, and the event of transitioning is not read
as a simple or straightforward linear narrative towards a state of perfection. Turning to
José E. Muñoz’s writing on queer futurity and utopias and to Elizabeth Duval’s critique of
universal trans identity and experience, I argue that Veneno both surrenders to common
narratives of transformation and transitioning and reimagines them, at once reflecting and
reshaping the halting, stuttered treatment of trans communities today.
Much like Ortiz herself, Veneno exploded onto the scene, receiving enthusiastic critical
acclaim in Spain and abroad and garnering several award nominations and wins, including
a three-way tie for “Mejor intérprete femenino en ficción” (“Best female performance in fic-
tion”) between its lead actresses at the prestigious Onda Awards. Told over eight episodes,
Veneno ambitiously covers the major points of Ortiz’s life: her childhood in Andalucía,
transition, and the start of hormone therapy as a young adult; her history as a sex worker
in Madrid in the 1980s, evolution into an outrageous media figure, and imprisonment for
insurance fraud; her return to public life, eventual redemption, and tragic death in 2016.
The acclaim and the renewed cultural impact of La Veneno has been keenly felt in Spain.
This was made even more evident in the second episode of Drag Race España, a reality
competition show in which drag queens compete for prize money and the title of “Spain’s

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First Drag Superstar.” Airing on June 6, 2021, and presided over by a team of judges
that included Veneno creators Ambrossi and Calvo, the episode challenged its contestants
to dress up in the style of La Veneno in order to walk a catwalk in front of the judging
panel. The most faithful to the spirit of the iconic showgirl would win the challenge. Inter-
spersed through the episode, the contestants shared their thoughts on the iconic figure in
talking-head style interviews. While some spoke to the tragic legacy of La Veneno, others
remarked on her humor, her catchphrases, and her bombastic feminine figure. Later, when
asked individually to speak about what Ortiz meant to them, one of the contestants, Inti,
shared a more personal anecdote: “La verdad es que Cristina, para mí, y eso que soy de
Bolivia, es mi mayor referente, es mi santa a la que rezo. Y ella incluso era de mi barrio,
¿sabes? Entonces la veía, me sacaba fotos con ella de pequeña, entonces, de hecho – ”
(“The truth is that Cristina, for me – and I’m from Bolivia – is my biggest reference, she’s
the saint that I pray to. And she was even from my neighborhood, you know? So, I would
see her, I would take photos of her when I was younger, and in fact – ”). At this moment,
Inti begins to cry. “Me ayudó un poco a pensar mi transición. A poder no tener miedo, a
que todo es normal y natural” (“She helped me to imagine my transition. To not be afraid,
that everything is normal and natural”; “Divas”).1 This remark complements an earlier
moment in the episode, when Inti framed their perception of La Veneno in much more
carnal ways: “La Veneno era cuerpo. La Veneno era belleza. La Veneno era actitud. Era
sexo, lujuria; carne, libertad. Y lo quería demonstrar” (“La Veneno was body. La Veneno
was beauty. La Veneno was attitude. She was sex, lust, flesh, liberty. And I wanted to show
that”; “Divas”). Inti’s thoughtful appraisal of La Veneno is contrasted by a similar list that
Elisabeth Duval, writing on the first episode of the series, will acerbically offer up: “La
Veneno muere por nuestros pecados. La Veneno se destruyó a sí misma por nosotras. La
Veneno es la Madre de todas (¿quiénes somos todas?), es la magia, es el hada que se clava
en la mirada: es una imagen en repetición, un virus, un ídolo” (“La Veneno dies for our
sins. La Veneno destroyed herself for us. La Veneno is the Mother of us all [who are we?],
she’s magic, the fairy you fix your gaze upon: she is an image in repetition, a virus, an idol”;
Duval 98). The sardonic references to La Veneno’s 1996 single “Veneno pa tu piel” only
serve to emphasize Duval’s rejection of the television series’ more hagiographic elements,
a move which is sharply juxtaposed by Inti’s reaction to Ortiz as representational – if not
religious – icon for a transgender collective.
Still, La Veneno’s duality is clear from both passages. As both Duval and Inti describe
(the former in critique, the latter in praise), there has been an almost mythic recreation of
La Veneno in Spanish popular culture with a sort of carnal saintliness: An iconic figure who
could guide a young trans person like Inti through acceptance of their transition and a seduc-
tive woman made flesh, a figure of lust and sex. It is a vision of Ortiz that finds her naughtily
straddling sainthood, an idea reflected even in the title of her biography, ¡Digo! ni puta ni
santa: Las memorias de La Veneno (I Say! Neither Whore nor Saint: The Memories of La
Veneno), by Valeria Vegas. Duval’s rejection of the portrayal of La Veneno in both book
and television series decries Ortiz’s character and story as flattened, made into a redemptive
Bible story for mass consumption. I contend, however, that Veneno foregrounds the com-
plexity of Ortiz’s legacy, and that Ambrossi and Calvo (known artistically as “Los Javis”)
work to portray this throughout the series’ eight episode run. This is to say that the series
portrays La Veneno as alternately kind and cruel, cynical and naïve, and trusting and spite-
ful as she evolves from wide-eyed child to world-weary vedette. By refusing to craft a simple
hagiography of La Veneno and embracing flaw as well as virtue, Los Javis weave messiness,

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weakness, and imperfection into a narrative of personal and physical transformation; that
such transformation can be degenerative as well as restorative becomes a through line of
the show’s explorations on queerness and trans identities. As in Inti’s personal reflections
on Ortiz, the show embraces the contradictions of La Veneno in much the same way that
it embraces the fantastical stories surrounding her life. As such, and much like the mythic
personal narratives spun by La Veneno herself, the series’ narratives dip and twist through
truth and fiction without ever landing firmly in one camp or another.
It may seem disingenuous (or worse, dangerous) to write about hope on the horizon at
a time when transgender people are still suffering a disproportionate share of hate crimes
throughout the world, including in Spain. The 2023 Annual Review of the Human Rights
Situation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex People in Europe and Central
Asia by ILGA-Europe2 reported 466 hate crimes in Spain in 2021, a significant increase
from years prior, and nearly 200 cases more than the preceding year (2023 Annual Review
136). In the 10 years that ILGA-Europe has been tracking hate crimes and bias-motivated
violence towards members of the LGBT+ community, the disproportionate share of such
violence routinely falls to this community. In 2015, for example, “a mid-year police report
found that LGBT individuals had been the largest victim group for of bias-motivated crimes.
235 incidents reported in the first half of the year were linked to victims’ sexual orientation
or gender identity (43% of the total)” (2015 Annual Review 152). Though current statistics
shows one in every four hate crimes targeting LGBT people, the available data between
2023 and 2015 may not even provide the full scope of violence against the LGBT+ com-
munity in Spain, given the fact that “only 16% of hate crime victims reported hate crimes to
any organisation or the police” in 2020 (2021 Annual Review 105). That said, it has been
clear that bias-motived speech against transgender people has steadily risen. Even a short
review of such incidents provides grim confirmation: The State Federation of Lesbians, Gays,
Transsexuals and Bisexuals (FELGTB)’s helpline “reported a 266% increase in the number
of trans people calling in for help during the COVID-19 pandemic” (2021 Annual Review
105); Iratxe Otero, a trans woman originally from Colombia and residing in Tenerife, was
found murdered near a shopping center in December 2020, and her murderer now faces
12 years in prison (“Un jurado de Tenerife condena al acusado de matar a Iratxe Otero,
una mujer trans, en diciembre de 2020”); in the summer of 2021, there were nationwide
protests in Spain denouncing the murder of 24-year-old Samuel Luiz, a young gay man in
Galicia who was violently beaten to death by a group of around 13 people on July 3, 2021.
Two of his murderers were recently sentenced to three and a half years in juvenile detention
(“Los menores detenidos por el crimen de Samuel Luiz, condenados a tres años y medio de
internamiento por asesinato”). Though in June 2022, the Spanish government approved the
‘Ley trans’, which allows people over the age of 16 to change their legally registered gender
without medical intervention, there remain constant challenges to the law by parties across
Spain. Given these facts, it is hard to propose hopeful future alternatives, much less utopias.
Yet looking to the future or to hope does not negate the dismal present or the possibility
for painful catastrophe on the horizon, as José Esteban Muñoz has brilliantly argued. In the
foreword to Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann
Pellegrini further elaborate on the connections to hope and heartbreak:

That hope will be disappointed, and fail us, is not its negation but its condition of pos-
sibility. When the acute failures and dangers of the present (of “normal,” “straight,”
“white,” or “capitalist” time) threaten us, we turn to the utopian imaginary in order

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to activate queer and minoritarian ways of being in the world and being together. We
do so to survive the shattering experience of living within an impossible present, while
charting the course for a new and different future.
(Chambers-Letson et al. xiv)

For Muñoz, as for Chambers-Letson, Nyong’o, and Pellegrini, looking to a hopeful future
on the horizon offers a way to survive the pains of the present; it also stands as a confirma-
tion of one’s queer failures, or what Chambers-Letson et al. call a “failure to be normal,
unwilling or unwillable to submit to the pragmatic dictates of majoritarian being” (xiv).
Queer survival and its failure – even queer death – crack open future possibilities, worlds
in which something more can be imagined, “queer avenues for other potentials to flicker in
(and out) of being” (xiv).
The world of Veneno displays this ever-present possibility, one that sits equally amidst
loss and hope. In the opening credits of its first episode, for example, we can see this duality
when a message appears on screen:

Esta historia está basada en las memorias de Cristina Ortiz, La Veneno, y en los
relatos de algunas de las personas a quienes ella cambió la vida. Como en todas las
historias que provienen de la memoria, hay en ella algo de realidad y algo de ficción.
Y como en todas las historias de ficción, hay en ella algo que es profundamente ver-
dadero. (Ambrossi and Calvo, “La noche que cruzamos el Mississippi”)
This story is based on the memoir of Cristina Ortiz, La Veneno, and on the accounts
of the people whose lives she changed. As a story product of memory, it has a bit of
reality and fiction. And, as in all fictional stories, it has something profoundly true.

By allowing for the possibility of fiction to muddle the (relative) truth of memory, the show
places an emphasis on transformative storytelling, or the act of (re)weaving one’s past and
present to change the future; in so doing, it allows for the possibility that all three (past,
present, and future) can be reshaped. It also means that even dark events – the emotional
and physical abuse that Ortiz suffered as a child and teen, for example – can be explored
with tenderness and love and ultimately presented as a story of self-expression and the
sometimes-painful process of discovering who one is.3
The show’s early episodes establish Ortiz’s legacy, her disappearance from public life,
and her influence on younger trans women like Valeria Vegas, the journalist who wrote
La Veneno’s biography. The television series is loosely based on this biography, and in
fact chronicles its inception and publication in a frame narrative that threads together
La Veneno’s memories of her childhood and public life with her post-fame reality. As
depicted in the series, Vegas’s work to compile the biography sets up a parallel between
her self-actualization and transition and that of Ortiz, whose larger-than-life story eventu-
ally constitutes most of the episodes of the season. In Después de lo trans, Elizabeth Duval
frames Vegas’s story as one of the fundamental aspects of the series:

La primera imagen que vemos de la Veneno es la imagen de un mito maduro en el

momento mismo de su génesis: la mirada de una jovencísima Valeria Vegas (antes
de su tránsito, en el primer lustro de su vida) anticipa aquello que la Cristina entre-
vistada dentro del televisor todavía no es, en lo cual no se ha convertido, pero en lo
que se transformará como consecuencia de su contexto y del discurso propagado a

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su alrededor; una referencia para su construcción imaginaria, una posibilidad, una

estrategia del ser. (Duval 97)
The first image we see of La Veneno is that of a mature myth in the moment of
its genesis: the gaze of a very young Valeria Vegas (before her transition, in the first
stages of life) anticipates that which the Cristina being interviewed on television is not
yet, that which she has not yet become, but what she will become as a consequence of
her circumstances and the stories that proliferate around her; a reference for Valeria’s
imaginary construction, a possibility, a strategy of being.

This future possibility that Duval sees – here, the answer to a question that a young Valeria
Vegas has yet to formulate or even imagine – is in part what Muñoz would term the “warm
illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (1). Indeed, there is hardly a better
image for this futurity than the moment that Duval points out: A young Valeria on her
staircase, one hand clutching a stuffed animal and both hands holding fast to the rails of
the stairs, makeshift cell bars for a prison she doesn’t fully see around her just yet. Her face
is lit by the soft glow of the television, which shows an early interview with Ortiz; Vegas is
thus locked into the present and seeing the future, however far ahead it may be for her, and
however long she may have to travel before she arrives there. Muñoz frames this type of
moment succinctly, claiming that “queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled
from the past and used to imagine a future” (1).
Duval is right to critique the ways that Veneno weaves parallels between the stories of
Ortiz and Vegas, which may set up too many generalities about trans womanhood that can-
not hold up to the multiple lived realities of being transgender. Generalities aside, the show
is very much about the specific life of its eponymous showgirl. As with Vegas’s story, Ortiz’s
narrative begins with her childhood. Born in a small town in Andalucía in the early 70s, Ortiz
is portrayed as a cherubic but slightly mischievous child attempting to process her gender
expression and natural tendencies within the suffocating conservatism of her surroundings.4
In the context of the episode, the second of the series, Ortiz begins her story dramatically, tell-
ing the event of her birth and of a grandmother who baptizes her with what Ortiz will see as a
prophetic blessing: “Este niño está destinado a conquistar con la mirada” (“This child is des-
tined to conquer with a look”; Ambrossi and Calvo, “Un viaje en el tiempo”). After this brief
sequence, the title screen appears with the name “Veneno” appearing amidst flashes of light
and thundering sounds, a dark red burst against a blood-red background. This transition,
which offers a dramatic jump between Ortiz’s portentous birth and the series’ title screen,
lends a mythic air to the origins of La Veneno. The episode then launches into Ortiz’s playful,
light description of her family and the town in which she was born. The camera follows each
family member as Cristina names them, eventually landing on an empty space next to the
mother, a white wall with a crack laced through it: “Y yo (“And me”), José Antonio Ortiz
Rodríguez.” Ortiz is thus framed both as a felt absence and as a crack in the family, some-
thing missing and defective. Though this representation seems somewhat at odds with her
earlier description of her birth as magical and revelatory, it demonstrates the profound dis-
connect she had with this part of her past, and the pain that still surrounds these memories.5
In this episode, the past narration is done in Joselito’s voice, though it is still very much
Cristina’s story. The younger Ortiz describes her daily life and the things she likes, revealing
slowly the cracks in the family’s foundation, which mostly stem from her mother’s relation-
ships with her children. Ortiz paints a picture of losing her mother’s love – or the revelation
that it was only ever conditional – as a gradual realization of the precariousness of trusting

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in others. She also shows telltale signs of a mischievousness that would later solidify into
something a little darker, perhaps, or at least more caustic and troublesome for her public
and private life. In the story of her first communion, for example, the audience sees Ortiz
gape excitedly over the gowns that the altar boys wear. Later, she dresses for her communion
with her childhood friend Manolito, depicted through a series of jump cuts, fragmented into
extreme close ups of their hands, belts, and robes. As they cinch themselves into their outfits,
Ortiz muses to her friend whether the gown is too long for her taste. The camera cuts to
Manolito throwing open the doors to the church wide open, and Ortiz comes into view, back-
lit by the sunny day; she poses for dramatic effect, hands on her hip, and the audience sees
that she has cut the gown into a mini skirt. In a reverse shot, the packed crowd in the church
turns around to see her, aghast. Ortiz struts down the aisle of the church proudly, with a small
smirk on her face as she walks by her mother, who offers a dark expression in return. Upon
taking her first communion, Ortiz looks directly at the church audience, her mother, and the
camera itself before sticking her tongue out with pleasure and offering a knowing wink. She
stands and faces the audience, and in a moment of elated surprise, peacock feathers magically
fan out from behind her. The audience audibly gasps again, and she smiles in excitement.
Magical storytelling included, this scene sets up the hallmark emotions of Cristina’s life. That
is, there are moments of glory as she willfully breaks normative, oppressive rules, but there are
deeply painful abuses that she suffers as both cause and effect of her seeking out a space in the
world. The transformative potential that she summons is thus laced with tragedy; whether in
the deeply damaging effects that her recollections have on her throughout Veneno’s season or
in the ways that even her closest relationships are marked by her often poisonous, uncontrolled
anger, her persona is as damaged and damaging as it is luminous and inspirational. In this wild
toggling between the two states, Ambrossi and Calvo seem to propose a model of representa-
tion that allows trans women to be more than the sum of their (literal) parts.
Duval is right to question this model, wondering “¿Cuál es la relación que establece el vín-
culo entre las mujeres trans o las personas trans propuesto por la serie, elaborado a través de
un nosotras? ¿Se trata de una genuina relación de sororidad? ¿De qué tipo son esos lazos?”
(“What is the relationship proposed by the link between trans women or trans people in this
show, one that is elaborated through an ‘us’? Is this about a genuine relationship of sister-
hood? What kinds of links are these?”; Duval 105). Seeing the model of the show as poten-
tially limiting, Duval’s critique asks whether there truly is a transgender sisterhood that can
be successfully interpellated here, given the vast differences this would imply – race, ethnicity,
class, and age, to name only a few of these. She follows this by stating more emphatically that

No puede enunciarse que, vengamos de donde vengamos, de alguna manera, todas

somos la misma. No puede enunciarse sin estar ocultando una violencia inaudita:
compartiremos nuestra incapacidad gestante, compartiremos algunas experiencias en
la infancia (y solo quizá), compartiremos miedos, imaginarios, pero no podremos ser
la misma. (Duval 106)
It cannot be said that wherever we come from we’re in some way all the same. It
cannot be said without hiding a monstrous violence: we may all share our barrenness,
we may share some childhood experiences (and only maybe), we may share fears and
imaginaries, but we cannot be the same.

But the show’s establishment of trans sorority is not about envisioning a trans singularity.
Despite the recurrent parallels between Ortiz and Vegas, the series goes to great lengths

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to show that they are not the same and that, even when they understand each other, there
are chasms between them. It is the same with all of Veneno’s trans characters, who bicker,
argue, love, and care, who sometimes coalesce into structures that resemble families but
who just as quickly fall out of them, lose contact, and disappear from each other’s lives.
In his book After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life, Joshua Chambers-Letson
thinks through some of these questions, teasing out the nuances of understanding the
collective minoritarian “we” as it is enunciated through performance. This “we,” for
Chambers-Letson, is composed of the “minor classes (the proletariat, people of color, indig-
enous people, queers, women, trans people)” (17) and is enmeshed into a collective against
the dominance of majority culture. But the collective may not look anything like the field of
sameness that Duval finds in Veneno; rather, as Chambers-Letson envisions it,

We don’t really have a responsibility to or relationship with each other. If anything,

we’re just floating here. But the looseness of that metaphor might actually be a way to
describe minoritarian affinity: we, who float together in the wake of any host of his-
torical catastrophes, subject to the tides and forces of history and power. Not so much
a blending or melting, we are strewn detritus hovering at the surface, trying not to be
dragged under, while caught up in precarious, awkward, and queer entanglements,
rich with friction as we bump up against and crush into each other.
(185)

Chambers-Letson captures the rich possibility inherent to such “minoritarian affinity,” as

he calls it; that is, not a group that has been flattened into sameness, but one whose internal
frictions and precarity loops it together in ways that are both compelling and crushing.
It should be clear that I see this type of trans entanglement throughout Veneno. In the
earlier scene of her first communion, Ortiz’s childhood friend Manolito is a kindred spirit
of many sorts: queer, dramatic, and both protective of Ortiz and in need of her protective
embrace. In later years, when the two are young teens, Manolito suffers a homophobic
attack and Ortiz comes to his aid, an event that becomes the catalyst of her decision to leave
her hometown, Adra; much later, in a televised return to the village (the first since her tran-
sition), she goes to meet Manolito. His life has played out as her inverse, a mirror image of
what she could have been: revealing a deformed face, he explains that he attempted to tran-
sition but was unable to afford professional surgeries or hormones and was subsequently
left badly scarred. The two catch up, and Ortiz describes her life, her boyfriend, and her
new apartment in Madrid, and encourages Manolito to come visit her. “¿Pero qué voy a
hacer yo en Madrid?” (“But what would I do in Madrid?”) he chides her, pointing to his
face, “¿Así voy a ir yo a Madrid? No, yo no tengo nada más que hacer. Yo me voy a quedar
aquí. Ya está.” (“Go to Madrid like this? No, I don’t have anything else left to do. I’m going
to stay here. And that’s it”; Ambrossi and Calvo, “Cristina a través del espejo”). The silence
stretches for a few brief moments before Cristina changes the subject. As they’re leaving, an
emotional Ortiz says that they’ll see each other soon, to which Manolito replies with a nod
and a small smile: “Cada noche, en la tele” (“Every night, on TV”).
It is a sad farewell and in many ways not the triumphant return to her hometown that
she had imagined. It is also an interesting choice to portray her relationship with Manolito
in this light, revealing the kindness and deep connection they still feel for each other even
as Cristina is categorically unable to fully revive what once was between them. Even her
attempts to play pretend fall flat – they’re too different, and their bond has been fractured

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and made brittle by the gulf of their lived experiences. Through this sequence, the show
undoes the notion of trans sameness; that is, it has equated some of their experiences, like
their childhood queerness, the brutal phobias of others, or the experience of transitioning,
all of which dissipate under the difference that Cristina represents as an attractive, healthy,
famous, and wealthy trans woman. Of course, some of those characteristics are at once
superficial and transitory, a fact that the show will pointedly drive home throughout its
series arc. But in this sequence, and through their conversation, Manolito and Cristina dem-
onstrate a disjointed sort of sorority, one equally marked by his dispirited resignation and
clear envy as it is by her naïve narcissism. They are connected, yes, but those connections
are loose and ill fitting, an entanglement of shared memories and painfully dissimilar expe-
riences of their sex and gender. If there is hope to be found on the horizon for Manolito, it
seems to be in the fact that Cristina was able to transition, to find fame and social accept-
ance, and to live comfortably and happily. This hope does not make their entanglement any
less frictional, but it does demonstrate a way of thriving through and within the pain of the
present. Manolito’s last words to Cristina envision a brutal sort of togetherness, one which
leaves him in the shadows while she steps into the spotlight.
Perhaps the model of affinity through entanglement is not very appealing, requiring that
one pin too much on the pain of the past and present while looking to a future that may never
come. Or, as Chambers-Letson, Nyong’o, and Pellegrini phrase it: “How are we to have hope
while living simultaneously in the before and after of queer heartbreak?” (xii). In answer, they
refer to Eve Sedgwick’s model of reparative reading, which makes it possible “to entertain
such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past . . .
could have happened differently from the way it actually did” (cited in Chambers-Letson et al.
xi). For the authors, this way of reimagining the past allows us to “cast a negative or critical
picture of the insufficiencies of the present, but also . . . [to] undertake the work of hoping
for, rehearsing, dreaming, and charting new paths toward different and queerer futures” (xi).
The trajectory of Veneno’s eight-episode series arc clearly points to the “insufficiencies of
the present,” mostly in the ways that it underlines the unceasing stream of violence against
trans women. The violence may be shaped like a person (a family member, loved one, or
stranger), or it may emerge out of the many institutional and social structures that refuse to
acknowledge one’s needs or one’s existence. That violence is brutal and omnipresent. In the
face of this, Veneno sees affinities, entanglements, and hope emerge out of something that
looks like community and which, in the show, is sometimes renamed as family. Of course,
this is not entirely or always the world in which we live; as such, the entirety of the series is
an act of dreaming, and of fantasy – one that is seen from behind the bars of the real world,
like young Valeria seeing Cristina on television for the first time, or like Manolito, as he
admires from afar the woman he could never become.
The final episode deals with Ortiz’s death, which occurred on November 9, 2016, as the
result of a fall while at home. As the characters attempt to process their grief at her sud-
den passing, they are also forced to work through their often-thorny relationships with La
Veneno. In a particularly emotive moment, Ortiz’s close friend Paca la Piraña, who plays
herself in the series, calls up Valeria Vegas, distraught. Claiming that Ortiz’s death wouldn’t
have happened if they had still been close, Paca cries and begs Valeria for a favor: That if
Valeria ever writes anything more or is interviewed on Cristina, she rewrite the past so that
Paca and Cristina had made up by the end and that Paca had been able to say goodbye to
her friend. “Pero Paca, ¿si tu querías que el libro fuera verdad, que no fuera una fantasía?”
(“But Paca, didn’t you want the book to be true, and not a fantasy?”) Valeria responds

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quietly, crying. Through her sobs, Paca retorts: “¿Pero tú qué mundo quieres vivir, en el
mundo de fantasía de ella o en el mundo real que tenemos ahora nosotros?” (“But what
world do you want to live in – her fantasy world or the real world that we have here?”) She
repeats the question to Valeria, insistent: “¿Qué mundo quieres vivir tú? Dímelo” (“What
world do you want to live in? Tell me”; (“Los tres entierros de Cristina Ortiz”).
The question hangs in the air throughout the episode as Cristina’s effects are sold without
fanfare and as the remainder of the Ortiz clan bickers over what to do with her body. In a
grim reminder of the loss of autonomy over memory and image in death, each of the Ortiz
siblings attempt to process their sister’s death in differing and complicated ways: her older
sister offers rampant (but persistent) speculations over Cristina’s death as murder,6 while oth-
ers refer to her by her deadname or wrong sex, and others make claims to her possessions.
There is no doubt that the “real world” is not a place one would choose to live in, or at least
not this version of it. In response, the show sets about reimagining it. In one of the episode’s
final sequences, Valeria stands alone in La Veneno’s empty apartment when a warmly lit vision
of Ortiz appears. She asks Valeria to tell her about the funeral and, leaning into her role as
conduit for Ortiz’s stories once more, Valeria invents a beautifully false narrative: La Veneno’s
ashes are spread in the place her self-discovery truly began, in Madrid’s Parque del Oeste, at
an event attended by what amounts to nearly the entire cast of the entire series – including her
family members, the sex workers at the Parque del Oeste, people from Cristina’s youth, and
even some of the real-life versions of the characters. In a comedic appearance, Paca la Piraña
makes a last-minute arrival, abandoning her cleaning job with joy and running to celebrate her
friend one last time. In many ways, it is a kinder narrative than what the show portrays just
afterwards, which is a gloomy and unceremonious spreading of Cristina’s ashes by her brother
in the Parque del Oeste and the return of the rest of her ashes to her family home in Adra.
In the end, the show offers the fantasy of fulfillment to Paca the character as well as Paca
la Piraña herself; that is, it recreates the funeral-that-never-was in an act of care and fantasy,
a rewriting of the bleak past that is nevertheless acknowledged in all its pain and frustrating
truth. Veneno thus takes on the work of critiquing the insufficiencies of the present while
actively demonstrating what a better future could look like – a fantasy of unity, entangle-
ment, care, and kindness, even in and through pain. By framing itself through the genera-
tional trauma of the LGBTQ community, and above all that of trans women, the show does
not shy away from harm, messiness, or degeneracy – either wielded against or emerging
from within these communities themselves – and instead sees it all as bundled, an insufficient
present that nevertheless drives us onward to a horizon we cannot yet see, only imagine.

Notes
1 All translations are my own.
2 ILGA-Europe is the European region of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Inter-
sex Association. Established in 1996, the three core pillars of its work are advocacy for human
rights and equality for LGBTI people throughout Europe, strategic litigation in European courts to
advance the rights of LGBTI people, and the reinforcement of the LGBTI movement in Europe and
Central Asia. For more information, see the organization’s website at www.ilga-europe.org.
3 Given the purposeful weaving of fiction and fact, this chapter treats Veneno on its own merits and
as a work of fiction. There are several scenes that draw directly on reality, including through some
of the show’s dialogue, which is sometimes repeated verbatim; there are just as many metafictional
elements, moments that break the fourth wall, and unverifiable accounts. As such, and while this
chapter makes some reference to the real-world counterparts or factual stories behind the show, the
focus is firmly on the act of world-building that Ambrossi and Calvo offer through the series.

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4 A brief note on pronouns and (dead)names: Both the show and Ortiz recognize and reference her
childhood name of “Joselito,” often using “he/him” pronouns to refer to her childhood in a way
that sees Joselito as separate from Cristina. This act is at once a coping mechanism for Ortiz, as we
see in the series, and a more pat storytelling device for the show. Respecting Ortiz as herself, I main-
tain the use of “she/her” pronouns throughout the article, including during this period of her life.
5 This is not unlike the experiences of many trans people, who often discuss the pain of seeing images
of themselves pre-transition or who describe the incomplete nature of their lives before being able to
fully live as themselves. A vivid example of this pain can be found in the Veneno “Question & Answer
Roundtable” hosted by Frameline, in which two of the actresses (Jedet and Lola Rodríguez) discuss
the emotionally difficult experience of acting as men in pre-transition roles. Jedet briefly halted her
transition to film her scenes as adult Joselito, and Rodríguez was made up and digitally altered into
a pre-transition version of her character. For the full roundtable, see “Veneno – Q&A – Frameline”.
6 Some of these speculations are documented in the show and are true to the real-life theories and
fears that have continued to the present day. When Ortiz died, Vegas went on record as to publicly
speculate whether her death was a result of domestic violence; Ortiz’s family still claims foul play.
See “La Fiscalía se opone a reabrir la causa por la muerte de La Veneno” for more.

Works Cited
Ambrossi, Javier, and Javier Calvo. “Cristina a Través Del Espejo.” Veneno, Episode 5, Atresplayer,
4 Oct. 2020.
Ambrossi, Javier, and Javier Calvo. “La Noche Que Cruzamos El Mississippi.” Veneno, Episode 1,
Atresplayer, 29 Mar. 2020.
Ambrossi, Javier, and Javier Calvo. “Los Tres Entierros de Cristina Ortiz.” Veneno, Episode 8, Atre-
splayer, 25 Oct. 2020.
Ambrossi, Javier, and Javier Calvo. “Un Viaje En El Tiempo.” Veneno, Episode 2, Atresplayer,
28 Jun. 2020.
Chambers-Letson, Joshua, Ann Pellegrini, and Tavia Nyong’o. “Foreword: Before and After.” Cruis-
ing Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, edited by José Esteban Muñoz. 10th Anniver-
sary ed., New York UP, 2019, pp. ix–xvi.
Chambers-Letson, Joshua Takano. After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life. New York
UP, 2018.
“Divas.” Drag Race España, Episode 2, Atresplayer, 6 Jun. 2021.
Duval, Elizabeth. Después de lo trans: sexo y género entre la izquierda y lo identitario. Primera
edición, La Caja Books, 2021.
ILGA-Europe. Annual Review of the Human Rights Situation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and
Intersex People in Europe 2015, May 2015. https://ilga-europe.org/annualreview/2015.
ILGA-Europe. Annual Review of the Human Rights Situation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and
Intersex People in Europe 2021, Feb. 2021. https://ilga-europe.org/annualreview/2021.
ILGA-Europe. Annual Review of the Human Rights Situation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Trans and Intersex People in Europe 2023, Feb. 2023. https://www.ilga-europe.org/report/
annual-review-2023/.
“La Fiscalía se opone a reabrir la causa por la muerte de La Veneno.” El País, 4 Feb. 2021. https://
elpais.com/gente/2021-02-04/la-fiscalia-se-opone-a-reabrir-la-causa-por-la-muerte-de-la-veneno.
html. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.
“Los menores detenidos por el crimen de Samuel Luiz, condenados a tres años y medio de
internamiento por asesinato.” elDiario.es, 13 Apr. 2022. https://www.eldiario.es/galicia/
menores-detenidos-crimen-samuel-luiz-condenados-tres-anos-medio-internamiento-asesinato_
1_8913662.html. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. 10th Anniversary ed.,
New York UP, 2019.
“Un jurado de Tenerife condena al acusado de matar a Iratxe Otero, una mujer trans, en diciembre
de 2020.” dosmanzanas – La web de noticias LGTB. https://www.dosmanzanas.com/2022/05/un-
jurado-de-tenerife-condena-al-acusado-de-matar-a-iratxe-otero-una-mujer-trans-en-diciembre-
de-2020.html. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.
“Veneno – Q&A – Frameline.” Frameline, 2020. https://youtu.be/-Y5njI5AVs8.

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 31
MOTIONLESS
Disability and Snow White in Narratives
of the Crisis

Emily DiFilippo

The figure of Snow White was first conjured in medieval Europe, through the spoken words
of folk tales. The Snow White legend has inspired a multitude of variations over the cen-
turies, two of the most internationally recognizable versions being the text of the Brothers
Grimm, published in 1812, and Walt Disney’s 1937 film, released in the wake of the Great
Depression (another time of political and economic upheaval). This chapter considers two
Spanish Snow White iterations in the context of the economic crisis that followed the 2008
burst of the U.S. housing bubble, a disruption that shook the global financial system to its
foundations. That the tale should appeal in a time of crisis is not surprising, considering
Snow White as an excluded figure. She is traditionally an unwanted person, lacking kin-
ship ties, sent away into the liminal space of the forest, shunned. Specifically, Snow White
is an excluded woman, thus making her story a creative means of exploring issues of gen-
dered oppression. In 2007, Spanish author Belén Gopegui published her novel El padre
de Blancanieves (The Father of Snow White),1 which draws upon the Snow White tale to
highlight issues of social inequality facing immigrants and the female caregivers of people
with disabilities. In 2012, nearing the height of the Great Recession, Pablo Berger’s film
Blancanieves (Snow White) was released in Spain. This black and white adaptation is set in
the age of silent film and emulates it stylistically, casting Snow White as the daughter of a
flamenco dancer and a bullfighter, growing up in 1920s Andalucía. It is seldom remarked
that Snow White is a story about disability, of a young woman deprived of movement and
speech as a result of the paralysis brought on by the poison her evil stepmother administers.
In these two Spanish, crisis-era imaginings of Snow White, it is non-normative embodiment
that leads to exclusion, inviting an examination of ideologies that bar certain bodies from
full participation in the life of the nation.
While the recent Great Recession was framed as an exceptional moment of widespread
hardship, to inhabit the capitalist economy is, in fact, to live in constant peril of crisis and
disenfranchisement. The global economic crisis shifted Spain from being a welfare state
whose public health system was among the best in the world to a country where, amid ubiq-
uitous unemployment, more and more dependents were denied vital public assistance. By
the early 21st century, services intended to be publicly funded and democratically managed
had become increasingly privatized. These neoliberal trends brought policy that favored

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 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

limited government regulation of commerce and finance, thus promoting “independence”

as the ideal state of achieved human progress. In the years following 2008, Spanish rates
of unemployment soared, reaching their peak at 26% in 2013, as reported by the Organi-
zation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). By 2018, unemployment
dropped to 16.6% and the OECD declared that Spain had made a successful economic
recovery. Nonetheless, the ideologies that caused the crisis in the first place had not – and
have not – by any means been eradicated.
The occasion of questioning the neoliberal ideologies of competition and privatization
that have led to widescale precarity becomes an opportune moment to examine the inter-
twined ideologies that determine the able or disabled body under this very system. For
example, the model citizen is understood as one who lives independently, freeing the state
from the burden of ensuring their wellbeing. Independence represents an ideal condition,
and is assumed to be the achievement of human progress. Robert McRuer has emphasized
the necessity of thinking critically about the terms “independence” and “inclusion,” which
are often posited as self-evident solutions for people who have disabilities (6). “Independ-
ence,” that is, the ability to exist self-sufficiently, without the aid of others, is understood
as necessary for “inclusion,” or the possibility of participating fully in society and living
free from discrimination (McRuer 8). McRuer, however, calls into question the assumption
that if people with disabilities can live independently, they will enjoy a greater quality of
life. For some individuals, independence and survival (or even comfort and happiness) are
incompatible. Furthermore, the goal of “inclusion” must also be considered critically, since
the societal participation desired by any individual may vary in form and extent.
The experience of an economy suddenly shattered presents a valuable opportunity to
reassess these “common sense” ideologies and, through literary and filmic production, to
imagine alternative ways of being and being in community. As Luis Moreno-Caballud pro-
posed in 2012: “una apreciación justa de la situación actual debe tener en cuenta . . . un
generalizado cuestionamiento de las narrativas de sentido hegemónicas, que han entrado
también en una profunda crisis” (“a fair assesment of the current situation should take
into account . . . a generalized questioning of hegemonic, common-sense narratives, which
have themselves entered into a state of profound crisis” (536). A commonly known fairy
tale such as Snow White constitutes a decidedly useful point of departure for reimagining
the familiar world. Tracey Mollet explains that Disney’s 1937 Snow White was especially
appealing to the audiences of the Great Depression, since it provided an entertaining escape
from reality while reinforcing the values of the American Dream with a “rags to riches”
happy ending and a heroine who maintained hope in the face of adversity (113–14). In
other words, Disney’s Snow White promises that the individual’s hard work and worthy
character will lead to material fortune and delivery from precarity. In contrast, Dean All-
britton observes that Spanish narratives of the Great Recession tend to present vulnerabil-
ity and precarity as a collective experience, mitigated by recourse to communal support
(103–4). Indeed, this orientation toward precarity is a salient feature of each of the Snow
White iterations discussed in this chapter.
Also key to this analysis are the ideologies of gender and sexuality that govern the ideal,
independent and productive citizen. The requirements of reproductive heterosexuality
inform the construction of the medically approved, able body and thus the desired citizen
capable of work and full participation in society according to traditional gender roles. In
dominant, heteronormative culture, gender norms are closely tied to the body’s appear-
ance and ability: masculinity is conflated with robust able-bodiedness and, while public

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participation in the workforce is a traditional requirement of men, women’s private and

unremunerated caregiving continues to undergird the economy.
In studying these works, it is important to ask how diversely abled bodies are situated
within ideas of belonging to the nation. The nation state is, as Julie Minich establishes, the
primary source from which human rights are dispensed (16). The nation exists also as a
cultural imaginary that is represented in artistic expressions such as literary and filmic texts.
According to Minich, disability is especially appropriate for the consideration of these
notions because, traditionally, in many cultures and by many political regimes, “the ideal of
the healthy, whole body” is employed “as a paradigm for the nation or the citizen” (3). This
has, in fact, historically been the case for Spain, as Luisa Elena Delgado explains: “A par-
tir del siglo XIX, la nación normal se metaforiza como un cuerpo sano, no marcado por
ninguna desviación física ni mental y capaz de reproducirse en otros cuerpos sanos: es una
metáfora poderosa, peligrosa y de muy largo alcance” (“Since the 19th century, the healthy
body is presented as a metaphor for the nation, unmarked by physical or mental difference
and capable of reproducing other sound bodies: A powerful, dangerous and wide-reaching
metaphor”; 269). The present chapter is focused upon those who are excluded from tradi-
tional, reductive representations of “Spanishness”: Subjects who are present within Spain’s
legal and geographic space, but whose lives remain outside the limits of cultural belonging.
Both renditions of the Snow White story studied here weave marginalized figures into
a familiar folk tale, shifting expectations of prototypical characters and accustomed forms
of community. “Ahora soy responsabilidad suya” (“I am your responsibility now”) are
the words spoken by a Latin American immigrant to a white, middle-class Spaniard in
Gopegui’s novel, thus requiring the interlocutor to see beyond the bonds of citizenship
(26). The present chapter begins with an analysis of this work, which presents both the
immigrant and the person with disability as bound with all Spanish citizens in a web of
interdependence. It continues with a study of Berger’s film, Blancanieves, which populates
a traditional “españolada” with such unexpected figures as a wheelchair-bound bullfighter,
his bullfighting daughter and a troupe of bullfighting little people.
In her novel, Gopegui challenges readers to interrogate their own social reality by high-
lighting the misogyny of classic Snow White narratives. In most versions, the villain is the evil
stepmother, but Gopegui’s narrative instead calls attention to the absence of Snow White’s
father, emphasizing his role in the tragedy that befalls his daughter. Luis Martín-Cabrera
points out that, since the early 1990s, Gopegui has been known for using the written word
as an activist tool for cultural critique and for the promotion of real-world social change
(119). El padre de Blancanieves centers on the story of an Ecuadorian immigrant’s relation-
ship to a middle-class, white Spanish family and also includes significant anecdotes about a
young man, Nicolás, who has cerebral palsy. Through its portrayal of marginalized people,
this novel calls upon all individuals to recognize their common responsibility toward more
vulnerable members of society.
The novel’s primary narrative concerns Manuela and Enrique, a middle-class couple
living in Madrid. Manuela inadvertently causes a supermarket delivery man, an immigrant
from Ecuador, to lose his job when she places a complaint about an order arriving late.
The next day, the delivery man, known initially only as “el ecuatoriano” (“the Ecuadorian
man”) appears at Manuela’s home and demands that she take responsibility for his well-
being: “ ‘Ahora soy responsabilidad suya,’ dijo el ecuatoriano. . . . Consiga que me read-
mitan” (‘I am your responsibility now,’ said the Ecuadorian man. . . . ‘Make them re-hire
me’ ”; Gopegui 26). This is the only time in the novel that the “ecuatoriano” (whose name

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is Carlos Javier) speaks. His words “I am your responsibility now” constitute the narra-
tive’s thematic cornerstone.
This theme of interdependence is further emphasized by the story of Nicolás, narrated by
his brother Goyo, who is a member of the activist group to which Manuela and Enrique’s
daughter also belongs. Goyo explains that his brother Nicolás, who has cerebral palsy, is
nonverbal and highly dependent upon his mother for basic care. Eschewing a victimization
narrative, Goyo does not primarily speak of his brother’s cognitive difference as a tragedy.
He describes their relationship as loving and expresses grief and a sense of loss in response
to Nicolás’ recent death. He insists that his brother was “normal”: “Nunca se me ocurrió
pensar que Nicolás no era normal. Yo había crecido viendo a Nicolás” (“It never occurred
to me to think that Nicolás wasn’t normal. I had grown up seeing Nicolás”; Gopegui 34).
To describe someone with a severe disability as “normal” challenges readers to question the
concept of normalcy and the way it functions to assign value to bodies and lives.
Goyo acknowledges that, while his brother was indeed a normal human being, the care
of someone so dependent does not fit into what most would consider a normal life: “Nicolás
era normal, lo que no era normal era la vida de mi madre porque seguía dándole la papilla
tres veces al día a un niño de seis años, de diez, de dieciocho. Porque seguía cambiándole
los pañales” (“Nicolás was normal, what wasn’t normal was my mother’s life because she
was still feeding baby food to a six-year-old child three times a day, then to a ten-year-old,
and then an 18-year-old. Because she was still changing his diapers”; Gopegui 34–5). It is
notable that Goyo specifically highlights the gendered division of caretaking labor and its
impact on his mother’s struggles, observing that his and his father’s lives remained “fairly
normal,” implying that the male family members did not partake in Nicolás’ care (Gopegui
35). Feminist scholar Eva Feder Kittay demonstrates that post-industrial society is struc-
tured so that “professional” work is visible, public, and remunerated, but dependency work
remains private, invisible, often unpaid, and largely associated with women (40). For this
reason, it is not only dependents but also their (often female) caretakers who become disen-
franchised and are framed as superfluous to society (Kittay 77). Because the responsibility
of caretaking was relegated exclusively to Nicolás’s mother, she herself came to be margin-
alized, devoting her existence to full-time caregiving, a labor for which she was not materi-
ally compensated. As Kittay reminds us, “as long as the bounds of justice are drawn within
reciprocal relations among free and equal persons, dependents will continue to remain
disenfranchised, and dependency workers . . . will continue to share varying degrees of the
dependents’ disenfranchisement” (77). This scholar emphasizes that dependency is a fact
of normal human life and that it is actually the fantasy of universal independence that is
unrealistic and exceptional.
It is important to note that, while the novel calls for a recognition of the common
humanity of the Spanish citizen and the immigrant as well as of the able-bodied individual
and the person with a disability, both the immigrant and disabled perspectives are absent.
Gopegui’s narrative itself does not pretend to incorporate Carlos Javier’s perspective or
voice; the only moment in which he speaks is in the aforementioned episode when he con-
fronts Manuela. Nicolás, who was nonverbal, is deceased at the time the action takes place,
so his story is necessarily mediated by the words of his brother. Though the format of the
novel shifts between various first-person accounts, bits of Manuela’s journal, discourses
directed between characters, and letters from a “collective,” Carlos Javier’s and Nicolás’s
perspectives are absent. This narrative choice suggests that the work is directed toward an
able-bodied and middle-class audience. Keeping in mind Gopegui’s activist project, this

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makes sense, considering that it is the able-bodied, bourgeois subject who holds hegem-
onic power in contemporary society, and who is therefore the most urgent recipient of
the work’s message. Martín-Cabrera argues that the orientation of the narrative serves
to invite the middle-class to more seriously question the status quo of their lives and its
potential impact on more marginalized members of society (127). Furthermore, the work
is polyphonic, employing a variety of interwoven narratives and narrators, including the
aforementioned collective voice. Luis (Iñaki) Prádanos uses the term “systemic narrative”
to describe this unique form: “These narratives are shaped by systemic selves that co-form
and co-inform the diegesis by interacting and observing each other. They can neither be
fashioned in an isolated way nor in a universal manner, but rather in a relational construc-
tion” (209). In this sense, the multiplicity of voices in the work serves to emphasize its mes-
sage of interdependence, demonstrating that the challenges and tragedies experienced by
any individual character are not a result of their particular circumstances, but instead are
evidence of systemic injustice that affects all members of society.
While Gopegui’s narrative bears little resemblance to the Snow White legend, the tale is
mobilized as a referent, both in the title and through the absent father figure, which asks
readers to think critically about social responsibility. It is the collective voice that provides
an explicit reflection upon the role of Snow White’s father: “El padre de Blancanieves vive
con la madrastra pero nadie lo nombra, nadie habla de él. La madrastra maquina con-
tra Blancanieves, y el padre ¿por qué calla?, ¿por qué no actúa? Con todo, el padre nos
delata . . . el padre aguarda en el castillo, mudo” (“Snow White’s father lives with her step-
mother but no one speaks of him. The stepmother plots against Snow White, and her father,
why does he keep silent? why doesn’t he do anything? With all this, the father betrays us . . .
the father awaits in the castle, silent”; Gopegui 54–55). This interpretation of the tale ques-
tions the usual focus on the stepmother, placing emphasis instead upon the father figure,
laying blame upon Snow White’s male parent for his failure to engage patriarchal privilege
to protect his daughter. Martín-Cabrera observes that the figure of the “father of Snow
White” is easily aligned with the middle-class as passive witnesses of violence, injustice and
oppression, who chose to tolerate these ills in exchange for protection of their own private
property and interests (127–28). According to this scholar’s interpretation, the father of
Snow White abstains from intervening to save her in order not to disturb his “bubble” of
middle-class normalcy. The middle-class bubble is, in fact, a fantasy whose fragility was
revealed by the effects of the global economic crisis, which burst the bubble and drew the
middle-class into its vortex. In this sense, Gopegui’s novel is indeed “almost prophetic,” as
Moreno-Caballud observes (539).
Berger’s film, Blancanieves, also portrays Snow White’s absent father; although his lack
of involvement could be partly justified by his disability. Following an injury in the bullring,
Snow White’s father is paralyzed from the neck down and confined to a wheelchair.
For this filmic Snow White and her father, it is specifically the enjoyment of bullfighting
and flamenco that become inaccessible: Two stereotypically “Spanish” cultural expressions
that happen to rely heavily on able-bodiedness. Movement, as evoked in the film’s visual
language and soundtrack, comes to symbolize wellbeing and happiness, whereas immobility
signals impairment and tragedy. Able-bodiedness is additionally equated with Spanishness,
through its association with stereotypical, gendered symbolism as exemplified by the bull-
fighter, whereas disability signifies both social isolation and exclusion from the nation itself.
While Berger’s choice to locate the Snow White story in Seville, Spain is a departure
from other versions, the picturesque setting of Andalucía can surely be read as a kind

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of mythic locale, a reductive synecdoche for Spain that has long been marketed abroad.
William Washabaugh traces the history of Andalucía as a symbol of Spain back to the
late 18th century (272). This cultural phenomenon is exemplified by Prosper Mérimée’s
1845 story “Carmen,” which was made into the world-famous opera by Georges Bizet
in 1875 (Washabaugh 272). Washabaugh and others have highlighted the intertextual-
ity of Berger’s film with Carmen, whose “tragic torero flamenco andaluza” (“bullfight-
ing, flamenco-dancing Andalusian) heroine is consumed worldwide as a symbol of Spanish
femininity (274). Berger’s Snow White is, in fact, named “Carmencita.” The choice to style
this cinematic world according to a stereotypical vision of Spain is particularly interesting
considering that the director is Basque, hailing from Bilbao. Indeed, multicultural imagina-
tions contributed to the Blancanieves project, including a Catalan production company
(Arcadia Motion Pictures) and soundtrack developed in collaboration with a Catalan fla-
menco artist, Juan Gómez “Chicuelo,” featuring vocals performed by Catalan singer Silvia
Peréz Cruz (Cox 323). Thomas Deveny believes that Berger’s choice to set his Snow White
film in Andalucía, to cultivate an aesthetic based upon “the most common (albeit stereo-
typical and controversial) cultural markers of Spanish identity” is a result of the time the
director spent studying film at New York University and living for nine years in the United
States (346). Deveny speculates that this experience motivated the director to create a film
projected to have “transnational appeal,” presenting a Snow White who inhabits a kind of
exportable fantasy of Spanishness for external consumption (346).
It is important to remember that, beyond constituting a distinctive symbol of “national”
Spanish culture, both bullfighting and flamenco require a rigorous level of physical abil-
ity and the capacity to move the body in controlled and skilled ways. In fact, one rea-
son Berger makes bullfighting central to his film is the type of motion it brings to the
screen: “siempre he pensado que los toros son muy cinematográficos. Tienen movimiento
y conflicto. Ceremonia narrativa” (“I have always thought bullfighting was very cinemato-
graphic. It involves movement and conflict. Narrative ceremony”; qtd. in Belinchón). The
heroic, almost superhuman skill needed by the successful bullfighter is emphasized by the
text frame that announces Villalta’s fight with the words: “Six bulls and one single mata-
dor, Antonio Villalta” (Blancanieves). It is not surprising that a body endowed with such
exceptional strength and skill is proudly set forth in popular and touristic imagery to stand
in for the Spanish nation. Minich explains that cultural representations generally “foment
a preference for healthy, whole bodies over diseased or disabled bodies,” and decidedly so
when they are made to function as symbols of wider communities or nations (38).
The virile able-bodiedness of the bullfighter is also a key element of idealized masculin-
ity. Rafael Núñez Florencio describes the art of bullfighting in terms of seduction, compar-
ing the torero with the figure of Don Juan (449). Don Juan is, of course, another archetype
of Spanish masculine sexuality; the association of the bullfighter with the “burlador de
Sevilla” (“the libertine of Seville”) joins the notion of able-bodiedness with that of sexual
norms. In Berger’s film, mobility is simultaneously connected to the fulfillment of hetero-
sexual social roles and to national belonging; paralysis, on the contrary, ultimately results
in isolation from both. The first minutes of the film see Villalta gored in the ring, an injury
that transcends his physical body, at the same time attacking his performance of mascu-
linity. Aptly named “Lucifer,” the bull who attacks him represents the embodiment of
evil. It is this malevolence that brings Villalta paralysis and takes from him his mobility
and his status as a bullfighter. The accident occurs after a fatal mistake: A camera flash
distracts Villalta, which leads to him being gored and lifted from the ground by the bull’s

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horns. Reaction shots of Villalta’s mother-in-law and wife’s horrified faces and alarmed
spectators are cut with close-ups of the torero screaming as the bull tramples him. Within
this sequence, a skull flashes for a mere second, recalling a similar image from Disney’s
Snow White, a grinning skull that materializes on the stepmother’s iconic apple to signal
its deadliness.
Just as the poisoned apple brings Snow White the “sleeping death,” the bull’s horns
bring Antonio Villalta what the film portrays as a “living death.” Upon learning both
of his paralysis and his wife’s demise in childbirth shortly after she witnessed the trauma
of his goring, Villalta appears absolutely defeated. He despairs, wanting nothing to do
with his newborn daughter. As a quadriplegic, not only is Villalta unable to fight bulls,
but he becomes dependent upon others for survival. It is a combination of the wounded
bullfighter’s physical vulnerability with his emotional withdrawal that results in his banish-
ment from society. Resigned to a life devoid of value, he marries Encarna, an opportunistic
nurse who cared for him in his convalescence. Antonio finds himself at the mercy of his
second wife, who comes to occupy the archetypical role of the evil stepmother as she takes
advantage of the bullfighter’s fortune while forbidding him contact with any human being,
including his daughter.
The goring results in a form of emasculation; now that Villalta is no longer able to fight,
the quintessential form of Spanish masculinity that he once embodied has become unavail-
able to him. Embroiled in his physical and emotional suffering, he becomes unable – or
unwilling – to occupy the traditional heterosexual, masculine role of husband and father
that is central to Catholic, Spanish culture. His daughter, Carmencita (Snow White), is
raised by her grandmother, while Antonio surrenders entirely to his new wife, who physi-
cally and emotionally abuses him while enjoying his wealth. Carmencita does not meet
her father until she comes to live with him and Encarna following the death of her grand-
mother. By this time, he has become a figure of supreme unhappiness, imprisoned in his
large house, as well as his body.
The sequence in which Carmencita meets her father for the first time establishes him as
a wretched figure, according to Sara Ahmed’s definition: “wretch, referring to a stranger,
exiled, or banished person. The wretch is not only the one driven out of his or her native
country, but is also defined as one who is ‘sunk in deep distress, sorrow, misfortune, or
poverty’ ” (17). The sequence begins in silence as the camera pans across a large, shadowy
room. A subjective shot, from Carmencita’s perspective, reveals a solitary person seated
in a wheelchair. Slow, melancholy music plays. The first bit of Villalta that is visible is
his hand, lying limply in his lap, palm upward, suggesting the incapacity for action. The
camera focuses on the hand, then tilts up the arm to finally reveal Antonio’s face, eyes
closed, head reclining against the chair, appearing lifeless. At the mercy of his wife, he has
been removed from the social world, and his disability has expelled him from his former,
gendered place in Spanish society as a bullfighter. Delgado argues that national belonging
is more than just a symbolic identification; it is rooted in the enjoyment of certain social
practices and the national myths that are structured around them: “Asimismo ninguna
afiliación nacional puede sostenerse únicamente por medio de identificaciones simbólicas e
imaginarias; se requiere también un excedente afectivo, una conciencia del goce específico
que se materialice en prácticas sociales y en los mitos nacionales que se estructuran alrede-
dor de dichas prácticas” (“In and of itself, national belonging cannot be sustained only by
symbolic and imaginary identifications; it also requires an affective excess, a consciousness
of the specific pleasure that materializes in social practices and in the national myths that

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are structured around said practices”; 66). In the context of Berger’s Blancanieves, belong-
ing to the Spanish nation crystalizes around the social practices of bullfighting, flamenco,
and traditional, gendered parenthood and marriage. It is both Antonio’s physical disability
and his emotional despair that bars him from these experiences, thus distancing him from
the nation itself.
The motionless solitude of the disabled bullfighter contrasts with his daughter’s secret
visits, which are characterized by movement, light, and lively music as she dances flamenco
for her father, and he teachers her the art of bullfighting. The image of the zoetrope becomes
a symbol of the times they pass together, as well as a tribute to the origins of cinema.
The interior part of this toy is painted with static images, which turn while the viewer
looks through an aperture, thus creating the illusion of a moving image, much like the
juxtaposition of photograms in film that produce movement. In Blancanieves, the inside of
the zoetrope appears in extreme close-up, showing a tiny bullfighter. In a sense, the static
bullfighter animated through a playful illusion reflects Antonio himself, now incapable of
full-body physical movement and bullfighting, but re-animated by the love of his daughter.
These sequences create a binary division between stasis and movement, definitively associ-
ating the latter with positive affect and human connection.
Not only does Carmencita dance herself, as she learned from her maternal grandmother,
but she also includes her father, turning his wheelchair, while the camera remains fixed in
front of Antonio’s smiling face, moving with him to capture his joy. The sequence is satu-
rated with sunlight, as Carmencita pushes her father in circles, returning to him the sensa-
tion of movement, albeit a mediated one. As Antonio and Carmencita are seen laughing,
a light reflects off a bell hanging from Antonio’s chair, connoting a happy sound. It is this
ringing that attracts the stepmother’s attention, bringing an abrupt end to an era of happi-
ness between father and daughter. Not long after, Villalta’s wife murders him by pushing
his wheelchair down a flight of stairs. The bullfighter’s tragic end and his positioning as a
victim devoid of agency represents disability as inevitably resulting in the impossibility of
participation in one’s familial and national community. While the film proposes a some-
what more empowered vision of its female protagonist, its portrayal of disability is inargu-
ably problematic.
Carmen does act, temporarily, as a kind of prosthesis for her father, following in his
footsteps as a bullfighter, and thus personifying a boldly feminist Snow White. At the film’s
climax, as Carmen stands in the bullring facing the animal, memories of her father are
communicated through a montage of the film’s previous moments, including a shifting col-
lage alternating images of stillness and motion. The soundtrack changes to palmadas (hand
clapping) of flamenco, and a shot of Antonio Villalta’s paralyzed hand is seen, followed by
shots of him seated in his wheelchair, and then images of Carmencita’s zoetrope in motion,
turning to the rhythm of the palmadas and giving movement to the tiny bullfighter figure
painted inside. These frames alternate with close-ups of Carmen’s face, filled with emotion.
It is then that she decides to “terminar la faena para su padre” (“to finish the performance
for her father”) to take his place and fight bulls on his behalf (Blancanieves). Whispers pass
through the crowd as spectators realize Carmen is the daughter of Antonio Villalta. The
crowd begins to wave white handkerchiefs, calling for the bull’s pardon. Triumphant music
plays as the bull retreats and the crowd cheers – no blood must be shed for Carmen to fulfill
her destiny as the daughter of Antonio Villalta and to take her rightful place in Spanish
society. The fact that she, as a woman, stands in for her father, with short hair and wearing
the male torero’s traje de luces (suit of lights), questions traditional gender roles particularly

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since, as Anna Cox points out, the placement of a female bullfighter in the setting of early
20th-century Spain is a fantastic anachronism (325). Carmen’s experience of empowerment
is short lived, however.
True to the Brothers Grimm version of the story, adult Snow White falls victim to a poi-
soned apple from her stepmother, given to her as a gift following her success in the bullring.
The skull image that appeared in the sequence of her father’s goring at the beginning of
the film returns here, superimposed onto the poisoned apple in an homage to the Disney
version. It is not the bull that immobilizes Carmen but rather the hatred of her stepmother.
Carmen is laid inside a glass coffin, as in other renditions of the tale, but in this case as
part of a carnival side show, in which people can pay to kiss her and see if she will awaken.
Snow White is featured as an attraction along with “freaks” (a clear wink to Tod Brown-
ing’s 1932 cult classic film) including the hirsute wolf man, a pair of conjoined twins in
“Siamese” costumes, and a fat woman who is sexualized on stage, wearing lingerie and
showing off her legs. Curiously, Snow White’s hair is now long, a departure from the short
style she wore in the bullring. This change reverts back to the appearance of the classic fairy
tale princess, a figure associated with passive femininity. A line of paying customers forms
alongside Snow White’s coffin, as each gives the unconscious woman a kiss in hopes that
she will wake. The discomfort of this sequence is highlighted by reaction shots from the
sideshow freaks. The face of the fat woman, who waits off stage, betrays discomfort and
pity as she watches Snow White having to accept sometimes lengthy kisses from a series
of strangers. These reaction shots establish a relationship of sympathy between the camera
and the freaks, rather than with the able-bodied and “normal” carnival-goers who are par-
ticipating in the sexual exploitation of a disabled woman.2
Berger’s ending is ambiguous; the director himself has stated that he prefers to allow
audiences the space for a range of interpretations (Deveny 341). Despite receiving a kiss
from her “prince,” a little person named Rafita, Blancanieves does not awaken. Instead, in
the film’s final frame, she lies in paralysis, a simulacrum of death, as light reflects off a single
tear emerging from her closed eye. Cox reads the tear as an optimistic sign of life and a
promise of revival, though she acknowledges that “the spectator is left wondering whether
Carmencita and all that she represents is dead or alive. Thus, the film invites and even
encourages dialogue in the end” (333). I concur with Washabaugh in seeing Blancanieves
as “stuck” and “immobilized” (275). The emergence of the tear suggests that Snow White
is neither “dead” nor “alive,” but rather unable to live with any kind of agency. To end
the film on this note emphasizes once again the theme of immobility, and the unthinkable
suffering and tragedy it promises. Just as her father was rendered “wretched,” in Ahmed’s
terms, by disability, separated from the happiness of both family life and a career in bull-
fighting, Blancanieves is isolated from the promise of able-bodied participation in the
nation. Ultimately, Berger’s film presents disability as a tragedy resulting in banishment and
victimhood, which contrasts starkly with the assertion in Gopegui’s novel that all members
of society – including people with disabilities, their caregivers, and other marginalized indi-
viduals – are bound inextricably to one another.
The Great Recession left Spain besieged with unemployment, uncertainty and civil unrest.
From this turmoil, important debates emerged surrounding the meaning of democratic citi-
zenship and the cultural agency of marginalized groups including women and people with
disabilities. It seems unsurprising, therefore, that a story like that of Snow White would cap-
ture imaginations during this time. Gopegui, in her interpretation, employs a familiar nar-
rative from most readers’ childhoods to question the past and modify orientations toward

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the future. She demonstrates how those with disabilities as well as their caregivers are
devalued and unheard, relegated to the margins of the nation. Even though the prognosis of
Berger’s Blancanieves remains open to speculation, these disabled bullfighters, released into
the cinemas of the crisis, cannot fail to evoke a nation paralyzed. While the Great Reces-
sion was said to have passed by 2018, the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19 brought another
shock to the Spanish economy and way of life. Along with an increase in unemployment,
the mandatory pause of lockdown brought a forced reconsideration of normalized expecta-
tions for commerce and productivity, social interaction and interdependence and, of course,
human frailty and mortality, along with long-lasting or permanent disability in many cases.
The globally shared experience of the pandemic has drawn into relief the divisions made on
the basis of nation; although the virus has threatened all human beings, the experience of
this threat varied widely based on the individual’s belonging to a nation with a particular
amount of privilege and orientation toward community responsibility. While these Snow
White tales have been read in the context of the Great Recession, their themes of vulnerable
bodies and those who care for them are essentially human and, thus, perennial.

Notes
1 All English translations are mine.
2 Note the intertextuality with Pedro Almodovar’s Hable con ella (2002), which features both a
wounded female bullfighter and non-consensual sexual contact with a woman in a coma.

Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke UP, 2010.
Allbritton, Dean. “Prime Risks: The Politics of Pain and Suffering in Spanish Crisis Cinema.” Journal
of Spanish Cultural Studies, vol. 15, no. 1–2, Mar. 2014, pp. 101–15.
Belinchón, Gregorio. “Blancanieves Oscura.” El País, 2 Sept. 2012.
Berger, Pablo. Blancanieves. Arcadia, 2012.
Cox, Anna K. “Interrogating the ‘Real’: The Circular Construction of Race and Remediation in Pablo
Berger’s Blancanieves/Snow White (2012).” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 94, no. 3, 2017,
pp. 315–35.
Delgado, Luisa Elena. La nación singular: fantasías de la normalidad democrática española
(1996-2011). Siglo XXI, 2014.
Deveny, Thomas. “Blancanieves: A Film Adaptation of ‘Snow White’ with a Spanish Twist.” Mar-
vels & Tales, vol. 30, no. 2, 2016, pp. 328–53.
Feder Kittay, Eva. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. Routledge, 1999.
Gopegui, Belén. El padre de Blancanieves. Editorial Anagrama, 2007.
Martín-Cabrera, Luis. “Contra la suspensión de la mirada crítica: reflexiones sobre la persistencia
del conflicto capital/trabajo en la cultura contemporánea española.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic
Cultural Studies, vol. 14, 2010, pp. 117–38.
McRuer, Robert. “Taking It to the Bank: Independence and Inclusion on the World Market.” Journal
of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, Oct. 2007, pp. 5–14.
Minich, Julie. Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mex-
ico. Temple UP, 2014.
Mollet, Tracey. “ ‘With a Smile and a Song . . .’: Walt Disney and the Birth of the American Fairy
Tale.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 27, no. 1, 2013, pp. 109–24.
Moreno-Caballud, Luis. “La imaginación sostenible: culturas y crisis económica en la España actual.”
Hispanic Review, vol. 80, no. 4, 2012, pp. 535–55.
Nuñez Florencio, Rafael. “Los toros, fiesta nacional.” Ser españoles: imaginarios nacionalistas en el
Siglo XX, RBA, 2013, pp. 433–63.

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Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD Data. http://www.oecd.org/.

Accessed 24 May 2021.
Prádanos, Luis I. “Writing an Engaged Novel in the Network Society: Belén Gopegui, Systemic Nar-
ratives, and Globalization.” Global Issues in Contemporary Hispanic Women’s Writing: Shaping
Gender, the Environment, and Politics, edited by Estrella Cibreiro, and Francisca López, Rout-
ledge, 2013, pp. 208–23.
Washabaugh, William. “Blancanieves, Flamenco and National Identity.” Flamenco on the Global
Stage: Historical, Critical and Theoretical Perspective, edited by K. Meira Goldberg, McFarland &
Company Publishing, 2015, pp. 271–79.

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 32
A CIVIL DEATH
Homeownership, Migration, and the
(Un)Making of Urban Subjects

Sophie L. Gonick

Introduction
During the Spanish crisis (2008–2014) hundreds of thousands of households lost their homes
to foreclosure and eviction. In a country where over 80% of people lived in owner-occupied
housing, homeownership has been a foundational system that has produced both urban
space and urban subjects. The homeownership model reached its apogee during the boom
(2000–2008), a period of rapid demographic transformation in the face of intensifying
immigration. In Madrid, crucible for Spain’s regimes of housing and urban policy and plan-
ning, immigrants sustained the housing market at its height. When crisis struck in 2008,
they also were the first to experience mortgage difficulties. In response to this landscape
of dispossession, the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH, Platform for People
Affected by Mortgages) emerged to challenge the extant terms of housing, homeownership,
and urban crisis.
In this chapter, I use ethnographic and archival materials to examine homeownership
and its challenges in Madrid. While cities across Spain experienced similar forms of crisis,
the capital saw some of the first organizing against mortgage dispossession in mid to late
2008. Notably, Andean immigrants impelled this early activism, helping to spark the crea-
tion of the PAH.1 Their activism, I argue, confronted a model of housing long integral to
the production of urban subjects. For members of the traditional working class, homeown-
ership was a vehicle for social mobility, aspirations of middle-class consumption, and the
perpetuation of traditional gender roles. In a moment of mass immigration, meanwhile, the
property market also became a mechanism for the integration of newcomers, which I dem-
onstrate through an examination of Madrid’s Andean community. But property’s pros-
perity was short lived, as natives and newcomers alike experienced foreclosure, a process
that went far beyond the economic. Indeed, many whose homes were foreclosed described
themselves as having undergone a muerte civil, a common though alienating identity within
the post-crash city. I reveal in this chapter that Andeans were the first to contest the Spanish
culture of property by drawing upon their unique positions within transnational networks
of migration and exchange. In so doing, they transformed civil death into civil disobedi-
ence, enunciating a new identity of the afectada.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-36 
 A Civil Death

Citizen Homeowners
The Spanish economy has been reliant on the construction industry, and by extension the
prevalence of homeownership, since the early years of the Franco dictatorship. As this
model of economic development reached its millennial apogee, it also relied on creating
new homeowners drawn into its web of indebtedness. Following the dictatorship, the state
pursued a number of measures to deregulate the mortgage market in an effort to integrate
Spain into the global economy and ease entry to homeownership. The introduction of secu-
ritization at the start of the millennium soon meant almost anyone could qualify for a
mortgage (Carbo-Valverde et al.). Deregulation coupled with widespread fraud also meant
mortgages could be issued for as much as, or more than, the purchase price of the house.
The mortgage thus made one rich, even if only for a short time.
In Madrid, homeownership found its newest members within the working-class periph-
eries. There, the acquisition of private property allowed for a host of opportunities other-
wise unavailable. For example, Néstor, a young father of two from Fuenlabrada (a smaller
city within the Community of Madrid), saw purchasing a house as the only means of leav-
ing home. He had a steady girlfriend, a steady income, and a desire to no longer live with
his parents. In Fuenlabrada, vast new housing enticed young people.2 The ethos of the time
stipulated that housing prices would only rise; Madrid’s recent history was evidence of this
economic truth. In a society in which young people, especially young men, leave home later
and later – in part because of the high cost of housing – homeownership allowed for both
independence and economic and financial self-sufficiency.
Borja is another working-class interlocutor from Madrid’s suburban periphery, who was
“always drawing my house, my family.” Purchasing a home after many years of backbreak-
ing manual work meant the realization of this primordial dream. Borja’s financial history
is closely linked to his sense of himself as a family man. Similarly, Iñaki, another young
homeowner from a working-class background, stated “We’re used to a life with a partner
and a mortgage. The Spanish dream is to have a partner and house with a mortgage, and
when you’re done paying it off, a house at the beach.” Both spoke of the mortgage as neces-
sary for an aspirational future of wedded bliss. There emerges clear links between mortgage
credit, domesticity, and middle-class sensibilities; Iñaki alludes to it as one part of a larger
dream of upward mobility.
These aspirations, meanwhile, perpetuated masculine identities. These young men envi-
sioned themselves as providers, and providing the house was their responsibility as male
wage-earners. This understanding, however, was in contrast to the social reality of millen-
nial Madrid. During the dictatorship, Franco prescribed strict gender roles that confined
women to the home. Those women who transgressed the borders between public and pri-
vate were objects of shame and vilification (Graham and Labanyi). During the democratic
era, however, changing gender roles, economic necessity and restructuring, and the feminist
movement all transformed the social landscape. Now women were active, vital members of
the workforce. Yet in the domestic imaginaries of these young men, Spain’s new sociological
reality is rendered invisible. Their self-perceptions still adhere to traditional roles in which
the male partner is the breadwinner and provider. In Iñaki’s analysis, the quest for a part-
ner (female) is allied closely with the accrual of mortgage debt. To be a man meant being a
homeowner. The mortgage, then, became the tool that mediated between a traditional past
and the millennial, exuberant present.

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While perpetuating traditional masculine identity, the mortgages offset stagnant wages.
Introduction to the European Union (1986) and then the euro (2002) meant integration into
global markets in addition to a rise in prices. Yet real wages actually fell during this period
(López and Rodríguez). The price of housing, however, in addition to many other consumer
goods, only skyrocketed. While a previous generation found well-paid work with indefinite
contracts, young people were introduced to the world of work through an endless series of
internships and low-paid contract work. In light of stagnant wages and a bifurcated labor
market, real estate provided an obvious avenue for the accrual of wealth, becoming a mode
of participation in the labor market (Sánchez Santos). The market promised astonishing
rates of return in addition to easy entrance (Aldridge). Commonsense understanding of the
market’s endless rise conspired with the liberal availability of credit, thus “blurr[ing] the
boundaries between investment and consumption” (Clarke and Zavisca 3). Housing also
became the key investment strategy for everyday people in a country that lacked a strong
investment culture (Sánchez Santos).
Rather than signify middle-class status, homeownership became the sole means of
attaining that status. Borja said, “I’m a blue-collar worker who wasn’t able to live above
my means. I’m a mileurista or a bit more, I learn for myself alone.”3 But the introduction of
easy credit meant Borja’s possibilities were now greatly expanded. Secondary credit prod-
ucts could be introduced into the mortgage balance, allowing for other consumer oppor-
tunities. Thus, someone like Borja, with an initial mortgage of 100,000 euros, soon had
a debt of 180,000. Increased debt allowed for easier entry into the middle class. He could
enjoy the pleasures of the city, go on sunny vacations, and purchase new electronic goods
and American sportswear. If his parents had been mired in the working class poverty of
poorly serviced housing estates at the city’s edge, Borja instead saw himself joining the mid-
dle class, replete with opportunities to take part in European consumer fantasies (Castells).

Homeownership and Immigration

During Spain’s exuberant boom, the country also became the site of largescale immigration;
from 2001 to 2011, its foreign-born population swelled 300%.4 With the onset of immi-
gration, the national government established norms and regulations for entry and length
of stay. However, it devolved responsibility for integration policymaking to autonomous
communities (Carrera). In Madrid, the concept of integration for the state closely hewed to
economically liberal notions of personal advancement and economic attainment, in which
the onus was largely placed on the figure of the immigrant. Further, both policymakers
and members of civil society displayed a great deal of hostility towards “others” (Gonick).
In light of such attitudes, homeownership offered an attractive tool for integration: For
the state, homeownership provided a vehicle for individual amelioration and economic
incorporation, while for immigrants it was an arena in which they could demonstrate their
competencies as financial actors.
Irregularity, ambiguity, and physical toil marked immigrants’ early years in Madrid. For
the boomtime economy, predicated in part on low-skilled work and stagnant wages, a large
pool of undocumented labor was convenient for urban reproduction (Calavita). Reflecting
back on her history in Madrid, Mabel, a middle-aged Peruvian woman who came in the
late 1990s, told me, “Out of 24 hours in a day, we worked 20. Work and work. Work, eat,
sleep. We didn’t allow ourselves any leisure.” Ecuadorian Yvette narrates a similar story:
As a live-in maid with no papers, she slept four hours a night and was at the mercy of an

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imperious boss. Her boss wanted an undocumented worker who could not complain about
long hours. With or without papers, the city’s newest denizens were subject to labor abuses,
economic vulnerability, and social exclusion, but persevered with the hope that they would
one day find steady work with better wages and benefits. These forms of exclusion also
permeated the housing market. Without official work contracts, immigrants often lacked
the documentation required by landlords. Many interlocutors describe how in the absence
of a stable, regulated rental market, landlords could ask for exorbitant down payments and
inflated rents, or refuse to rent to immigrants entirely.5
Despite these struggles, performances of “good” citizenship are central to many testi-
monies of migration and settlement. Mabel, who came with papers, told me, “I arrived [in
Spain] at 9 AM, and by 12 I was working. The next day I went to pay all my Social Security
taxes. I paid Social Security. It was [my employers’] obligation, but you eat all your own
expenses. You pay Social Security.” She would work whatever job she could find in order
to one day bring over a daughter she had left in Peru. She strived to do everything by the
book, meticulously carrying out whatever small task might confer legitimacy.
To attain full membership and settle indefinitely, however, required housing. Through
a series of immigration laws passed under the conservative government in the early 2000s,
the state obligated immigrants to secure “adequate” and permanent housing in order to
bring over family members and/or gain residency. Those same laws made it more difficult
for them to access subsidies and public housing. It also prohibited non-permanent residents
from social housing programs. While immigration was rapidly growing, channels by which
immigrants could attain legal status narrowed.
At the same time the state re-regulated immigration, it de-regulated banking practices
and the real estate industry. The banking industry saw immigrants as the newest frontier
for the spread of credit (La Caixa). Early penetration through calling cards and remit-
tances services established trust within migrant communities, allowing the later introduc-
tion of mortgage debt. The deregulation of the financial industry, moreover, allowed for
the proliferation of financial entities, many of which explicitly catered to immigrant popu-
lations. Through often shady strategies – 120% mortgages bolstered by personal loans,
co-ownership schemes, or the insidious practice of crossed loan guarantees – homeowner-
ship became readily accessible. Without protection in the rental market, many immigrants
found it was easier and possibly even cheaper to buy.
Publicity campaigns tapped into the idea of the good citizen with images of domesticity,
mainstream notions of normalcy, and traditional ideals of hearth and home. The backpage
of the January 20, 2006 edition of Latino, for example, was dedicated to an ad for Fincas
Mendel, a real estate company that, purportedly, “had the key to your future.” In the ad, a
young, modern couple sit together on the bottom right-hand corner, staring at a blue ren-
dition of a quaint pitched roof house with a family of four, mother and father flanked by
daughter and son. Fincas Mendel promised “the house of your dreams at the best price.”
Such images tapped into the dreams and desires of a population that largely toiled long
hours at the margin of urban life. In a world in which people were forced to take whatever
they could get, here they were being offered possibility, expansive opportunity, and an
imagined future that actually reverberated with their dreams of settlement.
These financial and cultural considerations configured homeownership, and more spe-
cifically mortgage debt, as central to urban belonging. Through economic transactions and
encounter, moreover, Madrid’s Latino community could prove themselves competent mem-
bers of society, assiduous at paying debts so as to become permanent settlers.

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A Civil Death
Soon, however, these debts would come due. Debt was ubiquitous throughout Madrid,
where it made manifest modest aspirations of domestic bliss and urban cosmopolitanism.
Debt united personal bank balances and municipal coffers, small businesses and multina-
tional corporations. For many everyday citizens, it briefly accorded the illusion of wealth,
class, and status. Soon, however, homeownership’s debts would prove unsustainable.
In Madrid the mortgage wrested years of equity from modest urban dwellers who found
themselves mired in debt. In January of 2007 the Euro Interbank Offered Rate – Euribor for
short – went up significantly. Over 90% of mortgages in Spain use the Euribor as reference.
Suddenly mortgage payments across the country began to rise, a situation that would only
worsen as the rate continued to climb over the next year and a half. At this same moment,
the economy was slowing; years of frenzied construction were finally coming to a halt.
With the implosion of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, Spain’s long decline began in
earnest, as droves of people began to lose their jobs. Mortgage debt suddenly, sometimes
tragically, became a problem – without jobs, many could not make growing monthly pay-
ments and soon found themselves in foreclosure.
Five years later, I listened to people describe their situations of financial precarity during
PAH assemblies. People often spoke of their poverty as muerte civil – civil death. An evoca-
tive descriptor for financial exclusion, civil death gestures toward participation in daily
life while also insisting on an ending, a death. In Spain, once a person enters into arrears,
she becomes a morosa (akin to a “deadbeat”), placed on a credit blacklist that prohibits a
whole host of economic activities and exchanges.6 She cannot take out a credit card, add a
new cellphone line, or be eligible for even a small loan. Further, in the absence of personal
bankruptcy laws, she cannot wipe her slate clean, and the debt can also pass down to her
children in the event of death. Mortgage law, too, dictates that even after foreclosure and
bank repossession people owe the outstanding balance. Civil death, at first blush, is a collo-
quial term people use to denote financial delinquency.7 Yet it also hints towards an ontology
of dispossession. Julia Elyachar writes, “Dispossession is more than an economic process. It
strips individuals of their political identity and their psychic well-being as well” (30).
Central to civil death was a sense of crushing isolation. Borja, reflecting on his finan-
cial decline, stated, “From loneliness and being alone, living alone, I didn’t want to see
friends. You feel ashamed.” He felt increasingly alienated. His internal emotions and
experiences, brought about by indebtedness, translated into external actions of avoidance
and self-exile. Borja, too, was wrested from previous visions of European cosmopolitan-
ism – gone were the holidays, consumer goods, and fantasies of upward mobility. The life
he had been living suddenly proved to be a lie, and he discovered that he was instead no
better off than previous generations. Homeownership was supposed to better his stock
in life. Throughout his childhood and early adulthood, the promise of upward mobility
animated his milieu. A generation removed from the Franco dictatorship, Borja and his
contemporaries were supposed to lead lives that were vastly improved from those of their
forebearers who were condemned to an existence in colonias de barro (mud estates) at
the urban fringe (Cronistas Villa Verde). While his grandparents, rural to urban migrants
from Spain’s devastated peripheries, faced hunger and repression, he expected to have a
life of material comfort. Yet crisis revealed success to be illusive. Instead he, too, faced
precarity, lack, and even the specter of hunger. Progress, once everywhere in evidence,
suddenly came to a halt.

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Civil death also splinters and punishes extended networks of family and friends. While
its earliest manifestations are perhaps individualized, it can become a common symptom
among an entire collective. The financial industry took advantage of dependence on famil-
ial structures that compose modern life; within the ranks of the working class, traditional
social relations came to be mediated through banking and finance. Deemed high-risk cli-
ents, immigrants, young families, and single people, for example, were often required by
their banks to procure a cosigner who would guarantee their loans (Observatorio DESC
and Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca). Typically, a family member served in such
capacity. While previously people lived at home with their parents, now those parents acted
as avales (guarantors), using their homes or bank balances as collateral. Reliance on avales
was widespread among immigrants, many of whom used family members as a means of
accessing homeownership.8
While guaranteeing a loan would later have disastrous consequences, family members
readily agreed to do so in the moment of purchase as it was a naturalized extension of
support for their kin. Betsy described involving her father in the folly of her mortgage: She
said, “of course he said yes. It’s your father or mother,” alluding to the emotional binds that
aid financial decisions. While seemingly a rational economic transaction, it also imbricates
sentiments, imaginaries, and the dreams parents have for their children. In the moment of
purchase, no one – parent or child, sister or brother – imagines default, and thus this formal
agreement of financial responsibility was rendered insignificant, a signature on a piece of
paper. Yet the consequences for financial guarantee meant ruin could spread throughout the
family. Extended networks were thus implicated in default and subsequent demise, as the
banks would then pursue the assets of whomever acted as aval. Thus, individual debtors
carried with them the anxiety of not only their own potential ruin, but also the ruin they
might bring to those who had formally supported their entry into homeownership.
The financialization of kinship ties destroys families, as the punitive conditions of debt
splinter kinship networks. One woman came to the PAH because she had acted as the aval
for her son. When he lost the house, he ceased to speak to his mother. Perhaps his shame
was too great, or perhaps he lashed out with resentment at her for having abetted his
ill-fated decision to buy a home. Now, however, mother and son had not spoken for years,
and she subsequently lost her house to the bank. She felt the shame, isolation, and aliena-
tion of debt without ever actually having taken out a loan herself. The decision to help a
loved one became disastrous. Nearing old age, she now contemplated a future rife with
uncertainty and poverty. Her only mistake was to act on maternal responsibility in assisting
the dreams of a loved one.
The more informal arrangements of everyday survival also strain family ties. Mired
in financial woes, adults come to rely on their immediate families for monetary support.
Throughout interviews, interlocutors spoke about the help they received from their fami-
lies, which while crucial to their survival was also the source of additional and crushing
shame. As adults, they had lived on their own, not reliant on anyone but themselves. The
act of explaining their situation to parents or siblings was traumatic, because it meant mak-
ing their shame public. Financial ruin was thus infantilizing because it transformed them
once again into dependents reliant on family for both finances and shelter. Sofia, a Spanish
interlocutor who had to mortgage her home to pay off business debts, stated, “This crisis
also consumes your family.” When she and her husband had exhausted all other economic
resources, they had to turn to their adult siblings. In the twilight of their middle age, they
were keenly aware of the financial strain they placed on those around them.

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The widespread effects of the crisis also created pressure on family networks. At first
families helped, thinking it was a temporary situation until loved ones recovered. But the
subtle pull of economic depression is insidious, reducing pensions and placing other fam-
ily members on unemployment. Because the crisis was so extensive, even those who didn’t
face foreclosure or unemployment felt its devastation through slashed salaries or reduced
work hours. For the afectada, as her family feels the weight of crisis, her guilt becomes
exacerbated; she is one more drain to finances. Such situations reach their crescendo when
eviction takes place, and family members become dispersed throughout the homes of rela-
tives, straining the system further.
Civil death is a condition that isolates people, cutting them off through shame, violence,
and the intense work required to stave off complete destitution. Dispossession, after all, is
a process that is tied to possession, which privileges the individual (Butler and Athanasiou).
What kinds of claims can they then make upon this city, upon a polity that has rendered
them excess and outside? How can they find one another amidst alienation and despair?

Waking the Civil Dead

How to formulate an alternative common sense against and through dominant hegem-
onic systems of beliefs and practices? I argue that by making tangible connections between
personal financial ruin and the flows of global capital, the PAH successfully translates
experiences of shame and guilt into collective empowerment. Further, this translation is
necessarily open and inclusive, situated within a material history particular to Madrid in
which immigrant subjects have played a central part.
In Madrid, a pioneering group of Andean immigrants were the first to contest situations
of financial precarity brought about by the collapse of the housing market. They were
members of a community that had only very recently become a target for the spread of the
homeownership model, particularly as the native Spanish market became saturated.
Experiences of migration and settlement conditioned responses and contributed to
future activism. First, having lived through one brutal economic shock, they were per-
sonally familiar with the intimate ties that bind together politics, the economy, and the
domestic arrangements of home. Living overseas, largely at the behest of financial forces
beyond one’s control, affords an understanding of the way in which the micro-scale of the
household is influenced by macro flows of capital. Migration is one experience that can
reveal the ways in which the machinations of “out there” political economy affect, alter,
and reconfigure the deeply personal experiences of family and home. In interviews, immi-
grant informants point to crisis in their home country as impetus for their migration. Macro
changes in the government, the onset of economic crisis, and the proliferation of debts all
conspired to have great impact on the microscale of the household.
Migrant remittances not only reconfigured domestic relationships. They also provided
the crude materials for the entire transformation of the Andean economic geography. As
small bits of money flowed from modest bank accounts in Madrid to household economies
in places like Quito, growing urban and rural wealth allowed families once ravaged by crisis
to slowly improve their situations, often through investment in the city itself. A globalizing
real estate market abetted this urban investment, promoting the development of new homes
and suburbs on the peri-urban fringes of many Latin American cities. Throughout Latino
(the free weekly publication aimed at Latino immigrants in Spain), real estate agencies
promoted housing not only in Madrid and elsewhere in Spain, but also in places of origin,

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offering migrants easy opportunities to purchase units back home. Several informants own
properties in their countries of origin, contributing to the transformation of Latin American
cities, even at a distance. These links between familial duties and relationships, economic
advancement, and international geographies of migration have fostered an awareness of the
ways in which everyday domesticities and personal lives are highly circumscribed within
much broader trends and movements. While many, too, felt the intense sting of isolation,
shame, and guilt, their lived histories served to contextualize and make sense of personal
ruin as situated within complex political economies.
Several features unique to the Ecuadorian community in Madrid complemented these
migratory histories. As one of the most well-established immigrant groups in the Comu-
nidad, Madrid’s Andean population was ripe for financial penetration. Highly organized
with myriad civil society associations, the community featured strong social networks and
inter-communication. Years of organized settlement had allowed for the flourishing of busi-
nesses catering to their needs, in addition to the establishment of immigrant neighborhoods.
Financial entities leveraged such ties to disseminate credit products throughout the collec-
tive through both formal mechanisms, as in the case of the Centro Hipotecario del Inmi-
grante (CHI, Mortgage Center for the Immigrant), and informal ties.
With crisis, those ties also proved a means of sharing information and collectivizing
mortgage problems. Aida Quinatoa was the president of the Coordinadora Nacional de
Ecuatorianos en España (CONADEE, National Coordinator of Ecuadorians in Spain) and
a lifelong activist, reflecting how traditions of activism and popular education in Latin
America have translated into contemporary migrant struggles in a diversity of sites. Those
repertoires of action, seemingly addressed to a unique set of social problems, nonetheless
condition activism and engagement. Aida relates her activism as innately tied to her sense
of self and her sense as an Ecuadorian national. She told me, “Solidarity is in our blood.”
In a moment of economic uncertainty, she did not hesitate to act.
Quinatoa had been active in the indigenous movement in Ecuador, which challenged the
violence perpetrated by the national government, multinational corporations, and exposed
the long shadow of neocolonial domination. This past activism contributed to her contem-
porary struggles in Madrid. As the president of the CONADEE, she was a tireless advocate
and saw her role as facilitating mutual understanding between Ecuadorian immigrants and
native Spaniards. While the immediate issue of mortgages was far removed from indigenous
struggles around land and rights, it recalled similar processes of wealth, power, control, and
corruption. The economic vulnerability that runs throughout her community demanded
collectivization. From that first glimmer of trouble, she responded to a collective problem,
negating its individual consequences.
Meanwhile, her status as immigrant conditioned her desire for a collective response.
She was aware of her place within the margins of Madrid’s urbanity. She had replaced one
peripheral identity – indigenous women – for another – precarious migrant worker. Work-
ing as a cleaning woman, she occupied an almost invisible role within the city’s modernizing
project, caring for the home as women went to work outside the house. She had lived in
four or five different places before purchasing her house, an itinerant body moving through
the city. But as someone who had struggled for rights and recognition, she knew how to
manipulate her position to achieve things seemingly beyond her reach. In struggles over
land in her native Ecuador, she had long ago discovered the power of numbers. Collectiv-
izing the problem was the only way for those concerns emerging from the peripheries to
challenge the center, for marginal voices to reach seats of power. Those who held the keys

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to redemption would not listen to her alone. Thus, she couldn’t worry about the specificities
of one mortgage case but rather had to draw strength from the collective.
In collectivizing the problem, demonstrating how it emerged within a situated political
economy, the civil dead channeled their fear and sorrow, guilt and shame, into anger, rage,
and action. Betsy, who went to the first meetings in 2008 and 2009, stated, “I see the same
life in a different way.” In relating her story, she reveals how becoming part of this collec-
tive changed her understanding of the problem. While the problem itself has not changed,
the ways she relates to and makes sense of it have undergone a profound transformation.
As she sunk into depression, without work and under mounting debt, she saw her inability
to pay as a symptom of her own moral failings. Now, however, she understands herself as
the victim of a complicated process of extraction and punishment. But instead of resigning
herself to her victimhood, she has claimed agency and believes that she is not alone. A few
breaths later, she stated, “You start to believe in yourself, in the struggle. This struggle is
like an ant against an elephant. But if we’re a million ants. . . . We have to be a million
ants.” She has regained her sense of self, which is now tied inextricably to her struggle, to
fighting against dispossession.

Conclusion
A trailblazing group of Andean activists helped to spark one of Spain’s most emblem-
atic movements, the PAH. The contemporary housing movement has transformed people’s
experience of civil death into empowerment and action. No longer are the civil dead con-
demned to shame and alienation. Instead, they have used their histories of mortgage-related
dispossession to put forward claims and demand recognition. The PAH has of course made
strides in undoing the punitive logics of systems of housing and mortgage finance. But
perhaps more importantly, it has reoriented everyday urban dwellers’ experiences of the
city and its modes of habitation. Membership within city life is no longer predicated on
homeownership. Instead, new forms of sociality and political organizing have created novel
communities. Within these communities, the civil dead are now afectadas and activists,
understanding crisis as situated and open for contestation.

Notes
1 The PAH was officially created by long-term housing activists in Barcelona in early 2009. Drawing
on the lineage of Andean area studies, I use the term to reference mostly Ecuadorians and Peruvi-
ans. Most interlocutors and early organizers were of Ecuadorian descent. At the same time, there
are many ties between the Ecuadorian and Peruvian communities in Madrid, with the latter being
much smaller than the former. Because of their relatively small size, many in the Peruvian commu-
nity were incorporated into the Ecuadorian community. For an overview of Andean area studies,
see Drake and Hershberg, State and Society in Conflict.
2 Information gleaned from interviews and observation. Translation from Spanish my own unless
otherwise noted.
3 “Mileurista” is a portmanteau for someone earning 1000 euros a month (a very modest amount),
which was a fairly standard wage during the boom.
4 Because of the rapid and relatively recent onset of immigration, it is difficult to access authorita-
tive data on immigration and housing. A 2007 immigration survey found that almost 40% lived
in owner-occupied dwellings. Meanwhile, a 2012 survey by the Plataforma de Afectados por la
Hipoteca found that 35% of families struggling with mortgage issues were immigrant (Colau and
Alemany). Data collection by the state also contributes to a culture of opacity: The National Statis-
tics Institute has only just started to collect information on evictions, yet has failed to account for

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demographic characteristics in their collection process. Thus far, social movements and civil society
institutions have had to rely on eviction order issued by courts for information.
5 Because the state has so thoroughly encouraged owning over renting, the rental market is very ad
hoc with little, if any, oversight. An array of urban legends also clouds this very small segment of
the housing market (about 80% of the population lives in owner-occupied dwellings).
6 I will continue to use the female pronoun; PAH Madrid is explicitly feminist, and the vast majority
of people who seek out mortgage-related aid is women.
7 The language of delinquency also of course allies an economic situation with personal failings and
deviant behavior.
8 At times, however, the aval might be someone the buyer barely knew, a situation I will revisit
later on.

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 PART 5

Communities and Collectivities

 33
EARLY 20TH-CENTURY
POPULAR MOBILIZATION AND
LABOR MOVEMENTS IN SPAIN
From the Restoration to the Second Republic

Pamela Radcliff

This chapter will map the world of popular politics “from below” in early 20th-century
Spain. One of the important features of this era was the growth of mass politics, character-
ized by ubiquitous collective mobilization in the public sphere on behalf of groups which
often felt marginalized from the official political sphere and who struggled for access to
power in elite-dominated liberal regimes. The combination of urbanization, new forms of
sociability, growing literacy, industrialization, expanding civil rights and suffrage, along
with the inequalities that accompanied some of these developments, changed the context
for popular politics and created new “repertoires” of collective action. The structure of
mobilization ranged from formal associations and trade unions to informal demonstrations
and protests, and the participants made claims in the name of workers, women, Catholics
and their anti-clerical opponents, and consumers. Some sought to reform the existing politi-
cal system while others pursued a revolutionary transformation of society, although the line
could be blurred or crossed, depending on the political context. The formal political struc-
ture shifted dramatically over the course of the first third of the century, from the consti-
tutional monarchy of the Restoration (1875–1923) to the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera
(1923–1930) to the democratic Second Republic (1931–39). The Republic was defeated in
a brutal Civil War (1936–9) which marked a rupture in patterns of popular mobilization set
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although the role and impact of popular mobiliza-
tion differed across these distinct regimes and periods, the chapter’s basic argument is that
all of these forms of participation constituted part of a richer and more complex political
history that reaches beyond the formal institutional sphere and incorporates the diverse
voices of groups staking their claims for empowerment and inclusion.
In many ways, this Spanish story of the emergence of mass politics follows European
patterns, but there are also specific elements, as in each national case. In structural terms,
Spain’s uneven economic development created industrial and urban hubs in a handful
of regions, such as Catalonia, the Basque Country, Asturias and Madrid, while agrarian
and rural communities dominated much of the interior except for the capital. The agrar-
ian economy was not monolithic either, ranging from small and medium-sized peasant
farms in the north to huge plantations or latifundia in the south, which barely sustained

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-38
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

a population of desperately poor landless laborers. The sequence of political regimes also
created evolving “opportunity structures” for popular mobilization, with a shifting balance
between a militarized public order and tolerance or protection of the rights of assembly and
association, a balance which also shaped levels of violence. Finally, the forms and agendas
of popular mobilization shared some characteristics with other national cases, such as col-
lectivities based on class and gender identities, but also contained distinct features, such as
the prominence of anti-clerical activism and the role of anarcho-syndicalism in the labor
movement. While these differences used to be incorporated into a narrative of Spanish neg-
ative exceptionalism or backwardness, the dominant revisionist trend places Spain within
a spectrum of European diversity rather than in contrast to a fictitious European “norm.”
Scholars have employed a range of theoretical frameworks to understand how and when
collective action emerges and to measure its impact on the broader political sphere. The
classic scholarly framework for the early 20th century was Marxism, which identified class
struggle as the fundamental dynamic of modern politics and privileged class-based move-
ments as the main protagonists of historical change. While class remains an important cate-
gory of identity in current analyses of early 20th-century collectivities, most scholars would
agree that gender, religion, ethnic, racial and national identities constituted an “intersec-
tional” quilt that could mobilize individuals into groups along various axes. Social move-
ment theory helps us to understand the “opportunity structure” of resources and grievances
that favor the formation of some collectivities over others, the “repertoires” of actions that
shift over time and the broad “cycles of mobilization” that provide chronological structure.
At the same time, it is important to avoid any simplistic teleology of the “modernization” of
protest forms, which generally marginalizes actors with fewer resources from the narrative
of what constitutes “modern” politics. The result was an emerging world of mass politics
that was noisy and disorganized, incoherent and contradictory, and full of unexpected
twists and turns that led to no predetermined outcome. But at the same time, it was an
engaging world that provided new channels for ordinary people to try and improve their
lives. The concept of the public sphere or civil society maps the space in which collectivities
come together to make their claims outside the halls of Parliament or the electoral booth.
Finally, the idea of politics as a two-way dynamic that emerges “from above” and “from
below” captures its relational nature and incorporates grass roots mobilization as a struc-
tural element of modern politics.
The early 20th century inaugurated a new era of mass politics in Spain, marked by the
institution of universal male suffrage in 1890 and the military defeat of 1898 that began the
process of splintering the liberal elites who had controlled the Restoration political system
since 1875 through electoral manipulation and back room negotiation between the two
main political parties. Over the course of the first two decades of the 20th century, newly
organized collective actors populated a diversifying public sphere, as liberal governments
waffled between repression and defense of civil liberties. There has been historiographi-
cal debate about whether the Restoration was theoretically capable of integrating some
of these groups, like the increasingly powerful labor unions, into a more representative
democratic regime. On the other hand, scholars have analyzed why the elements of what
have been colloquially called the “Bolshevik trienio” (1918–1920), which included massive
urban and rural strike waves, did not produce a Russian-style workers’ revolution in Spain.
Sharing the public sphere with the labor movement were Catholic associations and nation-
alist leagues, as well as consumer protests against rising prices and anti-clerical demonstra-
tions against the Church. In the end, a military leader, Miguel Primo de Rivera, staged a

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coup in 1923 that “paused” the parliamentary system and imposed “law and order” on the
noisy public sphere of the postwar Restoration. During the Primo de Rivera dictatorship,
the public sphere was largely demobilized, except for conservative organizations loyal to
the regime.
But only a few years later, the declaration of the Second Republic in April 1931 inaugu-
rated the most vibrant era of mass politics in Spain’s history, encouraged by a democratic
regime that aspired to finally empower the masses, politically and economically At the same
time, the fractured Republic had trouble implementing this aspiration, and governments
struggled with how to treat politics “from below,” excluding some groups on the right like
Catholics from the public sphere, while employing familiar forms of state repression against
left wing protesters. The contentious public sphere of popular politics did not bring down
the Republic, but it served as an excuse for military leaders to launch a failed coup, partly
in the name of law and order, which devolved into a three-year civil war that inaugurated a
new era in popular mobilization and collectivities.
Across all three political periods, one of the most important players in popular politics
was the labor movement, which fought in the name of working class economic, social
and political empowerment. Labor unions had existed since the 1840s in some urban
centers like Barcelona, and in both rural and urban settings during the democratic Sex-
enio (1868–1874), but they were not major political actors until the 20th century, when
class consolidated as a major category of political identity and struggle. Both of the main
branches of the labor movement solidified into national organizations and mass move-
ments, a process that culminated during and after the First World War. The defining fea-
ture of Spain’s labor movement was its fundamental division into Anarcho-syndicalist and
Socialist branches, in addition to a smaller Catholic federation. The general split of the
labor movement into reformist and revolutionary wings was common to most European
countries after WWI. The Socialist parties of the Second International which had been edg-
ing towards social democracy in the decades before the war were increasingly challenged by
“maximalist” Syndicalist, Communist and Anarchist movements that advocated immediate
overturning of bourgeois regimes. But while anarchism or revolutionary syndicalism had
been found in a variety of countries in late 19th-century Europe, especially France, Russia,
Italy and Switzerland, after the post–World War I crisis, it remained an explicit protagonist
of the European left only in Spain, although syndicalist currents remained in many trade
union movements. As a result, the dynamic between the Spanish Socialist movement and its
Anarcho-syndicalist rival, the CNT, was specific to Spain.
The Socialist party (PSOE/1879) and its trade union federation (UGT/Unión General
de Trabajadores/1882; General Workers’ Union) had remained smaller and less influen-
tial than their European counterparts in the decades before WWI. The UGT grew from
6,000 members in 1898 to 100,000–200,000 at its peak in 1918, with most of its mem-
bership located in urban industrial and mining centers in Asturias and the Basque Coun-
try. The Socialists limited their appeal by not yet vigorously pursuing the mobilization of
agricultural workers, who were of course marginal in orthodox Marxist theory, but their
expansion was also limited by the constraints of manipulated elections. During the postwar
period, the Spanish Socialists were neither fully reformist nor revolutionary and extended
feelers in both directions. The existence of the anarcho-syndicalists on their left generally
pushed them towards more moderate positions, but the Restoration system kept them from
fully embracing a political strategy of electoral conquest such as that pursued for decades
by the German Social Democratic Party, which was the largest in Europe. Thus, on the one

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hand, the Socialists participated in the so-called democratic assembly movement of 1917,
which advocated for constitutional reform and democratization of the system, while they
also joined in the revolutionary general strike in 1918.
The dominant trade union movement in the postwar era was the CNT (Confederación
Nacional de Trabajo; National Confederation of Work; Smith). The CNT had its roots in
the 19th-century “apolitical” anarchist movement, but the federation’s establishment in
1910 opened a new phase, both in terms of structure and ideology. Instead of the earlier
amorphous idea of a spontaneous popular uprising of autonomous communities, the CNT
adopted the new French syndicalist repertoire of the revolutionary general strike. Thus, the
revolution would be triggered by a massive general strike that would bring the country to
its knees, spark a political crisis and pave the way for a new egalitarian society. In the short
term, the Anarcho-Syndicalists pursued a repertoire of “direct action,” taking to the streets
in strikes and demonstrations against specific targets, in contrast to the Socialists’ engage-
ment with the formal realm of elections and government policies. In the present as well as
the future, syndicates or unions would form the backbone of social and political organiza-
tion. These would be linked in voluntary federations that would manage both political and
economic affairs without need for a government, which was inherently hierarchical and
repressive in anarchist theory. The merging of apolitical anarchist ideals with syndical-
ist organization created anarcho-syndicalism, which provided a more permanent structure
for worker mobilization. From an initial 40,000 members in 1910, the CNT ballooned to
about 800,000 at its peak in 1918, far outstripping its UGT counterpart.
The continued strength of anarchism in the Spanish labor movement was once viewed as
another indication of Spain’s “backward” status, but several generations of scholars have
refuted Eric Hobsbawm’s famous inclusion of the anarchists among the “primitive rebels”
in his classic book of that name. From his Marxist perspective, anarchism was a feature
of the poorest pre-industrial environments where its “millenarian” appeals seduced the
uneducated lumpen-proletariat. But in fact, the geography of UGT or CNT membership
did not conform to any simple modern/traditional binary. The general strength of the CNT
and its formally a political stance made sense to a lot of workers in the Restoration context
of manipulated elections where a strategy of electoral conquest seemed doom to failure.
Furthermore, the concept of decentralized self-governance also resonated with a long tradi-
tion of municipalist and federalist political ideas. The defense of municipal autonomy vis
a vis the central state extended back to the early modern period, but federalist principles
took center stage during the Sexenio (1868–74), when some local communities declared
autonomy from the state during cantonalist uprisings in 1868 and 1874. Finally, the CNT
actively recruited members from among the landless agricultural laborers (braceros), who
constituted a significant percentage of the proletariat.
On a more granular level, the CNT and UGT developed local and regional strongholds
as a result of a combination of political, economic and cultural factors. In general, the CNT
was more likely to put down roots in towns and cities with a strong republican tradition.
Republicans also tried to organize workers, but mostly in cultural centers, libraries, ateneos
and lay schools, which had previously catered to a middle- and upper-class audience (Álva-
rez Junco). Not surprisingly, the first worker ateneo was founded in the largest industrial
city of Barcelona (1881), along with the first workers’ choral society (1850), promoted by
the musician and politician Anselm Clavé. Republicans and anarchists often co-mingled
within a cultural milieu based on the shared values of expanded literacy, rational educa-
tion, anti-clericalism and the transformational potential of cultural dissemination. Since

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anarchists didn’t mount candidates for public office, they also didn’t compete directly with
the republican parties, and sometimes even quietly voted for them in local elections. Local
studies on places such as Valencia, Barcelona and Gijón have fleshed out this diverse milieu
(Radcliff, From Mobilization; Purkiss; Eahlam). In most places, it was not until the 1930s
that the CNT was able to compete directly with republicans by forming its own cultural
organizations. But even during the Republic, many anarco-syndicalist workers relied on
republican cultural organizations, since the limited resources of their own unions were
mainly consumed by labor struggles, waves of repression and campaigns to release arrested
militants. In any case, the cultural associations of this milieu constituted a growing feature
of working-class collective life in small and large urban areas across Spain, culminating in
density and extension during the Republic of the 1930s.
The Socialists, on the other hand, competed directly with the Republican parties for
electoral votes, which made it more difficult in the early decades of the 20th century for the
movement to find its political space. During this period, the political and economic dualism
of the Socialist movement made it less flexible and hindered its growth, as did its central-
ized structure. The UGT thrived in the mining towns of Asturias and the Basque Country,
but the PSOE struggled to elect more than a handful of representatives to the Parliament
during the Restoration.
With the declaration of the Republic in 1931, however, the disruption of the political
map turned to the Socialists’ advantage. With free elections and the discrediting of many of
the old political parties, the PSOE’s electoral prospects suddenly blossomed. As the largest
party in Parliament, the PSOE was able to wield influence and create labor legislation that
in turn increased the appeal of joining an affiliated UGT union, whose collective member-
ship topped one million by 1932, surpassing the CNT. The Socialists’ enhanced position in
the labor movement also benefited from the newly formed FNTT (Federación Nacional de
Trabajadores de la Tierra; National Federation of Agricultural Workers), a UGT-affiliated
federation aimed at organizing agricultural workers, which ballooned from about 36,000
members in 1930 to 392,000 by June 1932. Accompanying the spread of Socialist unioni-
zation were the Casas del Pueblo, which served as cultural and political hubs for working
class communities in towns, villages and urban neighborhoods.
At the same time, the Socialists’ growing influence set up a contentious competition with
the half a million members of the CNT for the hearts and minds of the working class, which
became one of the defining features of the first two years of the Republic. The Socialists
sought to use the power of the state to enact redistributive social policies, while the CNT
rejected governmental solutions and defended “direct action” tactics. Each side blamed the
other for the toxic dynamic that undermined the consolidation of the new democracy, but
conservative and employer resistance to social reforms also played a role. Socialists stood to
gain support if they could demonstrate that reforms, such as land distribution, were work-
ing, while the CNT stood to gain from evidence that the forces of reaction would fight such
changes tooth and nail. At the local level, the animosity could be fierce, with CNT unions
mounting strikes against the imposition of mandatory arbitration committees designed by
Socialist legislators and UGT members acting as strike breakers against them. Complicating
the dynamic was another anarchist organization, the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica;
Iberian Anarchist Federation), which had been formed in 1927 to push the CNT towards
more revolutionary and less syndicalist positions. The CNT itself was a diverse organiza-
tion, with some who favored at least neutral collaboration, as long as the Republic would
let the organization pursue its syndicalist goals. It was only several years later, after a series

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of failed FAI-led uprisings against the Republic and the Socialists’ growing disillusionment
with the direction the Republic was heading that the two trade union organizations began
to reconcile, a process that culminated in the Popular Front election of February 1936,
which the CNT tacitly supported. The small Communist party joined the Popular Front,
but its role in the labor movement remained minimal until the Civil War and Soviet aid to
the Republic boosted its profile and its influence.
Despite their many differences, both major wings of the labor movement were domi-
nated by male workers and a masculine ethos, as was true across Europe during this era.
Particularly before the 1930s, most unions of either branch were openly hostile to women
and viewed them as either competition in the workplace or as primarily mothers and wives.
In addition to male resistance, women workers also faced more obstacles to joining unions,
including the time constraints imposed by their greater domestic responsibilities. Women
were more likely to join unions in female-dominated industries like the needle trades, laun-
dry or textiles, which could focus on demands that were specific to female workers. Among
the first female UGT unions were the Laundresses and Ironers and the Seamstress Union,
formed in Madrid in 1902 and 1904 (Nash). Cigarette makers in the state-owned tobacco
factories were also among the earliest female unions (Radcliff, “Elite Women Workers”),
along with textile workers in Catalonia, who launched a strike in Barcelona in 1913 that
incorporated as many as 27,000 female strikers. Dozens of strikes were organized in female
industries over the next few years, suggesting that those women who did unionize fully
shared the labor movement culture and its practices. During the Republic, both federa-
tions made more of an effort to encourage the recruitment of women, which did improve
their representation, but they were still a minority and virtually absent from the leader-
ship. The UGT increased its female members from 18,000 in 1929 to 100,000 by 1936,
which still constituted only 4% of the 1 million members (Aguado). The CNT had a bet-
ter record, with 142,000 women among its 550,000 members in 1936, but it still had a
male dominated leadership (Espigado). The fact that neither federation maintained a sepa-
rate women’s branch during this period of mass expansion (the Socialist women’s group
was dissolved in 1927) probably served as a further limit on recruitment, as suggested by
broader European patterns.
There was one more branch of the labor movement, which also made an effort to attract
female workers, which were the Catholic unions. The unions were part of a broader Catho-
lic movement within the European Catholic milieu, which aimed to combat secularization
and de-Christianization, especially among the working classes. The dynamic was different
in each country, but in general these associations developed later in Spain because the Res-
toration government had taken the lead in defending Catholic unity and confessional inter-
ests, in contrast to Italy, France and Germany, where the Church was on the defensive. In
the early 20th century, however, a combination of timid anti-clerical policy proposals from
the Liberal party and the revival of popular anti-clerical mobilization from below motivated
the Church to begin building a network of lay associations, including unions and Catholic
Action groups, although the efforts were uneven and localized until the 1920s–30s. While
adopting new forms of associationism, the Catholic movement also utilized older collective
forms of occupying public space, from processions to religious festivals and pilgrimages.
The Catholic unions offered a cooperative alternative to the adversarial stance of the
class-based labor movement, calling on employers’ Christian charity to improve condi-
tions for their workers. The first Catholic worker associations were formed in 1909, in
response to the anti-clerical violence of the “Tragic Week.” For the first decade, they were

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top down and “mixed” organizations, which included both employers and workers. In
recognition of the failure to attract many workers with this model, after 1918 the Catholic
unions reorganized into a worker-only National Federation of Catholic Syndicates, which
claimed autonomy from management, and held its first Congress in 1919. The first Con-
gress of Female Catholic Workers was held in 1924. The Catholic Syndicates reached their
organizational peak during the supportive Primo de Rivera regime of the 1920s, with about
60,000 male and 35,000 female members. During the Second Republic, the Catholic union
movement stagnated, as membership in the Socialist and CNT unions grew dramatically in
the more permissive environment. Among the few successes were the Catholic agrarian syn-
dicates, which retained a niche among small farmers and tenants in the north. In addition,
the female unions recruited more members, proportionally, than their class-based counter-
parts, despite the “paradox” between the traditional gender roles defended by the Church
and the call to join public sphere associations, as elaborated in Blasco Ibáñez’s classic book.
In fact, the relative success of female Catholic unionization was one of the motivating fac-
tors in pushing the UGT and CNT in the 1930s to pay more attention to recruiting women
into their own ranks.
More important in the Catholic public sphere of the 1930s were the associations of Cath-
olic Action (Acción Católica/AC), especially the youth and women’s branches (Montero).
The Catholic Youth organization grew from 12,000 members in 1928 to 70,000 in 1936.
The Women’s Catholic Action followed the opposite trajectory with a peak of 118,000
during the Primo Regime, declining to 60,000 by 1936, but this still represented the single
largest women’s association. The adult men’s branch never took off, probably because they
were more likely to invest their time in political associations. During the Republic, the AC
became one of the major collective voices defending the prominent role of the Church and
Catholicism in public life. Scholars continue to debate whether this stance put them at
odds with the Republican and democratic project as a whole, but they certainly mobilized
against the secularizing agenda of the center left Republican government. They attacked
the closure of religious schools, the secularization of cemeteries, civil marriage and divorce,
and their repertoire included circulating petitions, writing letters to government officials
and staging public religious acts to protest policies. Although they were officially supposed
to remain politically unaffiliated, the formation of the first mass Catholic political party in
1933 (CEDA, Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas; Spanish Confederation of
the Autonomous Right) built on their networks and increasingly drew them into electoral
politics in defense of “Catholic civilization” against what they broadly defined as “commu-
nism” and “atheism.” By the Civil War, any distinction between the Catholic political and
public spheres had collapsed, as the military leaders and rebel forces took up the defense of
Catholicism as one of their unifying principles.
The mobilization of the Catholic public sphere was both a reaction to and an incen-
tive for anti-clerical activism. The early 20th century inaugurated the new era of conflict
between Catholic and anti-clerical forces in local public spheres across the country, in an
accelerating dynamic that culminated in the 1930s. The secularization “culture wars” were
not unique to Spain but they reached an unusual level of intensity in the only European civil
war of the period in which religion was one of the primary lines of division. Older Marxist
versions of the Civil War tended to downplay the autonomy of religious motives, framing
them as reductive products of the primary class divisions. It is certainly true that the evolu-
tion of the Catholic Church in Spain over the second half of the 19th century increasingly
linked its economic fortunes to the wealthy classes, which bankrolled the Church as it

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recovered from the expropriation of most of its property during the desamortization pro-
cess of the 1830s–60s. But it also seems clear that the “culture wars” were not simply a
proxy for class warfare.
The first anticlerical street protests of the era occurred in Madrid around the turn of the
century, but the most dramatic explosion of anti-clerical violence that set a new precedent
of church burning was the “Tragic Week” in Barcelona, in July 1909. Unions had called a
general strike to protest the calling up of mostly working-class conscripts to fight the gov-
ernment’s colonial war in Morocco, but large crowds of men, women and children occu-
pied the streets with anti-war and anti-draft slogans. But strikingly, anger was also directed
against the Church, which the popular anti-clerical press had linked with greed, corrup-
tion, moral depravity and Spain’s “backward” status. Crowds of both genders attacked
churches, convents and religious schools, pulling sacred items onto the street and destroy-
ing them and lighting fires from inside. Of the 120 buildings torched over the course of sev-
eral days, 80 of them were religious. The basic repertoire of desecration and fire, including
symbolic acts of sacrilege such as mock processions, exhumed and mutilated corpses, and
parodies of religious rites, continued into the 1930s, culminating in the massive destruction
of religious places and spaces during the Civil War.
The Civil War introduced a new element to the repertoire (Thomas). In 1909, religious
personnel were terrorized and intimidated, but not routinely targeted for assassination,
as occurred during the Civil War, especially in the first few months. An estimated 6,800
members of the clergy were killed in the war, almost half during the initial months. The
escalation of violence and the collapse of state authority that occurred with the failure
of the initial coup opened the door to an escalated level of anti-clerical violence. Beyond
the specifics of a new and lethal “opportunity structure,” it seems clear that the violence
directed at the clergy, sacred icons and religious structures was specific to their religious
nature and steeped in an eliminationist symbolism that sought to eradicate the sacred role
of Catholicism and the Catholic Church in Spanish society. On the other side of this reli-
gious war, the Nationalist forces countered that Catholicism was consubstantial with Span-
ish national identity.
In addition to class and religion, gender also played an intersectional role in public
sphere mobilization of the early 20th century. On the one hand, working-class women
sometimes joined their male counterparts in the labor movement, despite the generally
masculinist culture of its institutions. On the other hand, Catholic women sometimes joined
their fellow believers in associations that defended Christian civilization against seculari-
zation and atheism. Anti-clerical women also noticeably took part in the church-burning
crowds of the “Tragic Week” and later. Women’s studies scholars have pointed out that
women’s propensity to mobilize during this period often followed informal and local chan-
nels. Women of the popular classes relied on local networks organized around community
spaces like public water fountains and markets, which they could mobilize episodically in
specific moments of crisis, like the deployment of soldiers in 1909.
Women also played a central role in consumer protests over high prices, shortages of
basic goods, or fraud, stemming from their domestic role as provisioners of the house-
hold. Temma Kaplan’s classic formulation of “female consciousness,” as opposed to either
class consciousness or feminism, is often cited as a framework to understand what brought
women together in these informal collectivities. Consumer protests date back to the early
modern period, but they became increasingly feminized in the 20th century, as more for-
mal political channels opened for men of the popular classes. Waves of consumer protests

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occurred around the turn of the century and again during the First World War, following
their own “direct action” repertoire of collective action that included attacks on bread
dispensaries and food distribution centers, demonstrations in front of city halls, destruc-
tion of tax collection centers and gatherings at ports to prevent the loading of goods for
export. Individual protests usually emerged spontaneously out of women’s informal net-
works, although they were sometimes supported by the formal organizations of the labor
movement with a sympathetic strike (Radcliff, “Women’s Politics”).
In addition to their membership in class or religious organizations and their partici-
pation in informal protests, some women formed autonomous associations devoted spe-
cifically to women’s issues. (del Moral Vargas; Folguera; Aguado and Ortega). This was
the era of “first wave” feminism in Europe and the US, when mostly middle class, liberal
democratic women joined together to challenge their exclusion from citizenship rights, as
universal male suffrage became the norm in democratizing states. There was a broad range
of feminist movements across Europe, which varied by size, repertoires of collective action,
and demands. Individualist feminist movements like those in the US and Britain argued
for equal status for women using liberal arguments, while relational movements accepted
women’s distinct roles as advocates for family interests. In Catholic countries like Spain,
France and Italy, women tended to favor the relational version and a repertoire of collec-
tive action that focused on petitions and press campaigns instead of mass demonstrations.
Still, self-defined feminist movements in Spain played a smaller role than in neighboring
European countries, probably as a result of slower access to education and professions, as
well as Catholic norms. From the turn of the century, a small group of mostly middle-class
women that included teachers, writers and journalists, separated and single women, left-
ist political activists and free thinkers pushed the limits of accepted female behavior and
created their own world of informal networks and associations, such as the Autonomous
Women’s Society in Barcelona (1889–1892) or the Women’s Freethinker Union of Huelva
(1898–1906).
The first association formed explicitly to advocate for women’s citizenship was the
National Association of Spanish Women (ANME, Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Espa-
ñolas), founded in 1918, followed by the Spanish Women’s Crusade (CME, Cruzada de
Mujeres Españolas) in 1920, as many countries granted female suffrage coming out of the
First World War. The CME circulated a petition with 800 signatures in support of a broad
array of equal rights for women, culminating in a protest on the Parliament steps in 1921.
Both the Women’s Catholic Action association and the Socialist party jumped on board in
supporting female suffrage, although for these latter two groups women’s suffrage was a
means to increase votes for their own political parties. Scholars have argued as to whether
Catholic women’s activism in defense of a conservative version of womanhood should be
labeled as a version of feminism. The European Socialists of this era famously rejected femi-
nism as a bourgeois movement and viewed women’s emancipation as a secondary problem,
whose solution had to wait until after the class revolution. But with the presentation of a
women’s suffrage bill by a conservative minister in 1919, the Socialist party in Spain had to
take a public stand. Conservatives believed women’s greater religiosity would skew them
as voters towards their political parties, a conviction many liberals shared. This conviction
kept the bill from passing in 1919 and nearly prevented women from being granted the
vote in 1931, in the democratic Second Republic. In the end, women’s citizenship rights
were granted, not because of pressure from feminist groups, but because of their symbolic
importance to Spain’s new democratic identity. During the Republic and Civil War, more

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women were drawn into the culture of popular mobilization, but largely through religious
and class organizations that foregrounded their other identities.
While class, religion and gender were key vectors of identity that could mobilize col-
lectivities, they were not the only ones. It is worth mentioning the emergence of popular
nationalist and regionalist movements during the same period, organized around Catalan,
Basque and Spanish national identities. The Catalan and Basque movements included cul-
tural and language centers with a grass roots base as well as “top down” political parties.
Spanish nationalist movements emerged in part as a response to these challenges from
emerging peripheral nationalism. In the postwar era, groups like the Mauristas (follow-
ers of prime minister Antonio Maura) and the Liga Patriótica Española (Spanish Patriotic
League) held public rallies in defense of a united Spain. These never reached the size of
nationalist leagues in Germany, France or Italy, but they did constitute part of a new genre
of popular politics that in some places played a role in the rise of fascist movements. Spain’s
self-defined fascist movement, the Falange, emerged later, during the Second Republic, and
only became a mass movement during the Civil War and after. The central role of the mili-
tary, both in 1923 and 1936, and the strength of Catholic associationism on the right, may
have undercut the appeal of a grass roots fascist nationalist movement.
The Civil War marked the end of the early 20th-century cycle of mobilization and served as
a transition era that contained several possible futures. The expanding Nationalist-occupied
territory in the Civil War was the one that emerged victorious. The Nationalists brutally
crushed the labor movement, assassinated or imprisoned many members and destroyed the
affiliated social, political and cultural milieu. Associational life under the Nationalists would
be strictly limited to Catholic groups and the emerging milieu of the Movimiento Nacional
(National Movement), a new anti-party organization that incorporated the Falange and
was modelled on the hierarchical collectivities of fascist regimes. In the gradually shrinking
Republican territory, there were competing models of popular politics and its relation-
ship to the formal political sphere. In CNT/FAI-dominated territory, the coup sparked an
economic and political revolution, characterized by grass roots collectivization of larger
businesses and farms and direct governance by local committees and militias. Elsewhere in
Republican territory, economic collectivization was minimal, but membership in affiliated
groups, including the growing Communist party, became an increasingly normal feature of
community life. Across Republican territory, churches and religious buildings were either
burned, deserted or re-purposed, signaling the intention to eradicate Catholicism from the
public sphere as the Nationalists enshrined its prominent role.
The early 20th-century cycle of mobilization occurred within a broader context of the
expansion of mass politics, urbanization and economic transformation. The expanding
Spanish public sphere was the site of collective mobilization, that took the form of asso-
ciations, marches, strikes, demonstrations and other forms of “bottom up” politics that
engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the evolving rules of the “top down” formal political
realm. At the beginning of the 20th century, political decisions largely took place within
elite circles, divorced from effective grassroots pressure. By the 1930s, millions of ordinary
Spaniards participated in a noisy realm of popular politics with competing visions of a
future society. The Civil War and Nationalist victory abruptly ended this cycle of mobiliza-
tion, with a 40-year dictatorship that set the Iberian Peninsula on its own course, in contrast
to both the Eastern European communist regimes and the Western European democratic
states. The political transition of the 1970s launched a new cycle of popular mobilization
that included associations of women, workers and regional nationalists, as in the early 20th

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century, but also new collectivities adapted to the needs and demands of a new historical
context. The most recent “15-M” mobilization cycle in Spain, which emerged out of pro-
tests against economic crisis, austerity policies, political corruption and demands for direct
democracy, demonstrate that the public sphere continues to play an important role in Span-
ish political life, giving voice and space to currents on the margins of institutional politics.

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1890–1930.” Journal of Social History, vol. 27, no.1, Sept. 1993, pp. 85–108.
Radcliff, Pamela. From Mobilization to Civil War: The Politics of Polarization in the Spanish City of
Gijón. Cambridge, 1996.
Radcliff, Pamela. “Women’s Politics: Consumer Riots in Twentieth Century Spain.” Constructing
Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, edited by Victoria Enders, and Pamela Radcliff,
SUNY P, 1999, pp. 301–24.
Smith, Angel. Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labour and the Crisis of the Spanish
State, 1898–1922. Berghahn Books, 2007.
Thomas, Maria. The Faith and the Fury: Popular Anticlerical Violence and Iconoclasm in Spain
1931–1936. Liverpool UP, 2012.

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 34
CHINESE CONTRIBUTIONS TO
SPANISH CULTURE
An Overview1

Joaquín Beltrán Antolín and Amelia Sáiz López

Translated by Linda Grabner

Lo Chino2 in Spanish Popular Culture in the First Half of the 20th Century
In 1876, a 26-year-old Chinese man born in Beijing married a neighbor from Sax (Ali-
cante), according to the municipal marriage register, which indicates that his profession
was “gymnastic exercises in public shows”; that is, he was an acrobat. During the last third
of the 19th century and the first third of the 20th, several Chinese circuses and acrobatic
companies traveled throughout Europe and Spain with their shows, which were always
well received. Furthermore, shows with Chinese magicians or non-Chinese magicians who
adopted Chinese stage names were also common. In their staging for live shows, these
artists used makeup and costumes that were identified, more or less, with the period’s
imaginary of supposed “Chineseness” (lo chino) – a form of “whitewashing” or, more
specifically, of yellowface. Impossible acrobatics and magic tricks and mysterious illusions
all supposedly from China offered a means of entertainment to the Spanish population
that allowed them to escape their daily life. The mobile, itinerant, nomadic nature of these
popular artists appeared to be an exotic novelty in places where contact with foreign lands,
with urban life, and with high culture was minimal.
The See-Hee-Shang Troupe of Shandong toured Spain in 1917, and that same year Pilar
Shang (a.k.a. Jua-Land) was born in Valencia, the daughter of the owner of this company,
which after traveling throughout Europe finally established itself in the country in 1927.
Jua-Land went on to have a career as a movie actress and singer. The China Chekiang
Troupe, founded in Germany in 1930, settled in Spain in 1934. In 1947 the owner of the
company, Tse-Ping Chen, founded the Chinese Theatre-Circus. He later changed its name
to “Teatro Chino de Manolita Chen” (Manolita Chen’s Chinese Theatre) in honor of his
wife, the Spanish singer Manuela Fernández Pérez, whom he met in the Price Circus and
married in 1944. The company evolved into a variety show that included acrobats, drag
queens, jugglers, contortionists, magicians and illusionists, rhapsodists, clowns, comedians,
dancers, orchestras, showgirls, and singers, and toured all over Spain until its dissolution
in the 1980s (Montijano Ruíz). This company was so successful that other traveling variety

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-39 
 Chinese Contributions to Spanish Culture

show theatre empresarios adopted the name “Chinese Theatre.” Spanish popular culture in
the puritanical Francoist society of the 1950s to the 1980s was thirsty for the risqué offer-
ings (music, dance, humor, scantily clad showgirls) commonly associated with Manolita
Chen’s Chinese Theatre, which became a referent for lo chino in the Spanish culture of an
entire era.
If mystery is the essence of magic and the impossible acrobatics performed in the cir-
cus, the risqué variety shows that challenged “buenas costumbres” (“good manners”) were
identifiers for “Chinese Theatres,” even when the cast no longer included any actual Chi-
nese performers. In this regard, the name change of the dance hall/cabaret Ca’l Sagristà
makes sense. This was a venue dedicated to drag shows in the Barcelona district currently
called Raval, but known in the 1930s as “barrio chino” (Chinatown) – despite the fact
that there were almost no Chinese residents there – and in 1934 its cabaret’s name was
changed to Wu-Li-Chang (Calvo Asensio et al. 153). The literary/cinematic imaginary of
“Chinatown” evoked run-down urban areas near the port where one could find bars, petty
crime, drugs, prostitution, homosexuality, transvestism, and so on. In the neighborhood
there were celebrations of transvestite “Miss Chinatown” contests, for example. This fed
an imaginary that associated lo chino with being “depraved,” “immoral,” or just “poor.”
Another association was with the distant peripheral locations of some districts far from
downtown, where some of the most disadvantaged members of society lived. Some of these
neighborhoods were commonly called “barrio Pekín” (“little Peking”), evoking both their
physical and their social distance.
As mentioned earlier, during this first phase of the history of a Chinese presence in Spain,
along with Chinese circuses, acrobats, and magicians, we find native Spaniards who prac-
tice yellowashing, like the magicians Wenceslau Ciuró (1895–1978), who in 1917 adopted
the stage name Ling-kai-fu; Joan Forns (1916–1998), who in 1933 was Ling-Fú and then
in 1945 became Li-Chang; the Fak-Hongs were the brothers Ernest and Alfons Roca from
the 1920s; Li-tong-fu, also known as Francisco Nieto Gras (1921–2002); Li-ho-chang, aka
Josep Morera (born in 1919); and Chang-Fu, aka Josep María Ferrándiz (1918–1999).
Another such practice of yellowashing was the company of “El Chino Torero” (“The
Chinese Bullfighter”), aka Manuel Pérez Luque, who disguised himself as Chinese for a
comedy-bullfighting-musical show that included dwarves as rejoneadores, the mounted,
lance-bearing bullfighters in the “fiesta nacional” (“national pastime”). The show was
founded in the 1950s and was, astonishingly, active until 2001, touring non-stop through-
out Spain and Latin America. Some ethnically Chinese bullfighters who also performed in
Spain actually came from Mexico and the United States: Vicente Hong in 1930 and Bong
Way Wong in 1970.
In another sphere of entertainment, cinemas screened movies with a greater or lesser
presence of Chinese stars, and theaters re-released plays with Chinese subject matter that
had been successfully performed abroad and were later adapted for a Spanish audience. One
specific example is Wu-Li-Chang (1928), an adaptation by Federico Reparaz of Mr. Wu
(1913) by Harold Owen and Harry M. Vernon that premiered in London that same year,
and from which two silent movies were also made, in 1919 and 1927 (based on the original
British play). In 1930 Metro Goldwyn Meyer also filmed a Spanish “talkie” version of the
work adapted for the stage, with a script by Salvador de Alberich, codirected by the Chilean
Carlos Borcosque and Nick Grinde and starring Ernesto Vilches. While not an exhaustive
list, we mention other examples of successful plays abroad that had connections to lo chino
and were adapted and presented in Spanish theatres: In 1913, Jacinto Benavente, who won

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the Nobel Prize for Spanish Literature in 1922, adapted the work The Yellow Jacket, writ-
ten by George C. Hazelton and Joseph Harry Benrimo. While the American play premiered
in November 4, 1912 in the Fulton Theater in New York, the Spanish adaptation was
shown in the María Guerrero Theatre in Madrid. Tian-Hoa (1922) by Giovachino Forzano
premiered in the Tívoli Theater of Barcelona in April 1925 with the company of Margarita
Xirgu, an iconic actress of the time. The Shanghai Gesture (1926) by John Colton – adapted
for film in 1941 by Josef Von Sternberg – was translated to Catalan by Alfons Fernández
Burgas and Rodríguez-Grahit and to Spanish by Arturo Mori in 1930. The Catalan ver-
sion premiered in 1930 in the Romea Theater in Barcelona, and the Spanish version in
the Comic Theater of Madrid the same year, both with the title Shanghai. And it is worth
mentioning original Spanish works among the movie listings of the 1930s: The comedies
Fu-Chu-Ling, by Jacinto Capella and José de Lucio, shown in Madrid’s Beatriz Theater in
1934 – a comedy of errors revolving around the figure of a Chinese prince, grandson of
the last emperor, Puyi, who, having fled from Republican China, joined the circus – and
Son . . . naranjas de la China (They are . . . China oranges), by Franco Padilla, premiering
March 13, 1936 in Barcelona’s Comic Theater. This play marked the beginning of the inclu-
sion in Spanish humor of stereotypes about Chinese people and culture with xenophobic,
racist connotations.
The imaginary regarding lo chino has, in large part, been colonized by foreign cultural
productions from the start of the 20th century to well into the 21st, especially by those com-
ing from Hollywood that became dominant and hegemonic, often uncritically reproducing
a whole series of stereotypes and clichés that have been continually repeated, together with
the practice of yellowface. It was also common to fall back on racist references to mock the
Chinese in comedies.

Evolution of the Chinese Presence in Spain and Its Impact on Popular

Culture Since 1950
With the second half of the 20th century Spain experienced an evolution of lo chino with
the arrival of another kind of Chinese artist: Taiwanese painters who visited Spain for dif-
ferent amounts of time, and even began exhibiting their works and winning some prizes
(Lin). This influx of painters was always small, but it has remained constant over time.
Their presence does not go unnoticed in fine arts schools, and a number of Chinese painters
have established their studios in Spain (Leng Bingchuan, Santos Hu, Czili, Hsu Su-Pi, Ming
Yi Chou, among others). The Chinese population in Spain was quite small until 1990, when
there were only about 4,000 Chinese people (as opposed to the even fewer 677 in 1980).
Because of this, Spanish cultural imaginaries of lo chino continued to be colonized by the
kinds of mass culture Anglo-American productions consumed by the public: in cinema, for
example, The Saga of Fu Manchu; in television series such as Kung Fu; and so on (Martín
Corrales 67). Local culture has appropriated lo chino in some works, almost always tend-
ing to uncritically reproduce an imaginary already developed in other countries.
Nevertheless, the continual increase in the resident population of Chinese ancestry has
not slowed down in recent years. In 2000 the number had risen to a respectable 28,693, by
2010 to 156,380, and by the end of 2020 to 227,415 – significantly, 23% under 15 years
of age – including those international Chinese students that are in Spain temporarily (8,090
in 2019).There is also 9,710 Chinese nationals who have been naturalized as Spanish citi-
zens in the period from 1995 to 2020) according to statistics from different official sources.

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In short, the Chinese population in Spain, whether Chinese-born or of Chinese ancestry,

began the century with approximately 30,000 people, and by June 2020 there were around
240,000. In the 21st century, and especially in its second decade, we see a generational
shift, with the appearance of youngsters born in Spain, or reunited with their families at
an early age, and, as would be expected, some of them are also creators and artists in the
cultural sphere.
A difference can be noted in the works and perspectives of permanent residents and their
descendants as opposed to temporary residents, such as international students, even when
the latter decide to lengthen their stay in the country. Sometimes that difference is also
apparent according to geographic origin (rural/urban, China/Taiwan/Hong Kong) and social
class. Their differing family and personal experiences also influence their artistic creations.

From “No Molesten” (“Don’t Be a Bother”) to “Aquí Estoy Yo”

(“Here I Am”)
The contributions to Spanish culture by populations of Chinese descent coexist with recourse
to lo chino – whether this plays out through people’s imitations or the appropriation of
cultural aspects – found in the production and works by Spanish creators who are not of
Chinese ethnicity. In general, those artists who have Chinese ancestry occupy a secondary,
marginal space, but as a group they are becoming increasingly more significant and progres-
sively gaining prominence, for example, through their presence in television series and films.
The database chinacult.es is a project that gathers information about Chinese-related contri-
butions – from both ethnic Chinese and non-Chinese artists – to Spanish cultural production
(Beltrán Antolín et al. Chinacult.es). Such Chinese-related references form an indistinguish-
able part of Spanish culture, and they range from clearly differentiated – and exclusion-
ary – ethnic markers to projects that merge and deliberately confuse ethnic considerations
by erasing distinctions and difference. Artistic creation, beyond the sources of inspiration or
referents that can be identified in the works themselves, involves the contribution of some-
thing new with a personal perspective; thus, each artist contributes to the national culture of
which they form a part, and where they are inserted, something new arises, so that the idea
of “ethnicity” is diluted and complicated and ultimately contributes to its own redefinition.
Culture is not only reproduced or imitated, but rather it is subjected to continual innovation.
The second decade of the 21st century is experiencing a generational shift among
Chinese-descended artists who have moved from occupying limited, marginal spaces within
Spanish culture, neither marked by nor particularly recognized for their ethnicity, to par-
taking in an explosion of artistic creations that highlight their own space, claim their due
recognition, and denounce the stereotypes and racism experienced in their daily lives, all
these experiences which are often collected and reflected in their works. It is a process of
cultural conscientization and activism that could be summarized by their passage from “no
molesten” (“Don’t be a bother” or “don’t be a nuisance”) to “aquí estoy yo” (“Here I am”),
which accompanies the identity politics that were developing in Spain during the same
period. In short, this emerging identity-based assertiveness could be one of the strategies of
introduction used in the cultural production of some Chinese creators at a given moment.
Several artists descended from Chinese immigrants have explicitly described in inter-
views with the media how their parents have maintained an attitude of being “invitados”
(“guests”) within the Spanish society in which they have inserted themselves, often by
starting businesses in the service sector; in these specific cases, we are referring to Chinese

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restaurants. According to the Chinese culture in which their parents were socialized, a
guest should be someone who doesn’t bother the host and who expresses their apprecia-
tion for the generosity that the host has shown by extending the invitation. According to
the descendants, and in consonance with the hegemonic Spanish image of this population,
this attitude led them to self-isolate within the Chinese collective, with minimal interactions
with the wider society, basically being reduced to the sphere of the service that they offer.
However, their children, the creators and artists, have been socialized in Spanish schools
where they have learned other cultural values, chief among them the idea of self-definition
and self-assertion. And this is why they use their voices to say, “Here I am.” In other words,
thanks to the growth in their population numbers and the evolution of Spanish society itself
and its identity politics and acceptance towards others, these younger creators have become
the spokespeople for a previously silenced collective.
“Here I am,” that is, the assertive self-identified voice, contributes to both the work
and dissemination of artist-activists like the musician Chenta Tsai – better known since
2017 as Putochinomaricón (loosely translated as “Fuckingchinesefaggot”), born in Taibei
in 1991; living in Madrid since the age of one – and the photographer Lucía Sun (Orense,
1994, although born in Valencia). This self-identifying, assertive voice was especially active
during the #NoSoyUnVirus (I’m Not a Virus) social media campaign and demonstration
in Madrid in February 2020, which echoed similar campaigns in other places around the
world in response to the racist, xenophobic reactions taking place against people of Chinese
ancestry during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lucía Sun took a series of photographs on this
theme; and in the fashion parade of Madrid Fashion Week 2020, Putochinomaricón used
their body to display that slogan in English, saying with gender neutral language on their
Instagram account that they wanted to support “aquelles hermanes que sufren racismo por
ello” (“those ‘siblings’ who suffer racism because of it”).3

Whitewashing, Yellowface and Humor

Since the early 20th century, references to lo chino or to aspects of Chinese culture within
Spanish culture created by non-Chinese people has been marked, in part although not
entirely, by a recourse to stereotypes – often racist and xenophobic – with the comedic
intention of causing laughter in the public, together with the practice of yellowashing, or
dressing up as Chinese, including the use of makeup. But since 2010, some Chinese creators
born and socialized in Spain explicitly use humor in their works to condemn precisely those
stereotypes and practices (Collado 132–210).
Quan Zhou (Algeciras, 1989) is a designer and illustrator, as well as an author of
graphic novels – Gazpacho agridulce (Sweet and Sour Gazpacho, 2015), Andaluchinas por
el mundo (Chinese Andalusians around the World, 2017), and Gente de aquí, gente de allí
(People from Here, People from There, 2020) – in which she reflects humorously on herself
and her family, to wind up condemning the racism, xenophobia, discrimination and the
broad anti-immigrant sentiment generally found in Spanish society. With a great sense of
humor, Quan Zhou brings to the surface both the difficulties she has had to confront within
her family, dominated by Chinese cultural values foreign to those of Spanish culture, and
the resistance of part of Spanish society to accepting her just as she is:

Ni la sociedad china ni la española se ha dado cuenta de que yo no me tengo que inte-

grar en ningún lado. Yo soy, y punto. No me tienes que juzgar porque no sepa todo el

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idioma o toda la cultura de un sitio u otro. Yo soy una cosa nueva que no existía. . . .
[Mi madre] Se ha dado cuenta de nuestra identidad mixta y de que nuestra voz tiene
importancia. (Centeno, “La andaluza Quan Zhou”)
Neither Chinese nor Spanish society has realized that I don’t have to integrate any-
where. I am, and that’s it. You don’t have to judge me because I don’t know all of the
language or everything about the culture of a place or group. I am a new thing that
never existed before. . . . [My mother] has come to recognize our mixed identity and
that our voice is important.

This practice of empowerment – “our voice is important” – is executed with a sense of

humor that is, among other things but not only, antiracist. This is a creative strategy that
differs from that of Yellow Power, the pseudonym of a graffiti artist born in Spain of Chi-
nese parents, like Quan Zhou, and who remains anonymous under this pseudonym, a
moniker (Yellow Power) which implies a forceful declaration of intent and condemnation:

Yo busco reírme de la sociedad, reírme de la temida invasión china. . . . El chino no

solo vende bolsas de chuches, ahora hay un Yellow Pope, un Yellow Punki, un Yellow
Hípster. . . . El chino es cualquiera, es uno más en nuestra sociedad . . . [mi acción]
no es racista, es un toque de atención. El Yellow Power nació como un concepto del
chino poderoso y las pintadas son su forma de expresión. (Panés)
I want to laugh at society, laugh at the feared Chinese invasion. . . . The Chinese
don’t only sell bags of sweets, now there is a Yellow Pope, a Yellow Punk Rocker,
a Yellow Hipster. . . . The Chinese person is anyone, just one more [person] in our
society . . . [my act] is not racist, it’s a call to attention. Yellow Power was born as a
concept of the powerful Chinese person, and graffiti is his or her form of expression.

During 2014 the streets of various downtown neighborhoods in Madrid were covered
with graffiti signed by Yellow Power, whose urban art manifests Chinese empowerment by
appropriating (non-Chinese) concepts, which the artist resignifies and deconstructs with
an ironic, humorous perspective. He uses the word “amarillo” (“yellow”) from the racist
trope “peligro amarillo” (“yellow peril”) to rewrite it through a reading that challenges
the expectations of the stereotypes associated with Chinese people, or he plays with those
expectations to show how absurd they are (Beltrán Antolín, “¿Peligro Amarillo?”). His
graffiti uses “yellow power” in English mixed in with Spanish words. At the same time,
some of the graffittis follow the stereotype that assumes that Chinese people have problems
pronouncing the letter “r.” Thus, there are graffitis written in “accented” English like “Vely
good fliends,” or “The blothels,” as well as others written in “accented” Spanish that say
“Aloz” [arroz (rice)] “Aloz tallalin” [arroz tallarín (rice noodles)], “Tles delicias” [tres
delicias (triple delight)], all names of popular dishes served at Chinese restaurants. Or he
will use phrases like “Aloz pala hoy, hamble pala mañana” [arroz para hoy, hambre para
mañana (“rice for today, hunger for tomorrow”), a resignification of the Spanish saying
“pan para hoy, hambre para mañana” (“bread for today, hunger for tomorrow”; Yellow
Power).
All of Yellow Power’s graffitis include a head identified as Chinese by the slanted
eyes, two exaggeratedly prominent upper front teeth, a conical hat, sometimes with a Man-
chu pigtail, and sometimes beside the head there is also the outline of a bear. The head is
usually painted yellow, redundant with the signature Yellow Power or one of his other

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monikers, “Yellow Invasion,” “Yellow People,” “Yellow King,” “Yellow Brothers,” “Yel-
low Sister,” “Yellow Family,” “Yellow Home,” “Yellow Love,” “Yellow Kung-fu,” “Yel-
low 3-D,” “Yellow Punk Rocker,” “Yellow Hipster,” “Yellow Rasta,” “Yellow Fat,” “New
Yellow,” “Yellow Cat,” and so on. Sometimes he directly interpellates or relates to some-
thing present at the place where he sprays the graffiti; for example, beside a store called “La
Chinata,” the graffiti says, “Chinata tú!!!” (“You’re Chinata!”).
All these graffitis directly address their readers, whether through the expected stereo-
typical associations – not being able to pronounce “r” in the usual jokes – or through the
unexpected ones – nobody associates yellow with words like love, sister, punk rocker, rasta,
hipster, and others – and thus the possible comic effect, on the one hand, comes together
with its deconstruction by using the term to suggest situations so different from the original
meaning of “yellow peril,” on the other. Both readings, in short, converge in a creative
strategy of vindication and empowerment.
Chenta Tsai also appropriates insults to create a pseudonym. He is an architect, musi-
cian, singer, DJ, multimedia artist and activist against homophobia and racism, and against
racism within the LGBTQIA+ community more specifically. He is the author of Arroz tres
delicias: sexo, raza y género (Triple Delight Rice: Sex, Race and Gender) published in 2019,
in which he relates experiences from his personal life from the perspective of antiracist
activism, which is his banner in his constant artistic and media activity. Putochinomaricón
is a customary insult in Spanish society (or at least a compound of several frequent insults),
and with its appropriation for his pseudonym, Tsai neutralizes and deactivates the daily
racism, especially towards people of Chinese descent, still found in Spain. In fact, Putochi-
nomaricón has become an influencer for a large segment of the younger generation: His
YouTube account has more than a million visits and a significant number of followers.
An Wei (Fuenlabrada, 1990) uses the color black in several paintings and in his
English-titled series Little Talks/Different Situations (2017). In it, he includes a self-portrait
in which his skin is painted black, and does the same for portraits of his parents, family
members, and Chinese friends, and even for a Chinese bullfighter. In this case, an artist of
Chinese descent has recourse to a variation on the strategy of blackface, which could be
interpreted as a condemnation of the subordinate position that society in general attributes
in the ethnic hierarchy to people with Asian and African phenotypic characteristics, assimi-
lating both under the color black for skin.
In fact, this deactivation or deconstruction of stereotypes used against Asian people
through humor and other means has an antecedent in a couple of short films by two Span-
ish filmmakers: Proverbio chino (Chinese Proverb, 2006) by Javier San Román, nominated
for Best Fiction Short Film in the 2007 Goya Awards; and Chino (2007) by Rogelio Sastre,
with more than 222,000 views on YouTube. In short, using humor as a strategy to coun-
teract racism and Chinese stereotypes in Spanish cultural production is inscribed within
a process of change in aesthetic and political sensibilities that is taking place in Spanish
society in the 21st century.

Self-Orientalism and Exoticization

Another of the strategies deployed by some artists is the practice of self-orientalism (Beltrán
Antolín, “Orientalismo” 257), which happens when Chinese people have recourse to an
imaginary developed outside of China (that is, “orientalism”) and which doesn’t necessarily
reflect reality, but rather, is a construction unrelated to reality, which impacts difference,

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triggering repulsion and/or attraction (exoticization) as a projection aimed at reinforcing

separation. This orientalist imaginary is exploited because it accommodates the expecta-
tions of the dominant imaginary (which the Chinese-Spanish creator can then expose or
exploit). The practice of self-orientalism and exoticization can be more or less consciously
chosen by the artists due to the presence of a sociocultural effect that uncritically reinforces
identity politics and the politics of difference (within the broader society).
An example can be seen in one part of the action and set design of the short film Xiao
Xian by the director, scriptwriter and producer Jiajie Yu Yan (Barcelona, 1989). It was
filmed in Chinese and nominated in 2020 for the Goya Award for Best Fiction Short Film.
Its cinematic referents include Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, Ang Lee, and Edward Yang,
both in film aesthetics and in its self-orientalist, exoticizing regard, which includes the
hypersexualization of Chinese women, in this case a lesbian, under the pretext of the char-
acter’s discovery of her sexuality. In this case the filmmaker falls into the same orientalist
trap that exoticizes, without a critical perspective, his own culture. Xisi Sofía Ye Chen
(Barcelona, 1994) filmed the short Xiao Qiang, primera ensoñación (Xiao Qiang, First
Daydream; 2020) about a young boy in a rural area; the action centers around his parents’
place of origin. The “daydream” referred to in the title already points to the construction
of a self-orientalization imaginary, in which there is no lack of Buddhist references, for
example. Again, it is an interiorized form of self-orientalism that mirrors that found in
mainstream culture.
Junyi Sun (Valencia, 1987), dancer, choreographer, founder and director of the Kernel
Dance Theatre Company of Barcelona, deals with themes like identity through a language
that includes contemporary dance, theatre, and martial arts. In 2018 he produced the show
Am I Bruce Lee? – a title, in English in the original, that parodies the documentary I Am
Bruce Lee (2011) by Peter McCormack – in which the filmmaker reflects on his own per-
sonal and professional trajectory through parallels with Bruce Lee’s persona. Important to
consider that Bruce Lee is an icon of lo chino associated with martial arts, and Junyi Sun
has incorporated them into his productions.
Likewise, in the series of photographs YoNoSoyUnVirus (IAmNotaVirus; 2020) by
Lucía Sun, the use of a red background in some images is associated with the centrality of
that color in Chinese culture and society, which, as she notes, even appears in the country’s
flag. The photographer Xiqi Yuwang (Wenzhou, 1975, living in Valencia since 1989) has
created several photo series in which he reflects on Chinese identity in Spain, such as Ye
Tianan: la historia de un monje Shaolin (Ye Tianan: History of a Shaolin Monk), in which
he uses a Chinese character to show the irony of stereotypes and the realities of immigra-
tion. Yuwang has also dealt with the memory of origins in other series: El pequeño puente
sobre el río (The Little Bridge over the River; 2010) and Magnolia blanca (White Magnolia;
2015).
Other aforementioned examples of deliberately parodic self-orientalism can be found in
the images of the Chinese head that Yellow Power always incorporates into his graffiti, and
in some of Quan Zhou’s illustrations.

The Generational Turn: Ethnicity and Activism

Identity politics incites difference, the distinction between people. It can be used and rein-
forced in a struggle for civil rights in discriminatory situations, activated in antiracist move-
ments or in movements seeking recognition for sexual identities (LGBTQIA+). At the same

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time, it can be an object of reflection in personal searches, especially in situations of double

socialization like those experienced by young people born in Spain and descended from
Chinese immigrants, children of mixed marriages, or those Chinese children adopted inter-
nationally by Spanish families. All these possible situations are also manifested in popular
culture.
The journalist Susana Ye (Alicante, 1991) has filmed documentaries to explore these
issues, for instance in Chiñoles y bananas (Chinese-Spanish and Bananas; 2016), in which
she gathers the recounting of experiences by several young people descended from Chinese
immigrants. “Chiñol” is a neologism coined to indicate that one’s identity includes one part
Chinese and another Spanish (chin[a/o] + [espa]ñol), and “banana” is another term that
indicates how they feel and how they sometimes identify themselves: “white on the inside
and yellow on the outside.” In fact, “banana” is also a term imported from the Anglo
world, where it has a pejorative meaning, although recently it has been donned proudly by
those who are called that by others, similarly to “Putochinomaricón” in taking on (appro-
priating) an insult to name himself. In any case, in Spain it is Chinese-Spanish people who
use this self-referential term, and not the rest of the Spanish population.
Paloma Chen (Utiel, 1997, born in Alicante), also a journalist and poet, has produced
a multimedia report about multiple experiences and identities through gathering personal
reflections and testimonies by young people of Chinese descent born in Spain or who immi-
grated at a young age, under the title Crecer en “un chino” (Growing Up in “a Chinese
[Business]”; 2015). In this case, the term “chino” refers to some of the service businesses
that characterize the work of a large part of the Chinese population – Chinese restaurants,
small supermarkets, or bazaars with cheap products. “Ir al chino” (“go to the Chinese”)
in popular parlance means that you’re going to one of these establishments, whether to eat
or to buy some necessities. This use has been condemned by these young people as a racist
microaggression.
Another documentary about the experience of four young Chinese boys descended from
immigrants is El hilo rojo (The Red Thread; 2017) by Xiaomei Espiro Rosselló, who came
to Majorca at the age of seven, adopted by a Spanish family. The documentary includes a
fictional part that could also be considered self-orientalist and exoticist.
Authors like Minke Wang (Wenzhou, 1978, living in Spain from the age of 10) – poet
(mòh, 2015), short-story writer (Los escritores plagiaristas [The Plagiarist Writers], 2017),
movie actor (in the movies of Daniel V. Villamediana, La vida sublime [Divine Life], 2010;
Flor-no-nada [Flower-not-anything], 2011; Cábala caníbal [Cannibal Cabbala], 2014), and
playwright (Inmortales [Immortals], 2013) – combine reflections on the search for oneself
and the relationship between people and languages. In his first works, the reference to
identity goes beyond the limits of an ethnicity linked to a specific origin, but over time, this
theme came to hold a more central place in his production, as in his play Un idioma propio
(A Language of One’s Own; 2018, María Guerrero Theatre, National Acting Center). The
author comments:

Mis orígenes de una región al sur de China surcada por canales configuran epigené-
ticamente un cuerpo en el que ha de brotar transfigurándose el idioma áspero del
páramo castellano. . . . Vine a España a los 10 años, y al cabo de este tiempo no me
siento ni chino ni español; no es posible ser de un lugar cuando decides que donde
más cómodo estás es en los límites. El migrante que llega trata de aprender fielmente
el idioma del país de acogida, pero una vez interiorizadas las reglas convencionales

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de uso su cuerpo se rebela, entonces debe desaprender lo aprendido e ir en busca de

una lengua imperfecta que pueda hospedarse en su organismo híbrido. En este caso
es el sustrato desarraigado el que intenta desplegarse y articular una forma extrañada
sin salirse de la gramática que le da cobijo: un idioma menor y extranjero dentro del
propio idioma. (Wang)
My origins from a region in the south of China [that was] carved by channels
epigenetically form a body in which the harsh language of the Spanish plains must
burst forth transfigured. . . . I came to Spain when I was ten years old, and after all
this time, I don’t feel Chinese or Spanish; it isn’t possible to be from a place when you
decide that the place [where] you are most comfortable is on the borders. The immi-
grant who comes tries to faithfully learn the language of the host country, but once
the conventional rules of usage are internalized, his body rebels, and then he must
unlearn what he had learned and go in search of an imperfect language that can dwell
in his hybrid organism. In this case, it is the uprooted substrate that attempts to unfurl
and articulate a missing form without departing from the grammar that blankets it: a
minor, foreign language within one’s own language.

Recognition and Institutionalization

The contributions to Spanish culture by creators of Chinese origin are not limited to the
margins; often they are developed within mass media culture and are even awarded prizes
and/or grants for their creative process. The works do not necessarily have to delve into eth-
nic differentiation, although identity politics occasionally contributes to their development,
support, and dissemination. The poet Berna Wang (Madrid, 1957) published Pequeños acci-
dentes caseros (Minor Accidents at Home) in 2004, and collaborated on a program for Radio
Nacional de España, Radio 3 (Música es 3 [Music Is 3], 2003–2008) with the segment “La
mirada oblicua” (The Sideways Glance) dedicated to her poetry, finally published as a book
(2008); another radio contribution was the bilingual Spanish-Chinese program “Cosas que
me explica mi madre” (Things my mother explains to me), where she commented on small
details about Chinese culture, as part of the Vive la vida (Live life) show on RNE (2018). She
is one of the authors included in the anthology La escritura plural: 33 poetas entre la disper-
sión y la continuidad de una cultura. Antología actual de poesía española (Plural Writing:
33 Poets between the Dispersion and Continuity of a Culture. Current Anthology of Spanish
Poetry, 2019) by Fulgencio Martínez. Wang’s dedication to poetry, writing and translation
place her at the center of Spanish culture, mediated by language, beyond her origins.
Minke Wang has also been officially recognized on multiple occasions, has been trans-
lated into French, and earned grants for creative work like the BBVA Foundation’s 2020
Leonardo Grant for Cultural Researchers and Creators, among others. He has been the art-
ist in residence at the Théâtre de la Ville-Paris, invited to various international literary fairs,
and is considered one of the “important Spanish authors,” as mentioned during his par-
ticipation in the Fourth Festival of Ibero-Romance Literature in Copenhagen in 2016. Xiqi
Yuwang won the 2009 FNAC New Talent of Photography Award, and his work has been
exhibited in China on numerous occasions. An Wei, a visual artist whose works include
murals, urban art, and installations, has participated in biennial exhibitions in Dakar and
has enjoyed residencies in Birmingham and Rome, in addition to winning the 34th Mario
Antolín BMW Prize-Grant for Pictorial Research in 2019.

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Junyi Sun, a dancer and choreographer of modern dance, has received different critics’
awards in 2014 and 2017, and in 2018 he was the first creator in residence at La Piconera
where he developed his project Am I Bruce Lee? Jiajie Yu Yan is preparing his first film,
San dai shi guang (Three Generations) – which follows the lives of a Chinese family in Bar-
celona since 1992, especially through the women of the family – thanks to the 2020 Film
Academy Residencies Program that he was awarded to develop the script. For her part,
Xisi Sofia Ye Chen has won the 2021 La Casa Encendida’s Audiovisual Creation Award to
write her first full-length movie, entitled La noche de la infancia (The Night of Childhood),
which narrates, from the perspective of the younger sister, the life of her older brother who
had emigrated to Madrid. Paloma Chen won the Second National Award for Life Poetry
#LdeLírica in 2020 for her work inspired by Chinese immigration, and has also published
the poetry book Invocación a las mayorías silenciosas (Invocation to Silent Majorities,
2022).
Quan Zhou and Putochinomaricón have collaborated with the most widely read national
newspaper, El País, where for a time they each had their own opinion column. In both
cases, their contributions to that medium were the source of their first published books:
Gazpacho Agridulce (2015) and Arroz tres delicias (2019), respectively. Lucía Sun was the
spokesperson for Gay Pride 2018 in Madrid. The independent journalist-activists Paloma
Chen and Susana Ye frequently write articles and reports in publications like El Mundo,
El Español, El País, and Cuarto Poder, 5W. Paloma Chen has linked her project Crecer
en un chino (Growing Up in a Chinese [Business]) to the newspaper El Salto and in the
introduction of her web page she says, “busco una mejor representación de la identidad en
los medios de comunicación” (“I seek a better representation of identity in the media”) as
she vindicates “el arte y la cultura como armas” (“art and culture as weapons”). She writes
the blog Wild Bananas (2016–2019) and collaborates on the blog Tusanaje (About Tusán)
dedicated to the Chinese diaspora in Peru.
In short, along with the still-persistent reproduction of some stereotypes in the roles they
are given, whether in film, television, or plays, the growing importance of Chinese crea-
tors in the cultural sphere normalizes their presence in terms of inclusion, adaptation, and
accommodation to the society of which they form a part.
The contribution to Spanish culture made by the Chinese population in Spain and their
descendants has grown rapidly due to the increase in creators born in Spain of immigrant
parents and socialized in the country, as well as the increase in Chinese international stu-
dents. Their cultural contributions are recognized and rewarded for their quality, and their
contributions to the public debate regarding identity politics encourage difference in a time
of construction of new identities and of antiracist movements that condemn the stereotypes
of an imaginary, still rooted in the colonial imaginary, to deconstruct and overcome them.

Coda
The contributions to culture by the tide of international students who reside in Spain
deserve special mention. Their works respond to other creative parameters, among them
highlighting the dissemination of current Chinese culture and the encounter with the Other
represented in the Chinese population living in Spain. So it is that Lin Yu, who came to Bar-
celona in 2010 to obtain a master’s degree in film direction at the Escuela Superior de Cine
y Audiovisuales de Cataluña (Cataluña College of Film), currently does photography and
video projects from his business Slumber Studio. The studio is also a cultural platform for

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promoting Chinese art and culture, being the organizer and promoter of the Lychee Interna-
tional Film Festival (LIFF), which began in 2017 for the dissemination of Chinese film. And
Dong Peili, a photographer, earned a Master’s degree in photography at the Elisava School
of Art in Barcelona (2013–2015), where he carried out various projects like the series Estoy
en Barcelona 我在巴塞罗那 (I’m in Barcelona, 2014), consisting of portraits of interna-
tional Chinese students in their rooms; and La comida es el cielo, 食为天 (Food Is Heaven,
2014), about restaurants and bars in Barcelona managed by people of Chinese descent.
The difference between these two segments of Chinese residents is expressed through the
photographic logic of inside/outside: inside the students’ rooms and outside the Chinese
family businesses. This is only a small sample of all the Chinese creators who have lived or
still live temporarily in Spain.

Notes
1 This chapter forms part of the research project I+D “New socio-cultural, political and economic
developments in East Asia in the global context” (PID2019–107861GB-I00, Ref.: AEI/10.13039/
501100011033, MINECO/FEDER, UE), InterAsia Research Group (2021SGR01028, AGAUR,
Generalitat de Catalunya).
2 Translator’s Note: Lo chino translates roughly to “what is Chinese” or “having to do with China/
Chinese” and can be used to refer to any aspect pertaining to Chinese people or culture. It has been
left untranslated because, in most cases, it is generally much more concise than what the appropri-
ate English translation would be.
3 Translator’s note: Putochinomaricón used the word hermanes, which is a gender-neutral variation
of the word hermanos, “brothers.” The use of the gender-neutral “siblings” seemed the best way
to reflect this in English. The use of e to replace o or a in Spanish nouns or adjectives referring to
people is becoming more common among younger generations as a way to linguistically reflect the
gender (non)identifications of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Works Cited
Beltrán Antolín, Joaquín. “Orientalismo, autoorientalismo e interculturalidad de Asia Oriental.”
Nuevas perspectivas de investigación sobre Asia Pacífico. Valencia 2008, edited by Pedro San
Ginés Aguilar, Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2008, pp. 257–73.
Beltrán Antolín, Joaquín. “¿Peligro amarillo? El imaginario de China en Occidente entre la geo-
política y la globalización.” InterAsia Papers, no. 59, 2018.
Beltrán Antolín, Joaquín, Amelia Sáiz López, and Irene Masdeu. “Chinacult.es.” Base de datos digital
sobre producción cultural española relacionada con China, 2015. chinacult.es/.
Calvo Asensio, Juan Carlos, Marc Millán Rabasa, and Pablo Cercós Maícas, “La presencia de Oriente
en tres dancings barceloneses de los años 30: Oshima, Wu Li Chang y La Criolla.” Mirai. Estudios
Japoneses, no. 4, 2020, pp. 143–60.
Centeno, Jesús. “La andaluza Quan Zhou contra ‘¡Chin Lú, comeperros!’ y otros tópicos.” Agen-
cia EFE. 6 Jun. 2019. www.efe.com/efe/espana/destacada/la-andaluza-quan-zhou-contra-chin-lu-
comeperros-y-otros-topicos/10011-3994480.
Collado, Adrián Alejandro. Caricaturas del Otro: Contra-Representaciones Satíricas de la Inmi-
gración en la Literatura y la Cultura Visual Española Contemporánea (1993-2017). 2018. U of
California-Los Angeles, PhD dissertation.
Lin, Jiun Yuh. Artistas chinos y taiwaneses contemporáneos en España. Reflexiones desde una per-
spectiva de género. 2012. Universidad de Salamanca, PhD dissertation.
Martín Corrales, Eloy, “Asia en el cine español. Del patriotismo a la parodia.” Revista Española del
Pacífico, no. 17, 2004, pp. 55–67.
Martínez, Fulgencio. La escritura plural. 33 poetas entre la dispersión y la continuidad de una cultura.
Antología actual de poesía española. Ars Poética, 2019.
Montijano Ruíz, Juan José. El teatro chino de Manolita Chen. Editorial Círculo Rojo, 2012.

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Panés, Alejandro. “El Poder Amarillo toma las paredes de Madrid.” Yorokobu, 12 Feb. 2014. www.
yorokobu.es/yellow-power/.
Tsai, Chenta. Arroz Tres Delicias: Sexo, raza y género. Plan B, Penguin Random House, 2019.
Wang, Minke. “Sobre el autor, Escritura”. Contexto teatral, 2008. www.contextoteatral.es/minke-
wang.html.
“Yellow Power, Street Art at Madrid.” Facebook, 2014. www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.73052
2320313567.1073741902.223632744335863&type=3.

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 35
MUSLIMS AND JEWS IN
CONTEMPORARY SPAIN
Returns, Legacies, Belongings1

Daniela Flesler

In the last decade, an increasing number of studies have sought to analyze what James
Renton and Ben Gidley called the “relational story” of antisemitism and islamophobia in
Europe, their “simultaneous epistemological connectedness and political divergence” (Ren-
ton and Gidley 6). Seeing these phenomena as a relational story “problematizes the extent
to which discussion of the racialization of these minorities remains unrelated to each other
or is explored in distinct silos as a series of internal debates” (Meer 386). As Meer indicates,
surveys such as those conducted by Pew have in fact shown that Western European atti-
tudes toward Muslims and Jews have a high degree of correlation with each other.
The situation of Jews and Muslims in Spain partakes of this European context, with the
additional charge that these discussions carry in Spain due to the centuries-long significant
presence of Jews and Muslims in Iberian territory. This presence not only marked Spain’s
cultural identity but also determined a European view of Spain as Oriental and Semitic, a
racial and religious Other of Europe (Fuchs 6–9; Hillgarth 160). Thus, views of Muslims
and Jews, and the memory constructed around their presence in Iberian territories, are
acutely implicated in Spain’s own negotiations of cultural and national identity. So are the
assumptions about the integration and assimilation processes of Conversos and Moriscos
into Christian Spain. The often-contentious historiography and public discourses that have
sought to explain these early modern processes greatly influence the way Jews and Muslims
are perceived in Spain today.
The last third of the twentieth century saw a double “return” to Spain of significant
numbers of people who identify as Muslims and Jews. Many of them came from north-
ern Morocco, from the areas occupied by Spain’s former protectorate, and saw them-
selves as descendants of those Jews and Muslims expelled from early modern Iberia. This
self-identification has given their migration and presence in Spain an overdetermined mean-
ing as a “return” to an ancestral homeland. However, Muslim and Jewish communities in
Spain today exhibit great internal diversity and are composed of immigrants from several
countries, their Spanish-born children, and Spanish-born converts to Judaism and Islam.
The Muslim population of Spain is around two million people, approximately 4% of
the total population.2 The Jewish population is considerably smaller, composed of around
45,000 people, less than 0.1% of the total population.3 Pew surveys from 2008 and 2018

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-40
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

showed Spain as one of the countries with the most negative view of both (Pew, “Unfavora-
ble Views”). Spain and Portugal also had the highest percentage of people saying that they
knew little or nothing about Judaism and Islam (Pew, “Nationalism”).
Moroccan Jews began arriving in Spain in substantial numbers after Morocco’s inde-
pendence in 1956, and, especially, following the Six Day War in 1967. They rapidly became
a numerical majority among Jews in Spain and organized the structures of today’s official
Jewish community based on the principles of Orthodox Judaism. They have been the main
interlocutors with the state through the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain (Feder-
ación de Comunidades Judías de España, FCJE).4
Muslim immigrants began arriving in Spain in the early 1970s as students in Spanish
universities. Following Spain’s 1986 entrance into the European Economic Community
(EEC) and its subsequent development, Moroccans migrated in larger numbers seeking
economic opportunities (Martín Muñoz et al 15, Planet Contreras 313). These immigrants
have focalized most of the debates over integration and assimilation, and they have become
the most ill-regarded immigrant group (Martín Muñoz 32–33). They have been gener-
ally identified with the trope of the threatening “Moorish invader” (Flesler, The Return
3–4). Spain’s Muslim community is also composed of several thousand Spaniards who
converted to Islam in the mid-1970s. These converts have had an outsized visibility and
influence representing the Muslim community in its relations with the Spanish government.
Indeed, there is a great power differential between migrants and converts, who have une-
qual social, political, and economic opportunities and access to self-representation (Abend;
Rogozen-Soltar).5
Several critics have established the notion that in contemporary Spain Jews are included
while Muslims are excluded (Aidi; Bastaki; Weisz). This dichotomy seems very clear in the
legislation that has allowed Sephardi descendants an expedited path to citizenship that does
not exist for descendants of Spanish Muslims. Law 12/2015 builds upon the provisions of
the 1982 Civil Code, which already allowed Sephardi Jews to apply for Spanish nationality
after two years of residency in Spain, just like citizens of territories “historically associated
with Spain,” instead of the ten years required for other foreigners.6 The 2015 law waived
the two-year residency requirement and allowed applicants to keep their current national-
ity. In terms of its justification, the Preamble of the Law stated how, among Sephardi com-
munities all over the world,

Palpita en todo caso el amor a una España consciente al fin del bagaje histórico y
sentimental de los sefardíes. Se antoja justo que semejante reconocimiento se nutra de
los oportunos recursos jurídicos para facilitar la condición de españoles a quienes se
resistieron, celosa y prodigiosamente, a dejar de serlo a pesar de las persecuciones y
padecimientos que inicuamente sufrieron sus antepasados. (Ley 12/2015)
(Love in every case beats for a Spain finally conscious of the historical and emo-
tional experience of Sephardis. It seems just that such recognition would use the avail-
able juridical tools to facilitate the condition of Spaniards of those who, consciously
and prodigiously, resisted the loss of their Spanishness, notwithstanding the persecu-
tions and afflictions that, as a grave injustice, their ancestors suffered.)7

This passage contains several important arguments. One is the mention of persecutions
and how the Preamble deems “just” to remedy that historic wrong.8 Because the law’s pur-
ported motivation, as reflected in this passage, is a symbolic historical reparation (although

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the term “reparation” is carefully avoided, because of its legal implications), it is not sur-
prising that several political parties proposed the inclusion in the law of other collectives,
such as Moriscos and Saharawis. Entesa pel Progrés de Catalunya, (EPC, Agreement for
Catalan Progress) and Izquierda Unida (IU, United Left) argued that these collectives had
also suffered historical injustices committed by the Spanish state and should not be dis-
criminated against in the law (“Proposiciones de ley”).
Former Partido Popular (PP, Popular Party) Minister of Justice Alberto Ruiz Gallardón,
one of the main proponents of Law 12/2015, justified the exclusion of Muslim descendants
arguing that, in contrast to Jews, they did not maintain “Spanish culture,” traditions and
language, nor a love for Spain, nor the keys to their former homes (qtd. in Flesler and Fried-
man 192). The law’s (and Gallardón’s) argument rests on what Jews purportedly did after
they were expelled (maintain “their love for Spain”), as in the Preamble referring to them
as “those who . . . resisted the loss of their Spanishness,” in contrast to Muslim descend-
ants. These affirmations stand in contrast to the historical record, which shows that many
Moriscos in exile in North Africa, for decades after their expulsion, continued speaking
Castilian and Catalan and dreaming about returning to the Iberian Peninsula, which some
did (García Arenal 298, 302, Muchnik 418, 432). Muchnik argues that both groups were
integrated in their local communities in Iberia, both saw themselves as a distinctive group in
exile with unique characteristics, and both had members who tried to return to Spain (414,
421, 432). In fact, prior Spanish official proclamations, such as King Juan Carlos I’s speech
at the ceremony held to celebrate the legacy of al-Andalus in Medina Azahara in 1992,
praised Morisco descendants for their faithful maintenance of affective links with Spain:
“comunidades árabes, descendientes de aquellos laboriosos moriscos que hoy habitan en
ciudades de tradición andalusí, como Fez o Testur, han mantenido, con fidelidad digna de
encomio, las llaves de sus casas toledanas o cordobesas” (Juan Carlos I). (Arab communi-
ties, descendants from those hardworking Moriscos that today inhabit cities of Andalusi
tradition, such as Fez or Testur, have maintained, with praiseworthy faithfulness, the keys
to their houses in Toledo or Cordoba.)9
In his speech celebrating the signing of Law 12/2015, King Felipe VI echoed Ruiz Gal-
lardón by thanking Sephardi Jews for their loyalty and for having maintained their language
and love for Spain for generations (Felipe VI).10 This perception of “love” has a long his-
tory. It has, in fact, become a pervasive cliché because this understanding of Sephardi Jews
has served Spanish interests and, at times, Sephardi interests as well. The modern develop-
ment of this perception is inextricably connected to Spain’s colonial ambitions. A pivotal
moment was the 1859–60 Hispano-Moroccan War. When Spanish troops triumphantly
entered Tetouan on February 6, 1860, the Jews received them as liberators. Many articles
in the Spanish press commented on these soldiers’ surprise at encountering descendants of
the Jews expelled from the Peninsula in 1492 who still spoke “Spanish” (González García
67–79).11 Spaniards used the Jews as intermediaries and translators, while the Jewish com-
munity received Spanish protection and assistance.
In the decades to come, this dynamic developed into a defining relationship for Spanish
political, military, and commercial interests (Rohr, “The Franco Regime” 100–101). The
strategic alliance with Moroccan Jews developed while the Spanish army fought colonial
wars of “pacification” in the Rif region of northern Morocco. The massive casualties of
Spanish soldiers at the hands of resistance fighters, such as in the battles of Barranco del
Lobo (1909) and Annual (1921), would reaffirm, in the Spanish imaginary, the validity
of the trope of the threatening, enemy “Moor” (Mateo Dieste, Moros vienen 116–17).

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As Bolorinos-Allard argues, this context, the colonization of northern Morocco, which

brought the establishment of a Spanish Protectorate in 1912–1956, “consolidated the
power structures by which Spain would relate differently to the descendants of the Sephardi
and the Moriscos” (139).
Other elements contributed to the construction of a clear difference in the perception of
the two groups. The issue of language – Jews’ “conservation” of fifteenth-century Castil-
ian –was interpreted as irrefutable proof of their “Spanishness,” loyalty and love for Spain.
As reflected in Gallardón’s and Felipe VI’s words quoted previously, this understanding of
language as carrying the essence of cultural identity has justified the argument about Jewish
“loyalty” to Spain and Muslim lack thereof. As explained by Benedict Anderson, language
constitutes one of the pillars of nationalism, the “physical realization of the imagined com-
munity” (149). While this mythology adjudicated feelings of love for Spain to Sephardi
Jews, its success rested on how it made Spaniards feel.12 Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, who
as war correspondent wrote a first-hand account of the 1859–60 war, reflects precisely
on this when describing how Tetouan’s Jews welcomed Spanish soldiers in a peculiarly
accented Spanish: “[a]l principio creí que aquellas palabras españolas las habían aprendido
la víspera para adularnos. . . . Luego supe que era su habla habitual . . . aquello tenía su
peculiar encanto: halagaba nuestra vanidad de vencedores y fortalecía en nuestro corazón
el respeto a nosotros mismos” (“at the beginning I thought that they had learned those
Spanish words the night before in order to flatter us. . . . Later I learned that this was their
usual language. . . . It had its peculiar charm: it flattered our winners’ vanity as victors and
strengthened in our hearts our own self- respect”; Alarcón 403, my emphasis). Spaniards,
personified in the first-person plural of Alarcón’s account, feel flattered by the fact of Jews
speaking “Spanish;” it contributes to their vanity; it makes them feel respected as true vic-
tors over the Muslim population and Moroccan territory.
These ideas and feelings about the language spoken by Sephardi Jews, and efforts at a
rapprochement with them, coalesced in the early twentieth century around the figure of the
senator Ángel Pulido y Fernández. He became the leader of the philosephardist movement,
which sought to expand Spain’s influence in the Mediterranean and advance Spain’s colonial
ambitions through the cultivation of links with Sephardi communities. The philosephard-
ists’ campaigns brought the history of Sephardic Jews into the public sphere and produced
concrete results, such as the granting of Spanish nationality to a number of Sephardi Jews
through a 1924 royal decree. The far-reaching consequences of these campaigns can still be
felt today in the rationale of the Ley 12/2015 (Linhard; Aragoneses; McDonald).
These assumptions about those who love or don’t love Spain are thus revealed as rooted
in colonial and nationalistic interests, and politically expeditious in different histori-
cal moments, but not in others. In fact, the figures of Jews and Muslims in the Spanish
imaginary are both characterized by ambivalence and contradiction. For example, in the
context of the conspiratorial view of Jews of the 1930s, and in sharp contrast to philose-
phardic rhetoric, the Spanish right argued that Jews hated Spain and wanted to destroy
it by supporting the Spanish Republic (Preston 41, Rohr). While a belligerent image of
Christian Reconquest provided justification for the Civil War, in the Moroccan Protec-
torate Spanish officials invoked the convivencia narrative of harmony among the three
religions of medieval Spain as a historic precedent that legitimized and fostered colonial
interests. Spanish colonial officials in fact emphasized the maintenance of the culture of
al-Andalus by generations of Moroccan Muslims (Calderwood 237–50).13 This analogy
was also at play when Franco invoked the “blood brotherhood” of Moroccan Muslims

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and Spaniards to justify the recruitment of Moroccan mercenaries (Mateo Dieste, La ‘her-
mandad’; Martin-Márquez; Calderwood). Jewish mercantile elites in territories of colonial
interest to Spain were “reminded” of their Spanish identity and “invited back” to Spain,
while members of the first Sephardi communities already established in Spain (especially
those without economic means) were not considered true Spaniards, and “were forced to
live in anonymity, both as Jewish and Spanish” (Ojeda Mata, “Thinking” 68). School text-
books continued referring to Jews as dangerous and inassimilable until the 1960s (Álvarez
Chillida 432). There were thus clear political and economic benefits that could be obtained
by Moroccan Jews in declaring their “love” for Spain, and there were clear benefits for
Spaniards’ colonial interests in sustaining this perception. We can conclude that there are
specific terms for the strategic Jewish inclusion of Law 12/2015, which contain significant
symbolic violence: Inclusion is predicated upon compliance with the myth of Sephardi Jews’
ancestral love for Spain.14
Philosephardic and Islamophilic discourses of inclusion, based on an overtly ideal-
ized version of their history in the Iberian Peninsula, bring about real effects upon the
lives of Jews and Muslims in Spain today. In her book about the Muslim residents of
Granada, Rogozen-Soltar shows how, paradoxically, the idealized memory of al-Andalus
can serve as an impediment in acknowledging racism as an existing problem in the city.
Thus, Islamophilic and inclusive narratives “can actually entail exclusionary social effects”
(Rogozen-Soltar 50–51). A similar mechanism occurs with philosephardic discourses. In a
2010 article, Robin Stoller and Alejandro Baer explained how, upon receiving the results of
a study confirming the widespread existence of antisemitism in Spain, the Spanish govern-
ment, which had commissioned the study, decided to shift gears and discard its conclusions,
producing instead a questionnaire “that not only [did] not measure antisemitic bias, but
contained questions drafted in a way that would elicit positive answers.” The government,
thus, decided to deny the problem of antisemitism instead of addressing it (Stoller and Baer).
The supposed “Spanishness” of Sephardi descendants, born of philosephardic argu-
ments, confers privileges such as an expedited path to citizenship. But it is noteworthy that
many of the strict requirements contained in Law 12/2015, such as expensive legal fees and
exams, obey a similar logic of fear about an “invasion of immigrants” associated with Mus-
lim immigration. Spanish media sources echoed such sensationalist concerns (Flesler and
Friedman 192–93). In fact, the Law’s draft, throughout its development and until 2015,
contained, in addition to the naturalization process specifically for Sephardi descendants,
a parallel revision of the procedure for naturalization through residence for all immigrants
living in Spain. It included provisions for exams on Spanish language, the Spanish con-
stitution and “Spanish social and cultural reality” as requirements to prove immigrants’
sufficient degree of “integration” in Spanish society, following the French model, heavily
influenced by discourses of islamophobia weaponizing fears of Muslim immigrant’s sup-
posed lack of integration into European societies.15 At the end, it was decided to separate
this discussion from the Law for Sephardi descendants. The revision of the process of natu-
ralization through residency would become Law 19/2015. Notwithstanding the opposition
of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), Partido
Nacionalista Vasco (PNV, Basque Nationalist Party), Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya
(ERC, Republican Left of Catalonia), and the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain,
Law 12/2015 did include the exact same requirements of exams to prove Sephardi descend-
ants’ “special link with Spain” which would be included in Law 19/2015, to prove immi-
grants’ “degree of integration” into Spanish society. Sephardis were thus conferred the

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special privilege of this law as a gesture of gratitude for their “Spanishness,” but provisions
were put in place to have them prove that very “Spanishness” and to limit the number of
applicants through criteria born out of Islamophobic fears (Flesler and Friedman 192–93).
Muslim intellectuals in Spain and Morocco have long called attention to the recognitions
officially granted to Sephardi Jews as grounds to make their case for a similar acknowl-
edgment. In 1998 the renowned writer and journalist Mohamed Chakor referred to the
injustice of Sephardi Jews being recognized as having a historical link with Spain while the
descendants of Moriscos were not (Chakor, “El moro” 126–27). In 2006, Spain’s Junta
Islámica (JI), a communal organization led by Spanish-born converts, called on the Span-
ish government to grant Muslims the same citizenship rights granted to Sephardi Jews
(Abend 151). So did Mohammed Najib Loubaris, president of the Asociación Memoria de
los Andalusíes, in 2014 (“Los Moriscos”). In connection with the commemoration of the
400th anniversary of the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609, a motion was presented in the
Spanish parliament by José Antonio Pérez Tapias, a PSOE representative, requesting insti-
tutional recognition for this injustice and the same treatment as the Sephardi communities
(Arigita140–41).16 A distinguished list of intellectuals were at the forefront of an ultimately
unsuccessful initiative that same year promoting the candidacy of “Andalusian Moriscos”
for the Prince of Asturias Award, which Sephardi communities had obtained in 1990 (Ari-
gita 141, Arigita and Galián 175).
Michael Rothberg coined the term “multidirectional memory” to refer to “the dynamic
transfers between diverse places and times in the process of remembrance,” to the fact that
memory is “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing” (3, 11).
Rothberg’s main examples come from his study of the way in which Holocaust memory
discourses provided key elements for the articulation of anticolonial movements. The con-
cept tries to move away from conceptualizations of memory as a competitive, zero-sum
struggle (Rothberg 1–3). As he explains, “[c]ompetitive scenarios can derive from these
restless rearticulations [of memory], but so can visions that construct solidarity out of the
specificities, overlaps, and echoes of different historical experiences” (Rothberg 16). In the
previous examples, we can see how the recognition given to Sephardi Jews is put to use
precisely in this way, in order to formulate a demand for recognition for the Moriscos vis
a vis the Spanish authorities.
Although beyond the scope of this chapter, we can note that complementary situa-
tions, of Muslim visibility contributing to the articulation of Jewish claims, can be found
in contemporary Spain. One such example consists of the controversy generated over the
ownership of the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba. It was in the wake of the mediatic vis-
ibility of this controversy that news about a similar request by the Jewish community in
Toledo regarding the Synagogue Santa María la Blanca were published in Spain’s news-
papers between 2013 and 2017. There had been prior Jewish claims over this synagogue,
but these recent requests and the Church’s response received wider public attention and
follow up from Spain’s main newspapers precisely because and only after the visibility of
the Mosque’s controversy generated a possible horizon of expectations where these Jewish
claims could be publicly enunciated and given attention.
In his 1997 essay “La llave o reflexiones neomoriscas” (“The key, or neo-morisco reflec-
tions”), Mohamed Chakor articulates the contours of Jews and Muslims’ common experi-
ence in Spain through his inclusion of a Moroccan Jew, Jacobo Pinto. Chakor calls Pinto “el
representante de nuestros hermanos andaluces, de confesión judía” (“the representative of
our Andalusi brothers, of Jewish confession”) and quotes his intervention in a conference

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of the morisco community. Pinto said, according to Chakor, “compartimos el mismo dolor
y la misma suerte. Fuimos víctimas de los mismos victimarios. . . . Nuestra época dorada
fue una obra común. Nuestras divergencias son pasajeras” (“we shared the same hurt and
the same destiny. We were victims of the same victimizers . . . our golden age was a shared
endeavour. Our divergencies are short-lived”; Chakor, “La llave” 41). Chakor describes, by
quoting Pinto’s words, both communities’ common experience of persecution in Spain, and
their long co-habiting, as a basis for solidarity and common purpose. This solidarity is also
sought by individuals and institutions in Spain that attempt to go beyond current percep-
tions of perpetual confrontation between Muslims and Jews rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
A case in point was the “Moriscos andalucíes” candidacy. It was organized by Fun-
dación Blas Infante, Junta Islámica, and Casa de Sefarad, where the announcement took
place (Arigita 141). Part of the activities included a “human chain” of about 400 people
who linked Cordoba’s historical Mosque and Synagogue on September 11, 2010. Inaugu-
rated in 2006, Casa de Sefarad is a private museum in Cordoba that organizes its activities
as “un ejercicio de la recuperación de la memoria de los judíos hispanos” (“an exercise of
recuperation of the memory of Hispanic Jews”; Castro). The museum, directed by historian
Sebastián de la Obra, actualizes the memory of Jewish Spain by connecting it to other dif-
ficult memories with close resonances, such as the memory of the Moriscos, the Spanish
Civil War and the Francoist repression.17 State-owned institutions and foundations such as
the Museo Sefardí, Centro Sefarad-Israel, Casa Árabe, and Fundación Pluralismo y Con-
vivencia have also sought to promote intercultural dialogue between and about Muslims
and Jews in Spain today. Their activities attempt to counter the idea that convivencia is
only a myth of the past and the perception of siloed, separate spheres for Muslims and Jews
in Spain today. Through exhibitions, concerts, performances, film festivals, lectures and
book publications and presentations, these institutions attempt to “practice” a convivencia
in and of the present. A similar objective is sought by private initiatives such as the group
Salaam Shalom in Barcelona, which seeks to establish interfaith dialogue between the city’s
Muslim and Jewish communities, to promote solidarity, and to fight both islamophobia
and antisemitism (Zieve).
The aspirational convivencia sought after by these initiatives coexists with entrenched
notions about the legitimacy afforded to different groups to claim a place in Spain today.
An enormous gap exists between the letter of the 1992 agreements signed between the state
and religious minorities guarantying equal treatment and the reality of their lack of access
to cultural and religious rights that are taken for granted when it comes to the Catholic
Church. In his analysis of anti-Jewish bias in Spain, Baer concludes that notwithstanding
processes of secularization and modernization, Spain’s antisemitism is still based in Span-
iards’ identification with Catholicism in a broad cultural sense (Baer; Baer and López).
Similarly, Sander Gilman argues, “[s]cratch secular Europe today, and you find all the
presuppositions and attitudes of Christianity concerning Jews and Muslims present in sub-
liminal or overt forms. Secular society in Europe has absorbed Christianity into its very
definition of the secular” (145).
This underlying Christian identity, that sees Judaism and Islam as foreign and threaten-
ing, produces exclusion of Jews and Muslims. The pattern has been clearly established by
Pew: Those who identify as Christian in Western Europe – irrespective of level of religious
observance – show higher levels of nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-religious minority
sentiment towards both Muslims and Jews than those with no religious affiliation (Pew,

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“Nationalism”). These anti-religious minority sentiments coexist, in Spain, with the general
acknowledgement of Muslims and Jews’ important place in Spanish history. This explains
how Spain can have both one of the highest percentages of anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish
sentiment in Europe and one of the lowest percentages of agreement with the statement that
“Islam and Judaism are incompatible with their country’s values and culture.” This para-
dox of inclusion and exclusion is lived by Jews and Muslims in Spain, who often resort to
the same language of convivencia and tolerance officially promoted by the Spanish state to
leverage a past that is often viewed more favorably than its embodiment in the present. The
articulation of old discourses of love for Spain and newer discourses of multiculturalism
and democratic equality form the contours through which both Muslims and Jews negoti-
ate their interrelated belonging to Spain.

Notes
1 This chapter has been supported by EtniXX-Discursos y Representaciones de la Etnicidad:
Política, Identidad y Conflicto en el Siglo XX Grant PID2019–105741GB-I00 funded by MCIN/
AEI/10.13039/501100011033.
2 See the 2020 demographic study of the Muslim population by the Observatorio andalusí and
UCIDE (Unión de Comunidades Islámicas de España): http://observatorio.hispanomuslim.es/
estademograf.pdf
3 This is the number officially given by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain, although
their real number is probably closer to 35,000.
4 Created in 1982 as the Federación de Comunidades Israelitas de España (Federation of Israelite
Communities of Spain) in the wake of the Constitution of 1978, which guaranteed religious free-
dom and prohibited religious discrimination, and the subsequent Law of Religious Freedom of
1980, it was initially composed of the communities of Barcelona, Madrid, Ceuta, and Melilla. See
Flesler and Friedman for more on this institution and its pivotal advocacy role in Law 12/2015.
5 For the racialization of ethnocultural characteristics for Muslims and Jews in Spain prior to the articu-
lation of scientific racism in the modern period and the role of cultural characteristics in racist thought,
see Nirenberg, Fredrickson, Goode. For an overview of Muslims in Spain and Spanish Islamophobia,
see Planet Contreras. For an analysis of Spain’s antisemitism, see Baer and Baer and López.
6 These territories include Latin American nations, Andorra, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea,
and Portugal. See Ojeda Mata, Identidades 138–42 and Aliberti 207–13 for a historical review of
Spanish laws related to nationality since the 1812 Constitution and the process by which Sephardi
Jews began to acquire citizenship through a naturalization mechanism after 1869.
7 All translations are my own unless noted otherwise.
8 See Flesler and Pérez Melgosa for the connection of this reasoning in Law 12/2015 to discourses
of historical memory and transitional justice culture.
9 See Arigita and Galián for an analysis of this same 1992 speech in terms of a comparison with the
parallel one the King pronounced for the Jewish communities. Arigita and Galián note, rightly, the
crucial differences between the two speeches, whereas the “welcome home” offered to Sephardi
descendants was not offered to Morisco descendants (169–70). Another irony of these official
speeches of praise for their “fidelity” to Spain is that both Moriscos and Conversos were, after their
conversions to Christianity in or after 1492, “considered traitors to both Church and Crown,”
seen as having external loyalties either to the Turks, France, or the Netherlands (Muchnik 415–16).
10 See McDonald for an analysis of the constantly repeated phrase “lack of rancor” used by Span-
iards to characterize Sephardis’ feelings for Spain and Flesler and Friedman for more on this
ceremony.
11 The Judeo-Spanish language has its origin in old Castilian, but it is a live language that has
evolved in contact with and influenced by other languages. Rather than an expression of love for
Spain, the use of this language among Sephardi populations was an affirmation of their own Jew-
ish minoritary identity, a differentiating element that explains why many referred to this language
as “judío’ or “judesmo” (Hassán 42–45).

458
 Muslims and Jews in Contemporary Spain

12 I am using the term “adjudication” in the sense that Gil Anidjar uses it to explain “historical
containment;” the ways that the past is interpreted in particular ways so as to close it off to
subsequent analysis: “the mechanisms that operate to sediment the past as past serve, beyond all
intentions, to adjudicate on the question of ends . . . and of worlds” (Anidjar 202).
13 See González Alcantud for an ethnographic account of present-day families in Morocco today
who identify themselves as “Andalucíes,” that is, as descendants of the Muslim inhabitants of
al-Andalus who emigrated to North Africa before or following the expulsion of the Moriscos.
14 Following Taguieff, Fredrickson speaks of a racism of inclusion in addition to racism of exclu-
sion (Frederickson 9–10). See Goode (especially 1–19) for a discussion of modern Spanish racial
thought as based on incorporation and fusion.
15 It is not a coincidence that this modification followed the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and customers
in the Hypercacher kosher supermarket in Paris in January of the same year, 2015.
16 As Arigita explains, the proposal was rejected by the right-wing Partido Popular (PP) and Con-
vergència i Unió. It is quite ironic that a few years later, it will be a PP minister, Alberto Gallardón,
who championed the law of nationality for Sephardi Jews on precisely the grounds of symbolic
reparation that the PP had dismissed for the Moriscos’ commemoration (and that the PP also dis-
misses when it pertains to the Republican victims of the Civil War and the Francoist repression).
17 See Flesler and Pérez Melgosa for more on this remarkable institution.

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 36
MADE BY PUNK, MAKERS
OF PUNK
Spanish Women in the Transition Space

Nuria Triana Toribio

Girl in a Band
Many aspects of what we assumed about Spain’s music scene during the Transition and
early democracy are under question. For example, Eduardo Viñuela, in “Memoria, nos-
talgia y canon: el documental musical en la historia de las músicas urbanas” (“Memory,
nostalgia and canon: The music documentary in the history of urban music”), examines
music documentaries, books, television series and other cultural products mediating the
period from the late 70s to the early 90s, and shows that these revivals are often clouded
by nostalgia and distortion. Viñuela scrutinizes films like ¿A quién le importa? La edad de
Oro del Pop español (Who Cares? Spanish Pop Golden Age; Sony BMG Music Entertain-
ment España, 2006); Frenesí en la gran ciudad (Frenzy in The Big City; Antonio Moreno
and Alejandro Caballero, 2011); and experimental documentaries where music is key,
such as Luis López Carrasco’s El Futuro (The Future, 2014), set during a party after the
PSOE’s (Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party) landslide October 1982 victory, among others.
As Viñuela says, drawing on Reynolds’ work on “retromania,” revivals are led by the
generation (and, I should add, the gender) for whom they are most advantageous: “[L]a
Movida madrileña, un movimiento que coincide en el tiempo con la juventud de la gener-
ación del baby-boom en España, la misma que a principios del siglo XXI ocupa los ámbitos
sociales del poder (instituciones, medios de comunicación, entes de gestión cultural, etc.)”
(“The Madrid Movida, a movement which coincides with the youth of Spain’s baby boom
generation, the same generation which in the early twenty-first century occupies the areas
of social power (associations, communication media, cultural management institutions”;
159).1 These curators of Spain’s cultural industries shape the canon by acclaiming times
and events that are given much more significance than they originally had, as Viñuela dem-
onstrates. He further shows that this revival has generated many music documentaries that
bring to the present and resignify a particular music scene, resituating it in the annals of
history with distortion, heightening its importance and canonizing it.
The documentaries I am interested in have been made since 2010 and focus on punk
groups from the late 70s to the mid-90s. Some of them are the focus of Viñuela’s analysis,
but not all. They are both part of this canonization and part of its critique. Si yo fuera tú

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-41 
 Made by Punk, Makers of Punk

me gustarían los Cicatriz (If I were you, I’d Dig Cicatriz; Jorge Tur Moltó, 2010) looks at
the band Cicatriz (1984–1988) from Vitoria. Barcelona’s Desechables (1982–1990) are the
focus of El peor Dios (The Worst God; Alejandro Montes, Daniel Arasanz, Nico Tarela,
2013), and La banda trapera del rio (1976–1982) is the subject of Venid a las cloacas (Come
Down to the Sewers; Daniel Arasanz, 2010). Aliens (López Carrasco, 2017) focuses on
Tesa Arranz of Madrid’s Zombies (1980–1981) and Autosuficientes (Self-sufficient; Danny
García, 2016) on Parálisis Permanente (1981–1983) and on surviving member Ana Curra’s
El Acto. Although many documentaries are interested in the music and musicians mostly
in the last two decades, the films are very different. Many are shorts. Some documentaries
are destined for television, and not all follow the conventions set by canonical music docu-
mentaries such as Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967), a film that followed Bob Dylan
on tour. Others rely on the conventions of the made-for-television music documentaries that
use diegetic and non-diegetic music, voice-over and subtitles to tell the stories of groups and
scenes over images of archival footage and still photographs. Sometimes these materials are
complemented with present-day interviews.
Some of the Spanish films that focus on music from the late 70s to the mid-90s are
experimental documentaries or film essays from el otro cine (the other cinema), the denomi-
nation of independent Spanish cinema that has had much currency since 2013, and are
destined for the festival circuit (Kourelou, Liz and Vidal 133). The otro cine documentaries
and film essays have circulated via YouTube or VoD (video on demand) platforms such
as Filmin, Plat and Vimeo, as well as within the festival circuit. TVE (Spanish Television)
and the autonomous communities’ television channels have also co-produced films with
independent companies and screened them. These documentaries have made the most of
archival material available from RTVE’s (Spanish radio and television) La Edad de Oro
(The Golden Age) and La bola de cristal (The Crystal Ball) and other national and regional
music television programs from the 1970s through the early 1990s.
Viñuela demonstrates that nostalgic and revivalist filters introduced errors such as includ-
ing in La Movida groups like Tequila and Mecano and singers like Ramoncín and Joaquín
Sabina when they were not part of the scene – in some cases they were the obverse of the
movement – and, instead, excluding groups like Mamá and singers such as Tino Casal who
did belong to it (Viñuela 162). Equally, La Movida has become more madrileña than it was
in reality, as it is recast by these retrospective products. Finally, the title of “the golden age
of Spanish music” has been conferred too readily by these revivalist texts, and this has been
done at the expense of downplaying or ignoring altogether many other contemporary musi-
cal scenes (Viñuela 160; Fouce and del Val 125).
Viñuela does not focus on gender or other identity markers such as class or ethnicity in
his revisionist work, but he implies that something may be gained from taking that path
as what becomes clear is that the canon created as a result of these rock documentaries,
presents a picture where the most creative artists were middle-class males from Madrid.
In short, La Movida is represented as being from Madrid, middle class, male and heter-
onormative. This chapter argues that if we want to know who the real revolutionaries of
the period were, we have to also focus on the women involved in the youth culture of the
Transition and early democracy and on what they accomplished. To achieve this requires
us to be critical about the nostalgic documentaries and memoirs that circulate currently
and to go back to the sources themselves. Approaching these materials critically shows that
women have been rendered voiceless and invisible in mainstream accounts. Or rather, that

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they are in the story, but they seldom appear as protagonists, and what they say is presented
as irrelevant or marginal to the main plot.2

The Muse and the Mannequin

I want to begin with an experimental documentary from el otro cine which has been dis-
seminated through festivals and been the object of academic study (Fernández Labayen
99–115). Si yo fuera . . . (If I were . . .). Here Tur Moltó retraces the path of Cicatriz, a
grupo maldito (cursed band) from Vitoria which lost many members to drug overdoses and
AIDS. Retracing Cicatriz’s story involves revisiting their old haunts, bars and punk ven-
ues in Vitoria, talking to men that were part of the city’s punk scene, who knew the band
and still know their songs by heart. On this nostalgic journey to a city full of abandoned
boarded-up bars, Tur Moltó finds Lola. Lola is the subject of one of the band’s best-known
songs from some thirty years prior. Tur Moltó wants to interview her, but she does not
want to talk. Finally, she appears in long shot, sitting on a bench in the street, reading the
song’s lyrics in voice over. After finishing reading, she says: “Yo no era así. Nada tenía que
ver con ese personaje” (“I wasn’t like that. I had nothing to do with that character”; Si yo
fuera . . . 21:29–21:33).
Lola, who was a punk woman and lead singer from Lola y sus mataperros, features in
the film as the muse. Moreover, what remains totally outside of the narrative that Tur Moltó
is chasing is the fact that another punk woman, La Poty, was in fact the founding member
of Cicatriz, and the group’s original name had been Cicatriz en la Matriz (scar in the uterus
or womb) and then shortened. In other words, the group was originally named after an
undeniably female part of the anatomy, but this history has been erased by the documen-
tarist as well as other public sources. The Wikipedia page for Cicatriz describes La Poty as
Natxo’s girlfriend, another inaccurate and biased example of Hispano-techno-chauvinism
that shows how common the gendering of web content can be in sites like Wikipedia and
media outlets (Meredith Broussard 149). La Poty’s crucial role in naming the band is not
mentioned in the documentary and was unknown to me until, in the process of writing our
book God Save the Queens. Pioneras del Punk Cristina Garrigós González interviewed
Begoña Astigarraga, a member of the Bilbao-based group Las Vulpess. Begoña, who was a
fellow member of the Basque punk scene, described those years as follows:

Éramos pocas en el escenario, pero muchas en la calle. Yo tengo el recuerdo de que

entre las chicas punk de los 80 sabíamos hacernos oír. Las chicas que conocía que
tocaban en algún grupo punk tenían un protagonismo muy potente. Eran mujeres
valientes e irreverentes que no se dejaban atropellar, y que funcionaban a la par que
sus compañeros de grupo. Silvia de Último Resorte, Isabel de VI Reich, Geli de OX
Pow – que era una batería supercañera, Poty de Cicatriz, Teresa de Desechables,
Arantxa de Médanos de Singapur. . . . En general no nos dejábamos dominar por la
pareja ni por los compañeros ni por el sistema. (Astigarraga 76)
We were few on stage but many on the streets. I remember that we 80s punk girls
knew how to make ourselves heard. The girls I knew who played in punk bands had
a potent presence onstage. They were bold and irreverent women who did not let
themselves be pushed around, and that were on a par with the guys in the group. Sil-
via of Último Resorte, Isabel of VI Reich, Geli of OX Pow – she was a hell of a drum-
mer – Poty of Cicatriz, Teresa of Desechables, Arantxa of Médanos de Singapur. . . .

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In general, we didn’t allow anyone to tell us what to do, neither partners, nor com-
rades, nor the system.

Scenes in Si yo fuera . . . in which women punk rockers are presented merely as muses or
companions to their male counterparts are not the exception but the rule, and they show
that music documentaries focus almost exclusively on the male experience.
Another acclaimed experimental film essay from el otro cine, López Carrasco’s El
Futuro, shares with Si yo fuera . . . the impulse to reassess the reach and significance of
La Movida and the wider CT or Cultura de la Transición (Transition Culture)), here by
suggesting that the Transition failed to achieve real change and thus contributed to the
dismantling of official success narratives. Since La Movida has been hailed by both poli-
ticians and foreign and national media as the flagship of this success story (as it related
to youth culture), attacking its music is seen as a good strategy in order to question the
period at large. When this is the underlying motivation, the films are more interested in
when and where the groups existed (as is the case in Tur Moltó’s film) than in any other
consideration about the bands’ protagonists or their actual performances. The message is
that those times were full of possibility, since the nihilistic lyrics of Basque punk bands
such as Cicatriz spoke of smashing the old system, but the implication was that the future
would be different.
El Futuro (The Future), for instance, distils regret about having trusted in a better future,
about having focused on having a good time. Throughout the film we hear the soundtrack
of those hedonistic times, the punk and Nueva Ola groups of the Transition, played louder
than the conversations of the fictional partygoers. When we do hear the characters, whereas
men speak about politics, women instead – dressed in 80s party clothes, with big new-wave
hairstyles, shiny earrings and the occasional studded leather wristband – have inane chats
about ludicrous jobs and about their horoscopes. The horoscopes represent the extent to
which the future appears in the film, firmly planted on the auspicious present of 1982, at a
moment steeped in the “pacto de silencio” (pact of silence) denialism.
Among the more formally conventional music documentaries, for instance, we find Lo
que hicimos fue secreto (What We Did Was Secret; David Álvarez, 2017), co-produced with
TVE. This lengthy documentary goes beyond the initial punk phase by exploring groups
that were eventually co-opted by La Movida and into the more political phase of punk and
associated okupa movement that emerged in the mid-80s in the barrios of Lavapies, Aluche
and Vallecas in Madrid. The focus is again on the male experience (more working class in
this case), with the inclusion of some token women either because they are unavoidable
to explain the context (we see images of Paloma Chamorro, Alaska and Ana Curra) or
because they are part of the footage but not explicitly mentioned. Only Angela Saura from
OX Pow and Neme from Superrriffs were interviewed by the filmmakers.
From the mid-70s onwards, Spain came into contact with punk music when a freer
generation of Spanish youth enjoyed the liberalization of sexual mores and greater accept-
ance of drug use. Pictures of these scenes became “images and sounds as metaphors for
the changes since Franco’s death” as Héctor Fouce and Fernán del Val argue (130). This
was the first youth cultural moment in Spain that women could finally take part in, as
society had changed enough to allow them to do so. The novelty of seeing young women
openly as part of the movida and nueva ola scenes was encapsulating the extent of the
change, as women’s status in society and within youth culture were the areas where
these changes were most evident. Punk women are the perfect symbol for modernity on

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both counts, as young and female. No wonder Alaska (Olvido Gara) became, as Dun-
can Wheeler puts it, “the poster girl for Spain’s Transition” (375). However, the most
legitimate status accorded to women was that of being icons (as with Alaska), and these
Transition documentaries rarely go beyond this minimal gesture, even when they feature
a woman as protagonist. This is the case with El peor Dios (The Worst God), the docu-
mentary about Desechables, another grupo maldito from the outskirts of Barcelona in
which Tere González was lead singer. The documentary’s dismissive perspective is that
Tere was more interested in the group’s image than in the music itself. At some point,
key critic and La Movida promoter Jesús Ordovás, who is otherwise one of Tere’s most
outspoken fans, declares that although the lyrics were hers, she was more interested in
the shows’ mise-en-scène, on her appearance and that of the group. This contradictory
backhanded praise places Tere at the heart of song creation (by stating that the lyrics were
hers), while simultaneously denying her creative role within the band. Yet Ordovás says
in the documentary that all one saw on stage was Tere’s presence, that the other members
were unremarkable. Her performance style was fundamental to the group’s identity and
success. According to Garrigós González, “Tere’s performances became famous for their
high erotic charge and angst” (60). Moreover, appearance was not inconsequential to the
punk aesthetic, but central to their performance. Tere’s look and the band’s stage image
were among the most memorable aspects of the group. In a subculture such as punk where
“confrontational dressing” (Vivien Westwood, quoted in Hebdige 107) is a principal part
of their vocabulary, any attempt to question the creative role of a subcultural bricoleur
such as Tere is even more perverse and incoherent. In an interview by Cristina Garrigós,
Tere spoke about her strategies to “upset the wardrobe” (Hebdige 108).
Punk anti-fashion is a readable style fundamental to the subculture (Hebdige 107). For
this reason alone, punk women such as Tere should be given credit as subcultural bricole-
urs, as well as for their musical composition. Their look was often inspired by their British
and American counterparts but adapted to their local concerns and to what was available
in their surroundings. This is how Astigarraga, bass player from Las Vulpess (1980–1984)
explains how the band fashioned their confrontational attire in Bilbao:

Por ejemplo, cogíamos las pantis de redecilla negra, que entonces las usaban prác-
ticamente las prostitutas, les hacíamos un corte en la entrepierna y nos las poníamos
como camiseta, con el sujetador debajo o una camiseta sin mangas por encima. . . .
Nos hacíamos nuestras propias camisetas con pintadas a rotulador con frases como
“No necesito nada de este jodido mundo,” “No Future”. . . . Recogíamos ropa vieja y
la transformábamos quitando las mangas, cosiendo parches, llenándolas de chapas e
imperdibles, les cosíamos cremalleras a los pantalones y nos poníamos botas de mili-
tar, porque las Doc Martins [sic] solo se conseguían en Londres. Hacíamos cualquier
cosa que se nos ocurría. Recuerdo la camiseta que se hizo Mamen con una ikurriña,
imitando a Johny Rotten con la camiseta de la bandera británica. (Astigarraga 65)
For example, we took pairs of black fishnet stockings, which at that time only
prostitutes wore, and we cut the gusset out and wore them as t-shirts, with the bra
underneath or with a sleeveless T-shirt on top. . . . We made our own t-shirts with slo-
gans in marker pen using sentences such as “I need nothing from this fucking world,”
“No Future”. . . . and we wore Spanish army boots because you could only get Doc
Martins in London (sic). I remember a t-shirt that Mamen made for herself with an
ikurriña, after Johny Rotten’s one with the British flag.

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Die Young, Stay Pretty

These words by Astigarraga tell us of what only can be learnt by going beyond punk women
as images mediated through documentaries shot from a voyeuristic position or used as
cyphers for modernity to demonstrate how much Spain had changed, as these revivalist
and revisionist documents have done. We find through these women’s own words their
perspective on what they achieved during those years: They created bands, constructed DIY
looks, but also composed songs and played instruments. The documentaries I mentioned
previously are not fair to the women in punk; instead, they neutralize their legacy, mini-
mize their role, and value only their younger selves. One strategy in these documentaries
has been to focus on those punk women as victims of drug dependence. Some punk women
from the 80s and 90s saw their later lives thwarted by addiction or illness. Aliens (López
Carrasco, 2017), for example, explores how Tesa Aranz, former co-lead singer of Zombies,
has become obsessed with aliens and life beyond our planet. She is a painter with over
500 portraits of aliens to her name, who has herself always felt alienated from life. In a
monologue, she speaks about her drug use and more broadly her self-destructive behavior
during her years in Zombies and after, as well as her subsequent diagnosis with bi-polar
disorder. Aliens serves as a companion piece to El Futuro in debunking the triumphalist
discourse of the Transition, suggesting that what audiences saw as a young, fun-loving
and riotous singer, was in fact a tortured and unhappy woman. Nevertheless, Aliens is also
ambiguous in its valuing of the work by women such as Aranz who were so central to the
scene. The film features her as a casualty of the times, beyond anything else. Another case
in point is Autosuficientes (Self-sufficient), which presents an ambivalent portrait of Ana
Curra, keyboardist for Alaska y los Pegamoides, co-creator of Parálisis Permanente and
subsequently Seres Vacios. Curra’s career was marked by a hiatus, the result of the singer’s
profound grief after the death of her partner Eduardo Benavente and by her drug addiction.
Nevertheless, despite this dark period, her triumphs are numerous, not the least of them
her creation of the first independent record label in Spain, Tres cipreses. Moreover, Curra,
a conservatory-trained classical pianist, has been a highly skilled pianist and piano teacher
(see “Biografia”, n.p.). She returned to performing in 2012 with El Acto, a work she had
co-authored with Benavente in the 80s, and the documentary features her touring with a
new band while performing new and old songs. An uncanny scene from the film depicts
Curra on tour, performing one of Parálisis Permanente’s famous songs for which she had
co-authored the lyrics, Quiero ser santa (I Want to be Holy). At one point, the scene uses
archival footage of Benavente performing, while Curra’s voice can be heard in playback.
Thus, Benavente haunts the documentary, which is mostly about Parálisis Permanente,
just as his untimely death haunts the youth culture of that generation. In doing so, the film
reductively renders Curra into the most iconic “grieving widow” of La Movida. In this
documentary, there are hints that Benavente was the creative genius, while Curra was only
the conduit, as this scene tells us. As Ann Feigenbaum argues, rock criticism has often pre-
sented women’s work as derivative and has created “a discourse [that] reinforces a system
that deems rock music produced and performed by men the authentic or ‘real’ form, whilst
rendering rock music produced and performed by women inauthentic or peripheral to the
rock canon” (39).
What is lost in the appraisal of the work done by punk pioneer women when these films
characterize them as muses from the past? As the ones who were left behind carrying the
torch after the men died? What is lost when they are represented as juguetes rotos – which

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translates literally as broken toys and alludes to celebrities who were destroyed by fame?
I believe that, in these documentaries, their creative status as musicians ends up playing
second fiddle to their more striking and affecting images as individuals damaged by mental
illness, by addiction or by the normal aging process. What lies behind these films’ obsession
with counterposing images of these punk women “then and now”? The archive footage is
necessary to delve into the past and becomes a key element of these documentaries’ appeal
as they satisfy the audience’s nostalgia. However, unearthing the archive is not always an
innocent practice, and even when it is, it can have unintended consequences. For example,
as the surviving member of Desechables, Tere González is interviewed in El peor Dios, in
which we see the now-middle-aged woman in conventional clothes, contrasted with the
footage of her younger self dressed confrontationally. Much work is being done in reposi-
tioning punk beyond its origins as a youth subculture, one that is no longer age specific, and
in the course of this revision of youth cultures, there is a vindication of many ageing punks.3
However, growing old as a punk means different things for men than it does for women,
because mainstream culture reads images of older men and older women differently. We are
used to life-affirming meanings being ascribed to the images of men such as Iggy Pop and
Keith Richards aged by time and the rock-and-roll lifestyle, as opposed to those of women in
their same age group whose most iconic images are those of their youth (for instance, Deb-
bie Harry and Marianne Faithfull). The image of a cisgender woman’s rock-and-roll body
is that of a young, thin, leggy, white rock-chick that fits the heteronormative idea of attrac-
tiveness or, failing that, the androgynous punk iconic look of Patti Smith, also characterized
by whiteness and thinness. The punk pioneers who survived and who are portrayed in these
documentaries are women in their late 50s and beyond. We see their aged bodies and in the
case of Curra, we see someone who has kept her image resembling her 1980s look.
Society is sexist, and it could be argued that all bodies will be a target for prejudice in
one form or another. However, considering the iconic and poster-girl roles to which these
documentaries tend to relegate women, these images are particularly loaded. The men in
these groups, who died young and stayed attractive by virtue of their early demise, such as
Benavente, became legendary in the annals of Spanish punk, preserved in eternally young
and beautiful images by the archival footage. Only one documentary, Peligro social, Las
pioneras del Punk en Barcelona (Social Danger. Pioneers of Punk in Barcelona; Guillermo
Tupper et al., 2013), champions queer, aged, non-normative female bodies and gives Alicia,
Cheity, Isa, Magda, Semolina Tomic, Silvia (Escario) Resorte and Tina, from the Barcelona
punk scene, control of the narrative. This short is an outlier among my sample because
women here defend their resistance to patriarchal expectations of what women should look
like, then and now, including comments about their stage bodies, a fight they had already
taken on in the early 80s. These women describe the expectations that they shattered with
their songs and their looks. For example, dressed in leather and bondage gear, with glowing
blue hair, a late-50s Silvia Resorte explains how she was the first woman in Sant Boi who
dressed in punk clothes (Peligro . . . 15:44). Cheity tells the audience how she shocked her
local pet shop store attendant asking for a huge dog collar for herself (“Es para mi, le dije”
[“It’s for me, I told her”; 16: 51). Resorte explains how women, before punk, had totally
different looks and performed the types of songs that are poles apart from what punk
women took on:

Hay que pensar que justo antes de la llegada del punk, en todas partes del mundo, las
chicas cantaban canciones de amor, folk . . . cítrica social dura no había nadie que la

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hiciera. Quedaba muy chocante que una criaja como yo la hiciera. Con esa cara de
mocosa que tenía, y con la teta al aire, haciendo crítica social. (Peligro Social . . . ,
13:04–13:15)
You have to consider that before punk, girls, throughout the world sung love
songs, folk songs . . . nobody sung harsh social criticism. It was shocking that a slip
of a girl like me should do that. With that childish face I had then, and my tits out,
doing social criticism.

Peligro Social makes us wonder what the agenda of the other documentaries and films
might be. The erasure or diminishment of the role of women as performers, creators and
leaders in the dissemination of these cultures must be contested because, as has happened
with other punk subcultures in the UK and US, writing women back into punk stories is
still a necessity. Unfortunately, this process if reclaiming women’s role in the scene has to
be repeated regularly, judging by how they are habitually rendered invisible or how their
importance neutralized (Cazz Blase 2010 n.p.).
Working with Garrigós González since 2013, and then from 2016 onwards with Paula
Guerra, a longtime researcher of the Portugal and Brazilian punk scenes, we have consid-
ered the words of punk women pioneers without the mediation provided by these docu-
mentaries. In 2019 we released a book with the music-publishers 66rpm titled God Save
the Queens. Pioneras del Punk, in which we interviewed seven Luso-Hispanic punk women
who worked in the UK, US, Spain and Portugal. The words of Begoña Astigarraga (Las
Vulpes) and Tere González (Desechables, Raiser), which were quoted in this chapter, come
from those interviews. We also spoke with Silvia Escario (Último Resorte) and Palmolive
[Paloma Romero] (The Slits, The Raincoats). The Portuguese pioneers are Ana da Silva
(The Raincoats) and Ondina Pires (Ezra Pound e a Loucura).

Memoirs by Women I
God Save the Queens, our research project investigating the role of pioneer punk women
through primary routes such as interviews, is part of a growing interest in women in the
music industry. I would like in this section to depart from the strictly academic mode of this
chapter and explain why we moved away from the canonical story that these documenta-
ries present. These last two sections bring some details about how to locate the stories of
women who are left out of the narrative, and about connecting the stories of the pioneer
generation with that of those who follow, or who do not fit into the canonical male-focused
history.
Neither Cristina nor I were versed in the methods of oral historians, but we needed to
talk to the generation of women pioneers, since that seemed to be the only way to find out
their view on Spanish punk. Our aim was to hear points of view that had been obscured,
which we knew about from our own personal remembrance of the period. Moreover, we
found during our project that there were other women doing the same kind of recovery
work. One woman from that first generation, Beatriz Alonso Aranzábal, from the late
80s-early 90s punk/goth band Los Monaguillosh [sic], made her own documentary to tell
her side of the story, not seeing herself reflected in what was available in existing works.
De un tiempo libre a esta parte: Una adolescencia musical (From a Freer Time ‘till Now:
A Musical Adolescence] was made in 2015 and premiered in 2016. Alonso Aranzábal is
not a documentary filmmaker, nor part of the otro cine movement out of which López

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Carrasco and Tur Moltó emerged, and she self-financed the project. De un tiempo libre
has more in common with book memoirs by punk women from the last decade – particu-
larly with Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys: A Memoir
(2014) by British punk rocker Viv Albertine, published in Spain as Ropa, Música, Chicos
in 2017 – than with the experimental products of Spain’s otro cine. In June 2018, during
a Q&A with Garrigós and myself, held after the screening of her documentary as part of
a season we curated for Cineteca (Madrid), Alonso read from Albertine’s book. In that
reading, she connected the former Slits’ guitarist’s words to what she explains in her own
voiceover in the film. Albertine’s impulse to write her memoir arose from a serious health
scare. Alonso Aranzábal explained that the impulse behind creating her own film had been
surviving cancer, an experience which made her want to set the record straight about her
past and that of her comrades in arms. The documentary is conventional in its use of
mise-en-scène, editing and sound and relies on much personal ephemera she collected over
those years (concert tickets to see the Ramones, Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc.) and other
memorabilia. Although the film rejects the over-mediation and political use of La Movida
that we saw in previously discussed films, it does not come from the same political revi-
sionist place as López Carrasco’s work, for example. Alonso Aranzábal’s is a personal
testimony from an insider, and she interviews her contemporaries for their recollections.
The film is thoroughly Madrid-centric, middle-class and nostalgic in its content and tone:
These are the memories, images and sounds of men and women who had their wild years
of hedonistic rock and roll during their free time and then grew up and moved on to
careers, some of them very successful ones, in the cultural industry. Given that the punk
ethos was against commercialism, these careers may seem antithetical to their former punk
allegiances, but we must remember their class origins as well. Their trajectory confirms that
these New Wave and Movida scenes in Madrid were full of “educated youngsters who came
from families who were well connected to the new cultural establishment” (Fouce and del
Val 125) and who in some cases are part of today’s cultural establishment. What matters
to me is that in this account women actually appear as audiences and as active fans who
became musicians and performers, who developed fanzines and played a central role in the
scene. Alonso and others talk about being involved in the creative process of song writing,
being part of rehearsal and performances and also of being active in the dissemination of
their work though their own labels. De un tiempo libre . . . is not the only example of how
women filmmakers focus differently on the scene when their own experiences included hav-
ing been members of bands. As I argued elsewhere, a film from 2012 by another insider,
Chus Gutiérrez, titled El calentito, includes scenes of rehearsals of the fictional protag-
onist’s band, Las Siux, and of the process of songwriting by the film’s protagonist lead
singer Sara. We see group members putting on their make-up and fashioning DIY clothes
as part of their creative work. We also see them having fun, being free from the constraints
that affected the lives of their parents’ generation – for example, Sara’s mother is depicted
almost as a parody of a high-pitched-voiced, apron-wearing housewife worried about her
daughter going out at night, a characterization that was shorthand for the Francoist ideal
of keeping the woman in the kitchen (Triana Toribio 43–6).

Memoirs by Women II
No less crucial to writing women into punk and finding out about their actual experiences is
establishing a dialogue with the following generation of women (those born in the 80s and

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90s) and with their films. Women documentary makers in Spain are increasingly interested
in their relationship with the older generations, in finding out about the experiences that
their mothers had in the 70s and early 80s. These inter-generational dialogues take place
as part of scenes in which women discuss breaking away from the limited sexual and life-
style freedoms that previous generations had endured under Francoism. This type of work
makes for very different images and focus, as shown by the documentary essay *En lugar
de nada (Instead of Nothing, 2018) by Brenda Boyer. The film is shot from the perspective
of the daughter of the punk couple formed by Antonio Boyer and Victoria Sabater. Brenda
Boyer’s autobiographical film essay works through her memories of the past and explores
her childhood as the daughter of two young heroin-addicted punk parents. She traces her
childhood with photographs and with monologues in which her grandparents, with whom
she spent large parts of her childhood, narrate directly to the camera fragments of what
happened. The grandparents’ narrative intercut with long silences and with shots from the
arid landscape of the País Valencià countryside, where they worked the land. These shots
are also interspersed with conversations with the filmmaker’s mother, her father having died
of an overdose in his 20s. From the pieced-together fragments, we see how Boyer spent
most of her childhood shuttling between her grandparents and her mother, in an unsettling
upbringing that she is trying to work through in the film. Her grandmother’s perspective is
also part of the story.
Victoria, the filmmaker’s mother, is often angry, and the scenes with her daughter are
painful as they encapsulate the impossibility of reconciling the freedom to experiment with
music and drugs, which Victoria argues she had a right to do, and her responsibilities
toward motherhood. She plays a song as Brenda films her called “Estúpida cotilla” (“stupid
gossip”) in which the chorus becomes louder and louder as she shouts toward the camera
(held by her daughter) “olvida, olvida, olvida” (“forget, forget, forget”). Brenda’s film,
however, is the opposite of an exercise in forgetting.
One challenging legacy of the Transition is undoubtedly the pervasive and almost sanc-
tioned drug consumption, particularly of heroin, and the AIDS epidemic that ensued. Even
those women who, as Astigarraga confesses, have no regrets about the “años locos, irrepeti-
bles” (“crazy, unrepeatable years”) observe that “si hay algo malo que permanence es la
desaparición de tantos amigos” (“If something bad has remained it is the disappearance of
so many friends”; 78). In Ainhoa, yo no soy ésa (Ainhoa, That’s Not Me; Carolina Astu-
dillo Muñoz, 2018), the lifestyle of freedom, fun, music and drugs that has been shorthand
for the “crazy years” of the 80s and 90s, when women could be free to do so much more
(un tiempo libre, according to Alonso Aranzábal), turned out to be destructive for Ainhoa.
Carolina Astudillo explains:

Ainhoa Mata Juanicotena was born in a family that recorded, taped and filmed her
life for many years. In her teens, at the end of the 80s, Ainhoa started writing what
she did not want to show anyone. Life diaries that she kept until her death, describe
a woman different to who her family and friends knew. Intimate diaries which reveal
many issues connected to the female experience about which other women in history
have written.
(Carolinaastudillo.com)

Home movie footage, videos of her with friends, phone-message recordings of neighbors
complaining about loud parties, vinyl records of Rock Radikal Vasco, concert tickets,

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photos of her with dyed hair, ripped t-shirts and studded bracelets and so on. All the objects
that we have seen used elsewhere for telling a joyful story about these times are here the
outward displays of fun that must be weighed against diaries revealing the anguish of lone-
liness, the stress of abortion and internalized desperation. Astudillo connects these diaries
to images and texts by other women who had abortions, who had miscarriages and who
committed suicide.
Pregnancy, abortion and other female experiences (as Astudillo calls them) are themes
that only feature in the male-centered documentaries when they are subordinated to narrat-
ing another male experience. In the documentary Lo que hicimos . . . (What We Did . . .),
Manolo Suicidio (of Madrid’s band Panadería y bollería nuestra señora del Karmen)
explains that when girlfriends got pregnant, boyfriend band members had to accompany
them to London for abortions, and on these trips they were able to get the latest punk
records to bring back to Madrid. The trips were not wasted. Women’s experiences in this
story are no more than a pretext for the men’s musical education.
Among the many urgently needed revisions and corrections to the triumphalist accounts
of popular culture at the end of Francoism and early democracy, we must prioritize those
that apply the filter of gender. Punk pioneer women’s roles and experiences should not
continue to be reduced to being the symbols of how far into modernity Spanish society had
progressed, and they should not be presented as midwives for the movement. Here I have
pointed towards what a reading focusing on gender might look like by rethinking the place
and voice of women misrepresented by dominant and revisionist accounts and by returning
instead to a first generation account, through interviews and first-person documentaries in
order to reveal punk women’s real lived experience.

Notes
1 All translations are my own unless noted otherwise.
2 A revisionist documentary premiered in December 2020 focuses on the women in the heavy metal
scene in Madrid between 1982 and 1992 (Marcos n.p.).
3 See, for instance, Andy Bennett 2009, and Laura Way 2019.

Works Cited
“Ainhoa, Yo no soy ésa.” Directed by Carolina Astudillo, produced by Bélen Sánchez, and Carolina
Astudillo, 2018. https://carolinaastudillo.com/portfolio/ainhoa-no-esa/.
“Aliens.” Directed by Luis López Carrasco, produced by Luis López Carrasco, 2017. Film.
“¿A quién le importa? La edad de Oro del pop español.” Produced by Babel Films, Sony BMG Music
Entertainment España and RTVE, 2006.
Astigarraga, Begoña. “Begoña Astigárraga (Vulpes).” God Save The Queens. Pioneras del Punk,
edited by Cristina Garrigós, Nuria Triana, and Paula Guerra, 66rpm, 2019, pp. 64–79.
“Autosuficientes.” Directed by Danny García, produced by Danny García, and César Méndez, 2016.
Bennett, Andy, and Paul Hodkinson, eds. Ageing and Youth Cultures. Berg, 2012.
“Biografia.” Ana. curra.com, 22 Mar. 2022. https://www.anacurra.com/ana-curra/.
Blase, Cazz. “Writing Women Back into Punk,” The f-Word. Contemporary UK Feminism, 14 Mar.
2010. https://thefword.org.uk/2010/03/women_in_punk_w/. Accessed 22 Mar. 2022.
Blase, Cazz. “Stories of the She-Punks,” The f-Word. Contemporary UK Feminism, 2 Nov. 2018.
https://thefword.org.uk/2018/11/stories-of-the-she-punks/. Accessed 22 Mar. 2022.
Broussard, Meredith. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. MIT
P, 2019.
“Cicatriz.” Wikipedia, 22 Mar. 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicatriz.

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“De un tiempo libre a esta parte. Una adolescencia musical.” Directed by Beatriz Alonso Aranzábal,
produced by Beatriz Alonso Aranzábal, 2016.
“Don’t Look Back.” Directed by D.A. Pennenbacker, produced by John Court and Albert Gross-
man, 1967.
“El Futuro.” Directed by Luis López Carrasco, produced by Luis López Carrasco, Luis Ferrón Ferri,
Manuel Calvo Margallo, Roberto Butragueño, and Ion de Sosa, 2013.
“El peor Dios.” Directed by Alejandro Montes, Daniel Arasanz, and Nico Tarela, produced by Ale-
jandro Montes, 2013.
“*En lugar de nada.” Directed by Brenda Boyer, produced by Brenda Boyer, 2018.
Feigenbaum, Ann. “ ‘Some Guy Designed This Room I’m Standing In’: Marking Gender in Press Cov-
erage of Ani di Franco.” Popular Music, vol. 24, no. 1, 2005, pp. 37–56.
Fernández Labayen, Miguel. “Más moral que el Alcoyano. Espacio social y cultural popular en el cine
de Jorge Tur Moltó.” Territorios y Fronteras 2. Emergencias y urgencias en el cine documental
español, edited by Vanesa Fernández, Universidad del País Vasco UPV/EHU, 2013, pp. 99–115.
Fouce, Héctor, and Fernán de Val. Made in Spain: Studies in Popular Music. Routledge, 2015.
“Frenesí en la gran ciudad.” Directed by Antonio Moreno and Alejandro Caballero, produced by
TVE, 2011.
Garrigós González, Cristina. “Warriors and Mystics: Religious Iconography, Eroticism, Blasphemy
and Gender in Female Punk Artists.” Lectora. Revista de Dones i textualitat, no. 23, 2017,
pp. 51–65.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture. The Meaning of Style. Methuen, 1979.
Kourelou, O., Mariana Liz, and Belén Vidal. “Crisis and Creativity: The New Cinemas of Portugal,
Greece and Spain.” New Cinemas, vol. 12, no. 1+2, 2014, pp. 133–51.
“La bola de cristal,” produced by RTVE, 1984–1988.
“La Edad de Oro,” produced by RTVE, 1983–1985.
“Lo que hicimos fue secreto.” Directed by David Álvarez, produced by Eleventh Floor Studio, 2016.
Marcos, Carlos. “La vida fue cruel con Azucena, la diosa del ‘heavy’ español.” El País.com,
2020. https://elpais.com/cultura/2020-11-14/la-vida-fue-cruel-con-azucena-la-diosa-del-heavy-
espanol.html.
“Peligro social, Las pioneras del Punk en Barcelona.” Directed by Guillermo Tupper, José Manuel
Dávila, Juan Dávila, Isabel Trillo and Xavier Ortiz, produced by Màster en Teoria and Pràctica del
Documental Creatiu. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2013.
“Pepi, Luci, Bom, y otras chicas del montón.” Directed by Pedro Almodóvar, produced by Pepón
Coromina. Fígaro films, 1980.
Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. Faber, 2011.
“Si yo fuera tú me gustarían los Cicatriz.” Directed by Jorge Tur Moltó, produced by Jorge Tur
Moltó, KREA Expresión Contemporánea, 2010.
Thorn, Tracey. Another Planet. A Teenager in Suburbia. Canongate, 2019.
Triana Toribio, Nuria. “Memorias Selectivas: Two Film by Spanish Punk Women.” Lectora. Revista
de Dones i textualitat, no. 23, 2017, pp. 35–50.
“Venid a las cloacas.” Directed by Daniel Arasanz, produced by Juan Blanco and Sara Calatayud, 2010.
Viñuela, Eduardo. “Memoria, nostalgia y canon el documental musical en la historia de las músicas
populares urbanas.” La música en la pantalla, edited by Teresa Fraile, and Beatriz de las Heras.
Editorial Síntesis, 2010, pp. 151–66.
Way, Laura. Punk, Gender and Ageing: Just Typical Girls. Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020.
Wheeler, Duncan. “All Her Friends Call Her Alaska: The Cultural Politics of Locating Olvido Gara
in and beyond Madrid’s Movida.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, vol. 17, no. 4, 2016,
pp. 361–83.

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 37
NARRATING CLASS IN
TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPANISH
LITERATURE
From Class in Itself to Class for Itself

David Becerra Mayor

Introduction
Conflict precedes class. Class is constituted once the subjects that compose it recognize
themselves in the antagonistic position they occupy in a social structure based on exploita-
tion. This is a central idea for Marx and Marxism.1 As Jaime Aja and Eduardo Sánchez say,

[e]l desarrollo de las fuerzas productivas hace surgir la clase obrera como “clase para
el capital”, pero es la lucha política la que la constituye como una “clase para sí”. El
proceso de lucha de la clase trabajadora comienza conformando coaliciones económi-
cas en defensa del salario; posteriormente la lucha se hace en defensa de las propias
coaliciones, con lo que la lucha adquiere un carácter político. La organización y la
lucha adquieren una importancia central en la constitución de la clase. (147)
[t]he development of the productive forces gives rise to the working class as a “class
for capital,” but it is the political struggle that constitutes it as a “class for itself.”
The process of struggle of the working class begins by forming economic coalitions
in defense of wages; later the struggle is made in defense of the coalitions themselves,
through which the struggle acquires a political character. The process of organization
and the struggle acquire a central importance in the constitution of class.2

Only when class is recognized as such is it possible to narrate it. Narrating class is not
limited to a theme or specific form. It does not depend solely on a change of focus that
now shows what had previously been left out of the picture, nor is it a description of the
lives of the workers as the nineteenth-century novel portrayed the lives of the bourgeoisie.
It is rather a question of meaning, of configuring a new narrative from a radically different
place. It is about narrating class inserted within the conflict, writing from inside exploi-
tation and against exploitation. To narrate class means to reveal the workers as “sujets
révoltés, non comme des objets de compassion” (“subjects of revolt and not as objects of
compassion”; Traverso 219).

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-42 
 Narrating Class in Twentieth-Century Spanish Literature

In twentieth-century Spain it is possible to locate a literature starring different collectivi-

ties that, through their struggles, were constructing themselves as a class for itself. These
narratives emerge in two crucial moments of contemporary Spanish history: (1) In the late
1920s and early 1930s, between the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the proclamation
of the Second Republic, and before the 1936 coup d’état that marks the beginning of the
Spanish Civil War, and (2) in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the economy of the
Franco dictatorship was liberalized to allow the development of capitalist productive forces
through the activation of the Stabilization Plan in 1959, which was implemented in accord-
ance with the postulates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In these two historical moments it is possible to trace the transformation of class in itself
into a class for itself. It is a three-phase process: (1) the struggle for wages, (2) the constitu-
tion of a class organization with which to confront the ruling class and (3) the design of
revolutionary tactics and strategy. In this chapter we will analyze the way in which literary
texts narrate the constitution of class according to this trajectory. We will do so through
the analysis of three different novels, belonging to the two previously mentioned periods,
each one of which narrates class conflict from three different economic sectors: the primary
sector (Campesinos, 1931, by Joaquín Arderíus), the secondary sector (La mina, 1959,
by Armando López Salinas) and the service sector (Tea rooms: Mujeres obreras, 1934, by
Luisa Carnés).

Campesinos: Naming the Exploitation

In the 1930s, as Manuel Aznar Soler states in República literaria y revolución (1920–1939),
a type of revolutionary or proletarian-revolutionary literature arose, which should be inter-
preted as

una consecuencia directa de la lucha de clases que, durante la Segunda República,

se desarrolló en la sociedad española. La literatura proletaria-revolucionaria fue la
expresión artística de una clase social, el proletariado, en cuyo seno surgían ahora
escritores que manifestaban, a través de su obra literaria, la conciencia revolucionaria
de la clase a la que pertenecían. (I: 265)
a direct consequence of class struggle that, during the Second Republic, developed
in Spanish society. Proletarian-revolutionary literature was the artistic expression of
a social class, the proletariat, in whose bosom now emerged writers who manifested,
through their literary work, the revolutionary consciousness of class to which they
belonged.

The Republican period is certainly prolific in social, proletarian and even revolutionary
novels. But these are by no means complacent with the Second Republic. On the contrary,
they are critical of the new regime because they reveal that this “República democrática de
trabajadores de toda clase” (“democratic Republic of workers of all classes”) – as stated in
Article 1 of the Republican Constitution – beyond its promises was nothing more than a for-
malization of the bourgeois state the proletariat would have to confront. This state would
be the one that would have to take charge of repressing the revolutionary impulses that
these novels describe, portray or imagine. As Víctor Fuentes pointed out in his now-classic
essay “La marcha al pueblo en las letras españolas” (The March Toward the People in

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Spanish Letters), the authors of these novels constituted “la generación de la República, no
tanto de la oficial, sino de la que quedó por construir” (“the generation of the Republic, not
so much the official one, but the one that remained to be built”; Fuentes 68).
A paradigmatic case of a proletarian-revolutionary novel is Campesinos, published in
1931 by Joaquín Arderíus, who presented himself as “el primer escritor comunista español”
(“the first Spanish communist writer”; Aznar Soler, I: 245). Campesinos is a novel written
from and against exploitation. It describes not only the poverty in which farm workers live
and their conditions of misery or precariousness but the way in which this condition is the
result of an inequality that is constitutive of the system. The novel does not speak of poverty
but of exploitation. Inequality, far from being conceived as natural, which would lead the
peasants to accept it with resignation, is interpreted in the novel as social and historical.
The recognition of the historicity of class position denaturalizes the system and allows the
opening of a first line of escape towards emancipation. The awareness of inequality leads
the peasants to demand higher pay from the landowner, as in fact happens in the first phase
of awareness and the constitution of class for itself. But when the señorito calls the peasant
who demands an improvement in working conditions a “beggar,” the peasant responds:
“Yo soy un proletario” (“I am a proletarian”; Arderíus 75).
Thus, a first rupture takes place in the consciousness of the peasants which will trigger the
process of transformation of class in itself into a class for itself. The dispositif that fixed the
workers in a subaltern place in the social structure now allows to perceive, through its cracks,
a new language, other words that suddenly politicize the position they occupy in the social
structure. This movement denaturalizes and identifies the constitutive antagonism of the social
structure, based on the exploitation between those who possess the means of production and
those who possess “nada más que sus brazos” (“nothing but their arms”; Arderíus 76).
With awareness, the characters are tempted to improvise solutions, almost always
individual or impulsive. These, however, are discarded because they do not contribute to
achieving a revolutionary objective. Negotiation with the landowner cannot be the solu-
tion either. The antagonism could be temporarily harmonized with a wage increase, but
it would not mean the end of class structure or the end of exploitation. Even killing the
landowner would not lead anywhere either. Rage must be translated into political action
and individual struggle into organization: “lo que yo quiero que seas tú también, en lugar
de homicida: un soldado como yo” (“what I want you to be too, instead of homicidal: a
soldier like me”; 99). The homicide/soldier opposition politicizes the type of action to be
taken. Others think of emigration, moving to France, where wages are higher: “Hay más
trabajo y pagan algo mejor. Pero se explota también al pobre. Al mundo hay que revolu-
cionarlo” (“There is more work and they pay a little better. But the poor are also exploited.
The world must be revolutionized”; 88).
In this sense, and as Constantino Bértolo points out, unlike other novels where there is
hardly any mention of the unjust and unbalanced composition of the Spanish latifundia
and where the conflicts narrated are aimed at resolving this situation with adjustments or
reforms, Campesinos does not propose “la reforma de esa distribución injusta de la propie-
dad sino su desaparición” (“the reform of this unjust distribution of property but rather
its disappearance”; 207). Arderíus’ novel wants to go to the root of the problem: Private
property. In Constantino Bértolo’s analysis, Campesinos is defined as a “Leninist novel,”
since the possibility of “popular insurrection” is raised “not in an abstract or ahistorical
way” but as possible in a situation such as the one depicted in the novel (209). Campesinos,
Bértolo adds, “se levanta sobre una ‘poética leninista’ . . . : una novela concreta para una

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situación concreta” (“is based on a ‘Leninist poetics’ . . . : a concrete novel for a concrete
situation”; 209).
In the specific situation of the Spanish peasantry of the 1930s, it is necessary to organize
collectively so that the majority (the exploited) can confront the minority (the exploiters).
That refers to the second phase of the transformation of class in itself into a class for itself,
the moment to create organization and popular unity:

Juntándonos todos y tomando para nosotros el mundo entero, que es nuestro! . . . Por
cada señorito hay un millón de pobres. Y, además, todo lo fabrica el pobre. . . . Lo que
hace falta es unión. . . . ¿Quién nos junta? La misma hambre.” (Arderíus 134–135)
Let us all join together and take for ourselves the whole world, which is ours! . . .
For every master there are a million poor. And, besides, everything is made by the
poor. . . . What is needed is unity. . . . Who brings us together? The same hunger.

Unity must be translated into a party that acts as a revolutionary vanguard, the “party of
the poor, of the workers” that will confront the “party of the lords,” who are those who
governed both during the monarchy and during the Republic, it is said in Campesinos
(109). It is not unreasonable to imagine this scenario: Russia functions as a referent (77)
and makes the possibility of revolution plausible.
However, a radical question is raised by Campesinos: How does one make the revolu-
tion? The peasants conceive themselves as exploited, they have become aware that their
miserable situation is proportional to the wealth accumulated by the landowner, they also
know that collective organization and unity are the tools they must use in class struggle, and
that revolution is possible because it has already been possible in Russia. But something else
is needed: How can the “revolutionary seed” be transformed into an efficient revolution-
ary action, capable of confronting the repressive apparatuses of the state, always ready to
defend the interests of the bourgeoisie? This is the situation in two sequences of the novel:

La cosecha había sido escasa, y los jornales míseros y casi nulos . . . , comenzaba a
surgir el germen revolucionario. . . . La casi totalidad de la masa campesina de la
diputación se había convertido en un solo líder. . . . La mayor parte de los hombres
de Bruezos competían en odio al régimen burgués y en ansias de revolución. . . . Llegó
septiembre, y los campesinos de Bruezos, y de casi todas las diputaciones de Garzas,
formaban una gran masa al rojo. ¿Pero qué hacer para moldearse en acción, en acción
que tuviese una eficacia revolucionaria? (271–272)
The harvest had been meager, and the wages miserable and almost nil . . . , the
revolutionary germ was beginning to emerge. . . . Almost the entire peasant mass
of the county council had become a single leader. . . . Most of the men of Bruezos
competed in hatred of the bourgeois regime and in the desire for revolution. . . .
September arrived, and the peasants of Bruezos, and of almost all the deputations of
Garzas, formed a great red mass. But what to do to mold themselves into action, into
action that would have a revolutionary effectiveness?

And further on:

Tenían el germen revolucionario . . .

¡Pero era tan grande su ceguera!

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No tenían idea de nada.

¡Y sin rudimentos de técnica revolucionaria!
. . . en algunos pueblos de España se levantaban masas de campesinos. . . . Pero
que luego eran barridos por la Guardia civil, a fuerza de huracanes de balas de
mauser. (273)
They had the revolutionary seed . . .
But so great was his blindness!
They had no idea of anything.
And without the rudiments of revolutionary technology!
. . . in some villages in Spain masses of peasants rose up. . . . But they were then swept
away by the Guardia Civil, through the force of a hurricane of Mauser bullets.

Campesinos narrates a class that begins to name itself with words that do not displace
conflict but rather address it, allowing the subject to recognize itself in the place it occupies
in the structure of exploitation. This self-naming, this narration of oneself as a class, con-
stitutes the first step towards revolutionary action. Being conscious of exploitation does not
solve anything; it does not imply an immediate exit from capitalism, nor does it open a new
horizon of emancipation. But it serves to name the world in another way and, therefore, to
think from another place. However, none of this is sufficient without revolutionary training
and technique, Campesinos tells us. Without it, the revolution cannot but fail, because of
the unbalanced correlation of forces at the moment of the beginning of the battle. The peas-
ants are in the majority, but facing them is a class in control of the state and its repressive
apparatus. The end of Campesinos leaves the question open. Once the peasants revolt and
storm the City Hall en masse, after confronting – and defeating – the Guardia de Asalto, we
do not know what happens next. A red flag is raised on the balcony of City Hall, and, from
there, the peasants see the Guardia Civil arriving to repress the revolution. However, despite
the novel’s ending, in Arderíus’ Campesinos the revolution is already announced as possible.

Tea Rooms: Life in Two Halves

In the novel Tea Rooms: Mujeres obreras – Novela reportaje by Luisa Carnés (1934), the
protagonist is Matilde, a waitress in a centrally located cafeteria in Madrid. Through her
eyes Tea Rooms narrates a world built on inequality. Several scenes define the unequal
society that Matilde inhabits in almost cinematographic vividness. Class is inscribed in
bodies and, while ““la mujer rica desea el estío, que le permite cultivar su fina desnudez”,
“la pobre ve con temor la proximidad de los días radicantes de ese sol enemigo que des-
cubre el zapato informe, que ilumina el deterioro del atavío”” (“the rich woman desires
the summer, which allows her to cultivate her fine nudity,” “the poor woman sees with
fear the approach of the radiant days of that enemy sun that uncovers the shapeless shoe,
which illuminates the deterioration of the attire”; 21). Likewise, class is perceived in smells:
While in the worker’s house there is no smell of anything because in that kitchen there is
nothing but a “puchero de agua caliente . . . ni sardinas, ni picante pimentón para las sopas
de ajo” (“pot of hot water . . . neither sardines, nor spicy paprika for garlic soups”; 15),
it is possible to feel “esos blandos olores exquisitos de las cocinas ricas; el sugerente calor
que la envuelve a una al cruzar ante las ventanas de esas cocinas . . . , recordándole a una
que su hambre no data de unas horas ni de varios años, que es un hambre de toda la vida,
sentida a través de varias generaciones de antecesores miserables” (“those soft exquisite

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smells of rich kitchens; the suggestive warmth that envelops one when crossing before the
windows of those kitchens . . . , reminding the reader that one’s hunger does not date from
a few hours or several years, that it is a lifelong hunger, felt through several generations of
miserable ancestors”; 81). Class is also perceived in the way spaces are used and inhabited,
in the different itineraries to be taken according to the class to which one belongs, dividing
“la sociedad en dos mitades: los que utilizan el ascensor o la escalera principal, y ‘los otros’,
los de la escalera de servicio; y se sintió incluida entre la segunda mitad” (“society into
two halves: those who use the elevator or the main staircase, and ‘the others’, those on the
service stairs; and she felt included among the second half”; 26).
Life is, in effect, divided into “two halves” (26, 78). Matilde denaturalizes that division,
that inequality, giving it a political, class meaning. Reading a sign in the hall of a building
that tells her to enter “por la puerta de servicio” (“through the service door”), “Matilde
siente como nunca su condición de explotada” (“Matilde feels as never before her condition
of being exploited”; 81). The word with which she defines herself immediately places her
in an antagonistic, conflictive position in society, predisposed to class struggle, as happened
with the peasants of Arderíus when they defined themselves as proletarians as a first step
to think and organize the revolution. Through Matilde’s gaze, whose working day in the
cafe responds to the formula “Diez horas, cansancio, tres pesetas” (“Ten hours, tiredness,
three pesetas”; 34), it is not poverty or precariousness that is narrated but inequality as a
constitutive element of a system where a class gets rich through the exploitation of the labor
of its workers.
Without class consciousness, the workers can only reproduce and guarantee the repro-
duction of the system, as if they were unaware cogs in a perfectly oiled machine. In the
“filthy” maid’s room where they change, “cuelgan las empleadas cada mañana su person-
alidad para recogerla cinco horas después” (“the maids hang up their personalities every
morning to pick them up five hours later”; 41). As the manager tells them: “la dependienta,
dentro del su uniforme, no es más que un aditamento del salón, un utilísimo aditamento
humano. Nada más. . . . Aquí no son ustedes mujeres; aquí no son ustedes más que depen-
dientas” (“the salesclerk, in her uniform, is nothing more than an accessory of the salon,
a very useful human accessory. Nothing more. . . . Here you are not women; here you are
nothing more than salesclerks”; 36–37). The work erases the subjectivity of the cafeteria
employees, as they become reified objects in order to perform the task assigned to them.
Things do not rebel, only subjects do. The erasure of working class subjectivity is the device
applied by the bourgeoisie to guarantee the correct functioning of the system.
Tea Rooms shows how the precariousness of working conditions is increased for
women, who not only have to endure objectification, low wages, long working hours and
lack of sanitation in the work environment but also have to suffer sexual harassment at
work (113). As the novel narrates, most women workers lack critical and political tools for
emancipation, tools that would allow them to denaturalize their position in the exploitative
structure:

Los problemas de orden “material” (social) no han adquirido aún bastante prepon-
derancia entre el elemento femenino del proletariado español. La obrera española,
salvo contadas desviaciones plausibles hacia la emancipación y hacia la cultura, sigue
deleitándose con los versos de Campoamor, cultivando la religión y soñando con lo
que ella llama su “carrera”: el marido probable. . . . Su experiencia de la miseria no
estimula su mentalidad a la reflexión. . . . La religión la hace fatalista. (41)

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Problems of a “material” (social) order have not yet acquired sufficient prepon-
derance among the female element of the Spanish proletariat. The Spanish working
woman, except for a few plausible deviations towards emancipation and culture,
continues to delight in the verses of Campoamor,3 cultivating religion and dreaming
of what she calls her “career”: the probable husband. . . . Her experience of misery
does not stimulate her mentality to reflection. . . . Religion makes her fatalistic.

Instead of protesting, they barely murmur (42). What differentiates protest from murmur-
ing is the capacity to clearly articulate the discontent, from a position of class conscious-
ness and collective organization against the ruling class. Matilde, who “constituye una de
esas raras y preciosas desviaciones del acervo común” (“constitutes one of those rare and
precious deviations from the common stock”; 43), knows that “lo único eficaz sería elevar
a la dirección una protesta colectiva” (“the only effective thing would be to raise a collec-
tive protest against the company’s management”; 42). Similarly, when the waiters’ strike
began in the turbulent Madrid of the 1930s, Matilde tried to convince her companions to
support it: “Matilde preconiza la solidaridad, la unión de los trabajadores. Sin la unidad en
la acción no se consigue nada” (“Matilde advocates solidarity, the union of the workers.
Without unity in action nothing is achieved”; 145). And finally, she tells them: “nosotras,
aquí, nos pasamos la vida gruñendo por la miseria que ganamos; pero no nos preocupamos
por ganar más. Y con hablar por detrás no se arreglan las cosas. Tiene que haber solidari-
dad” (“We, here, spend our lives grumbling about the pittance we earn; but we don’t worry
about earning more. And talking behind our backs won’t fix things. There has to be solidar-
ity”; 145). From wages to organization – this is the road Matilde wants to travel with her
companions. But at the decisive moment, fear appears in the face of threats of dismissal by
the employer if they go along with the strike (150). Without the protection of a union, of
a workers’ organization that can fight for and defend their rights, it is difficult to organize
the protest.
Only through struggle, Carnés seems to tell us, will women be able to escape from the
double exploitation to which they are subjected: Labor exploitation but also the one that
curtails their imagination and prevents them from thinking of emancipation when their
only horizon in life is to find a husband and pray. As the plot progresses Matilde accom-
panies her friend Laurita to the outskirts of the city to help her seek an abortion for her
unwanted pregnancy. In a tragic outcome, we witness a workers’ demonstration at the
gates of a cookie factory. There, a woman delivers a speech urging them to unite the desti-
nies of women’s emancipation with the broader proletarian emancipation. Although long,
the speech deserves to be reproduced in its entirety:

Es necesario que las compañeras de trabajo que no están asociadas se asocien inme-
diatamente; que no permanezcan cruzadas de brazos en estos momentos de prueba
para la clase trabajadora; que se unan al movimiento y a la lucha de nuestra clase, la
clase de los oprimidos. Ha pasado el tiempo en que se consideraba ridículas y hom-
brunas a las mujeres que se preocupaban de la vida social y política del mundo. Antes
creíamos que la mujer sólo servía para zurcir calcetines al marido y para rezar. . . .
Hoy sabemos que . . . la mujer vale tanto como el hombre para la vida política y
social. Lo sabemos porque muchas hermanas nuestras han sufrido persecuciones y
destierros. Quiero decir con esto que, ya que los hombres luchan por una emanci-
pación que a todos nos alcanzará por igual, justo es que les ayudemos; justo es que

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nos labremos nuestro propio destino. Antes no había más que dos caminos para la
mujer: el del matrimonio o el de la prostitución; ahora ante la mujer se abre un nuevo
camino, más ancho, más noble: ese camino nuevo de que os hablo, dentro del hambre
y del caos actuales, es la lucha consciente por la emancipación proletaria mundial.
(199–200)
It is necessary for women co-workers who are not associated to join immediately;
not to stand idly by in these trying times for the working class; but to join the move-
ment and the struggle of our class, the class of the oppressed. The time has passed
when women who cared about the social and political life of the world were consid-
ered ridiculous and manly. We used to believe that women were only good for darn-
ing socks for their husbands and for praying. . . . Today we know that women are
worth . . . as much as men for political and social life. We know this because many
of our sisters have suffered persecution and banishment. I mean by this that, since
men are fighting for an emancipation that will reach us all equally, it is right that we
should help them; it is right that we should carve out our own destiny. Before there
were only two paths for women: Marriage or prostitution; now a new, wider, nobler
path opens before women: This new path of which I speak to you, in the present hun-
ger and chaos, is the conscious struggle for world proletarian emancipation.

The participation of women in the struggle of the proletariat will allow the birth of the
“new woman” (202), the transformation from the “living-room accessory” to which she
had been relegated into a political subject fully conscious of her position in the structure of
exploitation and, consequently, fully conscious of the need to build a political organization
for the revolution. From object to subject, the new woman will be able to narrate herself
within a certain class and as belonging to a class, as well as developing new practices of
struggle and an imagination that will allow her to abandon the place assigned to her by
capitalism and patriarchy and join her struggle to the proletariat’s. Through struggle she
will be able to escape from the chains that trap women ““en los países capitalistas [y] par-
ticularmente en España” (“in capitalist countries [and] particularly in Spain”), which force
women to “contribuir de por vida al placer ajeno, a la sumisión absoluta al patrono o al jefe
inmediato . . . a la humillación, la sumisión al marido o al amo expoliador” (“contribute
for life to the pleasure of others, to absolute submission to the employer or to the immedi-
ate boss . . . to humiliation, submission to the husband or to the plundering master”;131).
Tea Rooms narrates the need to inscribe the struggle for the emancipation of women
within the struggle of the proletariat – without erasing the specificity of women’s struggles.
Matilde, as an exploited worker, perceives her position in the social structure as conflictive,
and, after becoming aware of it, she sees the historical need to design a strategy of struggle
for her emancipation as a class and as an oppressed gender.

La Mina: The State of Exception of the Oppressed

In the social narrative of the 1950s, in the midst of Franco’s regime, it is also possible
to find novels in which class is constituted as such through labor struggle. La mina by
Armando López Salinas, published in 1960, is a clear example. The novel tells the story of
a peasant from an Andalusian town, Joaquín, who emigrates to a mining town to escape
poverty. La mina offers a faithful portrait of what mining work entails and denounces the
deficient safety conditions with which the workers must coexist, the accidents they suffer,

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the illnesses they endure due to their continuous exposure to noxious gases, the dust they
breathe and the darkness, as well as the physical pain caused by having to adapt to working
in extremely small spaces.
Accidents in mining, as well as the diseases contracted by the workers, are the result of
the company’s lack of investment in their safety. In the mine, profitability is prioritized over
safety. The company does not want to spend its money. It is not irrelevant that it is 1959.4
That is the year of the approval of the Stabilization and Economic Liberation Plan – recom-
mended by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF). Under the plan Spain will leave behind the post-war
autarchy to begin the so-called economic desarrollismo through a more open model, based
on market liberalization, the primacy of the private sector, foreign investment, less state
intervention and so on (De Riquer 434ff). With these measures aimed at modernizing its
economic structure, Spain managed to emerge from the situation of collapse and bank-
ruptcy that had plagued the country since the post-war and autarchy periods and finally
integrated itself into the Western capitalist block. The dominant narrative of history inserts
those events following a linear and homogeneous order, as one more phase within the story
of progress, which always moves forward. Economic development would thus be the logi-
cal consequence of progress: A story without people or relations of exploitation.
Historicism, which, as Walter Benjamin said, narrates history from “once upon a time”
(Thesis XVI 53), celebrates the Spanish “economic miracle” because what is “counted” does
not account for the dead. As Benjamin showed in his Theses on History, progress is built on
the suffering of its victims, who accept living the present as in a constant “state of exception:”
The oppressed suspend their rights in exchange for the promise of welfare that will be realized
in the future (Thesis VIII 43). The accumulation of capital produced in these crucial years for
the Francoist economy finds its correlate in the exploitation of a new working class, which,
coming from rural, impoverished areas of the Spanish geography, settles in the urban periph-
eries of the great industrial centers to sell its labor force at very low prices. That is only pos-
sible due to the high competition represented by the enormous human reserve army of labor
at the disposal of capital, thanks to the migratory flows derived from the social asymmetry of
the country. The greater the reserve of workers – and the greater the labor available and com-
peting for the same jobs – the lower the wage that the worker will receive and, consequently,
the greater the capitalist accumulation (Marx III 91–106). It is from that labor power that the
surplus value that will allow the development of the Spanish economy is extracted.
In his novel López Salinas focuses on the early victims of economic development, on the
human cost – death and exploitation – left behind by the process of capitalist accumulation.
He describes, precisely, a new working class that – formed by migrants fleeing poverty and
the lack of opportunities offered by the primary sector – goes to the mine in search of a
more dignified and better life, to find only exploitation: Low wages and precarious working
conditions that endanger health and safety. These conditions anticipate the novel’s tragic
ending, the collapse of the mine shaft and the death of the miners. López Salinas’ novel
portrays how the new Spanish economic “miracle” is built on the backs of the working
class. The working class, rather than the managers and technocrats, made this economic
boom possible. But the lives of working class subjects have been erased from history, buried
under the rubble left behind by the historicist narrative, much like the bodies buried after
the tragic collapse in the novel’s conclusion.
These first victims of the new capitalist exploitation will begin to organize themselves to
fight for their emancipation. By becoming conscious of their exploitation, they will become

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a class for itself. They will become active subjects who will not remain impassive before the
advance of history, before the state of exception of progress for the oppressed classes. The
consciousness of exploitation leads workers to explore methods of protest and organization.
But any attempt at collective action is met with threats and punishment by the company:

El “Asturiano” sigue dando vueltas a la misma idea. “Si vamos solos – se dice – los
de la cuarta galería no conseguiremos nada importante”. El suprimir los destajos y
el quitar las primas de producción era un aviso para los mineros, [una amenaza para
reprimir el descontento].

– Tendríamos que protestar todos, todos los del pozo. Toda la cuenca . . .
  [“Callarse”, piensa Ruiz, “todo el mundo se calla, nadie levanta la voz para
defender a los trabajadores de la cuenca. Hay una conspiración, un silencio de
cómplices. Algunos se callan por comodidad, otros por miedo, otros porque están
comprados. Pero cuando nadie quiere hablar, alguien debe tomar la palabra nec-
esariamente. El eterno silencio de España. Si el pueblo de los trabajadores per-
manece mudo es porque le han quitado la palabra”.
– Organizar la protesta, “Viejo”. Esto es lo que hay que hacer – respondió “el Astu-
riano”]. (253–254)

The “Asturian” keeps thinking about the same idea. “If we go alone,” he says to him-
self, “we in the fourth gallery will not achieve anything important. The suppression
of piecework and the removal of production bonuses was a warning to the miners, [a
threat to suppress discontent].

– We should all protest, everyone in the well. The whole basin . . .

  [“Shut up,” thinks Ruiz, “everyone is silent, no one raises their voice to defend
the workers in the basin. There is a conspiracy, a silence of accomplices. Some keep
quiet out of comfort, others out of fear, others because they are bought. But when
no one wants to speak, someone must necessarily speak up. The eternal silence of
Spain. If the workers’ people remain mute, it is because they have been deprived of
the word.”
– “Organize the protest, “Viejo”. This is what must be done – replied “the
Asturian”].5

As was the case in Campesinos and Tea Rooms, awareness allows the denaturalization of
their position in the structure of exploitation. They will have to confront the management
and challenge the coercive measures it uses to discipline protests and to keep the workers in
the subordinate position that allows the company to extract the maximum profit through
their exploitation. Once they have become conscious, no matter how much repressive force
the ruling class employs, there will be no way to stop the revolutionary impulse.
But there is no time for that in the novel. The collapse of the mine in which the work-
ers in La mina die prevents the protest from taking shape. However, after the death of the
miners, a different protest will take place that radically transforms the characters in it. The
miners’ wives, who up to that moment had fulfilled a reproductive function that guaran-
teed the accumulation of capital,6 decide to participate in the assault on the mines after
the collapse of the shaft, thus recovering the public and political dimension – and with it

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their dignity – that Francoism had taken away from them. The final words of the novel,
in a sort of free indirect style through which we can hear Angustias’ conscience, clearly
show this rupture. We now hear an other Angustias. After the fatal outcome, Angustias
can no longer be the same: That submissive, subordinate and disciplining behavior that
we found throughout the novel changes from the moment she participates in the assault
against the mining company. Angustias has participated in the struggle and, after that, we
cannot expect her to behave as if nothing had happened. The word “esperanza” (“hope”),
with which the novel closes, illuminates a new future. The ending of La mina, tragic for
Joaquín, is not completely useless, futile and lost forever. Angustias’ hope is historical: She
knows that Joaquín’s death will serve to as a motivation for those who will fight in the
future. Angustias alludes to her children, whom she turns into depositaries of memory, as
heirs of a struggle that Joaquín lost but that her children will be able to overcome if they
remember his death. Angustias urges her children – and also the reader – to continue the
fight, to fight for those who died, to gather their memory and take up the struggle of all the
defeated, so that exploitation and death do not bury the workers’ bodies under the rubble
again. Because in that “garden of hope” that is Angustias, the revolution of the future will
germinate. Angustias looks at her children and hopes that the memory of the defeated will
illuminate, in a Benjaminian sense, their struggle.

Conclusion
The three novels studied narrate exploitation in three labor scenarios that correspond to the
three classic sectors of the economy: The primary sector in Campesinos by Joaquín Arderíus,
the secondary sector in La mina by Armando López Salinas and the tertiary sector in Tea
Rooms by Luisa Carnés. Other novels could have been selected, and the analysis would have
worked just as well; we could have talked about Los topos (The Moles, 1930) by Isidoro Ace-
vedo or Octubre rojo en Asturias (Red October in Asturias, 1935) by José Díaz Fernández,
from the 1930s; Central eléctrica (Power Plant, 1958) by Jesús López Pacheco; or La piqueta
(The Picket Line, 1959) by Antonio Ferres, to mention only some of the most relevant ones.
All of them, despite narrating very different forms of labor and belonging to two differ-
ent eras, share a common background that makes it possible to put them in dialogue. All
three are not intent on narrating a backward world, marked by poverty and misery, but
rather seek to focus on the inequality constitutive of the capitalist system. These novels
study the objective functioning of a system based on exploitation that exists to guarantee
the process of capital accumulation. In the same way, the three novels narrate the transfor-
mation of isolated subjects, without class consciousness, who initially assume with a certain
resignation their position in the world, into political subjects who participate in the struggle
for emancipation.
After denaturalizing their situation and being able to understand their role within the
structure of exploitation, these subjects interpret their position with new words that give a
new legibility to the conflict, recognizing the antagonism that constitutes it. Consequently,
by politicizing and denaturalizing it, possibilities open up to transform their reality. In the
passage from class in itself to class for itself, the characters work for the constitution of a
revolutionary organization with which to confront the dominant class. On the other hand,
these novels reflect the difficulties of making the revolution without an effective organiza-
tion and little political training, when faced with an enemy as powerful as the state and its
repressive apparatus.

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In times where the concept of class seems to have entirely disappeared from public
debates and political vocabularies, these novels remind us how to narrate exploitation.
With this chapter I have tried to put in dialogue these three works written from and against
exploitation, in order to reestablish an interrupted literary genealogy. These novels could
not dialogue in their time because of historical events that prevented it: The Spanish Civil
War, the Francoist dictatorship and the pending task of the transition to democracy that did
not rescue from oblivion the cultural archive silenced by Franco’s literary institution. The
Spanish authors of the fifties could not read the works of the thirties, precisely because these
works lacked existence, like the bodies disappeared by the dictatorship (Martín-Cabrera
19). Today, critical novelists do not dialogue with these narratives either, because those
texts are not always available.
The objective is not only to recover key texts but also their conditions of legibility:
Reading them without erasing the moment of interruption, in order to elaborate, from
this new place, a radically different knowledge. It is not a matter of documenting the texts
and analyzing them; it is a matter of mobilizing their meaning and, with it, destabilizing
the theoretical – and also ideological – notions on which the literary history of contempo-
rary Spain has been configured. Reading from the rupture of that interrupted genealogy
must serve to exhume the imaginaries of literary texts that remind us that literature can
be – because it has been – otherwise. But also to discover that history can be – because it
also has been – interpreted differently from the way we have been told, giving us access to
a repertoire of political experiences for democracy that have been excluded from official
narratives (Becerra).
The novels studied here narrate exploitation in order to present the possibility of build-
ing a world without exploitation: With consciousness, organization and struggle, in spite
of all the obstacles and difficulties. They make us remember that another world is possible
because it always was a possibility.

Notes
1 This idea can be traced in the chapters of Capital on primitive accumulation (in Section Eight) as
well as in those on working time legislation (chapters VIII, XI, XII and XIII). Of course, they are
also in the chapter “Bourgeois and Proletarians” of The Communist Manifesto (Manifiesto 13–42).
2 All translation are my own unless noted otherwise.
3 Ramón de Campoamor (1817–1901) was a Spanish realist poet.
4 La mina was a finalist for the 1959 Nadal Prize.
5 The fragments marked in square brackets were censored in the various Spanish editions of La mina.
In my 2013 edition, I incorporate these censored fragments.
6 As the Italian feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa says, within the family, “la mujer se convierte en
principal figura represiva y disciplinadora de todos los miembros de la familia misma, tanto en el
plano ideológico como en el psicológico. . . . En tanto que responsable de la reproducción de la
fuerza de trabajo, la mujer, por un lado, disciplina a los hijos que trabajarán el día de mañana y,
por otro, disciplina al marido que trabaja el día de hoy y de cuyo solo salario depende la subsist-
encia de toda la familia” (“the woman becomes the main repressive and disciplining figure of all
the members of the family itself, both ideologically and psychologically. . . . As responsible for the
reproduction of the labor force, the woman, on the one hand, disciplines the children who will
work tomorrow and, on the other, disciplines the husband who works today and on whose salary
alone depends the subsistence of the whole family”; 49). As throughout the novel, Angustias, his
wife, urges Joaquín, despite the precariousness of his work, not to “get into trouble” (López Sali-
nas 238).

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Arderíus, Joaquín. Campesinos. Ayuso, 1980.
Aznar Soler, Manuel. República literaria y revolución (1920-1939). Renacimiento, vol. 2, 2010.
Becerra Mayor, David. “Leer desde la ruptura. Propuesta teórica para explorar el potencial político
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pp. 319–48.
Benjamin, Walter. Tesis sobre la historia y otros fragmentos. Ítaca/UACM, 2008.
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dida. El tiempo de la literatura de avanzada (1925-1935), edited by César de Vicente Hernando,
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Carnés, Luisa. Tea rooms. Mujeres obreras. Hoja de Lata, 2016.
Dalla Costa, Mariarosa. Dinero, perlas y flores en la reproducción feminista. Akal, 2009.
De Riquer, Borja. La dictadura de Franco. Crítica/Marcial Pons, 2010.
Fuentes, Víctor. La marcha al pueblo en las letras españolas (1917-1936). De la Torre, 2006.
López Salinas, Armando. La mina. Edición crítica de David Becerra Mayor. Akal, 2013.
Martín-Cabrea, Luis. “Introduction to Armando López Salinas.” Año tras año. Dyskolo, 2015.
Marx, Karl. El capital, vol. 8. Akal, 2012.
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 38
SOCIAL RESPONSES TO
MATERIAL INEQUALITY IN
SPAIN (2008–2022)
Steven L. Torres

The Great Recession that began in 2007–2008 triggered a significant increase in relative
poverty and material inequality in many countries around the world, including Spain.
Between 2008 and 2014, Spain’s Gini coefficient1 increased from 32.4 to 34.7 (Instituto
Nacional de Estadística or INE; National Statistics Institute), making Spain the country
with the highest level of social inequality in the Eurozone by 2012 (Delgado). Indeed,
unemployment levels reached 55.13% in 2012 for workers under the age of 25 (“El paro”).
According to a study by the Colectivo Ioé, between 2002 and 2014, the wealthiest 10%
of Spanish households increased their average net assets by 53%, while the poorest 25%
of Spanish households lost 108% of their net worth – in other words, they lost every-
thing (Colectivo Ioé 9). In 2020, once again, the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant
economic crisis produced a sudden 25% spike in the Gini index between February and
April, with devastating social consequences, particularly for a country such as Spain, with
a historically underdeveloped welfare state compared to many of its European counterparts
(“Evolución”). To illustrate, in 2011, the year of the 15M/Indignados movement, Spain’s
social public spending per inhabitant was the lowest of the EU-15 (Navarro “El Estado”).
Both major crises of late capitalism had a varying impact on different segments of the popu-
lation – namely, increased profits for the rich and devastating losses for the poor. What both
crises had in common was that they took their biggest toll not on the middle classes, as the
Spanish media often stated, but on the poor, on the three lowest deciles of the population,
on those who were already suffering the most when each crisis began (Rendueles and Sola
35) – including working-class youth, workers born abroad and significant segments of the
female population.
To further illustrate the depth of today’s socioeconomic polarization, in 2021, the three
wealthiest individuals in Spain owned as much wealth as the bottom 30% of the population
(Márquez). Furthermore, viewed on a global scale, the problem of inequality becomes even
more glaring, as the richest 1% of the world’s population now owns twice the amount of
wealth as 6.9 billion people (“Cinco”). Such extreme asymmetries should hardly be under-
stood as an unfortunate anomaly within capitalism. On the contrary, as Ellen Meiksins
Wood has argued, the very laws of motion that define capitalism itself – that is, the impera-
tives of competition, profit maximization and capital accumulation within a context of

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-43
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

market dependence – have historically been the cause (and not the result) of mass proletari-
anization (144), especially in those countries where the state does not take on a significant
role in regulating the economy and enacting redistributive measures in terms of wealth,
labor and leisure. Spain is certainly no exception in this regard. What does make Spain dif-
ferent, however, is that it has continued to rank high within Europe in terms of labor unrest,
political mobilization and public protest, despite its population’s low levels of political and
union affiliation (Fishman, “On the Significance” 355–356) and despite its population’s
modest membership in voluntary associations – an enduring consequence of Francoism’s
sociological legacy (Fishman, Democracy’s 12). With all this in mind, the present chapter
presents a highly synoptic view of some of the most salient ways in which various segments
of the population in Spain have collectively responded to the deterioration of their material
conditions of existence, especially since the 15M movement of 2011.
The 15M or Indignados movement took place within the context of a political cycle of
international contestation of the status quo, following the global recession unleashed by the
collapse of Lehman Brothers. This was a cycle in which people around the world expressed
their desire for greater democracy, liberty and equality, filling city plazas and online net-
works to express their grievances while using communication technology in new ways (for
convocation, organization and disseminating counterinformation), all within the context of
a globalized world that is “environmentally devastated and ravaged by the financial logic
of the global casino” (Monedero 23). Protests took place in Egypt, Greece, Spain, Iceland,
Tunisia, United States, Mexico, Portugal, Chile, Brazil and Peru, under labels such as Arab
Spring, Indignados, Occupy Wall Street or #yosoy132, signaling the emergence of new
forms of politicization which would have an enduring impact on later types of social mobi-
lization in Spain – such as the cycle of feminist protests that led to the 8M feminist strikes.
In the case of Spain, beginning on May 15, 2011, thousands of people flooded the pla-
zas throughout the country to protest austerity, corruption and unemployment in what
many described as a crisis of representation – famously encapsulated by mottos such as
“No nos representan” (“They [the politicians] do not represent us”). For many people, the
15M entailed a process of politicization which Spain had not witnessed since the period
of the Second Bourbon Restoration, also known as the Transition period (1975–1982), a
process in which thousands of people discovered the meaning of participatory democracy
(Pereira-Zazo and Torres 2). For some observers, the 15M also revealed a resurgence of
interest in matters of “social and economic inequality and injustice as master frames gal-
vanizing mobilization” (Tejerina and Perugorría 3), especially considering that most politi-
cians, journalists and academics had largely regarded such matters as outdated or irrelevant
for several decades.
While the 15M brought together a broad assortment of people in what was often
described as a transversal movement – university students, retirees, workers without a
higher education, housewives, part-time workers, unemployed workers – the existing field
data suggests that the bulk of the participants were young people, often between 26 and
36 years old, employed or studying, along with participants from their parents’ genera-
tion, disheartened by the prospect of a bleak future for their children (Monge Lasierra 76).
Symptomatically, it was also in 2011 that Guy Standing published The Precariat, a book
that addressed the emergence of a new segment of the population defined by its lack of
stable employment and by its consequent inability to plan for the future. At the time, Span-
ish media focused sympathetically on the tragedy of young people who earned advanced
degrees and spoke several languages, only to find themselves having to cobble together

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several jobs to subsist or even having to leave the country to find work. To many protesters,
such patterns signaled the end of the implicit meritocratic pact according to which study-
ing and playing by the rules would eventually lead to a successful middle-class lifestyle.
Clearly, Spain’s financialized economy – largely based on a real estate industry plagued
by corruption and scandal – was finally bottoming out. Indeed, it wasn’t until capitalism’s
proletarianization process began to reach into the middle class that inequality became a
matter of public concern. Unlike immigrants, who were largely underrepresented within the
Indignados movement, the middle-class segment of the precariat played a prominent role
in the 15M, and it is perhaps no coincidence that Spain’s major university cities demon-
strated a greater capacity for contestation than the country’s traditional productive centers
(Fernández-Steinko 96).
While it is true that the 15M aspired to promote a “politics of anyone” (Fernández-Savater
140), it would also be fair to say that those members of the precariat that came from a
working-class background were far less visible within the movement than their middle-class
counterparts. As studies have shown, the former typically possessed less cultural and social
capital, which often made them feel less confident and less valued within a public assembly
format (Gil Rodríguez and Rendueles 44). As César Rendueles aptly noted, the media fre-
quently denigrated this working-class fraction of the precariat for having chosen a so-called
“easy life” – as if working in construction on a scaffold entailed an easier life than discuss-
ing Plato in a classroom, for instance (Contra 111–2). Nevertheless, despite these limita-
tions, it is undeniable that the 15M promoted a massive process of politicization in Spain
in which “nearly one of every five Spanish residents claimed to have participated in the
occupations” by August of 2011 (Seguín 2).
Housing rights were one of the 15M’s most salient areas of concern, as expressed by col-
lectives such as V de Vivienda and, especially, the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca
or PAH (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages). While the PAH was first established
in February of 2009 in Barcelona, it gained significant momentum and visibility across the
nation after the 15M. In fact, circumstances were ripe: Over 200,000 families were evicted
from their homes by 2012 due to their inability to make mortgage payments during the
worst economic crisis the world had seen since the Great Depression. This was an exem-
plary instance of capitalist accumulation through dispossession.
Beginning in the 1960s, the Franco regime had sought to secure the loyalty of the work-
ing and middle classes by promoting home ownership, while divulging the idea that renting
was a waste of money (Colau and Alemany 34). Furthermore, the regime’s preservation of
Spain’s antiquated housing laws would have a strong disciplinary effect on workers tied to
mortgage payments. Because of Spain’s enduring and anachronist housing laws, homeown-
ers who defaulted on mortgages during the Great Recession were not only evicted from
their homes, but they were also forced to continue to make payments on the outstanding
amount after foreclosure, while financial institutions reclaimed ownership of their homes
as well as of their present and future assets. Foreclosures not only affected mortgagers but
also those who acted as cosigners on the mortgage loans, including friends, relatives and
parents. The massive levels of eviction nationwide seemed particularly egregious to broad
swaths of the population who understood that the government had spent 64 billion euros
to rescue failing (and often corrupt) financial institutions in 2009, while doing nothing of
substance to save families from eviction, poverty and despair – indeed, thousands of people
committed suicide. As Juan Carlos Barba Carretero observed, foreclosure victims would
have their payroll seized and would no longer be able to ask for credits, credit cards or

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contracts for electricity, gas or telephone services, essentially becoming “financial zombies”
(46). Such victims would be forced to survive with illegal jobs and with no contribution to
Social Security, hence no pension in their old age (Barba Carretero 46). The effect of this
crisis would be particularly devastating for a country such as Spain, whose patrimonial
tradition is closely tied to a promise of intergenerational social mobility, since parents often
count on bequeathing their property to their children.
On the other hand, banks and “cajas de ahorros” (savings banks) had often been con-
trolled through their boards of directors by politicians and entrepreneurs, who in turn par-
ticipated in massive levels of money lending and land reclassification, not only to promote
housing construction, but also to support superfluous megaprojects that often ended in fail-
ure. The ensuing speculative bubble (1999–2007) would have devastating social, economic
and ecological consequences (Naredo 35), leaving Spain with 3.4 million empty homes
(Martínez, “España”) – or by some accounts as many as 6 million (Colau and Alemany 49).
It is within this context that the PAH would become the most successful grassroots
organization of the next ten years, reaching 220 branches by 2017. The PAH introduced
matters of housing inequality, poverty and injustice into mainstream discourse, eventually
drawing the attention of the EU and the UN, due to Spain’s grave human rights violations.
By the time the financial crisis hit, Spain had become the country with the lowest percent-
age of both public housing and rental housing in Europe, thus leaving the population with
scarce housing alternatives (Naredo 22). Yet bankers and media pundits repeatedly claimed
that people had lived beyond their means – while conveniently ignoring that banks had sys-
tematically encouraged people to take out loans, which banks approved despite their high
risk. Having internalized the guilt, the shame and the blame, thousands of people turned to
the PAH for help.
As Ada Colau stated, the PAH promised people two things: That they would no longer
be alone and that they would not end up on the street (Faus). The PAH provided opportuni-
ties for those affected by the housing crisis to join non-hierarchical assemblies to share their
problems and find solutions, treating them as active subjects rather than merely providing a
service (Mir Garcia 242). This mutual-aid approach helped to create a strong sense of com-
munity, solidarity, reciprocity and fellowship, all within an environment that was respect-
ful of differences in terms of age, gender, ethnicity and national origin. Most importantly,
the PAH helped people to understand that “the problem is a collective one, that it is not
a personal failure and that the solution can only be achieved through collective struggle”
(Mir Garcia 242).
The PAH also sought to provide solutions, whether stopping evictions in local neighbor-
hoods, promoting campaigns to draw awareness and shape public debate or promoting
new policies to ensure housing rights at the local, regional and national levels (Rendueles
and Sola 14). For instance, participants were given the opportunity to collaborate with
volunteer lawyers and experts to understand the specificities of their mortgage contracts
and to negotiate with bankers. As the PAH’s protest actions appeared increasingly in the
media, banks became more eager to cancel debts in foreclosure processes, and rarely would
they do so without the involvement of the PAH – even though banks continued to oppose
regulation to make nonrecourse debts compulsory (Martínez, “Bitter” 1605–6).
After exhausting all institutional channels, the PAH would engage in non-violent civil
disobedience as a last resort. To prevent an eviction, people would gather in large groups in
front of homes, often summoning the media, while reading Section 47 of the Spanish Con-
stitution through loudspeakers (“all Spaniards have the right to enjoy decent and adequate

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housing”), along with other international agreements subscribed by Spain, such as the Uni-
versal Declaration of Human Rights, reminding everyone that Spain’s political system never
fulfilled its promise. Such practices, along with bank occupations and exposure protests or
“escraches” – a term and practice adopted from Latin America – to politicians, were highly
effective in publicly foregrounding the injustice of Spain’s housing laws and in framing the
crisis as a systemic fraud. Finally, those who were evicted without an alternative housing
arrangement provided by authorities would often turn to the PAH for unofficial housing
solutions, often in the form of squatting.
While evictions increased again in 2021, most of the people evicted in recent years have
been renters, not homeowners. To illustrate, of the 41,359 evictions that were documented
in Spain in 2021, 70% were evictions of renters (“Total”). Indeed, housing rights continue
to be a problem in Spain, as evidenced not only by PAH’s continued activity, but also by
the emergence of renters’ unions which provide legal counseling and collective bargain-
ing – such as the Sindicat de Llogateres in Barcelona – and by the continued activity of
grassroots initiatives to oppose touristification (Álvarez-Blanco, “Sindicat”).
While the PAH has arguably been the most successful and enduring example of the kinds
of grassroots initiatives that flourished after the 15M to confront inequality, it is certainly
not the only one. As Carlos Taibo noted, the 15M had “two souls”: The existing alterna-
tive social movements on one hand and the young people who wanted to express their
dissatisfaction with the economic and political status quo on the other, despite having less
political experience than their activist counterparts (57). Both segments of the population
would meet in non-hierarchical assemblies in squares across the country, eventually paving
the way for two different kinds of social responses.
On one hand, the 15M opened a cycle of social mobilization, leading to a succession of
periodic expressions, many of which would be as exciting as they were short-lived. Chief
among these were the color-coded “mareas” or “tides,” in which ordinary citizens, often
accompanied by sectorial workers, protested government cutbacks to a variety of pub-
lic services, such as healthcare, education, libraries, administration, employment services,
social services, water services and environmental protection, as well as cutbacks in public
policies to promote gender equality. The first “tides” in support of public healthcare and
public education were particularly instructive, as they successfully brought workers and cit-
izens together into the streets to defend both labor rights and social rights – a situation not
fully understood by Spain’s elites, who usually rely on private services for healthcare and
education. Such “tides” took advantage of the 15M’s mobilizing momentum to build broad
solidarities in defense of Spain’s underdeveloped welfare state (Rendueles and Sola 30). Fur-
thermore, in some instances, the new “tides” enabled the creation of unitary platforms that
brought social organizations and unions together, at times extending their struggles into the
courts and even into political institutions (Lacalle 165), albeit with limited long-term results
(Rendueles and Sola 30). In this sense, it would be fair to say that the tide metaphor proved
to be disappointingly accurate, as most of these initiatives would fall as easily as they rose.
Beyond the succession of “tides,” however, the cycle of mobilization that followed the
15M included a broad range of collective responses, such as the global protests against aus-
terity (October 2011); the Surround Congress protest (September 2012); the general strikes
of 2012 (March and November); the protests against the banks and their fraudulent prefer-
ence shares (a scam that caused hundreds of thousands of people with little or no financial
knowledge to lose most or all of their life savings after bankers wrongly assured them that
their money would be safe if they invested in preference shares); the recurring protests by

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the PAH; the protests against the Citizens’ Security Law, which limited freedom of expres-
sion, information and assembly (December 2013); the Marches for Dignity (March 2014);
the protests by pensioners (2016–2018); and the 8M feminist strikes of 2018 and 2019 and
the 8M protests of 2020, 2021 and 2022, all of which have been instrumental in trans-
forming Spain’s common sense regarding gender equality – particularly drawing attention
to the unpaid reproductive labor of care that is mostly carried out by women and which is
an integral part of capitalism’s conditions of possibility. Most of these periodic expressions
demanded greater material justice through a reformist or symbiotic approach.2 With the
important exception of the 8M marches, however, public protests have diminished signifi-
cantly since 2018.
On the other hand, the 15M also gave way to a broad array of self-managed initiatives.
Many such projects were developed interstitially, particularly at a time when many people
felt abandoned by both the market and the state, prompting citizens to turn away from
Spain’s traditional centers of wealth, power and authority. Such centers have often been
viewed with suspicion by many people in Spain, a country with a long history of unac-
countability, lack of transparency and weak democratic practices (Alberich 275–6). For
instance, some people began to develop initiatives in their own neighborhoods, through
local neighborhood associations, online initiatives, food banks and time banks. The lat-
ter allowed people to exchange hours of labor with each other according to each person’s
abilities, thus bypassing market relations altogether. Conversely, food banks and grassroots
networks would gain renewed prominence in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic prompted
many local communities to react quickly and in solidarity, often through self-organized
social networks, to assist the most vulnerable and combat food insecurity. After the 15M
there was also a resurgence of interest in long-term self-managed initiatives operating under
the general logic of the Commons. Many of these – such as the Iberian Network of Ecovil-
lages – remain committed to promoting greater social and ecological justice, often by acting
locally while thinking globally (Álvarez-Blanco, “Red”). While many of these initiatives
have been successful, they continue to face important challenges, particularly in terms of
scale, lack of government support and market pressure – including the risk of cooptation.3
An excellent place to begin to explore these kinds of projects is the Constellation of the
Commons (constelaciondeloscomunes.org), a massive research archive developed under the
direction of Palmar Álvarez-Blanco since 2016.
The 15M’s emphasis on self-management also triggered a renewed interest in the cooper-
ative movement, particularly at a time when many young people were questioning the hier-
archical nature of the corporate model and re-exploring the possibility of bringing greater
democracy and horizontality – as well as some measure of ethical and ecological responsi-
bility – to the place where many people spend most of their day: The workplace. Despite
the government’s minimal support, the cooperative tradition has historically worked well
in regions such as Catalonia as far back as the mid-19th century, while it also finds impor-
tant antecedents, albeit not without certain stratification problems, in the Basque Coun-
try, home of the Mondragón federation of cooperatives (Whyte and King). In addition,
the logic of self-organization and self-management also permeated specific sectors of the
population. Journalists, for instance, many of whom became unemployed during the Great
Recession, started to work together to build their own independent, democratically oper-
ated digital media outlets, thus offering an alternative to Spain’s hegemonic media – a media
largely controlled by corporate conglomerates and local governments (in the case of vari-
ous television channels), and which ranks poorly in Europe in terms of quality. Likewise,

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politicized cultural agents – creators, artists, performers – developed their own independ-
ent, self-funded projects in different areas, such as theater, film, publishing, bookstores
and anarchives, in order to participate more actively and with greater autonomy in the
struggle for social justice. Politicized professors and educators also sought to make them-
selves more useful and visible to the population by moving beyond the narrow circuits of
academia through media presentations, debates, publications and teach-ins. Furthermore,
a politicized citizenry, often led by militant activists, began to build its own political parties
and confluences at the municipal, regional and national levels, with a far greater emphasis
on transparency, accountability and participation “from below,” thus signaling a cleavage
between the old politics of the two-party system and the so-called “new politics.” Such new
politics often made inequality central to its discourse, referring to “those above” (a.k.a. the
“caste,” the 1%) and “those below” (the people, the 99%) in an attempt to destabilize and
displace the more traditional left and right political axis.4
The more recent experiences of the municipalist movement and of the so-called city
councils for change (e.g. Madrid and Barcelona) have demonstrated that there was far
more room for advancing social justice and for efficient governing at the local level than
was previously acknowledged. To illustrate, in recent years such city councils have actively
promoted the social economy, cooperatives, public services, urban facilities, social spend-
ing, nursery schools, gender equality, public transportation, green energy and bicycle lanes,
among other initiatives, while even bringing certain privatized services back under munici-
pal control (Rendueles and Sola 39). All of this was accomplished while avoiding the pilfer-
ing and corruption of the previous administrations. By contrast, these recent experiences
have also revealed some of the limitations of the municipalist approach: Incomers’ inexpe-
rience in local institutional politics, internal conflicts and lack of organizational anchoring
and long-term support from the local citizenry (after largely draining grassroots movements
of their organizational leadership, much like in the early eighties) and limitations imposed
by the central government to meet the demands of the EU (40). Such limitations include
spending caps and other laws which limit local governments’ ability to address large-scale
problems, many of which are broadly conditioned by the international flows of capital and
would be better addressed by national states working together (40).
Beyond the initiatives outlined previously, labor unions also continue to play a signifi-
cant role in the lives of millions of workers, and their historical importance should be prop-
erly recognized. In the 1970s, labor unions and the working classes played a central role in
the struggle for democracy during the years of the so-called Transition – a fact which many
observers have tried to ignore by erroneously casting the middle classes as the driving force
for democracy (Navarro, “Entrevista”). Likewise, in the late eighties and early nineties,
unions mounted the principal large-scale opposition to the government’s neoliberal policies.
Much like in other countries, and despite their efforts – including general strikes in 1988,
1992 and 1994 – unions in Spain largely failed to stop the neoliberal onslaught of labor
reforms. Nevertheless, because of the scale of their opposition, Spain’s ruling classes have
worked diligently since then to delegitimize unions and to limit their capacity for interven-
tion. Furthermore, in the last years, Spain’s major unions have not only been criticized
from the right but also from the left, and for a broad array of reasons. Some or the most
common concerns include their lack of transparency and accountability; their failure to
explain cases of corruption; their historically weak organic bonds between their representa-
tives and the popular union base (a tendency that dates back to the Franco years, when the
opposition labor movement was illegal and leaders faced dire risks); their historical lack

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of sensibility toward women; and their excessive closeness to politicians and employers,
whether real or perceived. Another key problem is that unions have been slow to reach
out to a post-industrial workforce which now includes higher numbers of young precari-
ous workers, immigrants and women. Because of unions’ delayed response to these demo-
graphic changes, segments of these groups have organized their own initiatives, such as the
Popular Union of Travelling Salespersons, which is composed mostly by immigrants from
West Africa who sell goods on the street; Las Kellys, hotel chambermaids struggling for fair
pay, many of whom are immigrants and single mothers; and also the falsely self-employed
delivery bikers who work for companies such as Deliveroo, UberEats and Glovo – workers
who have fought for the so-called “Ley rider” or rider law to protect their rights, albeit not
without some controversy among workers and unions alike. While it is true that Spain’s
major unions have serious problems that need to be recognized and addressed, the gen-
eral decline of union strength should be no cause for celebration, as no other entity has
emerged that is comparable in terms of scale and organizational capacity to better fulfill
their mission.
Spain’s two major unions, CCOO and UGT, faced a low point in 2011, when the 15M
movement exploded. Unions were pressured to agree to raise the retirement age from 65 to
67, a highly unpopular decision that many viewed as a capitulation. In addition, unions had
virtually no presence during the 15M occupations, and protesters took note. Despite these
limitations, it would be unfair to say that the world of labor remained apathetic and demo-
bilized in the years following the 2008 crisis, as some people claimed. On the contrary,
as José Daniel Lacalle observed, between 2008 and 2013 there were close to 200 strikes
per year more than in the years prior to the crisis (184). This is particularly noteworthy,
since historically labor conflict diminishes during economic downturns, when unemploy-
ment rates go up and workers become vulnerable. The opposite is also true: labor conflict
tends to increase when the economy is booming, since workers are in a better position to
engage in offensive measures to improve their conditions. This historical pattern was bro-
ken after 2008, as Spain’s economic crisis was met with an increase in strike activity, par-
ticularly within the service sector – although certainly not comparable to the levels of labor
activity witnessed in the seventies, when Spain had the highest labor conflict rates in all of
Europe (Navarro, “Entrevista”). While the media reported a handful of salient strikes in
the years that followed the 15M movement – such as a prolonged strike by workers for the
Coca-Cola company, disruptive strikes by dockworkers and so on – most of the increased
strike activity after 2008 was ignored by the press, creating a widespread perception across
the political spectrum that the world of labor was largely passive and demobilized, even
though labor unrest would rise again in 2018 (726 strikes), while peaking in 2019 (989
strikes, the highest rate since 2013), according to the Ministry of Labor data.
While it is true that union membership in Spain is relatively low – around 14% –
affiliation should not be the sole measure of union strength. For instance, trade unions in
Spain are stronger than in the US despite their similar affiliation rates, since collective bar-
gaining agreements in Spain cover all workers, not just members (Navarro, “Entrevista”).
Furthermore, Spain’s total number of union affiliates is hardly insignificant, as CCOO and
UGT have well over 900,000 members each. In addition, there are tens of thousands of
workers in other unions as well, including professional unions in healthcare and education.
In short, while unions today are less able to exert pressure within the context of small and
medium-sized businesses, they continue to play an important role in large-scale operations,
building solidarity and encouraging class activism, particularly when they are able to work

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together – as demonstrated during the 2021 strike in Tubacex, where five unions came
together to help create a solidarity fund so that workers in financial need would be able to
subsist throughout the long strike.
In addition to the challenges listed previously, Spain’s de-industrialization process, along
with the rise of the gig economy and its high worker turnaround, have all posed a signifi-
cant challenge for unions, since the workplace is no longer a central point for socialization
and politicization for many of today’s young workers. Furthermore, as Alberto Garzón
points out, jobs and social class are no longer key factors in terms of social identification
for many of today’s young people (226). In fact, young workers whose lived experience
includes flexible work and job precarity no longer socialize in the same spaces as workers
a few decades ago (Garzón 226), nor do most want to be defined by their job. Not surpris-
ingly, such youths tend to draw their sense of identity and community from other sources:
their generation; their tastes, habits and hobbies; their municipality; and their gender – all
categories that rank high in recent studies compared to class identity, a category that neo-
liberalist culture has sought to remove from view (Garzón 226–7). This means that class
consciousness is relatively low today, while identification based on age has proven to be
a key electoral factor for the “new politics,” whose parties tend to attract younger voters.
Moreover, the majority of voters on the left (e.g. Unidas Podemos; United We Can) tend to
be educated middle-class voters who work as technical professionals or within the field of
cultural production, whereas working-class voters often continue to vote for more moder-
ate options, such as PSOE (210). It remains a pending challenge, then, to build a hegemonic
block that appeals to the shared demands of both middle and working-class segments of the
electorate to better confront inequality.
Finally, on a national scale, the emergence of the so-called “new politics” and Unidas
Podemos has been responsible for many concrete laws and policies that would have been
virtually unthinkable in Spain just a few years ago. As Borja Barragué has so carefully docu-
mented, many of the demands that came out of the 15M movement in 2011 found some
form of institutional response ten years later, particularly in the areas of housing, poverty
eradication, labor rights and fiscal justice – including the Tobin tax and the Google tax,
among other new taxes on the wealthy (76–8). In addition, the Technicians’ Union of the
Treasury Department has also been instrumental in pressing for new tax evasion laws, fre-
quently denouncing that 70% of all tax evasions in Spain are committed by transnational
companies and by Spain’s large fortunes (“Gestha”). On the other hand, while demands for
an unconditional universal basic income – one of the main demands that came out of the
15M movement – have not materialized, Spain’s coalition government did approve a Mini-
mum Subsistence Income for the poor in 2020, despite its deficient implementation. Like-
wise, in 2019, after an agreement between Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias, the Minimum
Interprofessional Salary was increased by 22.3%, the highest increase in 41 years (Díaz).
While these kinds of piecemeal achievements may fall short of the 15M’s loftier aspirations,
they should nevertheless be acknowledged for their real-world specificity, especially consid-
ering the highly adversarial context that progressive forces have been forced to confront,
both domestically and internationally.
Having said this, as Rendueles and Sola have observed, neither the “tides,” nor munici-
palism, nor Unidas Podemos, nor feminism have succeeded in politically articulating the
majority of the working class, the poorest members of society (31) – and certainly not
the majority of the people who live in rural areas. This is a major challenge that needs to
be urgently addressed, particularly at a time when reactionary forces are actively seeking

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to expand their constituency. Progressive observers have also emphasized the need for
greater cooperation among the various fractions on the left, especially between people
working inside institutions (symbiotically) and those working outside of them (intersti-
tially) – including postcapitalist self-managed initiatives from below (Riechmann 96).
Indeed, both approaches should be viewed as complimentary in the quest for justice.
In sum, while major ruptural responses to capitalism seem highly unlikely within
the present context, Spain has witnessed a proliferation of promising symbiotic and
interstitial responses whose development could potentially play a significant role in the
long-term erosion and denaturalization of hierarchical structures and inequality, as well
as in the promotion of greater ecological justice. Conversely, it is also true that human-
ity stands at a historical crossroads, as capitalism continues its inexorable quest for
growth and expansion, pressing the biophysical limits of our planet and heading toward
a global scenario marked by scarcity and ecological collapse. Under such circumstances,
the potential also exists for an authoritarian and undemocratic intensification of the
asymmetries described previously – especially within a context defined by inflation. As of
2022, however, the owl of Minerva has yet to unfold its wings, although the fork in the
road is closer than ever.

Notes
1 A single number that demonstrates a degree of inequality in a distribution of income/wealth, theo-
retically ranging from 0 (complete equality) to 100 (complete inequality).
2 For the difference between ruptural, symbiotic and interstitial approaches, see Wright.
3 For additional challenges, see Álvarez-Blanco, “Destruir.”
4 See Monedero and Alegre Zahonero.

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Álvarez-Blanco, Palmar. “‘Destruir, domar, escapar o erosionar’. Transicionistas, o sobre la potencia
erosiva de la cultura de los comunes,” FronteraD, 6 Nov. 2020. www.fronterad.com/destruir-domar-
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by José Luis Carretero Miramar. Queimada, 2015, pp. 25–52.
Barragué, Borja. “Diez años después, ¿qué ha sido de las demandas del 15M que un día marcaron las
agendas política y mediática en España?” Tras la indignación, edited by Cristina Monge, et al.,
Editorial Gedisa, 2021, pp. 63–81.
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tional, 20 Jan. 2020. www.oxfam.org/es/cinco-datos-escandalosos-sobre-la-desigualdad-extrema-
global-y-como-combatirla.
Colau, Ada, and Adrià Alemany. Vidas hipotecadas. Angle Editorial, 2012.
Colectivo Ioé. “Derecho a la vivienda y negocio inmobiliario: 1,7 millones de desahucios.” 2018.
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Delgado, Cristina. “España es el país con mayor desigualdad social de la eurozona.” El País, 10 Oct.
2012. elpais.com/economia/2012/10/10/actualidad/1349901592_959130.html.
Díaz, Sato. “Así ha variado el SMI en los últimos años hasta convertirse en bandera de Unidas Podemos,”
Público, 9 Aug. 2021. www.publico.es/politica/variado-smi-ultimos-anos-convertirse-bandera-
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604651.shtml.
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el impacto de la crisis,” CaixaBank Research, 16 Nov. 2020. www.caixabankresearch.com/es/
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tiempo.
Faus, Pau. Sí se puede. Siete días en PAH Barcelona. Comando Vídeo, 2014.
Fernández-Savater, Amador. Habitar y gobernar. Ned, 2020.
Fernández-Steinko, Armando. “The 15M and the Financialization of Spanish Society.” Spain After
the Indignados/15M Movement, edited by Óscar Pereira-Zazo and Steven L. Torres, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2019, pp. 91–108.
Fishman, Robert M. Democracy’s Voices. Cornell UP, 2004.
Fishman, Robert M. “On the Significance of Public Protest in Spanish Democracy.” Democràcia,
Política i Societat: Homenatge a Rosa Virós, edited by Montserrat Cots Vicente and Antonio
Monegal, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2012, pp. 351–366.
Garzón, Alberto. ¿Quién vota a la derecha? Península, 2019.
“Gestha critica a Hacienda por rechazar propuestas para aumentar competencias de los técnicos ante
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Gini,” www.ine.es/jaxiT3/Datos.htm?t=9966#!tabs-grafico.
Lacalle, José Daniel. Conflictividad y crisis. El Viejo Topo, 2015.
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los-ocho-multimillonarios-que-se-reparten-el-dinero-de-la-mitad-del-mundo_1316970/.
Martínez, Juan Carlos. “España tiene 3,4 Millones de viviendas vacías, un 10,8% más que en 2001,”
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Spanish Housing Movement.” Housing Studies, vol. 34, no. 10, 2019, pp. 1588–611, DOI:
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pp. 239–51.
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Monge Lasierra, Cristina. 15M Un movimiento político para democratizar la sociedad. Prensas de la
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español, edited by José Manuel Naredo and Antonio Montiel Márquez. Icaria, 2011, pp. 17–69.
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 39
BROKEN PROMISES
Precarity and Affect in Contemporary Spanish
Poetry after 2011

Carlos Varón González

Everything changed in Spain in 2011 – and yet, by 2024, so much feels the same: The two
parties that alternated in power for 30 years still share it to this day. The monarchy also
holds up despite one king’s abdication and an endless list of corruption scandals miring the
institution. If anything, the rise of the far right seems to confirm fears that political authori-
tarianism and imperial nostalgia are deeply ingrained in a segment of the Spanish people.
On the other hand, the 15M movement, the series of protests and occupations of public
squares against austerity measures in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, evinced growing
disaffection toward the political system identified with Spanish neoliberalism, including the
old liberal and socialist parties and the potential or, at least, the desire, for new political
agencies and articulations (Delgado, “Public Tears” 271–4). The electoral rise of left party
Podemos (We Can) and local grassroots candidacies, such as Barcelona en Comú (Barce-
lona in Common) or Ahora Madrid (Madrid Now), seemed to reflect such hope in political
institutions during the 2014–2015 period. However, electoral stagnation and internal divi-
sions quickly deflated enthusiasm around the political constellation most identified with the
2011 popular protests and mobilizations. The apparent impasse of Spanish politics has led
to a reevaluation of the nation’s political past and concern about its future. The 1978 Tran-
sition to parliamentary monarchy, the entry to the European Union in 1986, or the GDP
growth driven by real estate and construction in the 1990s and 2000s had become attached
to promises of orderly, modern and cosmopolitan, consumption-oriented middle-class life.
In the name of that life, the erosion of the social safety net services that substantially con-
tributed to the well-being of the citizenry was quickly accelerated through budget cuts that
primarily impacted the working and middle classes. In 2008, it became obvious that the
market and the state had failed to deliver on their promises. The time had come for the
losers of the crisis to reconsider their political but also emotional attachments. Responses
across the political spectrum reconfigured the political map. For a short window of time,
it seemed that Podemos would replace the Socialist Party as the leading force in the left.
However, by the 2020s, after several rounds of electoral stagnation both at the national and
local levels, the promise of renewal seemed to have faltered too.
Spanish poetry has considered and reflected the impact of such political, cultural and
emotional turmoil. Toward the turn of the century, most politically oriented poetry was

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dealing with the inheritance and possible exhaustion of an instrumental use of poetic lan-
guage and with carving a space for itself in a moment of capitalist growth. Poetry collec-
tives like Alicia bajo cero (Sub-zero Alice, Valencia) and Voces del extremo (Voices from
[or ‘at’] the Edge, Huelva) shared, through their different styles, a distrust of transparent
language and toward claims about the moral innocence of poetry, as well as an attitude
of political insubordination and a sense of belonging, in one sense or another, to a poetic
project marginal both aesthetically and politically. 15M changed the situation by centering
the focus on the political and socioeconomic injustice in public discourse and inviting direct
and multi-generational citizen participation. The anthology En legítima defensa: Poetas en
tiempos de crisis (2014; In Legitimate Defense: Poets in Time of Crisis) collected works from
a wide range of poets, some nearing their 90s, like Antonio Gamoneda and José Manuel
Caballero Bonald. The fact that the hermetic, post-surrealist Gamoneda could spearhead
symbolically a collection of political poetry speaks to the kind of emphasis placed on the
political potential of the genre and highlights the ambitious exploration of poetic language
in much younger poets. For authors like Julieta Valero and Fruela Fernández, as we will
see, but also others, including María Salgado, Raúl Quinto, María Eloy-García or Miriam
Reyes, the poem is the site where the self-consistency of the liberal, private individual,
metanarratives of urban-cosmopolitan progress and the imaginary coherence of the social
order tense and break down through linguistic experimentation (Bagué Quílez).
Needless to say, the emerging poetry of precarity would eventually include books in
more than just the four languages officially recognized by the Spanish Constitution, target-
ing different specialized and non-specialized audiences,1 and it would be a daunting task
just to cover it all, never mind reaching definitive conclusions about it. From explicit refer-
ences to the impact of global capitalism in everyday life (Cebrián); to digital experiments
questioning the Constitution (Canteli); to non-fictional yet lyrical essays on the topics of
poverty and popular association and self-organization (Quinto); to the rewriting of the
canon in the light of contemporary concerns over gender, race and ecology (Pérez López);
to the resistance to meaning of the Mediterranean as the deadliest migration route (García
López), there are a number of ways to trace the politics of contemporary poetry in the
Spanish state. For reasons of space, I will focus on an issue that I believe characterizes an
important number of poetry collections written and published after 2011: The emotional
re-evaluation and re-orientation of Spanish modernity and a wariness toward representa-
tion, which I read not only as the conscious or unconscious mimetic “reflection” of an
economico-political state of affairs but as an attempt at political participation. que conci-
erne (2013; what concerns), by Julieta Valero and La familia socialista (2016; The Socialist
Family), by Fruela Fernández reassess the affective structure that helped reproduce Spanish
capitalism through the period spanning from desarrollismo to the global financial crisis of
2008. While both books are relatively explicit in dealing with the political (even if their
language is not particularly straightforward, largely a political choice), they correspond to
different emotional moments of the national left: Optimistic enthusiasm with the popular
mobilizations of 2011, followed by disappointment when it seemed that the new political
project was not reaching its goals.

Neoliberal Promised Lands

For José Luis Villacañas, Francoism’s ultimate success was not that the dictator held power
until his passing or that the regime curtailed the democratization of executive, legislative

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and judicial structures. Through uninhibited police violence, the criminalization of the
working classes and its political opponents, the monopoly of education and firm hold on
media, and with the unyielding support of land-owning and industrialist classes, the Army
and the Church, the regime accomplished an even more challenging task: It cultivated a
largely depoliticized, pragmatic, middle class (553). European and democratic aspirations
were only partly an overt confrontation with Spain’s dictatorial past. They were also,
importantly, a mimetic, aspirational, “síntoma de normalidad” (“symptom of normalcy,”
557). The Spanish Transition was characterized both by the desire of transformation and
the attachment to late-Francoist economic growth, driven mainly by tourism and construc-
tion, and the (forced) normalization of social life. That situation largely continued through-
out the first thirty-something years of the new constitutional regime that consolidated the
hegemony of Spain’s bipartisan political model: The ambivalently liberal Partido Socialista
Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party, PSOE) and the technocratic and tradi-
tionalist conservative Partido Popular (Popular Party, PP) have taken turns in power since
1982. They would soon weaponize constitutional liberalism to suppress social democratic
dissent, depicting it as the dangerous (and specifically Spanish) impediment to achieving a
(Eurocentric, supposedly universal) “normalcy” (Delgado, Nación).
The 2008 crisis proved such promise of continuous growth and orderly, petty bourgeois,
middle-class life as untenable. The objects and practices previously deemed to safeguard
this promise, from real estate to college degrees, depreciated literally with the mortgage
crisis, but also ideologically. Amaia Pérez Orozco speaks of the crisis, under erasure, to
emphasize that the apparent economic growth that preceded 2008 was unsustainable,
thereby reevaluating it as the actual crisis of economic, political and ecological reproduc-
tion. The process of privatization and defunding social safety networks did not begin in
2008, and the bursting of the real estate bubble only accelerated the long-festering process.
The COVID crisis, when furlough compensation or an increase in social workers and hos-
pital resources and personnel could have alleviated or mitigated much of the pain, dramati-
cally evinced the lackluster ability of the neoliberal state to support the population during
a crisis of care (Fraser).
What, then, had secured the development of privatization and precarization, in Isabell
Lorey’s sense, of labor in Spain? Laurent Berlant has described “cruel optimism” as the
identification with the very objects, practices and institutions that undermine you (1–2):
“This time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just
the right way” (2, emphasis in original).“This thing” (e.g. a stylish phone, more “likes,”
free-trade coffee shops) signals the satisfaction that it cannot possibly provide and, in fact,
depends on the very social forms that prevent satisfaction altogether. “This thing” is a
“cluster of promises” (Berlant 23) that assuages the subject’s alienation and suggests the
futurity that it is in fact undermining: “whatever the content of the attachment is, the conti-
nuity of its form provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means
to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world” (24).
Promises tie performative speech to a sense of temporal continuity, but also contain
the possibility of an infelicitous “break.” With economic growth, the fantasies that frayed
in 2008 included upward mobility, job security, political and social equality and lively,
durable intimacy. The set of dissolving assurances also includes meritocracy, the sense that
liberal-capitalist society will reliably provide opportunities for individuals to carve out rela-
tions of reciprocity that seem fair and that foster life as a project of adding up to some-
thing and constructing cushions for enjoyment (3). In other words, the Spanish desire of

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normalcy was a synecdoche: It stood for the fantastic promise of a European middle-class
identified with modernization, stability and social reproduction.
“Fantasy,” as Berlant uses it, does not just mean “delusion” but the underlying, unspo-
ken features of the good life that the subject is attached to and that the crisis endangered
(arousing a number of attitudes and emotions, from indignation to denial). The crisis in
Spain largely revealed and undermined the fantasies, endangering the very signifying struc-
ture behind them. Whatever they promised, they did not deliver. If a promise is a per-
formative act, it was an infelicitous one. That does not mean that its attachments simply
disappeared; they became the trace of an obsolete desire, both for those who abandon
hope and for those that engage in compensatory reinforcement (through authoritarianism,
nationalist enthusiasm, idealizing nostalgia, etc.). Optimism is not simply an error or illu-
sion – it is the compensatory ambivalence that “makes life bearable” (14). That is why the
broken promise of Spanish neoliberalism requires affective readjustment. Such a readjust-
ment takes place in a number of cultural products and practices, including contemporary
Spanish poetry. In Julieta Valero and Fruela Fernández’s work, emotions betray a move
away from the liberal subject and from urban spaces, respectively, but also the hope and
disappointment of the possibility of a future otherwise imagined.

A New Promise for the Political: Julieta Valero’s Que Concierne

Julieta Valero’s que concierne is very personal; it deals with her sentimental and sexual
history. It is also explicitly political; it opens and ends with images of crowds protest-
ing “privatizations” (11) and the people in the occupied squares speaking for themselves
(79); it quotes Tony Judt when it bemoans the “riqueza privada, miseria pública” (“private
wealth,/public dearth”; 31).2 There is no transparent, straightforward mediation between
the two. In fact, her language is deliberately opaque, self-referential. This is part of a coher-
ent aesthetic and political project where (poetic, political) representation is suspect, where
the political is much more a body than a slogan and where the neo-liberal subject – “hablar
de mí ya no procede” (“talking about myself is no longer appropriate”; 12) – is replaced
with the collective, cacophonous voice of the multitude3: “Una multitud tiene su centro
en cada una de las partes” (“A multitude’s center is in each of the parts”; 9). The book’s
opaqueness foregrounds the materiality of the language: it is the flow of the signifier, rather
than any (anchoring) meaning that moves the reader. Formally, Valero’s poetry functions by
accumulation: Signifiers pile up in long, multi-line free verses, almost to the point of con-
forming independent, shorter prose poems. She dismantles syntactical expectations often,
with equivocal Mallarmean signifiers whose grammatical function becomes undecidable.
However, Valero is also drawn to certain recurring structures (e.g. groups of three elements,
pairings of two parallel prepositional phrases, etc.).
The book partly deals with (and is, in general, the result of) the shipwreck of the neo-
liberal promises of a sophisticated, cosmopolitan bourgeois life for all. “Nos habían pro-
metido una infancia que incluyera educación musical, el té como consigna y la disposición
innata al ocio tenso de contenidos, pero cuando fuimos a reclamar, nos depositaron de
nuevo en la corriente” (“They promised us a childhood with a musical education, tea as
their motto and an instinctive disposition toward a leisure time dense with content, but,
when we asked, they left us in the water stream again”; 38). The “pero” in makes it clear
that the “they” of the poem failed to deliver on their promise, associated with a protected
childhood, an education packed with culture and extracurricular activities. To the cultural

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capital (education) containing the promise of meritocracy, followed in fact an indebted but
highly educated petty bourgeoisie that saw itself overqualified in a job market that could
not absorb college graduates. Instead, the collective subject that speaks in Valero’s poem
is left exposed to elemental forces that surpassed it and displaced it (often in the form of
migration).
In the context of the poetic speaker’s pregnancy, a subject released into the open acquires
different echoes that concern both the future (what one can promise their loved ones) as
much as the past (the old tacit and explicit promises now broken). Largely, the rhetoric of
bodily survival (variations of “survivor” and “survive” appear throughout the book) sug-
gests the precarious subjectivity that is still attached to the broken promises. First, the book
expresses concern for human, social and political reproduction entailing nutritional anxiety,
a feature of the crisis (Labrador 255–61), juxtaposed to the regulations of a political class
whose legitimacy goes bankrupt, “Hacia arriba y guiándonos por el hambre” (“Upward
and led by hunger”; 81). Second, it narrates intergenerational links weakening in the face
of a changing distribution of biopolitical roles: “Éramos jóvenes aunque padres muy de
nuestro tiempo: hicimos cocinar/a los ancianos hasta el amanecer para luego despreciar su
cansancio pero/¿qué hará el tiempo con el bajo de nuestro vestido . . . ?” (“We were young
if parents of our time: We made the old cook/until dawn to dismiss their exhaustion, but/
what will time do with the hem of our dress . . . ?”; 35). Third, the crisis of reproduction
traverses both the social and the poetic. It is not only the welfare state that has failed to
deliver, but a whole aesthetic regime. “Indigencia de palabras” alludes to T.S. Eliot’s famous
line, “April is the cruelest month” (53), but, here, “[n]i abril, ni el fondo del mar ni ella
se han comportado con crueldad. Son los afectos, siempre rompiendo muebles sus visitas
nocturnas al lavabo” (“Neither April, nor the sea depths nor herself were so cruel. It was
affects, breaking furniture as usual their nightly trips to the toilet”; 39). Valero’s rebuttal
of Eliot and her (respectful) references to Irene Nemirovski and Rosa Luxemburg’s deaths
speak to Valero’s active distancing from cosmopolitan modernism, a particular form of
cruel optimism for semiperipheral intellectual workers. que concierne signals again and
again the obsolescence of modernist expressive, voluntarist and, often, individualist opti-
mism, which includes suspicion toward social poetry, “algunos piensan todavía en un largo
canto colectivo” (“Some still believe in a great collective song”; 21), while still aesthetically
and affectively attached to it. Ultimately, when the poem mentions in its title an “Indigencia
de palabras” (“Word poverty”), it is posing a dire poetic problem: How to do things with
words when words have run out of credit/credibility?
Rather than despair in the face of this question, que concierne is animated by the hope
for a rearticulation of culture and politics into a republican, transformative movement. It is
no accident that the first poem of the book invokes the 15M protest at Plaza Sol (Madrid’s
Puerta del Sol). When the protestors shouted “No nos representan” (“They do not repre-
sent us”), they performatively disavowed the cruel of optimism of the 1978 constitutional
regime: The idea that a new election (“this thing”) would truly represent them better (“this
time”), “become[s] different in just the right way” (Berlant 2). They also enacted a crisis
in representation that modern poetry is invested in. However, the slogan “No nos repre-
sentan” performed a new attachment as well. Rather than disaffection, we find “a lack of
adhesion to traditional politics, and an attempt to find ways of publicly channeling a range
of affects and emotions that can be negative (such as indignation, anger, or spite) but also
positive (such as happiness, sympathy or hope)” (Delgado, “Public Tears” 272). For many
people on the left, the 15M protests suggested a radical change in politics, moving away

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from liberal party representation and toward assembly-based democratic politics, through
self-organizing activism (e.g. the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca or PAH; Plat-
form of those Affected by Mortgages) and new deliberation channels and protocols (e.g.
new party Podemos’ “círculos”: Circles or decentralized and horizontal decision structures)
(Seguín 302). Both the broken promise of equality and emancipation offered by neoliberal
democracy and the new promise of a (“this time”) horizontal politics create an emotional
bond that constitutes and sanctions belonging to a political community (Moscoso 28).
In other words, what the crisis meant for the middle class then entering the job market
was the cultural delegitimization of the main project of Spanish political nationalism since
1975 (at least) but also a new kind of optimism that may have since proven no less cruel.
que concierne signals a new attachment to a futurity tied to the (few) old promises that
still stand but also issuing the promise of reproduction. Future, potential children, desired,
fantasized with, these all crop throughout the book. “[L]os niños vienen de aquí; no de
la ilusión de crecimiento infinito; nunca del desprecio del público sector” (“This is where
children come from; not from the illusion of perpetual growth; never from dismissing the
public sector”; 43). The mother-infant relation, particularly in the infancy stage, in which
the human baby is an entirely dependent being, becomes the emblem of both cultural and
economic reproduction. The baby relies on others for material sustenance and becomes a
site of (pre-)social relations: “las tetas reveladas de Ítaca” (“Ithaca’s exposed breasts”; 54).
Infancy makes evident the necessity of care work, the socially necessary labor of tending for
an Other, which is embodied, cultural, biological, political. As Lorey states:

Precariousness becomes ‘co-extensive’ at birth, since survival depends from the begin-
ning on social networks, on sociality and the work of others. The fundamental social
dependency of a living being due to its vulnerability, due to the impossibility of living
a wholly autonomous life, also highlights . . . the eminent significance of reproductive
work. Because life is precarious, it is crucially dependent on care and reproduction.
(19)

In the West, reference to gender and kinship legitimates ideologically the unwaged
character of reproductive labor. The underlying patterns and conceptual ambivalence of
Valero’s metaphors foregrounds the importance of gender in political claims grounded on
justice and a critique of the capitalist crisis of reproduction (Fraser). But affective work (or
“care”) is not just a supplement of the production, circulation and destruction of capital
and (waged) labor. Affect is fundamentally relational. It undermines the self-containment of
the self, as a sort of interface between the body and the world (Ahmed, Cultural Politics).
In Valero, affect is a necessity of capitalism, but, also, it is a dismantling of any sense of
self-identical, autonomous identity. A new family held a new promise, but, in a circuitous
way, so did the old.

The Renewal of Disappointment: Fruela Fernández’s Una Familia Socialista

Yes, the 15M or Indignados protests suggested at one moment as the imminent breaking
point of Spain’s tolerance for representative politics, deemed by many dis-empowering and
as pseudo-democratic. It also seemed as a final straw finally breaking the relationship with
a neoliberal capitalism that was accelerating the erosion of social rights in response to (or
under the pretext of) the crisis. The 2014 European elections, with the quick ascendancy

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of new left-populist party Podemos, seemed to show that there would be an institutional
renewal sensitive to such a public-political atmosphere. However, insistent suspicion by the
liberal media but also the effective dismantling of Podemos’ once innovative mechanisms
of popular participation (the aforementioned círculos), the internal struggles of its factions
and the lack of a satisfactory and consistent leftist response to the Catalan protest of the
territorial organization of the state made the party fall short of its promise to bring about
a “Nueva Política,” a “New Politics” (or, if it did, it largely resembled the parochialism of
the old politics.)4
That is why, by 2016, poet Fruela Fernández could write that “la familia socialista/
ya contaba con mi decepción” (“the socialist family/was already counting on my disap-
pointment”; 38). Like Valero, Fernández’s poetry engages in a type of genealogical work,
if one more backwards-looking, more melancholic. He shares with Valero the emphasis
on the linguistic work of the poem and the collection of heterogenous, fragmentary voices
within it. His rhythm tends to be faster, with shorter lines laid down deliberately une-
venly on the page, complicating linear progression. His La familia socialista begins on
election day (2016), with the poetic self and his grandparents generationally and politically
divided, with a vocal grandmother who admonishes her grandson in Asturian not to vote
for “the Communists” (implicitly, Podemos): With them, she claims, in Asturian, “nun voy
ni a pañar perres”, “ye too gandaya” (“I wouldn’t even pick money up with them,” “they
are green fruit”–meaning “they can’t be trusted”; 35), the poem promptly explains. Theirs
is, after all, a “socialist family” (35). Her husband once believed in Felipe González; they
named the family house La rosa after a socialist symbol and look to Podemos with suspi-
cion. “Antes quieren [los comunistas]/a les dereches/que a un socialista” (“They [the com-
munists] prefer/the Right/to a socialist”; 36). Within that context, the grandson’s political
affiliations are in fact an act of disaffiliation. But political disaffiliation turns into another,
more melancholy form of affiliation: the grandson’s disappointment with Podemos turns
out to merely rehearse the disappointment with PSOE that the grandparents had to go
through.
Fernández’s is a fraught “nosotros” (“us”). Collective subjectivity results not from the
dissolution of the subject, nor from shared antagonisms, but from an intellectual migrant
worker’s failed and reluctant identifications (Varón González). The poem’s inclusion of
Asturian as the family’s language is tentative, aspirational, rather than the language of the
poetic speaker of the book. Fondness and respect toward a manual worker assembling
the speaker’s furniture, figuratively assimilated as one of their own “como un pariente
recuperado” (“as a relative that has been retrieved”; 18), all signal removal, failure at
interpellation. When offered a cup of tea, the worker asks for “Uno normal. Del que nos
gusta a los albañiles” (“The regular kind. The kind we builders like”; 18). The speaker
reproduces the family recipe for apple jam but can’t reproduce the moral perspective: When
he is tempted to discard sour apples, it is the grandmother’s experience and recollection of
post-war hunger that compels him not let them go to waste. The memory and the dictator-
ship he identifies with is the Other’s, the rural as Other, and it is the Other that characterizes
the neoliberalization of rural spaces:

Los pueblos, me explica,

acaban atravesados:
los impuestos que suben
los lobos que bajan.

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Y cuando quemen pol monte

los paisanos
cuando tanto quemen
que lo funden todo,
ye pa que marche el llobu.
(35)

Villages, he explains,
End up trespassed:
Taxes go up,
Wolves come down.

[In Asturian] And when they burn in the hills

The villagers [or ‘the locals’]
When they burn so much
That everything is consumed,
It is for the wolf to go forth.

Peasants subsist in between the symmetrical pressures of the natural world and an alien
culture that invades it, a culture that identifies itself with the erasure of the paisanos’ very
livelihood. The nature-destroying human-made fire is but the latest embodiment of a long
process of rural dispossession.
In the Spain of the Transition, as was the case in many other semi-peripheral capital-
isms – and given the renewed strength of the modernizing, pro-European ideal as a driving
social force – both capitalist modernity and aesthetic modernity prevailed decisively, displac-
ing any alternative modernities that might have been constructed in dialogue with the herit-
age of the rural cultures of survival and popular working-class values (Moreno-Caballud
132). Post-2008 Spanish poetry fails to be moved by the promises of modernization. On the
contrary, it strives to affiliate itself with rural spaces, as seen in María Sánchez’s Cuaderno
de campo (Field Journal; 2017), Francisco J. Chamorro’s Teoría de la justicia (A Theory of
Justice; 2017) or Carlos Catena Cózar’s Los días hábiles (Working days; 2019).
Fernández’s strategy to construct a collective subject is one of affiliation, but he can’t
help recording the failures of such (performative) acts of affiliation. Edward Said describes
(in a different context):

the transition from a failed idea or possibility of filiation to a kind of compensatory

order that, whether it is a party, an institution, a culture, a set of beliefs, or even
a world-vision, provides men and women with a new form of relationship, which
I have been calling affiliation but which is also a new system.
(19)

Rather than replacing a filiative scheme bound to the realm of nature, with acts of
affiliation to cultural institutions, La familia socialista reworks the terms (filiation/affilia-
tion) through direct reference and representation of the poetic self’s grandparents, but also
by strategically deploying the Asturian dialect and modern Greek. In so doing, the book
betrays a melancholic trans-generational identification. The binding affect is disappoint-
ment with the process of political affiliation, with the constitution of a voice (in the party,

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the círculo, the poem) that would have been able to speak to and for the pueblo (as in a
rural town but also the “people”). In that sense, its affiliation is constitutively flawed: The
articulation of a collective “we” is what ends up signaling exclusion. Its linguistic work is
philological (the longing for an other’s Word), and the collective historical consciousness it
sets forth becomes also a story of déclassement and separation from manual work.

The Futurity of Indignation

Despite all this, the political failure (and subsequent disappointment) that Fernández
describes contains a measure of success. When he was a child, in the heyday of PSOE’s
massive popular support, he was raised by a socialist family that believed in the promise
of the Spanish Transition. “De crío me ofrendaron al PSOE./Mítines en Rodiezno y La
Chalana . . ./donde brillaban/concursos de estibadores, tarteras de carne y la promesa/
que no tomaba forma” (“As a kid I was offered up to the PSOE./Rallies in Rodiezno and
La Chalana . . ./where they shined,/contests among stevedores, spam and the promise/
that did not quite take shape”; 12). When, thirty years (and the twenty pages of this very
short book) later, he finds “primero el miedo, después la promesa:/mejores ya que nuestros
padres/lavaríamos sus rasgos con los nuestros, sin que la culpa nos rozara” (“first fear,
then the promise:/at last, better than our parents/we were to clean their features with ours,/
untouched by blame”; 36). The poetic speaker’s generational “nosotros” repeats in fact the
previous generation’s oedipal disavowal of the third, older generation. In the 2010s, the
young Podemos voter identifies with his grandparents, and that is why he hopes to differ-
entiate himself from the generation that once believed in the Transition’s illusory promise.
Paradoxically, by attempting to differentiate himself from his parents, the subject perfectly
replicates their belief, but this time belief in another promise, also to be broken.
Sara Ahmed has described the phenomenological complexity of a promise, the con-
tradictory emotions that it sustains and triggers (The Promise). She warns us against the
straight drive forward, a push to follow a pre-stablished truth, in the name of (the promise
of) a future happiness. She is engaging in conversation with Berlant but also with the field
of queer studies. Lee Edelman influentially endorsed a queer refusal to the “insistence of
hope itself as affirmation [of straight time]” (4), which, in turn, abjected non-reproductive
practices. José Muñoz invited us instead to think of queerness as “not there yet but . . .
[approaching] like a crashing wave of potentiality” (185). When Julieta Valero, ironically,
suggests that “la familia no es lo que era” (“the family is not what it used to be”; 67), she
means to refashion and update the promise of reproductivity at the service of queer kinship.
She does so in the context of what she perceives as, rather than a collection of individuals,
the organization of a people caring for each other and for overcoming the representative
paradigm of politics (Delgado, “Public Tears” 278). Fruela Fernández suggests that the
desire for rupture, for non-reproduction, can be, ironically, reproductive itself; he empha-
sizes not an oedipal return to the same but a return of the failure of the oedipal paradigm.
What finally ensures entry of the poetic speaker into the socialist family is not his belief in
the promise of leftist electoral politics but its disappointment. The performance that sus-
tains social reproduction is not the promise but the breaking: “comprendí/que cada edad/
produce un exceso,/una esperanza/hecha de mínimos/que asciende o fracasa/por el resto,/y
que la familia socialista/ya contaba con mi decepción” (“I understood/that each age/pro-
duces some excess,/some hope,/made out of the essentials/that rises or fails/for the rest,/and
the socialist family/was already counting on my disappointment”; 37–8).

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I am in no way posing a circular narrative in which Spanish culture is condemned to

repeat itself. Cruel optimism should not be replaced with an equally unproductive form
of “kind pessimism” for two reasons. First, because, as stated, optimism to a large extent
is what makes bearable, what negotiates the everyday contact with the disciplinary, pre-
carizing realities of capitalism. Second, because pessimism can be but the reverse image
of the same futurity that it disavows. Optimism and pessimism “are both evaluative and
anticipatory; they are orientations toward the future as being empty or full, where empti-
ness and fullness have already been given affective value (it is always emptiness or fullness
of something). Given this, both optimism and pessimism involve the temporality of the
promise” (Ahmed, The Future, 173–4). Julieta Valero celebrates the “transexual periferia
del lenguaje” (“Transexual periphery of language”; 21) as a site of difference that makes
room for political transformation through affect. However, she does so without optimism.
“Intransitivo el dolor, eso seguro” (“Pain is intransitive, that’s for sure”; 21). Possibly para-
phrasing Rilke’s “intransitive love,” Valero zeroes in on an “intransitive pain” that moves
the subject toward an unconditional, open-ended future. Julieta Valero and Fruela Fernán-
dez reconsider and recognize the messiness of politics, its fraught character. The point is not
demobilizing political cynicism, pessimism, or hopelessness, but to reject the blackmail of
promises of happiness that disarm dissent. The negative emotions after a broken promise
do not simply dismantle cruel optimism, because cruel optimism is a reality of life under
neoliberalism. In no case should these negative emotions be the excuse to surrender to
enlightened, inactive, pessimism. Maybe, indeed, this time, we will manage to make the
difference that we so desperately need. A broken promise is a good reason to remain indig-
nant, to commit, to promise again, even, to look for the words that will let us speak (for)
ourselves.

Notes
1 By the end of the 2010s, authors with an influential presence on social media (Twitter, Instagram,
YouTube) published several commercially successful poetry collections. Marwán, mostly recog-
nized as a singer-songwriter, may be the most notorious example. The arrival of these best-selling
poets was met with controversy: Some saw in influencers an opportunity for poetry to reach new
audiences; some considered them collateral damage from access to a formally and editorially free-
ing technology (the Internet); some decried the (further) colonization by the market and mass
media of a highly specialized, relatively self-regulated field (Rodríguez Gaona).
2 All translations of the poems are mine. They are meant to be relatively literal (rather than poetic),
which does not necessarily reflect their authors’ emphases.
3 Suspicion of the individual subject was the main issue at stake in Julieta Valero’s previous book,
Autoría (2010).
4 Since I first wrote this chapter in 2021, Podemos joined a Pedro Sánchez (PSOE)-led government
coalition. In 2022, Vice President and Secretary for Labor and Social Economy Yolanda Díaz left
Podemos to lead new party, Sumar (Adding), and, in the 2023 elections, the center-left coalition
got to remain in power, this time without Podemos. Given that the latter was an unexpected, pyr-
rhic victory against a much-empowered PP and a vociferous far right (Vox), and since the bitter
personal struggles in a progressively fragmented left are still ongoing, it is fair to say that the hopes
for political renewal have not changed much.

Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh UP, 2004.
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke UP, 2010.

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Bagué Quílez, Luis. “Cuando fuimos postmodernos: entre la ruptura estética y la rehumanización
lírica,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 2 Apr. 2019. https://cuadernoshispanoamericanos.com/
cuando-fuimos-posmodernos-entre-la-ruptura-estetica-y-la-rehumanizacion-lirica/. Accessed 1 Mar.
2022.
Berlant, Laurent. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011.
Canteli, Marcos. cons ti tu ci ón. Malasangre, 2016.
Catena Cózar, Carlos. Los días hábiles. Hiperión, 2019.
Cebrián, Mercedes. Mercado común. La Bella Varsovia, 2006.
Chamorro, Francisco J. Teoría de la justicia. Hiperión, 2020.
Delgado, Luisa Elena. La nación singular: fantasías de la normalidad democrática española. Siglo
XXI, 2014.
Delgado, Luisa Elena. “Public Tears and Secrets of the Heart: Political Emotions in a State of Crisis.”
Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History, edited by Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura
Fernández, and Jo Labanyi. Vanderbilt UP, 2016, pp. 262–282.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004.
Eliot, Thomas S. Collected Poems (1909–1962). Faber and Faber, 1973.
En legítima defensa: poetas en tiempos de crisis. Bartleby Editores, 2014.
Fernández, Fruela. La familia socialista. La bella Varsovia, 2018.
Fraser, Nancy. “Contradictions of Capital and Care.” New Left Review, no. 100, 2016, pp. 99–117.
Lorey, Isabell. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. Verso, 2015.
Moreno Caballud, Luis. Cultures of Anyone: Studies on the Cultural Democratization in the Spanish
Neoliberal Crisis. Liverpool UP, 2015.
Moscoso, Javier. Promesas incumplidas: una historia política de las pasiones. Taurus, 2017.
Muñoz, José. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York UP, 2009.
Pérez Orozco, Amaia. Subversión feminista de la economía: Aportes para un debate sobre el conflicto
capital-vida. Traficantes de Sueños, 2017.
Quinto, Raúl. Yosotros. Caballo de Troya, 2015.
Rodríguez, María. Cuaderno de campo. La Bella Varsovia, 2019.
Rodríguez Gaona, Martín. La lira de las masas: Internet y la crisis de la ciudad letrada. Una aproxi-
mación a la poesía de los nativos digitales. Páginas de Espuma, 2019.
Saïd, Edward. The World, the Text, the Critic. Harvard UP, 1983.
Seguín, Bécquer. “Podemos and the Ideals of Populist Proceduralism.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic
Cultural Studies, vol. 21, 2017, pp. 287–309.
Valero, Julieta. Autoría. DVD, 2010.
Valero, Julieta. que concierne. Vaso Roto, 2015.
Varón González, Carlos. “Exhuming Labor: Alienation and Rural Affiliation in Spanish Migrant
Poetry.” Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century, vol. 45, no. 1, 2021. doi:10.4148/2334-
4415.2158. Accessed 1 Mar. 2022.
Villacañas, José Luis. Historia del poder político en España. RBA, 2014.

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 PART 6

Aesthetics and Technologies

 40
THE ATMOSPHERICS OF
MODERNITY
Flight in the Literary and Popular Imagination
in Spain, 1920–1936

Juli Highfill

El misterio de la Puerta del Sol (Mystery of the Puerta del Sol; 1930), the first talking
picture produced in Spain, contains a remarkable aerial sequence, filmed from a plane
as it flies from Barcelona to Madrid.1 In a build-up to a climactic ending, two passengers
board a Junker, operated by the recently founded Iberian Airlines, as they rush to save an
innocent man condemned to die, or so they believe.2 The plane takes off from the outskirts
of Barcelona, and as it soars over the city, we share the passengers’ gaze at the distinctive
urban grid of the Eixample, with its quadrangular blocks and chamfered corners. We hear
the deafening roar of the engine, one of many instances in which the director, Francisco
Elías Requelme, flaunts the new technology of sound cinema. Once beyond the city lim-
its, the plane glides across the open countryside, with fields and orchards appearing as
flattened, abstract, multi-textured forms, traced by curving roads (see Figure 40.1). These
ever-changing vistas – along with the plane’s shadow – stream across the windows – an
embedded meta-reference to cinema itself with its “moving pictures.”
As the plane approaches Madrid, the sparsely built expanses gradually fill in, becoming
jumbles of rooftops. The plane circles twice over the city center, enabling the camera eye to
reveal the Retiro, the Gran Vía, and finally the Puerta del Sol, with the ant-like throngs, the
trolleys, and motor cars barely visible (see Figure 40.2). To ensure that viewers will identify
this site, a passenger shouts above the din of the engine, “¡La Puerta del Sol!” Implicitly, this
aerial view of the plaza references an earlier scene shot from below, in which the film’s two
protagonists walk through the same crowds, dodging vehicles, amid a deafening clamor of
shouts and car horns. The plane then proceeds to the aerodrome, Cuatro Vientos, where as
it nears the ground, the streaming images become increasingly abstract. The dirt clods of
the landing strip appear as blurred streaks, intersected by the angular shadow of the wing.
The impact of the abstract aerial view upon the arts has oft been noted; we might recall
Gertrude Stein’s famous claim that the cubists, in fragmenting and flattening pictorial space,
were taking their cues from aero-vision.3 More broadly, across literary and artistic circles,
there emerged an “ecstatic rhetoric of flight” (Kern 246). The age-old dream of flying – long
associated with freedom, transcendence, and sublimity – had at last been realized. The aer-
ial experience, Stephen Kern observes, propelled a heightening of the senses, an “uplifting

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-46
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

Figure 40.1 Abstract Aerial View of Countryside. El misterio de la Puerta del Sol, dir. Francisco
Elías Requelme, 1929.
Source: Courtesy of Fototeca Española.

Figure 40.2 Aerial View of the Puerta del Sol. El misterio de la Puerta del Sol, dir. Francisco Elías
Requelme, 1929.
Source: Courtesy of Fototeca Española.

of human consciousness” (244). Inspired by the airplane as well as the skyscraper, writ-
ers and artists adopted what Adnan Morshed calls an “aesthetics of ascension,” blending
“godlike spectatorship, technological utopianism, and evolutionary idealism” (ix, 5). The
aerial view, in Paula Amad’s words, became “the quintessential expression of the modern-
ist gaze” (67). And while not the only factor behind the perceptual revolution in artistic
representation, it prompted a re-vision embraced by cubists, futurists, and Spanish ultraists
alike (69–71).
Well beyond the arts and letters, the conquest of the air had an incalculably broad
impact upon the public in the industrialized world. The expansive media-sphere of the
interwar period ensured that the aerial experience was widely shared, albeit vicariously
(see Figure 40.3). Enthralled with aviation, the public followed the feats of international

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Figure 40.3 “The Land of Spain Viewed from the Sky,” Estampa, Revista Gráfica y Literaria de la
Actualidad, 24 April 1928.

aviator-heroes, such as Louis Blériot, Charles Lindbergh, and Ruth Elder, the latter of
whom visited Spain in 1927. The most prominent among Spanish aviators, Ramón Franco
(brother to Francisco), set a record in 1926 by flying the hydroplane Plus Ultra from Palos
de la Frontera (in southwestern Spain) to Buenos Aires in 59 hours, 39 minutes.4 Notably,
Leopoldo Alonso – the same photographer who filmed the aerial sequence in Misterio de
la Puerta del Sol – accompanied Franco on the first segment of the Plus Ultra flight. As a
prolific photographer and chronicler of the early raids (record-breaking flights), Alonso’s
photographs circulated widely in the periodical press, among them: Stunning images of the
volcano, El Teide, ringed with clouds, shot during an earlier flight with Ramón Franco to
the Canary Islands in 1924 (see Figure 40.4).5 Such images – in the press, newsreels and
films – enabled viewers to vicariously adopt the exhilarating “god’s eye view” and to con-
template the “face” of the earth. Aerial vision, Morshed observes, “signaled the advent of
a modern spectator,” whether perched in an airplane cockpit or atop a skyscraper observa-
tion deck (4–5).
In this age of print culture, the exalted experience of flight was thus absorbed into a new
mass consciousness, and in that sense, democratized. Indeed, we might read the two scenes
of the central plaza in El misterio de la Puerta del Sol as a signal of that broadly shared expe-
rience of aero-vision. Early in the film, we assume the ground-level camera view amid the
throngs on the plaza; later, in the flight sequence we gaze downward upon that same (now
miniature) crowd. Working together, the two scenes enact a visual inversion, as the crowd
below is, by implication, “lifted up” and reassembled as the film’s audience, now sharing
the aerial view through the windows along with the passengers on-screen. Such mediatized
aerial experiences, it is important to note, were not merely visual, for they could also pro-
duce more intense affective responses, evoking vertigo, fascination, and wonderment.

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Figure 40.4 “A beautiful sea of clouds surrounds the peak of the colossus.”
Source: Photograph of the volcano El Teide. Leopoldo Alonso, Raid aéreo Melilla Cabo Juby-Canarias (Crónica
del viaje). Artes de la Ilustración, 1924.

This new aerial consciousness can thus be defined as a synesthetic, embodied awareness
of inhabiting a new atmospherics of modernity, which I would align with Miriam Hansen’s
notion of a globalized sensory culture, what she calls a “new sensorium” that emerged in
modern societies during the first decades of the twentieth century. Mass publics at this time,
Hansen argues, encountered “an expanded sensory and experiential horizon,” a height-
ened sense of physicality, and new quotidian possibilities for “subjectivities and subjects”
(71–72). While she emphasizes the role of cinema in transforming sensory culture, she cites
other factors as well – mass media, spectator sports, fashion, advertising, and the experi-
ence of speed. Together, these factors formed a “powerful matrix for modernity’s liberatory
impulses – its moments of abundance, play, and radical possibility” (69). My aim here is to
understand how aviation culture – its rhetoric, imagery, and affective experiences, however
vicarious – contributed to this new sensorium, heightening the affective environment of
modern life by fostering new ways of seeing and sensing.
But of course, in revisiting the mass enthusiasm and utopian dreams spawned by early
aviation, certain horrific historical outcomes must be acknowledged, particularly in the
Spanish context. During the 1920s, while the public avidly consumed aerial images and
thrilled to the record-breaking flights of aviator-heroes, the pilots of Aviación Militar were
engaged in the world’s first aero-chemical campaign against anti-colonial rebels in Span-
ish Morocco.6 But indeed, the immense utility for waging war from the air was recognized
much earlier. Aerostatic balloons had been deployed in the American Civil War to surveil
the enemy battlefield. World War I saw the first strategic use of aerial bombardment – by
zeppelins and planes – although the technology remained rudimentary. The full lethal
potential of “carpet bombing” was not realized until the colonial wars of the 1920s, the

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Spanish Civil War, and World War II. “New ways to see,” became “new ways to kill,” as
Teju Cole has succinctly remarked (14).
In the ideological domain, the semantics of flight – already infused with religious and
philosophical connotations of transcendence, empowerment, and moral rectitude – became
immediately verticalized, grafted along an up/down axis. Fascist and authoritarian regimes
embraced the God’s-eye view as a seat of omniscience and omnipotence. The Italian jour-
nalist, Guido Mattiolli, in his tribute to Il Duce, Mussolini aviatore, went so far as to assert,
“Every aviator is a born fascist” (qtd. in Wohl, Spectacle 51). In 1930 the Spanish writer,
Ernesto Giménez Caballero, a recent convert to fascism, recounted a flight to Barcelona
on the same airline featured in El misterio de la Puerta del Sol. As he gazes down on the
arid plains of Castille, he calls the region the “Cerebro de la Península” (“Brain of the
Peninsula”) and proposes a “re-visión” of a newly centralized Spanish nation, in which
the peripheral regions would undergo “una cabal y refinada organización central de nervios
distributores de voluntad y de energía” (“a thorough and refined central organization of
nerves as the distributors of will and energy”; 38). Here, as Del Pino has observed, Giménez
Caballero articulates the centralist, castellanista creed of the Falange; his aero-vision allows
him to project “una nueva España diversa pero orgánica cuya meseta funciona como centro
neurálgico” (“a new Spain diverse but organic, with the [Castilian] plateau as its neuralgic
center”; del Pino 171).
In the aftermath of the twentieth-century horrors – fascism and two World Wars – and
with the aerial experience now naturalized, the exuberant, utopian discourse that emerged
around aviation in its early years began to seem naïve and overwrought. Thus, subsequent
historical and theoretical commentary tended to emphasize the calamitous historical con-
sequences of flight. More recent studies of aerial vision and experience, however, have
acknowledged the ambiguity and complexity of the aerial experience. Paula Amad, in
tracing the “Janus-faced” conception of aero-vision, argues that the aerial view “must be
understood in a fluid relational context” that crosses over the utopian/dystopian and aes-
thetic/military divide (67). Similarly, Caren Kaplan contends that the history of aero-vision
troubles the conventional binaries between distance and proximity, totalization and sin-
gularity, strangeness and intimacy (22). For Jason Weems, “aeriality” reflects two central,
and divergent imperatives of modernity: On the one hand aviation represents the apogee of
modern rationality, order, progress; and on the other, a dynamic, disturbing, transforma-
tive, and destabilizing force not easily contained (xi, xviii).
To be sure, the aerial experience and the discourse that it engendered was riven by a
series of paradoxes. In an era of frequent crashes, as Amad observes, “the body’s liberation
in flight (i.e., its utopian lure) [was] always already accompanied by its potential elimina-
tion” (73). Hence, the sense of hubris and dominance that arose from “conquest of the air”
was shadowed by equally powerful feelings of vulnerability and insignificance amid the
vastness of the earth and the atmosphere that enswathes it. The realization of panoptic, uni-
tary vision – seeing all and thereby knowing all – was undermined by a certain illegibility of
the vistas below – hence the challenge faced by military surveillance in identifying features
on the ground, particularly given the advancement in techniques of camouflage. And while
the escape from gravity might produce a sense of disembodiment, the experience of flight,
particularly for the early aviators in open cockpits, was profoundly corporeal. Moreover,
the experience of distance and detachment was countered by an overwhelming feeling of
intimacy, a sense of responsibility for the world below, a response confirmed in more recent
times by the astronauts who first gazed upon the “blue marble” of Earth.

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The aerial discourse that emerged in the first decades of aviation technology, while
reflecting the widespread public enthrallment with flight, reveals upon close examination
the complex, contradictory nature of the experience. Let us examine two Spanish texts that
reflect the complexity of these responses: Corpus Barga’s chronicles of two flights, by plane
in 1919 and by zeppelin in 1930, and Ramon Sender’s account of a flight from Madrid to
Andalucía, where he will report on the brutal repression of an anarchist uprising in Casas
Viejas in 1933.

The Physicality of Flight: Corpus Barga’s Dispatches From the Air

In 1919, Corpus Barga, a well-known journalist and aviation enthusiast, seized the oppor-
tunity to take a flight from Paris to Madrid in a small military bi-plane, and to convey to
the public in plain but evocative prose the sights and sensations of the experience.7 Called
“el Vuelo de la Paz” (“Flight of Peace”) the mission was one among several flights arranged
to celebrate the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28. The pilot, Bernard Barny de
Romanet, had been a World War I ace, renowned for downing eighteen German planes and
for breaking speed records.8 Barga – formerly a war correspondent and now reporting from
Paris for Madrid’s El Sol and Buenos Aires’s La Nación – was assigned to travel on a mechani-
cal “dove of peace,” bearing “an olive branch,” a proclamation of world peace sent from the
Association of the Parisian Press to its sister Association in Madrid (Lorenzo 3).9 The aircraft,
which Barga would call “primitive” a decade later, had a single propeller, no compass, and two
open-air cockpits, one of which the reporter would share uncomfortably with the mechanic.
Throughout his dispatches, Barga stressed the sheer physicality of the aerial experience,
starting with the ignition of the plane’s engines and its exit from the hangar: “Empieza el
remolino de la hélice y se hincha el soplo del motor en un ronroneo. Tiemblan las alas del
avión, palpitan las hierbas abatidas sobre el suelo. La ráfaga corre del avión atrás y se enca-
jona en el hangar negro húmedo de gasolina” (“The whirlwind of the propellor starts up,
and the throbbing of the motor swells into a steady hum. The wings of the plane tremble,
the bent-down grass quivers on the ground. The gust of air streams back from the plane
and is compressed within the dark hangar, damp with gasoline”; 94). In these brief, staccato
sentences, Barga mobilizes all the senses – the roar of the engine, the rush of air, the smell of
fuel. He notes that his fingers ache from nervously grasping the bar, and he chides himself
for his stupidity. But his major discomfort comes from the “golpe sólido del viento que se
aplasta contra el rostro,” the “único punto sólido en ese columpio ambulante” (“solid blast
of wind that smashes against his face [the] only solid feature in that traveling swing”; 95).
In an odd inversion, he likens this sensation of hard air to “walking” upside-down on the
ground: “Es como si se pusieran los pies en terreno firme. Va uno andando con la cabeza”
(“It’s like placing the feet on terra firma. One walks with the head”; 95). These striking
images set the tone for the account that follows, in which bodily sensations – discomfort
and delight – prevail in equal measure.
Once reaching altitude, Barga’s observations initially run counter to readers’ expecta-
tions of spectacular aerial vistas. His first dispatch, titled “La tierra es fea” (“The earth
is ugly”), describes “nubes tiradas en jirones” (“clouds torn in tatters”), like rags laid out
to dry upon an uneven patchwork of fields – “una trapería” (“rag yard”; 95). From his
elevated perch, the spectacle of the earth appears alien, anarchic, in a state of dissolution.
Barga finds himself more enthralled with the skyscape than landscape, as he admires the
seductive, interlaced clouds that approach the plane: “Hay algo de femenino y de sumiso

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en estas nubes, ya opulentas, ya graciosas. . . . Se bañan en el viento, estas voluptuosas,

estas hijas del agua y del sol” (“There is something feminine and submissive about these
clouds, at once opulent and graceful. . . . These voluptuous figures, these daughters of the
sea and the sun, are bathing in the wind”; 96). In eroticizing the aerial view, Barga converts
the clouds into feminine objects of desire, while clearly maintaining a dominant masculine
stance. Soon however, he finds himself less enthralled with the skyscape, declaring that “El
cielo se pone feo” (“the sky turns ugly”), as they enter a tunnel of dark clouds. And when
they encounter strong winds and turbulence, Barga comments once more on the paradoxi-
cal solidity of fast-moving air: “El avión va continuamente forzando la puerta del aire, va
abriendo un boquete en el muro aéreo, en el muro de los vientos. Y encuentra el aire en
escombros. El avion tropieza, cae, se levanta, gira cogido por un ala y vuelve a levantar el
vuelo. El aire tiene baches, barrancos y hoyos. Las rutas del aire no están calzadas” (“The
plane advances, continually pushing against the door of air, opening a hole in the aerial
wall, in the wall of wind. And it encounters the air as rubble. The plane stumbles, falls,
rises, then turns, caught by a wing, and once again rights itself. The air has bumps, ridges
and potholes. The roads in the air are not paved”; 99). Once more, with his stunning
imagery, Barga conveys to his readers aspects of the aerial experience that lie beyond their
imagining, as he recaptures these collisions with “hard” air.
Proceeding in stages, their journey remains perilous; the plane often lands on harsh
terrain, on the outskirts of cities or in farmers’ fields, sometimes in remote areas with no
available fuel, as the mechanic makes repairs along the way. In Bordeaux they are grounded
by weather during a four-day period. But finally, defying the weatherman’s warnings, the
impatient pilot and his two passengers take to the air, and gazing below, Barga marvels at
the multitudinous “ojos fosforescentes de los lagos” (“phosphorescent eyes of the lakes”)
glittering below in northern Spain (103). When, after a week’s journey, they approach
Madrid, Barga reads the sheets hung to dry along the Manzanares as “señas alegres”
(“happy signs”) welcoming them to their final destination (109). He says nothing about the
landing in Cuatro Vientos, nor of events that transpired on the ground – the ceremonies,
the banquets, the audience with the King. Rather, Barga concludes with a prophecy about
the future of aviation – in which the extreme precarity of flight will be overcome, “que el
motor no pueda fallar nunca y sea, en todas las densidades seguro como una locomotora”
(“that the motor will never fail, and it will be, in all atmospheric conditions, as safe as a
locomotive”; 109). He foresees a future of infallible engines, instruments that enhance navi-
gation and visualize the land below – even when obscured by clouds – and enclosed cabins
filled with artificial air. For travelers in the year 2000, Barga suggests, a 1919-era plane will
seem like a stagecoach lurching down a hill or assaulted by bandits.
But of course, these enclosed cabins and advanced instruments would already be opera-
tional in 1930, when the characters in El misterio de la Puerta del Sol fly from Barcelona
to Madrid. In that same year, Barga chronicled another famous flight, this time traveling in
luxury on the inaugural flight of the Graf Zeppelin line from Friedrichshafen, Germany, to
Seville, to Rio de Janeiro (see Figure 40.5).10 The airship measured 236 meters in length and
36 meters at maximum diameter, the equivalent of two city blocks and a ten-story build-
ing. Its velocity ranged from 40 to 200 kilometers per hour, depending on wind direction.
Requiring a crew of forty for a maximum of twenty passengers, the gondola featured ten
cabins, an all-electric kitchen, a dining room, and lounge.11 For Barga’s flight to Brazil in
1930, La Nación paid what was then an exorbitant fare of $3000 so that Barga, its Berlin
correspondent, could join the celebrity passengers on this maiden voyage.

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Barga begins his account with his arrival at the Graf Zeppelin’s base in Friedrichshafen,
on the shores of Lake Constance, and upon seeing the dirigible, still in its immense hangar,
he asserts: “Parece un gigantesco monstruo de acuárium este pez volador” (“This flying
fish appears as a gigantic monster in an aquarium”; 115). From this point forward, writ-
ing entirely in the present tense, he provides a real-time account – in actuality a series of
telegrams sent several times each day to his editors for serial publication in La Nación. And
indeed, Barga’s characteristically terse, vivid prose, replete with striking (and often mixed)
metaphors, proves well-suited to this genre, as is evident in the first telegram: “Acaba de
subir el Graf Zeppelin, como si subiera en ascensor la torre de Pisa.” (“The Graf Zeppelin
has just ascended, as if an elevator going up the Tower of Pisa”;117). Then in another meta-
phoric inversion, Barga characterizes the abrupt rise of the airship in terms of a fall, as he
watches the circle of well-wishers suddenly drop below. As the vessel continues its rise, the
crowd disappears, replaced by a ring of “los últimos pañuelos [que] se hunden también en
las praderas.” (“the last handkerchiefs [that] likewise sink into the meadows”; 117).
With the vessel now soaring above Switzerland and France, Barga describes the great
patches of forests below, the bright ribbon of a river, the landscape littered with lights.
Typically, the Graf Zeppelin flies low over the cities – a strategy for attracting public inter-
est – which allows Barga to vividly describe the urban architecture of Lyon, Marseille,
and Cartagena. While waiting for milder winds, the captain delays their arrival in Seville
and flies further south, circling above Morocco. When they pass over Tangiers, its citizens
fill the streets, waving with excitement, as the airship’s shadow penetrates the homes and
courtyards, leading Barga to remark: “Los tangerinos no se enteran de que estamos en
sus secretos. Somos como dioses” (“The Tangerians are not aware that we are in on their
secrets. We are like gods”; 120). While Barga arguably adopts a “colonial gaze” here, he

Figure 40.5 The Graf Zeppelin Flying Above the Seville Cathedral, 24 April 1929.
Source: © ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, fondo Serrano.

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makes a similar claim about the citizens of Seville; where a vast, enraptured crowd has
gathered at the airport to greet the airship: “una multitud que rinde culto al Graf Zeppelin,
rival hoy de la Macarena” (“a multitude that worships the Graf Zeppelin, now a rival of
the Macarena”; 123). The enormous airship that has descended upon the city is cast here
as a modern deity, surrounded by exalted worshippers, and thus comparable to the figure
of the Virgen de la Macarena with her own vast cult of devotees. The two deities converge,
however, when the Brotherhood of the Macarena presents to the Captain an image of the
Virgen to accompany the passengers and crew on their transatlantic voyage.
Throughout the long flight, whether soaring over the Mediterranean and the Atlantic,
Barga deploys nautical metaphors to evoke the unprecedented sensation of “swimming”
through air. He is fascinated by the vessel’s immense shadow on the sea: “un pez aplastado
[que] nos sigue fielmente, como un perro” (“A flattened fish [that] loyally follows us like
a dog”; 120). He calls the command center “la boca del pez volador” (“the mouth of the
flying fish”) and notes that its “espina dorsal” (“backbone”), made of aluminum alloy,
measures 220 meters in length (127). In approaching the Brazilian coast, America appears
as an opening in a “maravillosa gruta dejada por el sol” (“marvelous grotto left there by
the sun”; 130). The vessel floats above Pernambuco before descending and attaching its
nose to the mooring mast, where it will refuel before continuing to Rio de Janeiro (130).12
Barga, however, disembarks there in order to take a hydroplane to Buenos Aires, explaining
that his assignment is to show for La Nación’s readers how long it would take a passenger
(albeit a wealthy one) to travel from Seville to Buenos Aires on the existing commercial
carriers.13
Writing from the hydroplane, Barga need no longer adhere to telegraphic word limits,
as he evokes the astonishing and exoticized vistas – the “paisajes primitivos de América”
(“Primitive landscapes of America”), streaming below as if on a cinema screen (133). Barga
admits to a “secret” plan, made in advance, to circle back and “surprise the dirigible” while
en route to Rio, thus giving him the opportunity to “ ‘interviuvar’ a este pez gordo [y] con-
templarlo por fuera en marcha, después de haber navegado en su vientre de ballena” (“to
‘interview’ this fat fish [and] to behold it from afar while underway, after having sailed in
the womb of the whale”; 133). The hydroplane pays homage to the airship from the air,
rising to its same altitude and then descending “en una curva para hacerle una reverencia”
(“in a curve to bow down before it”; 133), and once more, the Graf Zeppelin is cast as a
modern deity with its cult of worship. In Barga’s final dispatch, penned after his arrival in
Buenos Aires, he reflects on how this miraculous experience will soon become an everyday
occurrence. The world has shrunk: “No hace falta ser un héroe, un aviador recordman; la
distancia entre Europa y América ha quedado disminuida para el hombre cualquiera” (“It’s
not necessary to be a hero, a record-breaking aviator; the distance between Europe and
America is now diminished for any ordinary man”; 134). His six-day voyage from Seville
to Buenos Aires would have taken fifteen days by ocean liner.
With that “every man” always in mind, Barga endeavored in his chronicles to translate
the experience of flight – its sights, sounds, and physical sensations into plain yet poetic lan-
guage, replete with striking metaphors. The aerial perspective may seem to offer totalizing,
omniscient vision, but as Kaplan points out, it “was not ‘naturally’ intelligible or legible to
the first aeronauts. It is a mode of viewing that took some time to cohere” (71). The flat-
tened, abstract vistas from above must be deciphered, as surveillance analysts know well.
Corpus Barga played a key role in transmitting the experience of flight, enabling it to cohere
for the vast readership, rendering that abstract map concrete. And in capturing those aerial

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vistas, his vivid, haptic imagery allows readers to share his feelings of intimacy, as if the
eye were touching the face of the earth. To be sure, he sometimes directs his gaze through
a masculinist and colonialist lens, and he resorts to tropes of transcendence depicting the
zeppelin as a modern-day deity. But permeating his playful, lyric rhetoric throughout is a
spirit of largesse, as he casts his readers as fellow travelers, endowing them with the “right
to look” (Mirzoeff).
Moreover, Barga is motivated by a perceived desire for the freedom of the skies, and the
opportunity to help shape a more expansive visualization of modernity. Three years later,
in a report on an early, failed attempt at an “autogiro” flight, Barga recalls his air-voyage
of 1919 and reflects: “Me entusiasmaba la aviación por la aviación, sin ciencia ni práctica
ninguna. Volar como andar: la quimera del hombre libre” (“I became enthusiastic about
aviation for aviation’s sake; without any scientific or practical knowledge. To fly as if to
walk: The chimera of the free man”; qtd. in Gargurevich Regal 104). However, this associa-
tion of flight with freedom, redemption, and utopian promise, would soon be called into
question in Spain, as political tensions intensified on the ground.

“Ground-Truthing”: Ramón Sender’s Viaje a La Aldea Del Crimen

In January of 1933, Ramón Sender, a journalist and novelist with anarchist sympathies,
boarded a postal plane en route to Seville, assigned to cover the aftermath of an atroc-
ity. Four days before, Assault Guards had killed twenty-two villagers in Casas Viejas,
Cádiz – burning a family alive within their home and executing others – as retribution for
an attack on a nearby garrison.14 That initial attack was undertaken by local anarchists
acting in coordination, so they believed, with a nation-wide insurrection called by the CNT
(Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) labor union. Sender would report on these atrocities
in a series of articles for La Libertad, later published as a book, Viaje a la aldea del crimen.
Throughout his account, Sender deploys a terse, hyperrealist style that foregrounds the
horror of these events. Notably, however, in his first dispatch, titled – “En el avión postal.
Tiempo y velocidad. Hemos ganado cuatro días” (“In the postal plane. Time and speed. We
have gained four days”) – he partakes in the rapturous discourse of flight, conveying his
reveries and sensations while aboard the plane (19).
As in Corpus Barga’s account of taking-off in a bi-plane, Sender accentuates the physical-
ity of the experience. The clamor of the engine at first overwhelms his senses, but soon he
feels freed from the gravitational fetters that bind him to Earth. And embracing the “mila-
gro de estar en el aire” (“the miracle of being in the air”), he contemplates the landscape
below, watching it transform into a map (19). He marvels that he is now seeing, in actual-
ity, the very map of Spain imprinted in his mind as a boy in geography class. As he gazes
upon the ochre steppes of La Mancha, he thinks of Don Quijote seated securely below on
the saddle of Rocinante or clinging to the sails of a windmill. This leads him to wonder if
perhaps the caballero’s imagination might not have gone astray, had he been able to fly in
bodily form. But immediately, he dismisses that thought, as he embarks on his own wild
flights of imagination:
“Es posible esto de volar dentro del vuelo material. Se puede volar entre los cristales del
avión como una mosca. . . . Sí, se puede volar dentro del avión, bajo el alegre zumbar de los
motores. Se puede soñar dentro del sueño. Soñar que se sueña.” (“It is possible to fly inside
a material flight. One can fly between the glass windows of the plane like a fly. . . . Yes,
one can fly inside a plane, with the happy drone of the motors. One can dream within the

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dream. Dream that one dreams”; 19). Through the remainder of the flight, Sender allows
his imagination to roam free – indeed “to fly” like a winged insect within the cabin of the
plane. Now that “la imaginación del siglo XVII se ha hecho técnica – avión – todavía la
imaginación puede escapar en busca de metas nuevas” (“the nineteenth-century imagina-
tion has materialized as technology – airplane – the imagination can still escape in search
of new goals”; 19). Sender goes on to envision those “new objectives” by imaginatively
launching himself upward, such that the earthly map below recedes and begins to curve. He
imagines flying on the outer limits of the atmosphere, where without the resistance of air,
the sense of velocity would be attenuated.
These reveries allow Sender to reflect on the time-space continuum, with an implicit nod
to relativity theory: “Tiempo y velocidad. Dos conceptos inseparables y en lucha. Si pudié-
ramos acelerar la velocidad, aumentar las pulsaciones de los motores hasta alcanzar un
ritmo suficiente, venceríamos al tiempo (“Time and velocity. Two concepts at once insepa-
rable and at odds. If we could increase the velocity, boost the pulsations of the motors up
to the requisite rate, we could conquer time”; 19). He envisions the plane flying at a speed
that would enable him to orbit the earth four times in less than 24 hours at a “velocidad
milagrosa” (“miraculous speed”) and gain four days. Once more, he asserts that thanks to
the “weightlessness” of the plane, one can dream within the dream, like a fly buzzing within
the cabin. The sensation of landing in Seville awakens him, but when he disembarks, his
dream has become reality; he has moved backwards in time, gaining four days. When he
inquires of the news in Medina Sidonia, a town near the site of the massacre, the taxidriver
responds, “Allí no ocurre nunca na” (“Nothing ever happens there”; 20).
All this is a clever ruse, of course, a “set up” for what is to come. Sender’s whimsical
flights of imagination fulfill the obvious purpose of enabling him – or rather, his narra-
tor – to situate himself before the massacre and report the events as they unfold in “real
time.” But Sender goes further here by appropriating the ecstatic rhetoric of flight in order
to re-purpose it and turn it towards a political critique. In so doing, he plays with the
expanded sense of scale that emerged along with aerial vision, thereby adding “a new scale
in time and space” to “our mental and material equipment,” in E.A. Gutkind’s words (10).
Before the advent of aviation, “we were winding our way like worms through narrow
passages and seeing only more or less unrelated detail,” Gutkind observes, but now from
an aerial perspective, we can apprehend “at a glance the infinite variety of environmental
patterns spread over the earth, and appreciate their dynamic relationships. We can see side
by side the different scales in time and space and the tensions arising out of the neighborly
proximity of seemingly incompatible transformations of the earth’s surface” (10). Gutkind
calls for a simultaneous, side-by-side vision of the aerial and ground-level view, an “attune-
ment of the human scale to the universal scale” (40). Sender, in turn, adopts the aerial gaze
precisely in order to disclose and critique those dynamic relationships between broad social,
economic, and political patterns, and the conditions on the ground. Early on, while still in
the air over Ciudad Real, Sender looked down upon the mines and piles of coal, linking
the patterns traced upon the land to the economic system that perpetuates hard labor and
poverty: “Minas y mineros. Cimas negras de carbón y lentos hormigueros de explotación
y de miseria” (“Mines and miners. Black piles of coal and slow anthills of exploitation and
poverty”; 19).
Once on the ground in Casas Viejas – one of those impoverished “anthills” – Sender
winds his way upon the arid terrain, as he reconstructs the tragic events that took place.
In another instance of temporal elasticity, feudal conditions have stretched into the present

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day; for this is an area where the advent of a democratic republic has changed nothing,
where “el feudalismo agrario andaluz está hoy como hace ocho siglos” (“the agrarian,
Andalusian feudalism is the same today as it was eight centuries ago”; 24). He evokes the
harsh circumstances of the landless, seasonal laborers, who suffer perpetual hunger while
surrounded by fertile land left fallow by absentee señoritos (wealthy landowners). Having
arrived one day before the massacre, thanks to his fictional time-travel), he “meets” the
victims while still alive, and he “attends” the assemblies where the local libertarios (anar-
chists) discuss the flyers, the octavillas, that had called them to join a nation-wide revolu-
tion. At the appointed time, they surround the local garrison and invite the Civil Guards
to lay down their arms and become “hombres libres como nosotros” (“free men like us”;
44). The Civil Guards respond to this invitation with gunfire, much to the surprise of the
anarchists, who proceed to lay siege to the building, killing two Guards, then fleeing when
reinforcements arrive. In the brutal reprisal that follows, twenty-two villagers are killed,
either burned alive or executed.
Those who survive, after escaping and hiding in the mountains, remember those
octavillas – how clearly they had laid out the arguments, aims, and plans for the nation-wide
revolution – and they cannot understand why or how it failed. Sender once more invokes
the figure of the map and attributes the failure to “an error in scale”:

Las octavillas estaban escritas por unos hombres que no tenían la conciencia plena de
su responsabilidad ante los hechos. Figurémonos a un geógrafo poco escrupuloso. Ha
hecho un mapa. Aceptemos que el mapa es perfecto; pero el mapa no será útil si no se
da una medida exacta de las proporciones y de la relación entre las líneas del gráfico
y la verdad topográfica. Para eso es necesario que el geógrafo establezca exactamente
las medidas y pueda poner al pie una escala. (75)

The flyers were written by some men who lacked a full awareness of their responsi-
bility for the events. Let us imagine an unscrupulous geographer. He has made a map.
Let us accept that the map is perfect; but that map will not be useful unless it provides
an exact measure of the proportions and the relationship between the graphic lines
and the topographical truth. For this it is necessary that the geographer precisely cal-
culate the measurements for establishing a scale.

If the correlations in scale between the topography and map are off by even a millimeter,
Sender goes on to explain, this error, when projected across the entire panorama, will con-
sist of hundreds of kilometers. “Eso sucedía con los que redactaron las octavillas, con los
que aprobaron los manifiestos. El error – una frase, un juicio, una afirmación ligera – se
multiplicaba por mil en la realidad.” (“This is what happened with those who wrote the
flyers, those who approved the manifestos. The error – a phrase, a judgment, a minor asser-
tion – was multiplied by a thousand times in the reality”; 75). The villagers had read in
good faith an erroneous map – or rather, a flawed plan that had mapped out a coordinated
uprising across Spanish territory, which failed to materialize. As a consequence, twenty-two
men, women, and children were now dead.
The fateful significance of that aerial vista, transformed into a map of Spain, which
Sender had evoked in launching his reportage, now becomes clear. By partaking in that
rapturous discourse of flight – allowing his imagination to “fly” within the postal plane – he
is challenging the validity of that abstracted aerial view, along with all its presumptions of

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freedom, progress, and enlightenment. The experience of weightlessness while in flight was
a fiction; for given the gravity of the facts on the ground, gravity has reasserted itself. Sender
goes even further in his work of “ground-truthing” by allowing the untilled land itself to
engage in a dialog with hunger. This occurs as the fugitives from the village are hiding in
the sierra, at a site well-hidden from an aerial gaze; for according to rumors, the Secretary
of War may send planes to bomb the rebels and the rebellious land as well – “porque quiere
ser roturado y producir” (“because it wants to be plowed and to produce”; 75). With
plenty of firewood but nothing to eat, the men’s hunger speaks:

El hambre protestaba:
– ¡Esta tierra maldita! ¡Todo yermo! ¡Tierra de hambres y de miserias!
La tierra parecía responderles:
– Aradme. Sembrad.
– Por quererte roturar nos fusilan. (76–77)

“Hunger protested:
– ¡This damned land! Entirely barren! Land of hunger and poverty!
The land seemed to respond.
– Plow me. Sow.
– Just for wanting to cultivate you, they kill us.

The aerial bombings do not come, but when Sender takes the postal plane back to Madrid,
he finds it impossible to play imaginary games with time and space. Now, after all he
has seen and heard, he can only imagine how this same sturdy plane might one day be
re-equipped as a bomber. In Madrid, Sender finds the government in turmoil, attacked from
right and left, with both anarchists and the conservatives accusing Azaña of having ordered
the executions.
Sender ends his account of these events in February of 1933. Later that year, the dynamics
of scale once more come into play, as the atrocities in that remote village of Casas Viejas – a
mere speck on the map – precipitate the fall of Azaña’s center-left national government. In the
elections that follow, a broad right-wing coalition wins and proceeds to block Azaña’s pro-
gressive initiatives, among them agrarian reforms that aimed to expropriate and redistribute
the large estates. The peasants will remain landless and impoverished, political polarization
will intensify, and ultimately a failed military coup will lead to civil war and to the first mas-
sive aerial bombings of civilians on European soil. Sender’s account of his flight to Seville, in
which he adopts the aerial gaze and moves back in time, works not only as a clever artifice
to enable his “real-time” reportage on the ground; it also points to the complex interplay of
scale in the unfolding of historical events, given how small disjunctions between the expan-
sive abstracted perspective and ground-level truths can lead to cataclysmic consequences.

To twenty-first–century eyes and ears, the rapturous, utopian rhetoric of flight that emerged
in the first decades of aviation may seem overblown and naive. Not only have we natural-
ized the experience of flight, but we have absorbed into our historical consciousness the
massive death counts from aerial bombing in the past century’s wars; and today, unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAVs) continue to inflict death from the air. Yet the aerial discourse of
one-hundred years ago merits further consideration. In their enthusiastic response to avia-
tion, the public was staking a collective claim to an invention centuries in the making; for

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indeed, the pioneers of aviation were standing on the shoulders of legions of forebears. The
ecstatic discourse around early aviation was thus infused with a certain democratic spirit,
with an acknowledgment that aviation technology and the possibilities it afforded belonged
potentially to all of humanity.
In the first decades of aviation, as we have seen, the direct experience of flight may have
been restricted to the few, but it was translated and transmitted via literature, photography,
and film to a mass public that yearned to partake in the aerial gaze. Those kaleidoscopic,
elevated views kindled the public’s desire for more expansive understandings of life on earth.
And in turn, the rhapsodic discourse of writers like Barga and Sender responded to a collec-
tive desire for what Nicolas Mirzoeff calls “an extended sense of the real” (5). Throughout
the modern era, Mirzoeff argues, certain authorized “visualities,” or “renditions of physi-
cal and psychic space,” have held sway – naming, classifying, defining, and naturalizing the
field of the visible and the sayable (3). Yet at any given time, the reigning visuality may be
challenged by potential “countervisualities” that emerge whenever people claim “the right
to look,” the right to disrupt the regime of visuality and find new ways of seeing and new
designs for living. In the first decades of aviation, the visionary discourse and the public’s
ecstatic response sprung from a desire to seize a moment when visuality – how we see, how
we understand the world – appeared to be in play. The utopian promise was not to be real-
ized; two world wars, a series of colonial wars, nuclear holocaust, the commercialization of
flight – all foreclosed that moment of possibility and reinstalled a hierarchized, “vertical”
order. But today, with planetary survival threatened by climate change, with drone technol-
ogy ever more lethal, with space travel privatized by billionaires, it is past time for finding
a new mode of seeing – for a more just and viable countervisuality that might balance the
expansive view from above with the view upon our common ground.

Notes
1 Translations from Spanish to English throughout this chapter are my own.
2 Iberia, Compañia Aérea de Transportes was incorporated in 1927. Flights on its Madrid-Barcelona
line began in December of that year.
3 In 1912 Picasso included a newspaper headline, “Notre avenir est dans l’air” in several of his
still-lifes (Amad 72). For more on the connections between Cubism and aerial vision, see Kern,
pp. 245 and pp. 287–318.
4 Ramón’s brother, Francisco Franco, would take a historic flight, albeit not record-breaking, when
a British pilot, Cecil Bebb, contracted by the coup plotters, flew from London to transport him in
a Dragon Rapide from the Canary Islands to Tetuán, Morocco, where he launched the military
uprising that triggered the Civil War.
5 Alonso took aerial photographs of El Teide volcano on an earlier flight in the Dornier hydroplane,
“Maria Antonieta,” piloted by Ramon Franco, from Melilla to the Canary Islands in 1924. See
Alonso’s chronicle of the flight, which includes a number of photographs, Raid aéreo Melilla
Cabo Juby – Canarias.
6 According to Fitzgerald, chemical weaponry, prohibited in Europe after World War I, continued
to be used in colonial territories: the British in Iraq, the Italians in Abyssinia, the Japanese in
China, and the Spanish in Morocco. See Balfour for a comprehensive study of Spain’s semi-secret
use of chemical weaponry during the Moroccan War. Sánchez Méndez provides a concise history
of military aviation in Spain.
7 Corpus Barga (1887–1975) was the pen-name of Andrés Rafael Cayetano Corpus García de la
Barga y Gómez de la Serna. He had a long career as a journalist, working in the inter-war decades
in Paris as European correspondent for various Spanish periodicals and later in exile in Peru. His
series of articles on this flight were published in a brief book, Paris-Madrid: Un viaje en el año 19
(1920) and also included in a recent anthology, Periodismo y literatura (2009).

526
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8 The pilot, Lieutenant Romanet, was killed during a test flight two years later when the wind tore
away the fabric covering the wings of his Lumiére De Monge and the plane crashed.
9 See the full-page coverage by various reporters reporting on the arrival of Romanet and Barga in
Madrid: “Vuelo de la Paz,” El Sol, 9 July, 1919, p. 3.
10 Trans-oceanic commercial travel by plane was not yet feasible, as the engines at the time lacked the
sufficient power to carry the amount of fuel required to carry multiple passengers. Pan-American
would begin transpacific fights in 1935 and transatlantic flights in 1939.
11 Launched two years before, in 1928, the commercial line had already made several transatlantic
flights and in 1929, it circled the world in five legs. For a history of the Graf Zeppelin, see Dick
and Robinson.
12 The mooring mast at this site near Recife is the last remaining in the world, restored in 2013. It
is not, however, the same mast used by the Graf Zeppelin, but rather, another built in 1937 with
telescoping functionality in order to moor the Hindenburg.
13 Four year later, in 1934, the Graf Zeppelin line extended regular flights to Buenos Aires, after the
construction of a mooring mast.
14 See Mintz for a detailed account of the atrocities in Casas Viejas.

Works Cited
Alonso, Leopoldo. Raid aéreo Melilla Cabo Juby-Canarias (Crónica del viaje). Artes de la Ilus-
tración, 1924.
Amad, Paula. “From God’s-Eye to Camera-Eye: Aerial Photography’s Post-Humanist and
Neo-Humanist Visions of the World.” History of Photography, vol. 128, no. 1, Feb. 2012,
pp. 66–86.
Balfour, Sebastian. Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War. Oxford
UP, 2002.
Barga, Corpus. París-Madrid: Un viaje en el año 19. Fortanet, 1920.
Barga, Corpus. “París-Madrid: Un viaje en el año 19.” Periodismo y literatura, edited by Arturo
Ramoneda, Fundación Banco Santander, 2009, pp. 93–113.
Barga, Corpus. “Un viaje en el año 30.” Periodismo y literatura, edited by Arturo Ramoneda, Fun-
dación Banco Santander, 2009, pp. 115–35.
Cole, Teju. “On Photography: Each Achievement in the Dream of Flight, From the Balloon to the
Drone, Gives Us New Ways to See – And New Ways to Kill.” New York Times Magazine, 26 Jul.
2015, pp. 14–17.
Dick, Harold G., and Douglas H. Robinson. The Golden Age of the Great Passenger Airships: Graf
Zeppelin and Hindenburg. Smithsonian, 1985.
Fitzgerald, Gerard J. “Chemical Warfare and Medical Response During World War I.” American
Journal of Public Health, vol. 98, no. 4, 2007, pp. 611–25.
Gargurevich Regal, Juan. “Corpus Barga, el periodista del Zeppelín.” Escritura y Pensamiento, vol. 9,
no. 19, 2006, pp. 101–111.
Giménez Caballero. Julepe de menta y otros aperitivos. Planeta, 1981.
Gutkind, E. A. “Our World From the Air: Conflict and Adaptation.” Man’s Role in Changing the Face
of the Earth, edited by W. L. Thomas. Chicago UP, 1956, pp. 1–44.
Hansen, Miriam. “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.”
Modernism/Modernity, vol. 6, no. 2, 1999, pp. 59–77.
Kaplan, Caren. Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime From Above. Duke UP, 2018.
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Harvard P, 2003.
“La tierra de España vista desde el cielo,” Estampa, Revista Gráfica y Literaria de la Actualidad, 24
Apr. 1928, n. pag.
Lorenzo, Félix. “La paloma de la paz ¡A buena parte vienes!” El Sol. 9 julio 1919, p. 3.
Mintz, Jerome R. The Anarchists of Casas Viejas. Indiana UP, 2004.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counter History of Visuality. Duke UP, 2010.
Morshed, Adnan. Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder. U of Minnesota
P, 2015.
Pino, José M del. Del tren al aeroplano: Ensayos sobre la vanguardia española. Society of Spanish and
Spanish-American Studies, 2004.

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Salas, Nicolás. “Sevilla y la aventura fallida del Zeppelín,” El Correo de Andalucía, 29 mayo 2017.
https://elcorreoweb.es/sevilla-y-la-aventura-fallida-del-zeppelin-KH3009783.
Sánchez Méndez, José. “La Aviación Militar Española: Una historia corta pero de gran intensidad.”
Arbor, vol. 179, no. 674, Feb. 2002, pp. 187–216.
Sender, Ramón J. Viaje a la aldea del crimen (Documental de Casas Viejas). Ediciones Vosa, 2000.
“Vuelo de la Paz de Paris a Madrid: Llegada de Romanet y Corpus Barga a Cuatro Vientos,” El Sol,
9 Jul. 1919, p. 3.
Weems, Jason. Barnstorming the Prairies. U of Minnesota P, 2015.
Wohl, Robert. The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950. Yale
UP, 2005.

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 41
AUDITORY CULTURE IN EARLY
TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPAIN
Stereophonic Soundscapes of Modernity, From
Print Media to Radio

Tania Gentic

On November 22, 1929, the independent newspaper El Sol reported a first for the incipi-
ent radio industry: Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who was known for his published gregue-
rías and radiophonic greguerías onduladas, took his microphone to the streets (“Ramón,
reportero”).1 He already had a microphone set up in his office from which he could broad-
cast on Unión Radio Madrid, the city’s first licensed radio station, whenever the fancy
struck him.2 But on this day, he interviewed passersby, including a billiard club manager
and a baker. He also used the opportunity to meditate on the physical and metaphoric illu-
mination of the Puerta del Sol after the installation of its first electric lampposts. According
to the newspaper article, he proclaimed,

Las farolas debían inaugurarse con su discurso de apertura con mucha más razón que
los monumentos, que no tienen ninguna luz, y que muchas veces están dedicados a
espíritus apagaluces. . . . Esta farola a la que dedico mi apología traerá claridad a los
asuntos nacionales, y es antioscurantista por excelencia. (4)
It makes much more sense to inaugurate streetlights with an opening speech than
monuments, which don’t have any light, and which are often dedicated to spirits that
put lights out. . . . This streetlamp to which I dedicate my case will bring clarity to
national concerns, and it is supremely antiobscurantist.3

A week later, the magazine Ondas reported on the same event in its weekly column “A través
del micrófono,” noting that “Hasta ahora el micrófono había recogido los espectáculos
públicos más interesantes, pero desde la noche del 21 ya tiene pies y anda a la busca de
noticias y sucesos emocionantes” (“Until now the microphone had picked up the most inter-
esting public shows, but from the night of the 21st it now has feet and goes off in search of
news and exciting events”; “Ramón en la Puerta” 7).4 Ramón himself had celebrated the
reach of the microphone in one of his many greguerías on the technology of sound trans-
mission: “Micrófono: oreja de todos” (“Microphone: everyone’s ears”; Ariza 217). While
in Ramón’s descriptions of the streetlamp, illumination allows Spain to see its flaws and
light a way forward for the nation, radio allows for a mobility that gives voice an ability

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-47
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

to travel immediately and directly into the public’s ear. Moreover, with the inauguration of
the “micrófono ambulante,” radio, still in its nascent stages, was no longer simply what
Armand Balsebre has called a “music box,” by which he means that, initially, radio merely
retransmitted recordings of concerts, operas, and popular music like jazz and cuplés.5
Rather, in this celebration of Ramón as a reporter, the radio seems to achieve its wireless
potential, allowing local spaces to travel instantly, live, beyond their acoustic borders.
At stake in this movement was an opportunity, touted by newspapers dedicated to pro-
gress, like El Sol, for Spain to push forward into modernity, reasserting itself as an eco-
nomic player in a transatlantic frame. As the publication Ondas had put it in its report on
the first transatlantic radio communication between Berlin and Buenos Aires only two years
earlier: “Ya que no fuimos nosotros los primeros en hablar por T.S.H. [telefonía sin hilos]
con América Española, que no seamos los últimos. . . . La comunicación radiotelefónica,
especialmente con las repúblicas americanas de habla española, es de una importancia
grandísima para nuestras relaciones espirituales y comerciales” (“Since we were not the
first to speak by wireless telephony with Spanish America, let us not be the last. . . . Radio-
telephone communication, especially with the Spanish-speaking American republics, is of
great importance for our spiritual and commercial relations”; “La radiotelefonía”1). Just
as the avant-garde futurists saw technology as one of the keys to modernizing art, the intel-
lectuals who ran newspapers and print media saw the technology of the radio, a wireless
extension of the communication inaugurated by telephony, as a key to modernizing Spain
as a player on a global stage. The movement of the radio out of the studio and into the
streets seemed to augur this possibility.
As with most discussions of new technologies, in the previous discourses, the emphasis
on change is put on the technological medium itself. But in this chapter, I would like to
suggest that radio was already inserted into a geographic construct of the ear that reflected
what I will call a stereophonic soundscape. Technologically speaking, twentieth-century
stereophonic sound – the use of two channels (or more) to immerse the listener in a
three-dimensional auditory space through headphones or speakers – did not begin to be
developed until the 1930s. However, the emphasis on new forms of movement through
sound evident in discussions of literature, as well as early radio, reflects an auditory culture
in which the spatial and temporal implications of stereophony, as a means of situating a
listener in a three-dimensional space that is both here and elsewhere, are already present.
Thinking about the soundscape this way draws our attention to the intermediality of con-
temporary forms of communication, in this case radio, and the limits of technodeterministic
approaches to sound, such as those that supposed the microphone and the radio, as techno-
logical developments, would revolutionize Spain’s place in the world.6
Several concepts are at play in this argument. According to Jonathan Sterne, the study
of sound has long been affected by a set of subconscious assumptions about hearing and
vision, which he calls “the audiovisual litany,” that has privileged the visual over the sonic
for its presumed intellectualism, distance, and perspective (10). But as we see in Spain, the
visual and the sonic go hand in hand not only with each other, but with print media and
literature, in producing a convergent soundscape of modernity. By convergence, I am refer-
ring to Henry Jenkins’s assertion that technological innovation does not itself change the
cultural landscape, as some might propose:

Printed words did not kill spoken words. Cinema did not kill theater. Television did
not kill radio. Each old medium was forced to coexist with the emerging media.

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That’s why convergence seems more plausible as a way of understanding . . . media

change. . . . Old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are
shifted by the introduction of new technologies.
(Jenkins 14)

Paying attention to these convergences signals how technological changes – from analog
to digital, for example, or from compact disc to mp3 – do not occur in isolation from the
broader public sphere of which, in this case, print media, film, and art were already a part.
As Lisa Gitelman has argued, “The introduction of new media . . . is never entirely revo-
lutionary: new media are less points of epistemic rupture than they are socially embedded
sites for the ongoing negotiation of meaning as such” (6). Thus, when I reference auditory
culture, I am referring to two overlapping notions of sound: How the discourses around the
technology of the radio help shape the portrayal of sound transmission as a sign of moder-
nity, but also how the sounds that emerge from that technology reaffirm spatial notions of
modernity that predate, and indeed, live well beyond, the apogee of radio as a medium. In
addition to referencing several journals and newspapers from the early twentieth century,
I use a close listening of the first play written for the radio in Spain, Tomás Borrás’s teleco-
media, Todos los ruidos de aquel día (1931), to demonstrate these ideas in detail.

Mediatic Convergences of Sound, Art, and Technology

Radio was part of the auditory culture of Spain before the technology even arrived there. As
Afuera-Heredero has demonstrated, scientific journals had been discussing the possibilities
of “sinhilismo” (“wirelessness”) since the late 1890s (16). By the 1920s, the press was fully
invested in the significance of radio’s arrival. The first radios in Spain were built by hobby-
ists who had followed news of Marconi’s discovery and transmissions in the United States,
Argentina and elsewhere. Beginning in 1923, members of these elite clubs developed spe-
cialized magazines like Radio Sport, Tele-Radio (official organ of the Radio Club España),
Ondas, Correo de la Radio, and T.S.H. in Madrid, and Radiosola and Radio Barcelona in
Barcelona. Brimming with intellectualist elitism, as well as humor, these magazines included
interviews with radio listeners, profiles of famous composers, commentary on jazz, and pro-
gram schedules for local and foreign shortwave broadcasts. Their most attractive feature,
though, was visual, composed of numerous caricatures and comics, as well as three-quarter
page advertisements for radio parts. A 1925 issue of Ondas, the official magazine of Unión
Radio Madrid, for example, includes parodic descriptions of different “teletipos” (“tel-
etypes”), including the man who built a radio out of an apricot pit and gifted it to his
girlfriend, the cheapskate who keeps waiting for a better deal before buying a radio, and
the guy who simply can’t believe radio is real: “Sale al balcón, mira al espacio y le parece
inaudito que no se note nada en la atmósfera. Entonces vuelve a colgarse los auriculares y
repite ensimismado: ‘Parece mentira, parece mentira . . .’ ” (“He goes out on the balcony,
looks out at space, and it seems to him outrageous that there is nothing in the atmosphere.
So, he puts his headphones back on and repeats to himself, ‘It’s hard to believe, it’s hard to
believe . . .’ ”; “Teletipos” 6).7 Not yet available to the public, the solitary, individual nature
of radio in its early days – it required headphones, and the equipment was expensive and
hard to find – thus draws attention to the elitism of its technological possibilities.
Soon, however, major newspapers began incorporating sections dedicated to the wireless.
Rhetorically, radio’s ability to transmit the sights and sounds of daily life was connected to

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the markets, politics, and infrastructure that newspapers like El Sol saw as the future of the
modern world. Thus, in an incipient multimedia strategy, El Sol and La Voz – the latter of
which was owned by the father of Ricardo Urgoiti, who founded Unión Radio Madrid – pro-
vided program schedules and analysis of the station’s programs. La Prensa, El Debate and El
Imparcial, among other publications, soon followed suit by developing columns on radio as
well.8 In this sense, as with the news reports of Ramón’s “micrófono ambulante,” the realm
of letters legitimated the “new” sound of radio. Given that only a few years earlier Catalan
intellectuals had sought to normalize and publish literature in their language so that it could
escape the moniker of being merely oral, and thus “vulgar,” this validation of the written
word over the sound of the voices transmitted by radio is not surprising, even if it is ironic.
Once stations began to allow on-air publicity, moreover, an overlap between the press
and sound reformulated the radio not as a niche hobby, but as a market to be exploited.
The progressive newspaper La Libertad, for example, ran ads promoting their radio sta-
tion, Radio Libertad, as a source of advertising (at the cost of 1 peseta per word). One
ad includes this line about radio sound’s pervasiveness, which seems to contrast it to the
attention (and literacy) required of newspaper reading: On radio, as opposed to in print, an
ad “¡Se oye y no se puede dejar de oír!” (“is heard and can’t stop being heard!”; Díaz 91).
Affirming the terms of Sterne’s audiovisual litany, which contrasts vision as something to
which one can easily close one’s eyes, to sound, to which one cannot easily close one’s ears,
the wirelessness of radio is, on the one hand, a liberation from the written word, but it is
also, paradoxically, an invisible and inescapable tethering of the listener to consumption.
Early efforts to expand access to radios in order to grow listening publics were success-
ful: Official records indicate that there were 45,877 radios in Spain in 1930; by 1936 the
number was over 303,000 (Aubert 528).9 Although illiteracy rates continued to be high,
especially in rural areas, radio emerged as a popular form, as it played from bars, private
balconies and windows, as well as in public spaces. By 1943, almost 72% of the population
polled said they listened to the radio (Blanco Fajardo 64). As Paul Aubert has succinctly put
it, the advent of radio in Spain not only gave a broader segment of the population access to
recorded music and intellectual discussion, it also made possible a direct interpellation of
the public into politics through sound, something which both sides took ready advantage
of during the Civil War less than a decade later.
Notwithstanding the continued privileging of print in these early years, the possibility
of capturing events live as they happened shifted the establishment’s ears to orality, lead-
ing those in radio to establish their own methodologies for presentation. Throughout the
1920s, radios depended on existing newspaper teams to produce content. In 1930, Unión
Radio Madrid started a trend with the daily news program La Palabra, after which Spanish
radio stations began to develop their own news teams. During the Republic, furthermore,
the mediatic use of radio for news programming began to be associated with transparency:
In an attempt to give listeners access to the latest from the newly formed government, the
Cortes themselves were wired with microphones. This led Manuel Azaña to complain that
his colleagues had a case of “reporteritis,” purposely sharing inappropriate details in front
of the microphones, turning governance into spectacle (Aubert 526). Other intellectuals,
like Azorín and Pío Baroja, looked down their noses at radio, taking elitist positions similar
to those of Adorno and Horkheimer, who worried that because of radio, music itself was
being corrupted by a public who did not know how to listen properly and by a culture
industry concerned only with catering to the lowest possible tastes. Thus, during the Sec-
ond Republic, the journal Radio Sport, initially geared toward privileged radio aficionados,

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would complain that “La radio ha olvidado sus fines principales artísticos y se ha metido en
política” (“Radio has forgotten its artistic principals and has gotten involved in politics”),
as though art and politics were by nature antithetical (Díaz 121).10

The Aesthetic Spatialization of Sound

The spatial imaginary of the radio related to modernity that most interests me here, though,
has to do precisely with sound’s aesthetic possibilities, which overlapped not only with the
political concerns of the day, but with the role sound played in other fields. Avant-garde
artists had recently drawn attention to the limits of written literary language in a modern
world dominated by media: Advertisements and reportage, the visual and the aural, com-
bined to rethink the poetic genre itself. The influence of Italian futurists Marinetti and
Russolo, in particular, led to a keen interest in noise and sound as modern forces that could
renovate the arts. In Ramón’s case, his broader project to create “la nueva literatura” (“the
new literature”) also included rethinking oratory through his conferencias de maleta (brief-
case conferences), live performances in which he fused public speaking with entertainment.
In these shows he would take objects out of a box and improvise metaphoric, often humor-
ous, descriptions of them, livening up the staid tradition of oratory as an art defined by
traditional understandings of rhetoric and delivery, through the three-dimensional, inter-
medial integration of visual cues, props, and nonlinguistic sounds.11
A linear genealogy of the arts might privilege the avant-garde as the new way of hearing
most closely linked to radio, given the vanguardistas’ interest in electricity and technol-
ogy.12 Yet sound had already been reconceptualized as spatial through the work of the
modernista poet Rubén Darío, who among others, had revolutionized poetry through the
sound of language. Darío had reformed poetic metrics, favoring the endecasílabo, as a
means of giving Spanish American literature its own rhythm. In the process, he used the
sound of language to create a spiritual and spatial conceptualization of a new hispanismo
that, as Alejandro Mejías-López has suggested, “turned Spain into a part – a province, as
it were – of America” (138). For Mejías-López, at stake in Darío’s renovation of language
was the inverted directionality of power that emerged after the end of the Spanish empire.
I would add that, sonically, Darío also changed the directionality and sound of modernity
by playing on the images of waves that were so important not only for thinking transat-
lantically, but that would also become important for thinking about radio. To cite just one
example, we may consider a stanza of his poem “Cantos de vida y esperanza” (Songs of
Life and Hope; 1904):

Pasó una piedra que lanzó una honda;

pasó una flecha que aguzó un violento.
La piedra de la honda fue a la onda,
y la flecha del odio fuese al viento.13 (60)
A stone went flying from a slingshot;
an arrow, which violent man had sharpened, flew.
The stone from the slingshot went into the wave,
And the arrow of hate went off on the wind. (61)

With this conversion of the honda into an onda, Darío makes a linguistic gesture that is
also acoustic, marking the sonic resonance of two related but differently signified words:

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The oral pronunciation of honda/onda draws attention to an aurality defined by a tension

between writing and speech. But the reference is also spatial, as the unidirectionality of
an attack implied by the word honda, dissipates into a wave that, as an onda, can also be
read as a series of concentric circles that, as resonances, extend beyond the point of impact.
Read within the transatlantic hispanismo of the time, Darío’s poetic suggestion converts the
written word into a spatializing orality that privileges the ear. This gesture not only reflects
modernistas’ interest in synethesia, it remaps sound as a geographic phenomenon that is not
a point-to-point communication, but rather an immersion of the listener in space.
Indeed, the social and literary magazine founded, in part, by Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s
father, Prometeo, opened its pages with a reference to Darío’s “mágicas ondas de nueva
vida” (“magic waves of new life”) as a “ley que armoniza las innúmeras olas del mar”
(“law that harmonizes the innumerable sea waves”) in order to produce a “libertad que
existe solo teorizada” (“liberty that only exists in theory”). The journal’s “Prologue” fur-
ther states that it would work under a “limitación de radio” (“limitation of radius”) that
would abstain from considering the future, focusing instead on the present in the moment
of each issue’s production. Marking the temporality of the moment through a geographical
image of the “radius” (that, like Darío’s honda/onda, resonates homophonically with what
will become the popular term radio), the journal, as just one example, reflects on modernity
by drawing on Darío’s acoustic cartography to respatialize language and the literary-social
soundscape.
Other vanguardistas working in transatlantic collaboration suggested “vibracionismo”
as a new way of conceiving art, which seemed to draw directly from the invisible sound
waves associated with radio. In Barcelona, poet Joan Salvat-Papasseit, along with Uru-
guayan painters Rafael Barradas and Joaquín Torres-García, published a journal called
Arc-Voltaic that promoted a “Vibracionisme d’idees” in 1918.14 Salvat-Papasseit’s poetry
collection, Poemes en ondes hertzianes (Poems in Hertzian Waves, 1919), further links
the visual art of the caligrama to modernity’s sound waves. Rubén Gallo has argued that,
except for the title, the poems “no incluyen ninguna imagen radiofónica” (“don’t include
any radiophonic images”; “Poesía” 829). However, the poems quite clearly invoke the
transatlantic conception of ondas laid out by Darío by referencing sound as a geographic
expansion that is displayed visually on the page. A year later Salvat does dismiss Darío as
“inflat del vent” (“full of air”), but this seems to reflect an interest in hearing sound as a
political – indeed, linguistic – force linked to warfare. Thus Salvat-Palpasseit claims Cata-
lan culture can demonstrate its superiority over the Hispanic by opening itself aurally to
the speed and distance of travel made possible by Marinetti’s modern wireless sound. Such
sound surpassed the obsolete tradition behind Darío’s symbolist lyricism, which was more
in line with the epic than with the contemporary soundscape, not because of the geography
at play, but because of how the modernization of technology might further empower one to
challenge the sound of hispanismo: “Homer si va cantar els rems de la victòria, fou perquè
en el seu temps per la força dels rems s’obtenien victòries; En Marinetti avui cantarà els
cuiraçats, els aeroplans frenètics i les boques de foc dels monstruosos canons. – Lliurarem
Catalunya per la força dels rems?” (“If Homer sang the oars of victory, it was because in
his time victories were obtained by the force of the oars; Marinetti today will sing the bat-
tleships, the frantic airplanes and the mouths of the monstrous cannons. – Will we deliver
Catalonia by the force of oars?”; Salvat-Papasseit, “Contra”).
Within this transatlantic cultural space of vibrations, speed, and sinhilismo, the intel-
lectuals at Unión Radio Madrid like Ramón eagerly embraced the radio for its creative

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possibilities. Ramón, for example, used sound effects to replicate his conferencias de maleta
on air. He also renovated journalistic crónicas de viajes (travelogues) by recording “cartas
habladas” (“spoken letters”) in Madrid in which he falsely claimed to be speaking from
Paris, or pretended that they were recorded in Latin America and broadcast later; in that
sense, even if the microphone was the oreja de todos (everyone’s ear), the voice of the intel-
lectual could still interpret (or even falsify) the sounds that seemed to make transatlantic
communication possible.

Todos Los Ruidos De Aquel Día: Tomás Borrás and the Art of the
Telecomedia
With radio’s foundations in this literary imagination of spatialized sound, as well as the
technological possibilities of communication, in Spain as in the Americas, attention began
to be paid to the role sound would play as a new technology and/as a new art form. With
respect to radio plays particularly, we may consider what André Coeuroy explained in his
1930 Panorama de la radio as a difference between the radiophonic (which refers to writ-
ings that describe sound) and the radiogenic (sounds that would be produced specifically
by the radio as a new form of expression) (Gallo, “Radiovanguardia” 281). Interested in
thinking radio as a new art form, in 1931, Unión Radio Madrid held a competition to pro-
duce the first play explicitly written for radio, one that would take advantage of the new
medium’s possibilities.
The winning play, titled Todos los ruidos de aquel día: Telecomedia and written by play-
wright and novelist Tomás Borrás – who frequented Ramón’s tertulias in the Café Pombo
but, unlike Ramón, would later become part of Franco’s regime – reveals the geography
of the ear that inserted radio into a longer discussion of modernity and aesthetics.15 The
play’s use of sound encapsulates the tensions around the possibility of a speedy entrance
into modernity by carrying over constructs of time and space that display an unease with
the ideas of sound promoted by the futurists, even as the technological possibilities of radio
are foregrounded in the play. In these tensions, we can hear what Wai Chee Dimock refers
to as the bumps and pocks that are part of the contours of any surface or, in this case, the
intermedial soundscape of modernity as an aural imaginary that is not defined by new
beginnings but moments of convergence that extend forward and backward through deep
time (77).16
Scripted like a stage play, the program tells the story of a circus troupe, focusing largely
on a clown named Chocolate who is a drunkard, and his son, Tip-Top, a trapeze artist
who is in love with his French compatriot’s wife. What predominates in the telecomedia
are the aural cues that strive to bring realistic sounds of the city and the circus to the air-
waves. These include the sounds of cars on the street, ringing alarm clocks, roaring lions,
and cracking whips. The play begins in a Madrid boarding house, and the sound effects
include morning church bells, an alarm clock, and knocks on the door, to fully capture the
scene’s time and space. Similarly, there is discussion of travel by taxi to the Calle de Alcalá,
followed by other sound effects. The sounds of motors running, car horns and brakes, and
police whistles, all serve to mark the characters’ movement through the city. Yet these seem-
ingly obvious sounds are coded by the play’s narration and dialogue, which defines their
meaning for the reader. Sitting in a café, for example, Chocolate and his friend Rulito make
comments like, “Madrid en primavera es preciosa (“Madrid is beautiful in the spring”) or
“La calle de Alcalá es la más bonita” (“Alcalá is the prettiest street”).”17 In fact, Borrás

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asserts in the prologue that it is necessary to “educar el oído, que es el tacto de lo inmate-
rial” (“educate the ear, which is the touch of the immaterial”). Like a voice-over narration
in film, these phrases tell the listener how to interpret what he or she hears, becoming the
meaning-bearer for understanding the sounds and noises that create the spaces the play
seeks to reflect. In the process, the listener is immersed in a space that is both the space
of their home during the radio broadcast and the other places in the city, like the Calle de
Alcalá, which may be distant but, stereophonically, are meant to be heard as present in the
moment the listener hears the sounds associated with them.
In line with public intellectuals’ interest in radio’s aesthetic possibilities, the play’s pro-
logue also defines how best to hear and produce radio sound. Echoing Ramón’s suggestion
in Ondas that radiotelephony begins in the cosmos and that progress was bringing human-
kind closer to it (Fernández-Medina 303), the text theorizes radio art as an expansion of
time and space linked to the sound of voice and the epic form:

El inventor de la radiofonía fue Homero. Homero veía que la palabra no es un sonido

que se disuelve en la atmosfera sino una de mensajera que, batiendo sus brazos de
pluma, va a posarse en el hombro del interlocutor para depositar en su oído el miste-
rioso pensamiento. Homero comprendió que en alguna época las palabras irían más
lejos del área en que las podemos oír al ser dichas. Las dotó de alas.
The inventor of radio was Homer. Homer saw that the word is not a sound that
dissolves in the atmosphere but one of a messenger who, flapping her feathered arms,
is going to perch on the interlocutor’s shoulder to deposit the mysterious thought in
his ear. Homer understood that in some periods words would go beyond the area in
which we can hear them being spoken. He endowed them with wings.

Figuring the word as itself a mode of travel, radio transmission becomes part of a pro-
cess of expansion of thought through which, eventually, man will communicate with other
planets. Moreover, the movement of radio meant not just the freedom to travel long dis-
tances quickly, but to move temporally through “este universo estilo 1931, que es el uni-
verso einsteineano” (“this universe, in 1931 fashion, which is the Einsteinian universe”).
In his futuristic immaginazione senza fili (wireless imagination), Marinetti had proposed
that poetry could be renovated because there existed between the poet and the public a
“wireless imagination” that, like the telegraph, telephone, and gramophone, allowed one to
make direct connections that were free of complicated syntax, privileging telegraphic suc-
cinctness (“Futurist” 30). Borrás’s prologue similarly affirms that just as each person has a
distinct smell, they have a distinct sound that, in the play, is captured by instruments that
represent the characters’ essential selves. In this construction, radio is a means by which the
public may learn to hear an eternal mode of communication (the word) in order to make
intimate, direct connections with others. As a form of radio communication, this hearing
takes place immediately, across long distances, at a remove from one’s interlocutor, but it is
also, fundamentally, a connection to a past Classical ideal of art.
Borrás also situates the radio form in response to the image and the existing technology
of the gramophone, but he does so by extending communication into a broader geographic
realm, defined by distance, that is fundamentally metaphysical:

Tele – lejos – es de todas las palabras modernas la que mejor personifica nuestra
época. Por eso he llamado a la obra que van a irradiar “telecomedia.” La imagen está

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muerta y embalsamada, solo el sonido vive eternamente en potencia. El sonido hasta

cuando está en conserva en el disco de gramófono resucita y vuelve a saltar y a chis-
porrotear inundando el espacio. Su energía le hace salir de sí mismo infinitas veces.
El sonido es lo que nos da mayor y más perfecta idea de profundidad y distancia . . .
Tele – far away – is of all modern words the one that best personifies our time. That
is why I have called the work that they are going to broadcast “telecomedy.” The
image is dead and embalmed, only the sound lives eternally in power. The sound even
when it is preserved on the gramophone record is resurrected and jumps and sizzles
again, flooding the space. Its energy makes it come out of itself infinite times. Sound is
what gives us the greatest and most perfect idea of ​​depth and distance . . .

Given that one of the main problems of radio at the time was the crackling noise of interfer-
ence that interrupted a smooth transmission, this mention of the saltos and chisporroteos
of the gramophone draws the ear to the noisy, unevenness of technological sound transmis-
sion in general, including in recorded formats, but it endows them with a spatial power
that visual imagery, no matter how perfect, cannot have. In 1913 futurist Luigi Russolo
specifically associated noise with the art of modernity: “Noise was really not born before
the nineteenth century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over
human sensibility. . . . Nowadays musical art aims at the shrillest, strangest, and most disso-
nant amalgams of sound. Thus, we are approaching noise-sound” (Russolo 4). In Borrás’s
text, it does not matter if the noise of today interrupts the “voz del destino” that orders the
play. All sound transmission is transformative because, unlike the limited directionality of
the gaze – but similar to Darío’s ondas – it inundates the listener’s space in the moment of
listening. As Caleb Kelly has put it more recently, sound turns corners, altering our percep-
tion of our location in space in ways vision cannot (Gallery 21).18 Here, Borrás suggests
that transmitted or recorded sound is not simply an acoustic phenomenon but a tool for
changing listeners and the spaces they inhabit.
The convergence in this early radio play of the microphone’s capacity to capture and
reproduce sounds with discussions of the ideal aesthetic forms – and, indeed, power – of
sound thus display the concerns around the rise of information as communication that Wal-
ter Benjamin describes in his 1936 essay “The Storyteller.” Benjamin writes that, “The epic
side of truth, wisdom, is dying out . . . a concomitant symptom of the secular productive
forces of history [that have] gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech”
(3). With radio, Borrás suggests, the orality and the eternal wisdom of storytelling can be
integrated into new technologies in ways that will be modern not solely because of their
technological form, but rather because of what that form means for perpetuating an eternal
understanding of humankind. Tapping into what we may describe as a proto-fascist aes-
thetics (Borrás would join the Falange only a few years later), the play consciously inscribes
the wisdom of epic forms into succinct sounds of the everyday in a way that strives to
re-conceptualize technology itself as a metaphysical exemplarity that is also an occupation
of space – and thus, of its occupants’ ears – from afar.

The Stereophonic Geographies of Radio Voice

As Borrás’s mention of “tele” as the definitive word of modernity suggests, at the same time
as the radio was inscribed in a temporality of the new and the immediate, it also created
an aural geography that related the modern ear to distance. Within the Latin American

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context, Carlos Alonso has suggested that in the intellectual rhetoric of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, modernity is always elsewhere, while locally it is deferred to a
future time. In the texts I have presented here, however, radio produces a stereophonic
listening that draws the ear’s attention away from the present and the local in ways that
bring geographies of elsewhere into the immediate presence of everyday life. The seeming
immediacy of radio’s micrófono ambulante thus makes it harder to hear the elsewhere as
distant; instead, what is different abroad disrupts the quotidian aspect of the local and, in so
doing, presents the local as familiar and routine even as it exoticizes the unfamiliar as new,
particularly in its initial moment of impact on the ear. In this sense, the stereophonic sound-
scape in which the listener is inscribed is also a soundscape that is both more geographically
extensive than it might first appear, and less limited temporally to the discrete moments of
sound that strike the ear, in a constant renovation of the new that both echoes Prometeo’s
spatio-temporal “limitación de radio” (“radius limitation”) and the avant-garde interest in
speed and immediacy.
Politically, we can hear this stereophony in how certain constructs of identity were rei-
fied through the aurality of modernity as it relates to the sound of voice on air. In 1922,
Manuel de Falla and Federico García Lorca organized their first cante jondo competition.
At the time, European avant-garde composers were incorporating folk music into an ongo-
ing renovation of classical music, perhaps best exemplified by the works of primitivist
composers such as Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky, who looked to local traditions as a
means of overturning classical conventions.19 In Spain, this interest in Andalusian folklore
resonated as well in the first theatrical piece to be broadcast over Spanish radio, the 1899
entremés “El chiquillo” (The Young Boy) by the Álvarez Quintero brothers, performed on
Unión Radio Madrid in 1924. The brothers’ works were known for the costumbrismo of
the Andalusian voices they presented: The opening line of this play, with its Andalusian
pronunciation, as an example, is written “Vaya usté con Dios, Juaniyo . . . Ese hombre es
er florero más rumboso de toa Seviya” (“Go with God, Juaniyo . . . That man is the most
generous flower vender in all of Seville”; Álvarez Quintero 7). This folklorized sound of
“Spanishness” would reappear in film productions during the Second Republic and was
later institutionalized in the andaluzadas so favored by Franco’s film apparatus, CIFESA.
The aural imaginary of Spanishness developed in relationship to this Andalusian folkloric
ideal thus heard Spain through a sound of voice that could be inscribed stereophonically
into both a European aesthetic modernity that was elsewhere and an eternal, folkloric, local
“essence” of the nation.
Borrás’s play, too, incorporated accents that both reinforced, but also geographically
drew the ear away from, these ideas of Spanish or local identity. In a cast of fewer than a
dozen characters, there is a German lion-tamer named Bab, an Andalusian woman named
Carmencita, and a French marksman. All of them are characterized by their accents. Like
many costumbrista writers, the Quintero brothers’ play presents accent typographically as
a resistance to normative grammar and spelling, as it inscribes non-normative pronuncia-
tion within a single linguistic tradition. The radio portrayal of accented voice in Borrás’s
radiogenic play, meanwhile, draws attention to the geographic stereophony of orality as an
aural phenomenon, one that is not just spoken, but heard – and heard, moreover, through
the distinctions of accent that differentiate one character from another within a modern-
izing city. As Fran Tonkiss has suggested, citing Georg Simmel, the noise of the modern city
overwhelms its inhabitants, creating a din that dulls the senses, leading city dwellers to not
hear the noises or voices of others, participating instead in a kind of “social deafness” that

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offers “urban freedom – the liberty of knowing that nobody is listening” (304). She notes,
however, that within this framework of noise as silence,

Some people . . . sound stranger than others; certain voices jar to certain other ears.
The immigrant, it has been said, is audible, and indeed those forms of race thinking
that cannot bring themselves to speak of skin often are happy to talk of language. . . .
In its many accents, we hear a more literal version of what Roland Barthes meant
when he wrote of the city as that “place where the other is and where we ourselves
are other.”
(Tonkiss 305, emphasis in original)

When it appears on the radio, the otherness heard into accented voice is yet another
sound of urbanized modernity as an elsewhere that is also here, with all the tensions about
progress and nation, about whether Spain is as modern as the rest of Europe, that such
understandings of accented alterity tend to produce.
In fact, even as it implies the modernity of direct connection with other places, the local-
ity implied by accent also stands to signify backwardness or a lack that is out of sync with
these ideals of the contemporary and the modern. According to Ana María Ochoa Gautier,
the normative sound of voice is reified by intellectual elites’ norms of pronunciation and
rhetoric, and can be heard as an indicator of class, education, and overall social position
(14). Not just in Borrás’s play, but in the political realm of early radio broadcasting, this
aurality of class emerges in an incipient industry in which no normative voice has yet been
established. Thus, Manuel Azaña complained about the radio performances of his Republi-
can counterparts by producing a typology of accent and delivery, as Paul Aubert explains:

a su parecer [al de Azaña] . . . [Álvaro de] Albornoz “tiene un acento asturiano muy
marcado, y entona una salmodia con altos y bajos en los timbres que se suceden . . .
sin ninguna relación con la importancia de la palabra correspondiente.” . . . Encuentra
a Luis Jiménez de Asúa “pedantísimo y en suma superficial. ¡Qué tono, qué apostura!,
¡qué modo de triplicar las erres!” A propósito de Alcalá Zamora, apunta: “Lo sub-
lime y lo ridículo andan revueltos en su acento y en su aspiración. (Aubert 525–26)
it seems to him [Azaña] . . . [that Álvaro de] Albornoz “has a very strong Asturian
accent, and sings a chant with high and low timbres that occur . . . without any rela-
tion to the importance of the corresponding word.” . . . He finds Luis Jiménez de Asúa
“very pedantic and, in short, superficial. What a tone! What elegance! What a way of
trilling his Rs!” The sublime and the ridiculous are turned upside down in his accent
and his breathing.

Commenting on the sound of politicians’ accents thus becomes a critique of their politics,
but more importantly, these sounds indicate the need for acoustic training that signals how
far the voice still had to go to reach the imagined modernity that was tied to lettered ideals
of rhetorical performance. Azaña’s critique affirms lettered norms of language as a sign of
intellectual superiority that must be preserved despite radio’s seeming freedom to record
sounds as they are.
The accents portrayed by Borrás and Azaña, like the chisporroteos of the gramophone,
draw our ear to the fact that the soundscapes of radio are never smooth. Rather, they
are marked by interferences and foreign sounds perceived as noise but that form part of

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modernity’s geography. At the same time, these nodules of interference by other spaces and
times into the listener’s space call attention to the expansiveness of the stereophonic ear
that can only be partially channelized into the immediate space or time of its production or
reception, or by its mode of transmission. Each moment of hearing sound instead creates
what Wai Chee Dimock describes as fractal, tangled relationships in which “the gnarled
contours of the globe [loop] through the gnarled contours of every single node” (78). This
is the stereophonic soundscape of modernity that develops in the early years of radio, but
it is a soundscape produced by an aural imaginary with a wider geography and temporality
than its immediate material conditions of production might suggest.
The bumpy, rough soundscapes of modernity that move through Spanish everyday aural
imaginaries ebb and flow throughout the century, notwithstanding the political circum-
stances that change radically from the Republic to the dictatorship to democracy. Radio
played a role in making those imaginaries audible, but radio is itself a reflection of other
media, everyday speech, lettered discourse, and normative and rebellious visual and rhe-
torical practices, both local and national, that have converged in numerous ways to shape
Spain’s stereophonic auditory culture. There is more work to do to open our ears to these
cultural expressions and, especially, to the transnational, stereophonic relationships that
shape them, and which they in turn have shaped.

Notes
1 Greguerías were short, aphoristic statements that Ramón summarized as “Metáfora +
Humor = Greguería.”
2 The first Madrid station to broadcast was Radio Ibérica (1924), which was acquired by Unión
Radio Madrid in 1927, which in turn became Cadena SER after the war. By the end of 1924,
Madrid had Radio Ibérica and Radio España, Barcelona had Radio Barcelona, and Sevilla had
Radio Club Sevillano. By 1932, every major city in Spain was licensed by the government to have
a station with a 30-km radius.
3 All translations are my own unless noted otherwise.
4 Three years earlier, Radio Barcelona had broadcast the sounds of the Les Caramelles singers
performing traditional Catalan music in the Plaça de San Jaume on Holy Saturday (Díaz 99), an
instance of recording outside the studio they would repeat a few months later, but Ramón inau-
gurated the notion of reportage from the street.
5 See his Historia de la radio en España.
6 On the soundscape, see Schafer.
7 As much as this last character is humorous, the awe at traversing space through sound recalls the
Mexican estridentista poetry that also marvels at the radio. Maples Arce’s “T.S.H.: el poema de la
radiofonía” (“T.S.H.,” 1923), Arqueles Vela’s “El hombre antena” (“Antenna Man,” 1923), and
Kyn Taniya’s “Radio: poema inalámbrico en trece mensajes” (“Radio: Wireless Poem in Thirteen
Messages,” 1924) all invoked the “telefonía sin hilos” that allowed listeners to communicate with
worlds beyond their own. Even before that, César Vallejo’s Trilce and Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor
followed the futurist credo by inscribing noise and sound into the destabilization of poetic lan-
guage. See Gallo.
8 See Fernández Sande and Adami for more on the early relationship between radio and print.
9 By comparison, during the Republic, there were thirty newspapers in Madrid, but only six of them
reached a distribution greater than 100,000 (“El Portal”).
10 Similar discussions on the artistic possibility (or its limits) of technology were taking place among
film and literary critics outside Spain. Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, for example, had introduced
the notion of the kino-eye, which implied that the camera could see society in ways that previous
art forms had not. He later attempted to produce a kino-ear that would do the same with sound.
In French cinematic circles, debates raged on whether the introduction of sound and its attempts
at realist cinéma pur had diminished film’s visual potential as a new art form. Could sound be

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aesthetic, like music, or was it consigned to mimetism, or the narrative role it had acquired in
Hollywood? See Bordwell.
11 For example, we may think of his clucking like a chicken during the only known recording of one
of these types of performances, “El orador” (The Orator).
12 See, for example, Rubén Gallo’s article on estridentismo, “Poesía sin hilos: Radio y vanguardia.”
13 The poem was dedicated to Rodó and reflected the recognition that hispanismo was inscribed in
a new Atlantic geography, in which Latin America’s greatest threat was not Spain, but the United
States.
14 See Faxedas Brujats.
15 Borrás had worked as a war reporter in Morocco in the 1920s but also wrote zarzuelas and
worked for the conversative newspaper ABC. Under Franco he created the Sindicato Nacional del
Espectáculo and nationalized the Teatro Español.
16 I am referring here to Dimock’s concept of fractals: “Fractals is the geometry of the irregular and
the microscopic, what gets lost in a big picture,” even as these irregularities, as “pits and pocks,”
are “threaded throughout the world, in infinite extension and infinite regress” (77). The geo-
graphical movement of sound toward, in, and through modernity, I am arguing, follows a similar
shape in radio’s development.
17 In an attempt to produce a close-listening of the play, I have transcribed all dialogue from its
radiophonic reproduction in 2010 by RTVE. That being the case, I do not include page numbers
in the citations. Moreover, knowing that what I listened to is not a recording of the original per-
formance, I have also not assumed that the sound effects are necessarily identical to how they were
performed in 1930.
18 For further exploration of this idea, see also his work Sound.
19 In a nod to the importance of the quotidian in the development of mediatic sound, it is worth
noting that, according to Nelson Orringer, Stravinsky’s debut in Spain came during a puppet show
held for a children’s birthday party at Lorca’s house.

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 42
LANDSCAPE AS EVENT
Geometrics and Geopoetics in Contemporary
Spanish Cinema

Steven Marsh

My aim in this chapter is to conceptualize landscape in Spanish film as a destabilizing ele-

ment of national, regional, or even transnational cinema. With a handful of exceptions,
critical writing on cinema in Spain has largely overlooked the distinctive properties of film
in shaping our perception of landscape. While Patricia Keller’s recent and important book,
Ghostly Landscapes: Film, Photography and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contemporary
Spanish Culture (2016), has gone some way towards remedying this and there has been
a considerable amount of writing on “the rural,” the attention paid to landscape films in
Spanish cinema is often more concerned with thematic questions than formal ones. There
is, however, a long tradition of films that focus on the land and nature, something particu-
larly resonant today with the phenomenon of “la España vaciada” (“The Emptied Spain”),
the plight of Spain’s rural hinterland, as a social, political and cultural trope. Indeed, one
of the most pressing issues in the contemporary national discourse of recent decades has
been the systematic depopulation of the Spanish countryside as employment possibilities in
the cities have beckoned and the birthrate has plummeted.
My interest here, however, is slightly different. First and foremost, I center on the rela-
tion between different dimensional spaces as they are determined by the screen itself with
respect to landscape to examine questions of range and scale within mise-en-scène. Art
history (as Octavian Esanu has pointed out) has established a division between “horizontal-
ity,” the spatial expanse of landscape and “verticality” in which the figure (usually but not
always a human being) has a presence (at times an interruptive presence) in landscape. Tom
Gunning adds a useful third dimension to these criteria. Gunning writes of the pre-history
of landscape in the following terms: “Placing a view of nature within a frame, fixing that
view within a geometrical frame of reference, defined landscape as an art form. A frame
that organizes a composition geometrically, while simultaneously opening a view into a
depth – this describes the double aspects of the landscape” (Cinema and Landscape 33).
While Gunning’s interest is primarily on the relationship between landscape and technology
in early US cinema, I want to build on this insight regarding form to analyze three recent
Spanish films in which landscape figures in prominent, though different, ways.
In each of the films I will discuss in this chapter landscape is the subject rather than a
mere stage against or within which human activity is played out or the action of the film

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-48
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

is situated, though that is unquestionably a part of the philosophical, phenomenological

allure of landscape. Having emerged in the pictorial tradition with modernity – character-
ized by a fascination with the individual as subject, and its relation to nature – landscape
reaches its representational pinnacle during the nineteenth century with Romanticism. In
film, perhaps unsurprisingly, entire genres have been molded around landscape as theme,
although, as Sam Rohdie has observed, unlike painting there is no recognized genre called
“landscape film.” That said, the mid-twentieth-century Western is the paradigmatic exam-
ple of such a genre. The Western is clearly bound up with the ideology of nation (that of the
United States), the pioneering spirit of individual survival in a hostile context, the opening
of frontiers, and, of course, with battling adversaries (and eradicating them).1 While this is
the legacy of cineastes like John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, or Anthony Mann, the evocative,
memorializing aspects of landscape, particularly as they engage with the passage of time,
have served the creative documentaries of experimental filmmakers like James Benning (a
major influence on certain contemporary Spanish filmmakers such as the collective Los
Hijos, Lois Patiño, or Ramón Lluís Bande, among others).2 Landscape, as Keller empha-
sizes, is shaped by and imbued with, questions of memory and loss and Spain provides a
poignant location for that sense of loss that – in the wake of the Civil War and its after-
math – tinges the country’s historical markers, the traces of an absent object (“Lois Patiño’s
Landscapes”, 122). However, while each of the films discussed in this chapter has death at
its center, only one of them turns, in any explicit sense, on questions of national discourse.
Landscape as shown in these films is expansive, seemingly endless, boundless. Charged
with a distinctive force, landscape is ambivalent, yet it is also clearly defined. It is framed.
Its claims to be a site of pure and pristine nature are belied by the fact of its framing. It
only becomes landscape when its boundaries are marked out, when it is brought into exist-
ence by sight.3 Its hues and shades, outcrops, promontories, and panoramas are defined
by vision. That said, the tension between being produced by visuality and its ominous and
sinister, awe-inspiring and sublime quality make it enigmatic. In each of the three films
analyzed here, landscape figures as seemingly at odds with the historical encounter or the
cartographical impulse; as a visual riposte in the face of the seemingly inexorable passage
of time, but also, as we will see in the discussion of La isla mínima (Marshland; dir. Alberto
Rodríguez, 2014) as a palimpsest, an uncanny repository of “the already there.”4
One important aspect of landscape and film concerns mediation, the mediating encoun-
ter with bodily perception. Landscape commands our attention; it is affecting, an unfolding
locus at the heart of a Deleuzian flow of intensities, that the spectator in complex, multiple
ways absorbs, is absorbed by, and embodies; this flow is often between surface space and
depth, between the body and its surroundings, between bodies, or, indeed, between the
filmic apparatus and the images it produces. If film is projected on what Giuliana Bruno has
called a “screen membrane” (5) then there is a suggestive somatic encounter between the
experience of watching landscape on film and the spatial configuration within the diegesis
itself, the geometric dimension to which Gunning refers in his text as an encounter between
geometrics and geopoetics (33).
In the Introduction to their collective volume Cinema and Landscape (2010), Graeme
Harper and Jonathan Rayner write that the “isolation of the film auteur as solitary
map-maker for cinematic landscape may be particularly prevalent and tempting within
national cinema contexts” (22). Harper and Rayner are writing from a different perspective
and with a broader scope than my own, but their association of the practice of filmmaking
to that of map-making is telling. In at least two of the films discussed in this chapter a kind

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of spatial loss is experienced, a disorientation within landscape. Mimosas (dir. Óliver Laxe,
2016) is a feature which sees a group of travelers desperately searching for a route across a
seemingly impenetrable mountain range. La isla mínima depicts two outsiders navigating a
maze of wetlands amid tectonic changes in the social and political order. Slightly differently
(though arguably still a form of cartography), Lois Patiño’s observational documentary
about the Galician coastal region, Costa da Morte (Coast of Death; 2013), in northwest-
ern Spain posits a contradictory relation – at once conflictual and collaborative – between
humans and nature that involves traversing the perilously narrow conduit dividing life from
death.
I want in this chapter to consider unmapped space, and from there to think of landscape
as event. By event I mean landscape as defined as a configuration standing at odds with
historical circumstance, human experience, or narrative or, for that matter, with setting,
character, or plot. I want to think of landscape as the source of disturbance rather than a
merely representational element, in which nature and image encounter one another. Both
landscape and film share the use of terms such as range and scale. Framing and visuality
are key elements of both. What I am interested in here is the relation between land and
screen, the archive and the substrate; I seek to engage with disturbed topographies and
with the poetics of landscape. Landscape, which is often associated with surface and silhou-
ettes, with the horizon and with hodological space, is also marked by hidden mystery and
secrecy. Landscape goes to the heart of complex questions regarding distance and spacing,
the measure that constitutes a poetics. Commencing with a discussion of a film shot outside
of Spain and finishing with one that provides a visual critique of the underbelly of official
national discourse, this chapter thinks of landscape not as the essence of Spain but as its
disruptive other.

Mimosas (2016)
Óliver Laxe’s second feature, Mimosas, is a film situated at the juncture of formal rigor – that
determined by the genre film (Western, exploration, or adventure film) – and the ineffable,
its tone shaped by poetry, the sacred, and the mystical. Laxe himself has commented on
the film that “more than religious or spiritual, it is a metaphysical Western” (quoted in El
País). The doubled quality – and ambiguity – of Mimosas is reflected in the diegesis of the
film itself, in what Jordi Costa in his review for El País has described as “two communicat-
ing universes”: a thwarted meandering journey through the mountains led by a sheik who
plans to die in the ancient city of his birth and a modern city teeming with fast-moving
cars and unscrupulous schemers. Each element of this structure plays off the other (dif-
ferent times, different spaces), each inflects and refracts in ways that poetically remain
unresolved. The poetry itself is reinforced by the use primarily of non-professional actors,
whose earthy naturalism counterbalances the film’s striving for spiritual lyricism. This is a
film, however, whose most disturbing feature is the absence of identified place. Its indeter-
minate, in-between route – en tránsito, as it were – conditions its narrative. Even the one
named destination of the travelers who populate the film (at least initially) is bound up in
the archaic.
Two early scenes are crosscut. The aging sheik, who leads a caravan of family members
and aides on horseback with their accompanying pack mules, proposes that the group trav-
erse the mountain range that rises before them. The shortcut is regarded by his entourage
with foreboding. Visually imposing, landscape here is anything but quaintly picturesque.

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Paralleling this sequence, alternating within the diegesis, the second narrative component
inserts itself. An urban taxi impresario assigns vehicles to potential drivers. A short distance
from where the car keys are dispensed, Shakib, a young would-be preacher, delivers a ser-
mon to a group of men gathered around him. To the chagrin of the others awaiting a car,
Shakib is sought out and selected to drive a taxi. Before long, the two narrative components
will awkwardly converge.
Though shot in Morocco, the country is never mentioned in Mimosas. It is an anonymity
which adds a level of density to the enigma of the landscape itself.5 In this film landscape
functions as, to employ W. J. T. Mitchell’s term, a medium, within which discourses and cul-
tures encounter one another and interact. In the play of space, placelessness predominates
and contributes to the sense of disorientation felt not only by the characters but also by the
spectators. Premised initially on the desire of the ailing sheik to return, in a race against
time, to die in the city of his birth, a city that is indeed named, Sijilmasa, and yet whose
place-name is rendered mythical. Sijilmasa, the medieval citadel, once a major staging point
in trans-Saharan commercial trade, today lies in ruins and is shrouded in legends. This film,
apparently about a destination, transpires also to be about an origin. Significantly, Sijilmasa
is a destination that is never reached. In spite of the association of the ancient city with trad-
ing routes, Mimosas is notable for the absence of maps. Its protagonists fumble their way
along goat paths, through perilous gorges, and live in constant fear of attack by bandits.
They wade through snow drifts and precipitate down ravines, lost in the mountain range
into which they have ventured, and which will consume them. They are trapped, frustrated
in their trajectory, adrift in a passage to nowhere, absorbed by the landscape itself.
Just as this unmapped landscape is placeless (as the country is unnamed) it is also
strangely timeless. Mimosas is located at certain moments in the contemporary (the taxis
that race at high speed across the desert flats), while at others, it is thrust into a medieval
maelstrom, (such as when Shakib on horseback raises his sword and commits to battle).
Jeannette Catsoulis’ review in the New York Times describes time in Mimosas as “unreli-
able.” The paradox is produced and intensified in the urgency prompted by the sheik’s
impending death and the attempt to defeat time by cutting through the mountain space.
The two narratives (seemingly belonging to different times or epochs) not only shape the
film’s contradictory rhythms but also produce instances of confusion that deprive tempo-
rality of its teleology, that transport it seamlessly from one time to another. The sheik’s
wish to return to his origins conjures up a ghostly, suggestive gesture to an archaic past to
which Shakib (whose combination of the modern and the mystic straddles both worlds)
also resorts. Part of this contradiction lies in the fact that the film emerges from the slack of
time, in the lag produced by the two entwined narratives. It is the product of the ambiguity,
the collapse even, dividing origin and destination.
Gunning’s geometrics capture the division between the horizontal and vertical axes of
Mimosas’ filming. These vectors are hinted at in the first shot of the sheik and his entou-
rage as they pause on the desolate stretch of land facing the distant mountain expanse.
The group’s venturing deep into the unfamiliar landscape reaffirms Gunning’s observation.
Elsewhere in the film, the flat plains of the desert contrast with the series of ascents and
descents through the gorges of the imposing and impenetrable mountains. The presence of
the apprentice mystic Shakib connects both this horizontal-vertical geography and the two
narrative strains, hitherto paralleling one another. Shakib who has been dispatched on a
mission to ensure the safe passage of the sheik travels by car. He is a quirky, esoteric mes-
senger from one universe, the modern and the urban, dispatched to the other, the archaic.

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He is part angel, part idiot (Laxe describes him as belonging to the tradition of “wise
fools” to be found in Dostoevsky or a strain of Iranian poetry)6 who emerges from amid
the rocks on the horizon to reveal himself to the sheik’s group. Henceforth, Shakib assumes
the role as spiritual and terrestrial guide and in both regards proves susceptible to chance
and misfortune.
Landscape in this film defamiliarizes location and temporality. When early in the moun-
tain trek the sheik dies, his wife insists that his lifeless body be transported to its original
destination. Shakib’s appearance occurs shortly before the sheik’s death, and, on joining
the group, he soon teams up with the two other key characters of the film. The roguish
Ahmed whom Shakib has been commissioned “to take care of,” and who had previously
been reluctant to embark on the dangerous cross-mountain passage, changes his mind and,
together with his sidekick Said, agrees to undertake the task. Shakib joins them. Through-
out the journey Shakib’s spiritual instructions vie with apparently arbitrary instances of
pure chance or the idiosyncrasies of nature. Shakib’s positioning in Mimosas – as we have
seen, he is a kind of “holy fool” – fits within the film’s quasi-religious aura, its transcenden-
tal quality, as suggested by its formal structure. Each of the film’s three parts are signaled
by inserted titles – black lettering against white background – corresponding to the three
positions of Islamic prayer (bowing, standing, prostration) as if to confirm the critical defi-
nition of the film as a “Sufi Western” (Glassman).
Significantly in this respect is the idea of “passage.” Jean-Luc Nancy (also quoted by Kel-
ler) writes, “A landscape is always the suspension of a passage, and this passage occurs as a
separation, an emptying out of the scene or of being: not even a passage from one point to
another or from one moment to another but the step [le pas] of the opening itself” (Nancy
61, Keller “Lois Patiño’s Landscapes, 117). The “suspension of a passage” that Nancy refers
to here is a spacing, the aporetic spacing that characterizes the thought of deconstruction:
A temporalization of space, a spatialization of time, an opening, is also a kind of sacred
space. It is significant that these are travelers – outsiders – guided by instinct, intuition,
pure faith. As much lyrical as religious, the film’s register, molded by uncharted movement
through landscape, is that of a kind of geopoetics which sees the fusion of the temporal
with the intemporal, location and dislocation; a de-sublimination of the sublime rather than
a reaffirmation of it. This process of undoing the sublime reaches a crescendo in the final
section of the film. Ahmed, his friend Said murdered, the woman who accompanies them,
Ikram captured, and abandoned by Shakib on the fringes of the desert, buries the sheik. In
a series of long objective takes, Ahmed silhouetted against the landscape crosses the sandy
expanse towards the mountain as dusk falls. Two brief discrete – and subjective – shots, in
Ahmed’s flickering memory recall Said and the mute woman Ikram who joined the group
midway through their journey. It is a moment of bathos, an elegiac, elliptical sequence that
ends with a fade to white and the commencement of Mimosas’ third part, that of “Prostra-
tion” of the Rak’ah, the ritual of Islamic prayer. Ahmed makes a violent return to earthy
reality and contemporaneity as he regains consciousness, a crowd gathered around him,
having been struck by a car in a modern city. His stunned, semi-conscious reverie is punc-
tuated by inserts of desert solitude and the repetition of the earlier sequence of high-speed
cars traversing the desolate plains in a mobile panorama of desert, mountains and clouds.
Shakib reappears, this time on horseback, a sword at his side, and in a long tracking shot,
we accompany them as the two men gallop towards a fictitious destination. Shakib’s voice
in off describes the city of Sijilmasa, one that corresponds in its fantastical detail to Mimo-
sas’ introductory images discussed below. The film collapses into oneiric delirium as real

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time converges with the phantasmagoria of Ahmed’s dazed condition. We are, once more,
transported back into the mists of time. This kind of indeterminacy prevails in the film, cre-
ating a space of ambiguity where the virtual meets the actual, between the vertical and the
horizontal, between the contemporaneous and the archaic, between origin and destination,
between the material and the spiritual.
Although the film does not appear to be part of the pictorial tradition of landscape, the
first shots of the film – the credit sequence – are of a painting, a mural on the wall of a
building, divided by a doorway, as if to usher us in to the landscape that follows. To the
left it depicts a medieval city; a tower adorns the door itself. To the right is a sharp-ridged
mountain jagged against the blue sky. A spread of greenery extends from the base of the
mountain. The shadow of an actual tree is cast on the mural, the sway of its leaves and
branches in the breeze providing the only movement in the shot. While “reality” seemingly
impinges on representation, both the shadow and the sound are salutary reminders that
everything on-screen is representational. The defects in the masonry, the decay resulting
from the passage of time and the weather, that in the city are integrated in the representa-
tion itself, in the mountain section of the mural are clear material flaws. A second shot of
the painting focuses on the city itself; a third details a waterfall not visible in the initial
shot. Finally, a close-up of snow-capped peaks rising above and behind the foothills. The
gentle murmur of urban life provides the soundscape. The screen fades to black before
reopening with a medium shot of Said adjusting his turban. Although very different films,
the introductory sequence of Mimosas has something in common with La isla mínima
(discussed subsequently). There is a link in both films between visual representation and
defamiliarization through landscape. Both films deploy distinct artistic forms (painting
and still photography) in a slightly different use of the word medium from my previous
employment of it, here meant as an intermediary and intermedial field rather than a genre
(to recall my earlier use following Mitchell, landscape featured as a kind of medium that
complicates the conventions of those film genres, like the Western, that have come to
define it). Key to this slippage between and within media, and between different virtuali-
ties, is landscape itself.
As a coda to this section, I want now to turn briefly to another film by British experimen-
tal filmmaker Ben Rivers. The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are
Not Brothers (2015) extends the element of intermediality to directly engage with Laxe’s
film. It commences as a kind of “making of” Mimosas by filming the shoot of the latter film
with documentary veracity before it slides into a loose adaptation of Paul Bowles’ 1947
short story “A Distant Episode,” in which Laxe himself is the lead actor (he is kidnapped
during a break in filming). Bowles’ story is a violent fable about an innocent, arrogant
westerner who misunderstands Morocco and underestimates its dangers. Rivers, who (in
collaboration with Ben Russell) has a background in ethnographic filmmaking, produces
what becomes a kind of “trance” film, a ghostly, shadow intervention in Mimosas on the
mystery of what might have been amid the menacing landscape of Laxe’s film; a dialogue
between two films lost in the same landscape. The final shot of The Sky Trembles and the
Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers brings the disparate elements of the
film together in the image of Laxe fleeing, antick and crazed, into the desert, attired in
the tin can suit his captors have forced him to wear, the sun setting against the plains, his
silhouette framed in the dusk. It is an image of the encounter of the individual with and
within the landscape.

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Costa da Morte (2013)

Lois Patiño’s work is also distinguished by the intermedial in both of the senses to which
I previously alluded, in its use of multiple media and the presence of intertextual material
in the diegesis. The son of two painters, visual, pictorial, and video art have long influenced
Patiño the filmmaker. My interest though in this section is to prise apart place, space, and
the practice of filmmaking. The title of his 2013 Costa da Morte, the name of the northern
coastline of the Galicia it depicts, generates a series of questions. The title of the film and the
place itself register limits: Geographical limits and those that mark the boundaries between
life and death.7 Costa da Morte begins with an affirmative epigraph, whose sentiments the
film arguably undoes, in its citing of the words of the celebrated early twentieth-century
Galician nationalist Alfonso Castelao: “Nun entrar do home na paisaxe e da paisaxe no
home creouse a vida eterna de Galiza” (“Upon entering man in landscape and landscape
in man the eternal life of Galicia was created”). In this section I want to consider contra
Castelao, spacing as a disturbance of this kind of identification of landscape with place.
Costa da Morte is a film that complicates what Mitchell, following (in their very dif-
ferent ways) Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, calls a “conceptual triad” between
place (Galicia), space (the practice of filming place), and landscape (as an imaginary).8 The
naming of the film, its placing, has an antecedent in Deseret, Benning’s 1995 landscape
film (“Deseret” was the name that the Mormons gave Utah). Costa da Morte is also a film
about frontiers: Geopolitical frontiers (Galicia borders with Portugal), the limits of the
pre-modern world (Finisterre [Fisterra], Spain’s western-most point and the ancient end of
the world), as well as physical ones; those that mark out the land from the sea, the break-
waters, the shoreline that dominates the images of the film, with its tidal ebbs and flows.
However, these limits are impinged upon by the region’s famed rías, the deep-water chan-
nels that stretch inland from the ocean. They are zones of ambiguity, the sea’s penetration
of the land, the blurring of the limits of interiority and exteriority. Observational and often
contemplative, Costa da Morte in its composition, framing, and its photography registers
the spatial apertures, the intervals, the breaches in the continuum of landscape.
Keller notes the presence of a figure adjacent to the landscapes in several of Patiño’s
previous shorts and in his video work, and while the sequences of Costa da Morte are often
populated albeit sparsely, the film’s primary focus is the landscape itself (“Lois Patiño’s
Landscapes” 105–106). The film has no narration and follows no discernible plot. It con-
sists of a set of sequences of approximately the same duration linked by the region itself,
the sea that delimits it, and the land formations of its environs. It is a film defined by its
formal properties. The word “observational” that I used earlier to describe it stresses its
visual quality. While the imaginary of the landscape is defined by offscreen space, the sound
of waves, seagulls, the wind, and rushing water, the onscreen space that shapes the actuality
of landscape is marked by the “scopic regime,” by sight, by what is captured in a “view”
(the “viewfinder” is a component of the camera). In this sense, landscape is emphatically
not synonymous with nature. It only garners meaning as a visual or a textual (or better still,
a textural) concept; that is, as culture.
For clear logistical reasons Patiño films from a distance. His cinematography is marked
by the breadth of its scale and its depth of field. Perhaps the most dramatic moment in
Costa da Morte is the trepidatious four-minute percebeiros or barnacle picker sequence. As
with almost all the sequences, this is a long take, shot from a slightly elevated angle above
the action that moves slowly to frame the intensity of the natural drama ongoing before the

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camera. The sequence commences with a shot of a single silhouetted figure in a wetsuit. The
importance of the aural in the creation of landscape is confirmed by the sound of the sea,
the roar of the waves against the rocks, and the wind, gradually replaced by the recorded
eerie horn music that periodically infiltrates the natural diegetic soundscape. The images
of the team of percebeiros camouflaged against the rocks as they huddle in the face of the
onslaught of the waves, their insect-like figures caught in the backlight, as part of landscape
itself, scurrying and scrambling across the rocks. Its drama is further underscored by the
churning and swirling undercurrents, the foam streaming in rivulets down the crevices of
the dark stones.
The incidental choreography of the movement of the men and the flow of the sea takes
place within the scope of the wide-angle camerawork and the profound focus that defines
the filmic space, the geometry carved out that produces the landscape amid the continuum
of place, the cacophony of sonic elements, or the profilmic event. The drama of the sequence
is in the configuration of the space, the ongoing differentiation of space produced by the
filming, by the camera itself, in its broad unmoving capture of space – its parceling-off of
a segment of enclosed space, space enclosed in the framing – and by the uninterrupted
duration of the shot that spatializes time. The distance of the camera, the apparatus that
frames the landscape draws attention to itself and points to landscape as constructed rather
than simply being a slice of nature. To employ Mitchell’s words, the camera is used “to
draw out by drawing back” (viii). In this context the sound structure in this sequence and
elsewhere in La Costa da Morte is once more important. In a film that foregrounds the
natural, sound functions as acoustic seepage, pointing up the contradictions of its claims to
naturalistic verisimilitude and the manipulations of the editing room. The tensions between
the profilmic and the finished film are evidenced by the fact that conversations of the
shellfish-gathering women of an early sequence – one of several purportedly ethnographic
moments – were dubbed during the post-production phase. The necessary distance required
to produce the visual track made live audio recording of the dialogue impossible.
Costa de Morte is configured by the encroachments of the coast inland and the intensi-
ties of the encounters between the sea and the land, the mists that enshroud the forest, and
what the mountain caves conceal. History is present (the ecological disaster provoked by
the shipwrecked oil tanker Prestige in 2002, the Spanish Civil War, the stories of German
submarines in the Galician rías during World War II) though not situated at the center of
this film. It – history – emerges spectrally as inflection, part of the atmospherics of the film,
as apocrypha, rumor, haunted memories and ghostly places. Likewise with death, with the
tales of corpses originating in Portugal carried north by the sea currents and washed up
on the shores of Galicia, offering allusive histories of emigration, of absences, disappear-
ances at sea, the past present only as trace. Filmic technology captures the tidal forces, the
unpredictable flows of energy, in a poetic saturation of the littoral, a symphonic framing
whose edges are defined by the lens of the camera, the aperture that simultaneously opens
and encloses, and the incidental soundtrack – the sound design – that accompanies it: the
scraps of dialogue, the acoustic shards of the wind and the waves hanging in the air, elusive
in the breeze. Landscape, as we have seen throughout this section, is also a soundscape.
Serge Daney writes the following on Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Too Early,
Too Late (1981), a key film in the history of landscape cinema:

If there is an actor in TOO EARLY, TOO LATE, it’s the landscape. This actor has a
text to recite: History (the peasants who resist, the land which remains), of which it is

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the living witness. The actor performs with a certain amount of talent: the cloud that
passes, a breaking loose of birds, a bouquet of trees bent by the wind, a break in the
clouds; this is what the landscape’s performance consists of. This kind of performing
is meteorological.
(Serge Daney [quoted and translated by Jonathan Rosenbaum])

While Too Early, Too Late is notable for the absence of people, the human presence in
Costa da Morte is very often (though not exclusively) limited to workers carrying out their
daily tasks. Labor practices are defined by the spatial fluctuations in the measurement of
time, by the working day that landscape distorts, manipulates, extends, and compresses.
Landscape and labor are thus both brought unnervingly into focus in the framing of time
and of space. Costa da Morte is bookended by similar shots of two moments of what is
seemingly the same group of women scouring for shellfish at different times of the day (the
beginning and the end, at dawn and at dusk). The overwhelming sense transmitted by this
film is of an uneasy relationship with the landscape. Landscape, the film suggests, is a site
not only of the visual but also of labor. Once again, as in Mimosas and contrary to com-
mon perception, the force of landscape lies in its capacity, not to conform but to unsettle.

La Isla Mínima (2014)

The presence of workers in Costa da Morte is paradoxically more pronounced and yet less
present in the historical palimpsest that underlies La isla mínima. A labor dispute over the
wages of the temporary farmworkers hired for the harvesting season provides the backdrop
to the events of the film. Nonetheless, the film is driven by its detective story plot. The dra-
matic structure of the film, in a sense, is produced by the tension between the conventional
narrative arc of mainstream genre film and the landscape of its location.
If not knowing, being unable to fathom its hidden depths characterizes the uncanniness
that, according to Nancy, distinguishes landscape, then the detective story genre presents a
productive contradiction. The police procedural always concerns the pursuit of knowledge,
the seeking out and revealing of what has been concealed and yet, contrary to the linear
convention of the genre, La isla mínima commences with a rhizome, a detailed aerial shot
of the Doñana delta in a filmed reproduction of one of Hector Garrido’s photographs taken
from his book, Armonía fractal de Doñana y las marismas (2008). Other instances of Gar-
rido’s work feature in the film and photography both formally and diegetically is, as Tom
Whittaker has highlighted, an important element in La isla mínima. This is the Doñana
national park, the location for Rodríguez’s commercially successful and critically acclaimed
film. The title of Garrido’s book is interesting in its use of paradox. While a fractal implies
a complex aesthetic design, it also suggests disharmony and incompletion (fracture, frag-
ment), and endless reproduction. A sense of this aporia or problematic is there in the film’s
introductory sequences. The visual impact of its extraordinary initial sequence is discon-
certing. The first shot of the film scans the surface space of the landscape from above in
ways that are unfamiliar and unsettling for the spectator, unaware whether this is landscape
or that it is a place, a terrain. The series of aerial shots appear, at first sight, synthetic, like
radiographic images of the brain, with its lines of capillaries, arterial channels spreading
through tissue. A flock of birds filmed from above in a zenithal shot punctuates the line of
vision beneath the camera to interrupt and dispel the illusion. This “absolute” verticality
in the filming is followed by a ground level shot of birds in the sky from the point of view

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of one of two police detectives sent to investigate the disappearance (and, it transpires,
the murder) of teenaged girls, Juan Robles, a character associated with the enigmatic sym-
bolism of birds throughout the film. Behind him a wide-angle panoramic shot, as severe
as the previous vertical one, outlines the expanse of land and the unpaved road with the
detectives’ broken-down car center-frame set against the expanse of the fields and the flat-
ness of the Doñana wetlands. A dirt path – centered directly in the sights of the camera –
disappears over and into the horizon. It is a highly composed shot, one of nature deprived
of naturalism. The shot is labeled with a written on-screen date: September 20th, 1980. If
Costa da Morte is a toponym, whose very title identifies an eponymous albeit fluid location
that exceeds its own frontiers, and Mimosas takes place in an indeterminate mystical space,
the particularities of place and the geometrics of space are never more emphatically stressed
than in La Isla mínima. Furthermore, and unlike the other films, La isla mínima is framed
by and freighted with a specific historical charge.
Above and below: the vectors of this film are clearly and categorically defined –
vertical and horizontal – and they in turn define the parameters of the visual narrative and
the tensions between the visible surfaces and the unseen depths. The film exposes in its for-
mal method, the historical moment of putative reconciliation. The film and its investigation
depict an inhospitable community, a hostility towards outsiders, a suspicion and underlying
fear, the dirty secrets that characterized the Transition. These palimpsestic layers – historical
and material – underlie and perturb the action of the film. La isla mínima is framed by
the flatness of the landscape, by the expanse of the marshlands where the action takes
place. Yet beneath this surface strata a web of political intrigue, exploitation, and murder
is deposited in a quagmire – both as metaphor and reality – in the dank, festering, atavistic
exercise of power. The traces of the missing and murdered teenaged girls (their clothing and
possessions) are discovered beneath the surface of the land, abandoned in a well, the bodies
themselves, discovered later, are hauled from a ditch.
The two protagonists of La isla mínima (Juan Robles and Pedro Suárez) are Madrid
police detectives dispatched to the fringes of Andalucía for different punitive reasons (Pedro
in reprisal for a letter published in the press denouncing the anti-democratic conspiracies of
the military; Juan, for his past with the Francoist Brigada Político-Social, the dictatorship’s
brutal secret police unit, notorious for its use of torture). They have, in both instances,
been displaced against their will. They have been banished from the nation’s political and
geographical center to its margins. They too are situated – dislocated – at an odd angle, like
fractals, with regards the new regime within a particular landscape that is alien to them.
Here space and place form a dialectic in a locus that converges around the agents and
agency of the state. As in the Galicia of Costa da Morte, the margins of national space and
those between land and sea, are blurred by the estuary conditions. This is an area of contra-
band, where drugs (presumably from North Africa) are distributed from a vessel anchored
mid-stream in the river and only accessible by speedboat.
This angular, fractal-like positioning of the detectives in relation to the new regime
reflects the topography of the film. Located in the marshlands that spread out rhizom-
atically from the banks of the River Guadalquivir (the ground level of Garrido’s aerial
view), as in Mimosas, its protagonists are disoriented outsiders. Throughout the film they
blindly navigate the wetlands, fumbling through unmapped space. In the face of this regis-
ter of torpor, photography – the incontrovertible fact of visual evidence and, as previously
mentioned, the subject of Whittaker’s essay – instead of clarifying adds further confusion.
The inversion of the image discussed earlier of the birds filmed from above has its origin

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in a photograph, and that alone implies artificiality one that, in turn, belies the natural
setting – undoes “natural” beauty, the archaic condition of original or originary nature,
suggested by the shot of the gnarled, primaeval beak of the flamingo (in a reproduction of
another Garrido photograph). The close-up of the bird on the horizon – a jagged, primal
complement to the landscape – allusively conjures up other archaisms, such as the ancient
system of seasonal labor that survives to this day, a vestige of the feudalism that shapes (or
“scapes”) the surface of the land.
The sultry conditions in which the investigation is conducted finally break and give
way to the film’s denouement, to a deluge, a torrential rainstorm. In this, the culmina-
tion of the film, we are privy to a violent convergence of vegetational, meteorological,
and corporeal elements, bookended by man-made mechanical technology. The sequence
begins with a shot filmed from the interior of the policemen’s car of the rain ham-
mering on the windshield. There is a sense of confused claustrophobia as we glimpse,
from the point of view of the detectives, the shadowy figures in flickering liquidity,
through the glass outwards, as they approach the abandoned hunting lodge where the
suspect – Sebastián – has sought refuge. This is followed by a pursuit through the marsh-
land on foot (after their car has slid off the road into the mud) that involves crossing
an opening in the undergrowth where Jesús, the detectives’ local informant, is shot and
wounded by their invisible quarry (presumably Sebastián). A wide-angle shot captures
the expanse of space. The subsequent close and medium shots are of the individual
policemen, now separated, wading up to their waists in water through the forest of
reeds. The close shots of the two men – their hair plastered to their skulls, their clothes
drenched – emphasize the way the landscape has absorbed them, how they have become
part of the marsh itself, caked in the mud and the wetness of the rain, caught in the
flowing undercurrents. There is a collapse of any delineation between the exterior and
the interior, the land and water, the landscape and the body. To this sodden amorphous
mass of fluids Juan adds blood, his own (having been wounded by gunfire) and that of
Sebastián who he violently and repeatedly stabs in the abdomen with (the other suspect)
Quini’s knife before the detective finally casts his (Sebastián’s) lifeless body to a watery
grave in the churning spill of the weir.9
“¿Todo en orden?” (“Everything in order?”) says Juan to Pedro the morning of their
departure, the case solved (if not adequately resolved). The question is rhetorical. The night
before Pedro has seen photographic evidence of his partner’s past in the service of the dicta-
torship. As if to confirm Juan’s words (the reaffirmation of the old order irrespective of the
forensic proof or the superficial shifts in national political sensibilities), the film ends with
a panoramic – horizontal – shot of the detectives’ car as it departs through the neatly sym-
metrical, ordered, landscape scaped, fields being harvested by compliant farmworkers, their
labor dispute now settled at least for the season. The two policemen, one “democratic”
whose own violence required the intervention of his partner to restrain him, the other
associated with the murderous brutality of the dictatorship, end the film as uncomfortable
reproductive mirror images of each other, fractals of sorts. The irony of the final framed
images of the ordered landscape and those who work it undermines the formal resolution
of the police investigation. Likewise, the awkward relation – proximity and distance in
abeyance (like landscape itself) – between the two policemen constitutes what Deleuze and
Guattari call a “disjunctive synthesis” (12), a discordant and divergent encounter, just as
the closure of the conflicts of the Transition or the film’s narrative – for the purposes of
genre cinema – are rendered unsatisfactory.

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Conclusion
The complex, ill-fitting, even incompatible relation that the term “disjunctive synthesis”
evokes describes not only the partnership of Juan and Pedro in La isla mínima but also the
skewed relation of outside to place that emerges in different ways in the films discussed in
this chapter. Landscape is often associated with two ideas that of setting and that of the
sublime. The sublime (as I observe in an endnote), is etymologically connected to the word
“limit” that features so prominently in the earlier discussion of Costa da Morte. The limit,
the limen of the sublime, intensifies this sense of disjuncture in the frame of its filming,
within which the flows, the pulsations, the exchanges produced of the encounters between
persons and landscapes – delirium, bodily fluids, immanence, spirituality, working condi-
tions, crimes, politics, and historical shifts – take place and produce changes in each of their
interactions. In all three films landscape, rather than mere background, instantiates a pro-
cess of differentiation within which the action, the characters, or the narration are located.
One reason why landscape film is not more widely recognized as a genre is because of the
critical privilege habitually granted to narrative. In each of these films landscape presents
a challenge, a kind of deterritorialization of the disciplinary regimes of critique (to genre,
to character, to narrative) that conditions the films themselves to “reshape the conceptual
and material fabric of connectivity, relationships, pathways and institutions” (Beck and
Gleyzon 330), in a configuration that might be considered an event. The event is forged in
the destabilizing paradox of the unlimited ever-extending rhizome and the restraining frame
that curtails it geometrically and geopolitically, whose capture by filmic technology gives it
a singularly poetic intensity.
The cultural geographer and scholar of landscape, John Wylie, has written the following:

I would argue that the varying fields of landscape research could usefully pursue
an agenda in which landscape is understood in terms of a perpetual unsettling and
questioning of the senses of belonging, identification, connection and communion we
might associate with the term “homeland.”
(“A Landscape Cannot” 2)

Clearly this is a very different conceptualization of landscape to that of the traditional

Western film, which (despite the exceptions and in a variety of ways) sought to transmit
the idea of the North American pioneering spirit. Each of the films discussed in this chapter
concurs with Wylie’s notion of landscape as a process of disturbance (“Landscape can-
not” 3–4).
In this destabilization, Wylie refers to Derrida’s neologism ontopology, a combination
of onto and topos, being and place. Derrida critiques the axiom that connects belonging
with ethnicity, land, and nation. Questioning geographical, locational and historical attach-
ments, he posits that this “ontopology” is itself rooted in an originary displacement exac-
erbated by successive “tele-technic dis-location” (Specters of Marx 82), of which (though
Derrida makes no mention of it) film is just one of the more recent iterations. The particu-
larity of film is that it not only engages with different spaces (such as landscape), but that it
is itself a spatial technology that creates, generates spatial configurations (its framing makes
landscape), and it is in turn brought into material being by spatial technologies (the screen,
for example). “It is not only time that is ‘out of joint,’ ” Derrida writes, “but space, space
in time, spacing” (83).

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Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Patty Keller, Cristina Moreiras, Julián Gutiérrez Albilla, Teresa Vilarós,
Tatjana Gajic, and Jacques Lezra for their insightful comments on a previous and very
embryonic draft of this chapter.

Notes
1 The recent Nomadland (dir. Chloé Zhao, 2020) goes some way towards dispelling some of the
myths generated by the Western. More questionable perhaps is art history’s association of land-
scape with the West.
2 Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale (The Central Region) is another pioneering work of experi-
mental filming of landscape. One could add to this list the films of Abbas Kiarostami or those of
Nuri Bilge Ceylan. A very interesting example of the relationship between radical politics and land-
scape in cinema is the theory of fûkeiron (landscape theory) pioneered by the Japanese filmmaker
Masao Adachi.
3 Landscape is also indisputably defined by sound and what lies beyond the frame. My interest here,
though, is in visuality and the artifice of the frame.
4 I refer here in passing to the title of Michel de Certeau’s text “Ghosts in the City: The Uncanniness
of the ‘Already There.’ ”
5 Although this is not the place for such a critique, there is perhaps a veneer of orientalism in the
portrayal of the Arab “other” in both this film and Ben River’s The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is
Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, discussed later in this section. Arguably though these
films (and particular the latter) are, as The Guardian reviewer Peter Bradshaw suggests “opaque
essay film[s] on the nature of orientalism”.
6 See interview with Laxe conducted by Matthew Turner.
7 There is an etymological relation between the word “limit” and the word “sublime” (often associ-
ated with awe that landscape inspires). From the Latin limen, genitive liminis.
8 Mitchell’s, otherwise very useful “conceptual triad,” draws an analogy with Lacan’s formulation of
psychic development (Real-Symbolic-Imaginary) that I have opted not to follow here.
9 In the film Quini and Sebastián procure young girls for more powerful figures in the region. They
are low-level fall-guys in the conspiracy and subsequent cover up. The real perpetrators remain at
large.

Works Cited
Barker, Jess. “Alberto Rodríguez’s La isla mínima (2014): Visual Intertexts and Spain’s Ecosystem of
Violence.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 97, no. 6, 2020, pp. 615–634.
Beck, Christian, and François-Xavier Gleyzon. “Introduction: Deleuze and the Event(s).” Journal for
Cultural Research, vol. 20, no. 4, 2016, pp. 329–33.
Bradshaw, Peter. “Review: The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not
Brothers Review – Brutal Essay on Orientalism.” https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/
may/05/the-sky-trembles-and-the-earth-is-afraid-and-the-two-eyes-are-not-brothers-review-bruta
l-essay-on-orientalism.
Bruno, Guiliana. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago UP, 2014.
Catsoulis, Jeannette. “Review: In Mimosas, a Cryptic Mountain Trek.” The New York Times, 13 Apr.
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Christie, Ian. “Landscape and ‘Location’: Reading Filmic Space Historically.” Rethinking History,
vol. 4, no. 2, 2000, pp. 165–74.
Costa, Jordi. “Review: “El cielo protector,” El País, 12 Jan. 2017. https://elpais.com/cultura/2017/01/04/
actualidad/1483522007_261295.html. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.
Daney, Serge. “Cinemeteorology” [Serge Daney on Too Early, Too Late]. Translated by Jonathan Rosen-
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serge-daney-on-too-early-too-late/. Accessed 20 Jan. 2021.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Rob-
ert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane. U of Minnesota P, 1983/2000.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New Inter-
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fractal.blogspot.com. Accessed 26 Feb. 2021.
Glassman, Daniel. “Review: Mimosas,” Point of View Magazine, 15 Sept. 2016. https://povmagazine.
com/tiff-review-mimosas/. Accessed 22 Feb. 2021.
Harper Graeme and Jonathan Rayner, eds. Cinema and Landscape. Intellect, 2010.
Keller, Patricia. Ghostly Landscapes; Film, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contem-
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Keller, Patricia. “Lois Patiño’s Landscapes: Aura, Loss, Duration.” Abriu, vol. 7, 2017, pp. 101–24.
Lefebvre, Martin, ed. Landscape and Film. Routledge, 2006.
Mitchell, W. J. T., ed. Landscape and Power. Chicago UP, 1994/2002.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Ground of the Image, translated by Jeff Fort. Fordham UP, 2005.
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Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “On Too Early, Too Late.” 24 Nov. 2022. https://jonathanrosenbaum.
net/2022/11/on-too-early-too-late/. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.
Sitney Adams, P. “Landscape in the Cinema: The Rhythms of the World and the Camera.” Landscape,
Natural Beauty and the Arts (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts), edited by Salim
Kemal and Ivan Gaskell. Cambridge U P, 1993, pp. 103–26.
Turner, Matthew. “Interview: Oliver Laxe Talks Mimosas, Movies and MUBI,” VODzilla, 27
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Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.
Whittaker, Tom. “Crime, Knowledge and the Photographic Object in La isla mínima.” Hispanic
Research Journal, vol. 19, no. 1, 2018, pp. 41–54.
Wylie, John. Landscape. Routledge, 2007.
Wylie, John. “A Landscape Cannot Be a Homeland.” Landscape Research, vol. XX, no. X, 2016, 1–9.

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 43
INTIMATE WORLDS, PUBLIC
BATTLES
Gender, Agency, and Autonomy in
Contemporary Spanish Cinema

Sarah Thomas

Introduction
Spanish cinema’s historical gender imbalance is such a commonplace that it often goes
unremarked. This is particularly true concerning what might be considered mainstream
or “canonical” Spanish cinema, where, especially prior to the appearance of figures like
Josefina Molina or Pilar Miró, male filmmakers tend to dominate film histories and course
syllabi. In earlier periods, women were actively involved in technical roles like editing,
costume design or art direction. However, it is consistently shocking to the students in
my Spanish cinema course that – in part due to the constraints of digitization and the
course’s themes, but also because, as Sonia García López (“Miradas invisibles” 312) notes,
in Spain the women who directed feature films before Franco’s death can be counted on
one hand – we do not reach a female director until 1980, with Miró’s Gary Cooper, que
estás en los cielos (Gary Cooper, Who Art in Heaven), a film that thematizes this gender
disparity in its plot. My recent inclusion of Gary Cooper on this syllabus felt risky, as I was
unsure if students born at the turn of the millennium would connect to its subject matter:
The semi-autobiographical story of Andrea Soriano, a successful director who works for
Televisión Española and has just won an important award, but whose success has come at
a cost in the patriarchal society of Transition-era Spain. The protagonist’s personal life is in
shambles: She struggles to communicate with her boyfriend, a busy journalist covering the
political scene, not telling him that she is pregnant and needs to undergo life-threatening
emergency surgery. (This plot line itself reflects contemporaneous feminist debates, and it
is worth noting that women in Spain could not end pregnancies due to risk to maternal
life until the passage of a – still very conservative – abortion law five years after the film’s
release, in 1985.)
Much to my surprise, the film was a hit with my students. For a generation that came of
age in an ostensibly post-feminist era, where gender equality has supposedly been attained
(and who were scandalized by images of a workplace where Andrea is often the only woman
present, even if she is the boss), the film nonetheless struck a chord. This was undoubtedly
in part because the gender disparities it depicts persist well into the twenty-first century
and across national borders in often much more subtle – though no less pernicious – form.

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 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

(Indeed, not long after the last time I taught this class, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the
United States Supreme Court; much of the country had already seen its abortion access
curtailed to something not unlike Transitional Spain’s.) Miró’s film clearly touched an emo-
tional nerve with students, many of whose final projects focused on its nuanced portrait of
Andrea’s struggles to cope with fear, grief, and frustration in a moment of crisis.
This chapter takes as its focus these interrelated points, in two broad sections. In the
first, it addresses historical gender disparities in the Spanish film industry, as well as recent
efforts to remedy them, stressing the role of digital technologies of distribution, exposition,
activism and networking in democratizing visual culture, and the work of new generations
of female filmmakers in advocating for more balanced representation. In the second, it
analyzes how the intimate worlds of contemporary women’s cinema represent emotion,
everyday life and affective relationships, in two films focused – like Miró’s – on the gen-
dered experience of grief and the need to take stock of, and potentially change, one’s own
life: Mar Coll’s Tots volem el millor per a ella (We All Want What’s Best for Her, 2013) and
Celia Rico Clavellino’s Viaje al cuarto de una madre (Journey to a Mother’s Room, 2018).
These films not only serve as exemplars of contemporary cinema made by women filmmak-
ers; they also depict struggles against adversity and toward autonomy that run uncannily
parallel to the trajectories of women making cinema in the Spanish state today.

Women and Cinema

The question of how to define the genre of “women’s cinema” is one that has long challenged
feminist film critics. Drawing from predecessors including Elaine Showalter, Ruby Rich and
Icíar Bollaín, in the introduction to her eponymous 2013 edited volume, Barbara Zecchi
employs the term “gynocine” to address this challenge, framing the concept to include films
by women, for women, protagonized by women or showcasing women’s struggles or expe-
rience, as well as films with an explicitly feminist or anti-patriarchal bent (13–14). Zecchi
notes that, in contrast to other labels, this term is broader, more inclusive, and attentive to
multiple forms of difference; it is also categorized from a critical standpoint – the feminist
gaze of the critic who studies the cinema in question – rather than relying on a biological
or essentialist classification of the creators or subjects of the films themselves (Gynocine
14). Likewise, Zecchi notes that a gynocine approach moves away from the fundamentally
masculine construct of the auteur to consider films as “el producto de un equipo, y no de
una sola mente, resaltando así una presencia femenina en otras áreas aparte de la direc-
ción” (“the product of a team, and not a single mind, thus highlighting female presence
in other areas apart from direction”; 16). Gynocine extends beyond female auteur figures
who replicate patriarchal structures to include collaborative projects and women-centered
teams, in addition to films about and by women. This inclusive conceptualization echoes
what Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla and Parvati Nair – drawing from Claire Johnston’s
seminal “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema” – categorize thus: “Women’s cinema is not
predetermined or predetermining, in any sense, but it is the kind of filmmaking that arises
both from and in spite of the obliterating hegemony of patriarchal modes” (7).
Along these lines, in the introduction to Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting
Contemporary Feminisms, Patricia White notes that “the concept of women’s cinema has
animated three decades of feminist film scholarship even as, or quite likely because, its
parameters remain open to debate” (8). White uses the mainstream Hollywood case of
Kathryn Bigelow’s 2010 Best Director Oscar win for The Hurt Locker – the first time the

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award was given to a woman, although Bigelow herself downplayed the achievement’s
historicity – to parse the differing approaches to what “women’s cinema” might entail, and
how they remain at odds with one another. White’s comments bear quoting at length:

Some critics see Bigelow’s interest in masculinity and her work in “male” genres like
the action film as part of a feminist exploration of gender and power. Others argue
that it is these preoccupations that, in a sexist hierarchy, unfairly elevate her stand-
ing over that of women directors who make films about women. The debate signals
the ongoing lack of consensus on the concept of women’s cinema. While some might
find the term dated to the analog era of second-wave feminism, the discursive terrain
referenced by women’s cinema is still very much at stake.
(3)

Indeed, the jury remains out on what precisely constitutes “women’s cinema,” as well as
whether this is a useful or preferable term, especially as gender binaries become increas-
ingly problematized in contemporary culture. Nonetheless, there is wide agreement that
cinema made by women – whether they are at the helm as director or in other collaborative
roles – is worth separating as a cohort from the hegemonic model of (often male-focused)
cinema made predominantly by men, which still accounts for a disproportionate number
of commercial and art films produced worldwide. While it is beyond the scope of the pre-
sent essay to further trace the genealogy or boundaries of what constitutes feminist film-
making, women’s cinema, or gynocine – especially since these debates have already been
thoughtfully and rigorously addressed by many critics, including but not limited to those
cited here – it is nonetheless important to underscore the complexity and heterogeneity of
this field. My focus on films made by female-identifying filmmakers, while still composing
a vast minority within world cinemas, also necessitates a dual acknowledgement: First, of
the limitations of an auteur-based model focusing on the figure of the (woman) filmmaker,
and second, of the unfortunate reality that affluent, cisgender and white women are dispro-
portionately represented among women filmmakers, both in the Spanish film industry and
filmmaking at large.

Spanish Cinema’s Gender Troubles

Spain’s commercial and auteur film production has consistently been dominated by male
writers, producers and directors, most radically pre-1980, but also well into the twenty-first
century. María Camí-Vela has framed this history in stark terms as characterized by a
near-absence of female filmmakers until 1988 (17). Female trailblazers did exist prior,
including members of the generations active before and during the Franco years, like
Elena Jordi (1882–1945), Rosario Pi (1899–1967), Helena Cortesina (1904–1984), María
Forteza (1913–1961), Margarita Alexandre (1923–2015) and Ana Mariscal (1923–1995),
as well as their late-Francoist and (post)-Transition counterparts like Helena Lumbreras
(1935–1995), Josefina Molina (b. 1936), Pilar Miró (1940–1997) or Cecilia Bartolomé
(b. 1943). These often initially neglected figures (and their even less well-known coun-
terparts) have begun in recent decades to receive the scholarly attention that their work
merits, thanks to scholars such as Camí-Vela, Zecchi, Concepción Cascajosa Virino, Sonia
García López, Carlos F. Heredero, Susan Martin-Márquez and Francisco A. Zurian, among
others.1

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Somewhere around Camí-Vela’s detected inflection point of 1988, the 1980s and espe-
cially 1990s did see a promising increase in women’s participation in the Spanish film indus-
try, with the emergence of key filmmakers like Isabel Coixet (b. 1960), Gracia Querejeta (b.
1962), Chus Gutiérrez (b.1962), Montse Armengou (b. 1963), Icíar Bollaín (b. 1967) and
Judith Colell (b. 1968).2 As Zecchi notes in a 2004 essay, the boom of thirty-odd female
directors who appeared on the Spanish film scene in the 1990s was certainly cause for some
celebration, given that it almost tripled the pre-existing corpus of female feature filmmak-
ers from Spanish cinema’s inception until that point. However, despite many of these films’
feminist themes and approaches, Zecchi was rightfully critical of their inability to enact a
real shift in the “phallocentric status quo of Spanish cinema” (Desenfocadas 316). This
skepticism derived from the fact that, on the one hand, this new generation of directors
generally resisted or rejected the label of “women’s cinema” or eschewed an association
with issues of gender, and, on the other, their “boom” still only accounted for 5% of the
population of filmmakers making their debut in the 1990s (Desenfocadas 317).
To be sure, this promise has not fully come to fruition even two decades later, as women
at the helm of feature films have increased but do remain a minority.3 Improvement has
been consistent since the 1990s, and especially after Spain passed a 2007 gender equal-
ity law; the number of feature films directed by women increased from the 1990s’ high-
est year of 11 (in 1996), to the next decade’s highest number of 19 films (in 2008) and 23
(in 2009) (Zecchi, Desenfocadas 232ff). These remained as a comparatively small share,
however, when contrasted with the full picture: The 11 films in 1996 accounting for 12%
of the total 91 films released, the 19 in 2008 approximately 11% of a total 175, and the
23 in 2009 only slightly better, some 12.4% of 186 feature films released (Zecchi, Desen-
focadas 232ff). As these numbers show, while more films were being made by women,
more films were also being made overall, and the lack of even an approximation of gen-
der parity is striking, across all genres. More recently, as Elena Oroz and Mar Binimelis
have demonstrated in their study of Spain’s independent “other cinema” from the period
2013–2018, “the presence of female filmmakers is higher in independent circuits compared
to mainstream production, but it is still a minority hovering around 20%” (113).4 Nor is
the industry’s imbalance only a question of output, as Nuria Triana Toribio has shown in
the context of the debates around jury composition for the National Cinematography Prize
in the summer of 2011. With the jury, composed of nine men and three women, already
seated in the offices of Madrid’s Ministry of Culture, deliberations were suspended for not
complying with the 2007 law’s stipulation that selection committees must be composed of
at least 40% each of male and female members.5 The recomposition of the jury to comply
with the parity guidelines led many in the industry to complain publicly about the rule as
a bothersome annoyance; Triana Toribio notes, however, that the disappointing reaction
of those who scorned the equity requirements was at least part of a broader debate where
others applauded them, and “la presencia de la palabra paridad crea un filtro nuevo, una
obligación de pararse y mirar” (“the presence of the word parity created a new filter, an
obligation to stop and look”; 95).
Twenty-first–century gender disputes in the Spanish film industry are marked by this
tension between small but meaningful advances (following laws mandating greater equity,
the emergence of new women filmmakers, or increased media coverage of disparities) and
the continuing under-representation of women in the key roles of director, scriptwriter, or
producer, and in the decision-making about what films get funded. The two major televi-
sion powerhouses, Telecinco Cinema and Atresmediacine, together responsible for a vast

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swath of contemporary film financing, have had little to no parity in their funding, lead-
ing Tomasso Koch to note in 2018 that in the hundred-odd films they produced from
2010–2018, only one had a female director, and that fewer copies of women’s films made
it to market than men’s (“Más mujeres”). Being overlooked by the media giants also means
that, in addition to having to cobble together funding from several (often public) sources,
emerging women filmmakers are still much less likely than their male counterparts to go
on to make a second film, with only 9 out of 38 women directors debuting in 2000–2015
managing to do so (Zurian et al. 36). Barbara Zecchi (“Veinte años”) has evocatively noted
that this “broken second step” on the “celluloid staircase” has so far plagued many mem-
bers of the current emerging generation. Female filmmakers face tougher odds at every turn,
even well into the twenty-first century: In funding and making their first feature, managing
to make a subsequent film, balancing family and filmmaking and successfully distributing
their work.

Digital Democratization
It is in this context that several key initiatives, organizations and campaigns have emerged,
capitalizing on the new possibilities offered by digital technologies both for film production/
distribution and the dissemination of activist and media campaigns. This panorama is not
unique to Spain; as White writes, “the first decade of the twenty-first century showed the
contours of women’s cinema being redrawn by shifts in global production, circulation, and
evaluation of films as well as by changing perceptions and practices of feminism” (6). In the
Spanish case, after the 1990s boom of directors who frequently eschewed feminist affilia-
tions or interpretations of their work (most visibly in Bollaín’s polemic 1998 essay “Cine
con tetas” [“Cinema with Tits”]), film industry professionals have in recent years publicly
embraced activist and advocacy positions. Key in this process was the foundation in 2006
of CIMA, the Asociación de Mujeres Cineastas y de Medios Audiovisuales (Association
of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media [Professionals]), whose founding mem-
bers included several filmmakers from the 1990s generation, including Bollaín, Coixet and
Colell. The pluralist, transversal organization currently has over 1000 members, working in
a variety of technical and creative roles (CIMA website, “Nosotras”). According to found-
ing president Inés París, CIMA’s objectives, which include concrete actions and work plans,

señalan lo injusto de que haber nacido con un sexo u otro determine la carrera pro-
fesional. Plantean la pérdida de capital humano y de talento que esta situación repre-
senta, así como el ‘déficit democrático’ que supone la exclusión de las mujeres de una
industria tan importante no solo económica, sino social e ideológicamente
(“point out the injustice that having been born with a certain sex determines your
professional career. They show the loss of human capital and talent in this situation,
as well as the ‘democratic deficit’ entailed by women’s exclusion from an industry
that is vital not just economically, but also socially and ideologically”; París, “La
situación”).

CIMA’s objectives are framed as requiring active, reparative measures that will close the
vast gender gap in an industry that remains male-dominated at almost every level. In addi-
tion to compiling reports and statistics, providing mentoring, and supporting legal and
institutional measures geared toward greater gender parity, perhaps the most visible efforts

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CIMA has undertaken in recent years have been its social media and internet advocacy
work, such as the ongoing “#MASMUJERES” (#MOREWOMEN) campaign. Initiated at
the 2018 Goya awards and appearing thereafter in several other award and protest venues,
it featured iconic red fans emblazoned with the hashtag slogan, for use on the red carpet or
at the awards podium as a means of visibilizing the need for more women in the Spanish
film industry.
The Internet, and especially social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram, have
been fundamental for the dissemination of such campaigns, as well as other initiatives
sponsored by CIMA and related organizations, including several existent and emerging
Catalonia-based collectives and programs, like Drac Màgic (Magic Dragon), the Mostra
Internacional de Films de Dones de Barcelona (International Women’s Film Festival Bar-
celona) or Dones Visuals (Visual Women).6 In this sense the Spanish scene tracks with
Rosanna Maule’s description of what she calls “women’s cinema 2.0:” A new iteration of
“women’s cinema” developed in the contemporary context of the digital, where “various
social actors (both individual and organizational) are using digital platforms to consolidate
professional and cultural networks among women involved in film in different contexts and
roles” (1). Maule notes the key role of the Internet in “the production, the promotion, and
the discussion of films directed by women or with a strong interest for women, as well as
for the development of feminist discourse outside of academic and specialized circuits” (1),
which in the Spanish case would include (among others) the industry resources and news
housed on the webpages of groups like CIMA, Dones Visuals or Drac Màgic; the activities
and publications of the GECA (Género, Estetica y Cultura Audiovisual) group at Madrid’s
Complutense University spearheaded by Zurian; the online Gynocine Project started by
Zecchi; or sites like the Mujeres de Cine organization and platform, founded in 2010 with
the aim to promote and make visible women’s work in the film industry (Mujeres de Cine
homepage). Mujeres de Cine has more than 350 collaborating sites worldwide; it organ-
izes live screenings, presentations and colloquia and also features a streaming video on
demand service where, for a membership fee, viewers can screen films by women, both from
Spain and elsewhere. The site describes one of its objectives as mitigating the disadvantaged
position of Spanish films made by women, via online and in-person screenings and festi-
vals, and especially its streaming platform, which allows films by women filmmakers (often
lower-budget or made by less highly resourced production companies) to reach a broader
international audience than standard distribution normally allows.7
Without losing sight of the specificities of the Spanish case, it is vital to underscore
how platforms such as these both nationally and globally democratize the dissemination of
information about films and filmmakers, as well as the distribution of their films. While pri-
marily focused on goals like bringing women filmmakers working in the Spanish state to an
international audience (Mujeres de Cine, “El proyecto”), the Mujeres de Cine platform also
showcases non-Spanish films made by women from across the globe, thus creating multidi-
rectional pathways of circulation between Spain and other contexts in a digital era that is
marked by “multiple flows of cross-cultural consumption, shifting politics of prestige and
patronage, and competing definitions of feminism and postfeminism” (White 7). As White
observes, in the context of contemporary women’s cinema, these platforms are vital com-
ponents of a digital constellation that is reshaping the film industry worldwide as it democ-
ratizes distribution and visibility (7). While it is important to “acknowledge the Internet’s
implication in neoliberal ideology and economy” by not becoming overly optimistic about
the feminist or democratizing potential of online platforms or digital technology (Maule

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2), it is nonetheless fundamental to note “how these platforms can activate micro-practices
of self-orientation, professional advancement, and cultural critique for women in global
media production and reception” (Maule 12).8 By forming part of a digital platform like
Mujeres de Cine – which features a gallery of creators whose films stream on its video on
demand (VOD) page, including biographies and filmographies that often explicitly link
them with other professionals featured on the site – the members not only take part in these
“micro-practices of self-orientation” as part of a larger group of women film artists but also
engage in a collective, networked alternative to the (traditionally masculine) figure of the
solitary auteur director.
The participating filmmakers and industry professionals vary across generations and
genres (though again appear predominantly to be white, cisgender and often economi-
cally privileged), but there is a notable emphasis on younger and emerging filmmakers in
the Mujeres de Cine VOD catalog, one of the easiest places (in addition to other digital
platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo or Filmin) to find their work. It is worth noting two
defining characteristics of this emerging group.9 First, this generation of filmmakers (born
in the late 1970s–1990s) has come of age in the digital landscape, where Internet and digi-
tal technologies both enable broader film distribution and provide access to training, tools
and less expensive filmmaking methods. While technology is always a double-edged sword
(and streaming platforms are not necessarily advantageous in replacing theatrical release in
terms of financial remuneration), it is worth underscoring the gains of the digital era and
the fact that “today many more women in many more contexts have access to the tools of
the fiction feature, the format of entertainment film” (White 9–10).10 Second, in addition
to digital fluency, this generation of filmmakers also came of age in a specific environment
vis-à-vis feminism: After certain battles for equity had ostensibly been won, but where in
recent years younger women have increasingly self-identified as feminists and embraced
issues of gender equality as the limitations of those gains became more evident.11 This
engagement can be seen in the massive and increasingly radical 8th of March demonstra-
tions across Spain (and worldwide, notably in Latin America) for International Women’s
Day, linked in part to the widespread outrage triggered by the infamous “La Manada” gang
rape case of 2016 and its initial 2018 verdict of “sexual abuse” (rather than rape).
In this changing landscape, emerging women filmmakers have garnered attention beyond
the industry in mainstream media pieces like a 2019 article penned in the women’s maga-
zine Mujer Hoy, “Conoce la nueva hornada de realizadoras españolas: vienen con fuerza
y rompen tópicos” (“Meet the new batch of Spanish [women] directors: Coming in strong
and breaking clichés”). The article briefly reflects on the state of the Spanish film industry
as a mirror of society at large: Plagued by structural bias and very slowly improving, in
part, according to director Elena Trapé (b. 1976), because more women are entering uni-
versity filmmaking programs that do not discriminate on the basis of gender and where
they are given the tools to produce feature-length films.12 In terms of recent gains by the
emerging “batch” of women filmmakers referenced in the article’s title, Trapé also notes
that the recent economic crisis has led to more low-budget and auteur films, which may
have given female filmmakers an easier entry point to the industry (Durá).13 Indeed, many
recent films by filmmakers like Neus Ballús (b. 1980), Meritxell Colell (b. 1983), Coll (b.
1981), Anxos Fazáns (b. 1992), Belén Funes (b. 1984), Andrea Jaurrieta (b. 1986), Rico
Clavellino (b. 1982), Clara Roquet (b. 1988), Carla Simón (b. 1986) and Diana Toucedo
(b. 1982) have been made with lower budgets, filmed in a limited number of locations or
featured small casts. Although auteurist in style, they have also been marked by a shift away

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from the singular auteur figure toward collaborative processes, for example including films
with multiple directors (such as 2015’s Les amigues de l’Àgata, made by the team of Laia
Alabart, Alba Cros, Laura Rius and Marta Verheyen), as well as script workshopping and
mentoring among filmmakers and shared technical teams.14 These recent offerings have
included thesis projects from filmmaking schools like the ESCAC (Escola Superior de Cin-
ema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya) or the film programs at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra
(especially known for documentaries), both in Barcelona, which has become a hub for new
female filmmaking – and contemporary cinema in general.15
This intimate type of filmmaking, unquestionably more financially feasible in a context
of economic crisis or in response to the higher hurdles women filmmakers face in securing
funding, offers both possibilities and limitations. In a 2018 piece in El País, Tommaso Koch
draws out this duality via interviews with several filmmakers. On the one hand, actress
and director Mabel Lozano notes that lower-budget, arthouse, intimate productions, often
centered on female characters, run the risk of being written off as “women doing women’s
things,” in contrast to the “bigger,” brasher stories made by men that are considered “uni-
versal” (Koch). On the other hand, if more of these intimate, smaller-scale, female-centered
films were produced and distributed, these stories might be more widely appreciated as a
valuable alternative to the supposed (male) universal, as Irene Cardona Bacas asserts: “el
problema es la consideración de qué es el gran cine. Hace falta un cambio de valor, que
el cine intimista, que no reproduce los códigos de género del mainstream, sea también de
primera fila” (“The problem is the consideration of what constitutes great cinema. We need
a change in values, so that intimate cinema, cinema that doesn’t reproduce mainstream
gender norms, can also be [considered] first-class”; Koch). Digital platforms, as well as film
cycles and festivals organized by academic and artistic organizations like CIMA, Dones
Visuals, Mujeres de Cine, GECA, or the Gynocine project (among others), have been vital
in disseminating such content to a broader audience both within and outside Spain.16

Intimacy, Autonomy, the Everyday: Contemporary Women’s Cinema

Filmmakers Mar Coll and Celia Rico Clavellino both emerge from this context and have
produced work featuring the intimate scale, small cast, collaborative process and focus on
subjectivity and emotionality emblematic of this generation of cineastes. Their two films
I have selected to analyze as exemplars, Coll’s 2013 Tots volem el millor per a ella (We
All Want What’s Best for Her; henceforth Tots volem) and Rico Clavellino’s 2018 Viaje al
cuarto de una madre (Journey to a Mother’s Room; henceforth Viaje), share several com-
mon frameworks and themes, despite differences in their plots, settings, and languages.17
Tots volem, Coll’s second feature film and the winner of several Gaudí and Goya awards
and nominations, follows protagonist Geni (Nora Navas) as she works through grief, strug-
gles with identity and pushes back against her family’s paternalistic care after a car accident
leaves her with a partial disability affecting speech and mobility. Like Coll’s previous film,
Tres dies amb la família (Three Days with the Family, 2009), its critical portrait of the
Catalan bourgeoisie lays bare the strictures of social and family expectations, highlighting
their detrimental effects on communication and autonomy. Issues of agency, identity, com-
munication and family also come to the fore in Viaje, Rico Clavellino’s first feature film
and the nominee for several Goyas. Viaje follows working-class small-town mother Estrella
(Lola Dueñas) and young adult daughter Leonor (Ana Castillo) as they navigate both their
relationship and each woman’s individual desires, struggles and sense of self in the wake

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of their husband/father’s death. The film does not specify when they lost the unnamed
patriarch – whose clothing, shoes and accordion remain in their small apartment’s closets
and whose cell phone rings on a regular basis with promotional offers only he is eligible to
activate – but the two women’s grief is fresh and palpable in the codependent habits they
have formed to cope with his absence. Their fragile equilibrium is punctured when Leonor
takes a job as an au pair in London and Estrella finds herself left alone to figure out who
she is in the absence of both partner and daughter.
Both films thus situate their protagonists within processes anchored in grief for what has
been lost – for Geni, mobility, autonomy, her career as a lawyer; for Estrella, the proximity
of loved ones and her identity as a wife and mother – but also offer a possibility for finding
oneself in the present, envisioning and remaking a life after loss. Characteristic of much
new cinema by female filmmakers, the films’ greatest strengths reside in their depictions
of emotionality and subjectivity, forged through subtle choices in their mise-en-scène and
camerawork and a focus on the quotidian objects and bodily gestures that make up the
characters’ lives in domestic spaces. The worlds of these films are constrained and intimate,
with almost all of Viaje and much of Tots volem filmed in the characters’ homes; they also
allude to the wider world through a recurrence to transnational circuits of movement and
opportunity, gesturing beyond both the cinematic and national frame to suggest that these
“small” stories are part of something larger.
In Viaje, much of the action takes place within Estrella and Leonor’s apartment. It is
predominantly filmed in medium close ups and tight shots bordering on the claustropho-
bic, underscoring the apartment’s small scale and lack of privacy or surplus space, as well
as the characters’ stasis. The camera often finds them immobile, insistently repeating the
same places and poses: Sitting on the couch eating dinner and watching television; in bed;
showering or drying their hair. A recurring motif frames parts of rooms through an open
doorway, a camera angle frequently used to show Leonor and Estrella’s adjacent bedroom
doors ajar, each one’s bed visible from the other’s. The mise-en-scène of the apartment
subtly signifies elements of the characters’ relationship and emotionality, without stating
explicitly what has happened or what either woman is thinking or feeling; the viewer might
assume, without any confirmation, that the open-door bedroom policy emerges from their
recent grief, a desire not to sleep alone or perhaps to keep an eye on one another in case
one descends too deeply into her sadness. As Vilaró Moncasí points out, it also means that
each one’s room is always present within the other’s, symbolizing the mother and daugh-
ter’s intertwined (or co-dependent) relationship (104). In moments when each woman finds
herself alone in the apartment, shots of close proximity and long duration frame each of
their careful, tactile encounters with the quotidian objects in the home – the hair dryer or
towel, coffeemaker or Estrella’s thimble that Leonor picks up like a talisman – as well as the
belongings of the lost patriarch. In the same way that the film’s spatial limitations suggest
all that lies beyond the frame (Leonor’s life in London, only discerned through her mother’s
side of phone calls, for example) these silent explorations say much more than the film’s
sparse dialogue, which often points toward the challenges of communication and saying
what one means or feels, even (or especially) in intimate relations.
Likewise, in Tots volem, the use of interior space and characters’ gestural performance
speaks volumes about their emotional and psychological worlds and rifts. Protagonist
Geni, whose speech has been compromised by her never-explained car accident, often
struggles to produce words in moments of duress. In an early scene, where her husband
Dani (Pau Durà) confronts her about deceiving him and pretending to go to work every

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morning, she stutters through the only phrase she can muster as explanation: There are too
many things and she cannot handle them all (“no puc amb tot . . . son masses coses i no
puc”). Actress Nora Navas delivers a masterfully nuanced performance here, as through-
out the film, modulating her voice to find a defense against her husband’s paternalistic
condescension (with him insistently calling her “peque” (“little one”) and forcefully cajol-
ing her to “make an effort” to speak properly) and then giving in and quietly repeating
his injunctions as he leaves the room. She clenches her fist as she vows to make an effort,
seemingly trying to convince herself they want the same thing, before casting her gaze
defeatedly at her lap. In this scene and elsewhere, the camera frames the characters amid
the comforts of their bourgeois home, the mise-en-scène suggesting that before the acci-
dent they were likely a kind of power couple, Dani an architect and Geni a lawyer, driven
by professional advancement and the trappings of success. Much like the father in Viaje,
we are never told exactly what happened to Geni, but characters frequently comment on
how “before” she was not the kind of person to do or say the erratic things they now can-
not understand: Skipping work, therapy or rehabilitation appointments to sit on the couch
or drink with an old friend’s mother; fantasizing about living abroad, something she and
Dani never did; and generally disregarding the social strictures to which the rest of her
family is beholden.
Here too, silences, interruptions and failures of communication show how isolated the
characters are, or how difficult it is for them to understand one another’s feelings, thoughts
and experiences. Emotions are more easily expressed wordlessly through the film’s at times
ironically cheerful soundtrack, its contrasts between movement and stasis, or its careful
emphasis on small actions, like Geni cutting her hair to break with her prior identity, her
husband dutifully massaging her injured leg with lotion but rebuffing her attempts at physi-
cal intimacy (while seeming just a little too close to her sister) or in Geni’s interaction with
screen media artifacts, another common thread the film shares with Viaje. In Tots volem,
Geni finds escape from the disappointing and oppressive structures of her marital and fam-
ily life by rekindling her high school friendship with Mariana (Valeria Bertucelli). The two
had become estranged years before, when Geni’s mother’s terminal illness prevented her
from joining Mariana on their post-graduation trip around the world. The journey led
her Argentine friend to a precarious but fulfilling itinerant life, which Geni discovers via
their high school class’s Facebook page, becoming transfixed by a video of Mariana tagged
“con Martín en el Perú” (“with Martín in Peru”) and presumably filmed by a male partner,
depicting her friend in a field shrouded in mist. Geni watches it twice, putting the video in
full screen and inserting headphones to immerse herself fully in the sonic environment of
whipping wind and a man’s voice directing Mariana where to stand. Later in the narrative,
Geni becomes similarly engrossed in a film she watches on DVD from Mariana’s short-lived
acting career, a religious melodrama that moves her to tears and where her identification
with the characters is subtly telegraphed by shots of her nodding her head or unconsciously
replicating the actresses’ gestures. In both instances, although decontextualized and likely
serving as objects of fantasy or projection, these screen media artifacts provide a promise of
momentary escape from the limitations of Geni’s increasingly constrained life, as she grieves
not only the loss of who she was “before” but, perhaps more importantly, who she might
have become had her life been otherwise: Traveling with Mariana, not marrying Dani, not
losing her mother, not remaining in Barcelona with her oppressive family.
Viaje likewise employs interaction with screen media to signify beyond the frame. Early
in the film, Leonor has a drink with a friend who is home visiting their village, having arrived

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from her new cosmopolitan life in London. That city is initially represented in the film as
a promised land of economic and cultural opportunity that is ultimately revealed to be
disappointing and exploitative – an arc experienced by many young Spaniards who sought
work abroad following the economic crisis of 2008, the subject of another woman-helmed
film, Icíar Bollaín’s 2014 En tierra extraña (In a Foregin Land). Disheartened by her own
life and dazzled by her friend’s, Leonor retreats into the Internet, logging onto Facebook in
her bedroom after arriving home to find her mother asleep on the couch. She clicks through
the friend’s profile pictures, curated to show her happy London life, and then comes upon
a video of Vashti Bunyan’s 1966 “Train Song.” Its lyrics about traveling many miles north
to find a beloved likely resonate with the transnational northward journey Leonor herself
is beginning to contemplate. Also putting the video into full screen, she becomes absorbed
in the melancholy melody as her mother rouses from the couch and says goodnight. The
camera frames a door-through point-of-view shot as Leonor watches her mother settling
into bed as the song continues to play, before abruptly closing her laptop to stop the music.
Here, too, the character’s interaction with an audiovisual artifact subtly telegraphs her
need for escape. In this case, it is even more explicitly framed in transnational terms than
in Tots volem, where Geni entreats her husband to live abroad and tries desperately to get
herself and Mariana to France. In both instances, the characters’ fantasies of life elsewhere
are projected into transnational media artifacts, imbued with emotion in a quotidian
frame.18 Unlike the communication technology (cell phone calls, voicemails, WhatsApp
messages) that appears throughout both films, simultaneously connecting characters and
underscoring their lack of communication or synchronicity, these media artifacts create
moments of connection between the characters and their own emotional realities and
desires, even if these desires are ultimately unfulfilled, or based on narratives that prove to
be more escapist than liberatory.19
Indeed, both films also share a lack of resolution, catharsis or triumph for their pro-
tagonists. Just as they drop us into the action with little explanation of what has led their
characters to their current grief, their endings do not offer easy resolutions of the protago-
nists’ impasses and constraints. Each, however, provides some hope that escape toward
something better, toward more fully realized agency, might be on the horizon. Through the
small but powerful worlds these films create, they suggest that overcoming adversity and
finding autonomy is not a process with easy solution or a clear road map. This holds true
both for the films’ protagonists and for women filmmakers working within a system that
remains stacked against them, even despite the privileges of race, class and gender identity
many of them possess (the absence of transwomen, women of color, and immigrants in the
“new batch” of filmmakers must be underscored). At the time of writing, 2013’s Tots volem
remains Coll’s most recent feature-length film, and despite its strong critical reception and
Coll’s Goya for debut direction for her previous feature, she was unable to secure financing
for her planned third film and instead made a television series, 2018’s Matar al padre (Kill-
ing the Father) (“Nueva hornada”).20 Having two feature films, however, still put Coll in a
stronger position than most debuting female filmmakers. Subsequent to the writing of this
piece, and just as this volume went to press, Rico Clavellino’s second feature, Los pequeños
amores, was released on March 8, 2024 (International Women’s Day), the same week that
the wrapping of filming for Coll’s forthcoming film Salve María no was announced via
production company Elastica Films on social media. Much like their protagonists, these
women filmmakers – and many of their generation – face a hard road ahead, but one with
a hopeful horizon.

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Notes
1 See also Ledesma, Marsh, Melero, Vernon, Whittaker, among many others.
2 While the focus of this piece is on fiction filmmakers, it is worth noting that women have fared
better (while remiaing underrepresented) in documentary filmmaking.
3 This chapter was written in 2021, after which point the visibility of this emerging generation
has (happily) only increased, perhaps reaching its high point (to that date) in 2022, where more
women than ever previously were nominated across key best film and directing categories for key
awards like the Goyas or Gaudís. In many cases, however, they were beaten out for the awards
themselves by male counterparts.
4 For a detailed quantitative analysis, see Gómez.
5 For more on the 2007 equality law and related measures, see de la Sierra.
6 It bears noting, following Zecchi (“Veinte años,” 122), that the Catalan context has more long-
standing organizations, with Drac Màgic founded in 1971 to focus on audiovisual media promo-
tion, especially of female creators, and the Mostra Internacional de Films de Dones dating to 1993.
Dones Visuals, on the other hand, was founded in the current wave of feminist activity, in 2017.
7 For an analysis of non-explicitly women-focused platforms (Márgenes and Plat) and gender rep-
resentation, see Oroz and Binimelis.
8 This democratization has also begun challenging the division between professional and amateur
filmmakers, and enabling more low-cost projects by filmmakers who may be outsiders to codified
prestige routes. See Oroz and Binimelis.
9 For an excellent contextualization and analysis of this emerging generation, see Scholz and Álva-
rez or Zecchi (“Veinte años”).
10 Zurian et al. note that while lower-cost digital tools for filming and editing have improved the
playing field, it would be an error to see the resulting increase in female filmmakers as de facto
equality having been achieved (“El falso boom” 35).
11 It should be noted that debates within feminism in the Spanish state have also seen some divi-
sions, with recent battles emerging over the exclusion of transwomen from the feminist collective
or divergent attitudes toward sex work. The feminist engagement of emerging generations with
feminism contrasts sharply with the initial post-feminist stance of their immediate predecessors,
such as Bollaín or Coixet. See Zecchi (“Veinte años) and Wheeler on this latter point.
12 See Zecchi (“Veinte años”) for an excellent generational account, in which she notes that since
2000 a rising awareness of discrimination has created more dialogue between feminist theory/
critique and feminist filmmaking (118).
13 For more on the intersection of female filmmakers and lower budget “other cinema” as an alter-
native to the mainstream film industry post-crisis, see Oroz and Binimelis.
14 For more on the collaborative process, see Vilaró Moncasí, 99–101.
15 Following Carlos Heredero and Annette Scholz, Vilaró Moncasí notes that Barcelona has of late
become a center not just of documentary filmmaking but also an important launching pad for a
new generation of female fiction filmmakers (98).
16 On film festivals as circuits of visibility for women’s cinema, in tandem with VOD platforms and
independent film distributors, see Oroz and Binimelis.
17 On Coll’s biography and work, see Cascajosa-Virino (“Mar Coll’s Matar al padre”), Rams and
Colaizzi, among others. Coll’s film, shot in Catalan, has been included in part to showcase the
importance of cinema in non-Castilian languages in this generation’s work.
18 Virginia Guarinos notes that internationalism and transnational connections, including to loci
of emigration such as London and New York, are common threads in contemporary women’s
cinema from the Spanish state (92–3), along with other key elements of these films such as a focus
on women’s experience and an intimate framing (80–2).
19 Giulia Colaizzi notes that the recurring motif of communication technology in Coll’s films is used
not just as a mode of expression but also a form of techné that shapes socialization and epistemol-
ogy, enabling reflection on presence and participation in the world (112).
20 On Matar al padre and Coll’s shift from auteur cinema to television, see Cascajosa-Virino (“Mar
Coll’s Matar al padre”). Just before this chapter was finalized, a key director from this emerging
generation, Carla Simón, achieved watershed success with her 2022 second feature Alcarràs, the
first Spanish film by a woman filmmaker to win the Golden Bear top honor at the Berlin Film
Festival. As referenced in note 3, however, while it took top honors in Catalunya’s 2023 Gaudí

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awards, Alcarràs lost both best picture and best director to Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s As bestas in the
(national) Goya awards.

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Oroz, Elena, and Mar Binimelis. “Who Counts? The Presence of Women Directors in Spanish Inde-
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Zecchi. U of Massachusetts P and Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2013, pp. 281–300.
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ALGORITHMS, THE EARTH,
AND THE SPANISH STATE
The Politics of Making Digital Art1

Alex Saum-Pascual

Introduction: Networks, Binaries and Critical Web Materiality in the

Capitalocene
We are on the brink of planetary catastrophe. Environmental, political, humanitarian and
health crises (read: “the recent COVID-19 pandemic”) have infused the zeitgeist of the
Anthropocene with a sense of disaster (Crutzen and Stoermer 17). In this global scenario,
Spain is no different. The country’s economy and lifestyle have been hit dramatically since
the onset of the coronavirus crisis, and each year climate change is responsible for extreme
temperatures, fires and drought. Without falling into despair, this chapter explores the
imbrication of digital technologies in contemporary Spanish artistic and literary produc-
tion, looking particularly at its engagement with concepts of the environmental crisis writ
large. While digital media and the internet hold an undeniable central place in Spanish
culture and lifestyle today (social media usage in Spain increased by 55% during the first
weeks of lockdown in April 2020 (EFE)), digital literature and art are still outliers of the
cultural establishment. On the one hand, this has pushed out their cultural relevance and
influence to the margins, but, on the other, this marginal displacement has allowed them
to challenge central questions of Spanish cultural formation, national identity and Spanish
people’s relationship with the country’s territory, as well as their place within the globe as a
political space and natural resource. While keeping the cloud front and center, this chapter
explores the concept of “la tierra” (meaning both “homeland” in political terms, and “soil”
from a natural resource point of view) and “la Tierra” (the planet Earth). The triple mean-
ing of tierra (homeland/soil/Earth) allows me to shape a multifaceted representation of the
country that inevitably renegotiates not only the neoliberal image and hegemonic narratives
of post-dictatorship Spain, but, most importantly, of its citizens’ relation to the natural and
geopolitical territory as well.
To this aim, I have selected the work of three e-lit artists: Belén Gache, Joana Moll and
Eugenio Tisselli. Although these artists may not have been born in Spain or, in some cases,
may no longer reside there, they create work that contests the country’s neoliberal turn and
its destructive consequences for the environment and human life. For a neoliberal economy
to work, human activity is placed in opposition (or in addition) to nature, participating in

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-50
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

a dialectic discourse that, like the binaries of sexism, racism or even Eurocentrism, points
directly to the violence, inequality, and oppression of the modern world (Moore 2). As these
issues relate to climate and political change, the Anthropocene argument presents the exploi-
tation and accumulation of capital as conterminous to human nature and progress. Accumu-
lation, however, is not only productive but necrotic, in the sense that it unfolds a slow violence
sustained by reduction or, perhaps, extinction: the reduction of cultures, languages and peo-
ples, as well as the extinction of the Earth through depletion of resources (McBrien 116).
Following this logic, if accumulation is innate to us, then so are reduction and extinction.
In opposition to this framing, Jason Moore has advanced the notion of the Capitalo-
cene, where the role of capital is seen as a way of organizing nature “as a multispecies,
situated, capitalist world ecology” (6). I favor this term rather than the popular Anthro-
pocene, because it stands against the type of dualism that, while implicating something
abstract (nature/society), historically conforms to a seemingly endless series of material
human exclusions, subordinating women, colonial populations and peoples of color. As
Donna Haraway points out in Staying with the Trouble (2016), this world ecology frame-
work opens the door to a new conception of “ontological politics” that is not merely a
distributional (binary) proposition but one that questions the whole model of how capital-
ism values nature and humans within it. In other words, while accumulation and extinction
cannot be decoupled from capitalism, perhaps humans could.
Although Haraway makes this argument in a rebuttal of human exceptionality in favor
of “making kin” with nonhuman species, I use her “ontological politics” framework in this
chapter as a means to reorganize how humans (together with other living species) and digi-
tal machines are entangled vis-à-vis the Capitalocene. This affects Spain, a country under-
going a steady neoliberal transformation since Franco’s 1960s desarrollismo but, obviously,
everywhere else on Earth as well. Within this framework, globalization’s so-called deter-
ritorialization also forces us to look at the earthly nature of the globe itself. The contra-
dictions of capitalism’s globalization that I explore later in the chapter further justify the
selection of these works and artists that might not fall under the traditional categories of
what we understand by “Spanish writing.” They hold double nationalities, they live bina-
tionally and their work does not engage with local traditions or languages. Yet they create
from Spain, and thus the tension framed by the multiple meanings of tierra (Spanish land
and soil in/as/and everywhere else) becomes central in their work.2
For the past 15 years, Eugenio Tisselli (Spain-Mexico) has been exploring what he calls
“algorithmic politics,” the application of performative language (algorithms) to the destruc-
tion of language itself and its correlative destruction of life on Earth.3 Based in Barcelona
and Mexico City, he has had an active artistic career since the early 2000s. What is per-
haps his best well-known piece, El 27/The 27 (2014), runs a couple of algorithms through
the New York Stock Exchange and the 27th article of the Mexican Constitution, which
legislates the right to land and water. Every time the stock market scores positively, the
algorithm translates a fragment of the constitutional text into English, destroying the origi-
nal text by rendering it almost illegible. This way, the work’s code erodes language while
mimicking land exploitation. In this chapter, however, I examine his more recent Amazon
(2019), in response to that same year’s devastating fires in Brazil, which requires users to
execute a code that replaces virtual trees with numbers imitating Amazonian deforestation
for commercial pursuits.
Working together with Tisselli on the conceptualization of algorithmic politics,4
Joana Moll (Spain-Germany) has produced over 20 solo pieces that further expose the

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interrelation between actions and consequences of using digital technologies. Preceding Tis-
selli’s Amazon, Moll’s Defooooooooooooooooooooorest (2016) also acts as a visualization
on the destruction of forests, in this case showing the number of trees needed to absorb the
amounts of CO2 that Google searches produce every second.
Finally, Belén Gache (Spain-Argentina) takes a more playful and speculative approach
to market economies and the dematerializing effect they have on the world in Word Market
(2012), where users are able to broker words simulating a free market-exchange environ-
ment, abstracting language, now fully detached from material realities and referents, in the
purest neoliberal sense.
All these works place digital production within a web of material accountability that
rejects the binaries implicit in neoliberal logic in pursuit of a new type of poetic materiality
that points to the two branching prongs I am exploring; they redeploy digital abstraction
to refer to the devastating material effects of market abstraction via algorithmic economies
and their supporting infrastructures. For lack of better words, I am calling this an aesthetic
of “critical web materiality.”
Katherine Hayles has defined digital materiality as an emergent property created through
dynamic interactions between physical characteristics and signifying strategies, looking
poetically at how electronic literature moves between the machine and the reader (Writing
Machines 33).5 My understanding of materiality goes further, accounting not only for “the
constructions of matter that matter for human meaning” (My Mother 3) but looking at
materiality broadly in relation to the Capitalocene.
Although it may sound counterintuitive, the destruction of natural resources and human
life is directly related to the evolution of virtual (digital) technologies that project a perverse
sense of immaterial existence. As cloud technologies and the internet expand by offering a
massively distributed experiencing of the digital object that relies on its phenomenological
experiencing of immateriality (i.e., anything can potentially be accessed anywhere by any-
one at any time) they do so by building on precarious and invasive physical infrastructures
dependent on fossil and mineral extraction, as well as local networks and governmental
policies.6 In other words, Tisselli, Moll and Gache have produced works that exploit the
affordances and limitations of the digital global web, globalization and deterritorializa-
tion by explicitly engaging and referring to the precarious local infrastructures that sustain
them. Further, by criticizing the ways in which domestic online experiences have implica-
tions for all life on Earth, these works also help us to reconceptualize what it means to think
about 21st-century (local) Spain ethically in an environmental sense.

Amazon, Defooooooooooooooooooooorest and Word Market:

Three Digital Engagements With Material Life

Amazon
Born in Mexico and based in Barcelona, but popular in Global North digital art circles
since the early 2000s, Eugenio Tisselli is remembered in the community for temporarily
pausing his practice in 2011. In a public statement published in Netartery, he explained:

I feel that the issues involved in creating artworks with computers are too important to
be ignored. So I call for a truly trans-disciplinary, cross-sector research on electronic
literature: one that also involves a profound understanding of its environmental and

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economic effects. One that doesn’t ignore the social and cultural contexts which are
being effectively destroyed for the sake of our technology.
(“Why”)

Thus, after a hiatus, he returned to practice in 2013 with the earlier-mentioned The 27th/
El 27 and a new ethical commitment. Following Bernard Stiegler’s application of Derrida’s
pharmakon to digital ecology as that poison which at a certain dose is also the remedy (Stie-
gler 10), Tisselli returned with the creation of works which denounced our blindness to the
environmental repercussion of the very use of computers and the crises entailed. In 2019 he
created Amazon, a piece circulating as code that users/readers need to execute themselves
on their computers. It is written in a compressed format of HTML with embedded JavaS-
cript (a one-liner; 873 bytes). This type of highly compressed code is generally called mini-
fied; it has a reduced environmental footprint but, more importantly, is designed to make
the code difficult to decipher at first glance, rendering the piece readable only after running
it (or reversing it through parsers). The website where the code is shared includes explicit
instructions on how to execute the piece “copy the following code, paste it on a plain text
editor, save it as ‘amazon.html,’ double click the file so that it shows on your browser, and
watch capitalocene unfold . . .” (Tisselli Amazon). The piece then displays a square field of
hundreds of asterisk characters of different shades of green, evoking a forest seen through a
digital map or a satellite view. Green characters are then replaced with brown numerals in
an incrementally accelerated fashion until only a field of shifting brown numbers remains.
Virtual trees are consumed by abstract symbols.
Together with the code, Tisselli offers a little statement wondering about “what is
destroying the forest? it is the capitalist algorithm, executed by fascist war-men/machines”
(Tisselli Amazon) and adding “code is the vector that transforms your desires into data //
code extracts desires from your body, delivers them to the machine, and transports them
through the full stack // code is what connects your infinite boredom to the tragedy of
burning forests” (Tisselli Amazon). The compression of the code, in a way, references the
obscurity of the impulses behind human desire or, perhaps, functions “like the DNA of a
virus enclosed within a protein cloak. Code that spreads, apparently insignificant in size,
easy to copy and paste, yet cryptic and immanent” (Tisselli ELO).
The materiality of this piece is distributed through a variety of digital systems, platforms
and infrastructures. It travels as code and it is always executed locally on each reader’s

Figure 44.1 Amazon, Three Screenshots at Different Stages.

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 Algorithms, the Earth, and the Spanish State

computer, performing indeed like a virus. On the other hand, the reference to the capitalist
algorithm, as pure mathematical abstraction, translates into a devastating environmental
cost. 20% of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed, with deforestation surging in 2019
to the highest level in more than a decade (INPE), pushed by Bolsonaro’s government in
order to boost the Brazilian economy.
Paradoxically, digital materiality, as that emergent quality that combines the physical-
ity of an object which comes into being by the translation and entanglement of material
substrates, network infrastructures (hardware) and a series of signifying mechanisms and
languages (software), is different, if not opposite, to what we understand by historical mate-
rialism and its relation to the economy. I’m not saying digital materiality is not informed, or
even shaped, by the economy (quite the contrary, in fact), but I am highlighting the insepa-
rable role that digital technologies and infrastructures have in also shaping the economy
and material life of the neoliberal era. What we observe is a double process of abstraction
but constitutively concretized in local materials, wherever those are. This reciprocal struc-
ture is based on the entanglement between humans, the world (the Earth), animals and
machines, which is what posthuman paradigms of nonhuman agency (Latour, Haraway,
etc.) have been exploring with some success for the past couple of decades.
In a way, finding an ethical relation with these “others” can refigure conversations where
humans are not the measure of all things or “at least, need a different kind of theory of
mediations” (Haraway “Otherwordly” 174). For Haraway, these mediations would require
a language that could be a form of life in itself rather than being a tool to imagine a form
of life (in Wittgenstein’s terms). When thinking about how (nonhuman) algorithmic lan-
guages propagate and interact with the human and nonhuman world, Haraway’s metaphors
become more literal than we may think. After all, code is a language that acts as a form of
life by inscribing itself materially across substrates and surfaces, having physical impact
in the world every time it replicates symbolically. Put differently, code’s performative lan-
guage creates material realities in the world. If the abstract and material realities of code are
reconnected in a co-constitutively interrelated fashion, these nonhuman mediations could
potentially allow us to converse with materials and space from a different inter-relation that
would not be controlled by the binaries of neoliberalism and capitalism.7 Unfortunately,
most of our applications and understanding of code still rely on the infamous capitalist
dichotomy that subjugates matter to information by keeping them theoretically separated.
When discussing the code behind Amazon, Tisselli explains that by creating an extremely
condensed (minified) piece of code, he is suggesting “that code has agency beyond its mere
execution, and that it is based on its desire to proliferate . . . a sort of ‘code animism,’ if you
will, that may also be observed in human languages and other technologies” (Tisselli ELO).
Tisselli considers the Homo economicus behavioral model, which evaluates daily actions in
terms of costs and benefits, rationalizations and optimizations, to participate in the same
logic as executable code, and sees a “relation between the negative effects of such codified
behavior and the Capitalocene predicament, which I understand as a sort of ‘environmen-
tal artificial intelligence,’ shared by humans and machines alike, that parses and renders
the world as numbers” (Tisselli ELO). When everything is knowable through a process of
numerization, when every material can be translated into the abstract language of numbers,
life on Earth becomes as abstract as its numerical units. For Tisselli, this is the crux of the
Capitalocene; a sort of “fierce mathematization” of life, as Franco Berardi would put it.
What we see is two systems acting in contradiction. On the one hand, in Tisselli’s criti-
cism, everything becomes numbers (emphasizing the binary relation between abstraction

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and material life), but on the other, a concept such a Haraway’s “naturecultures,” where
the binaries (nature/culture; mind/matter; and so on) are inherently interconnected, implies
the ontological need to take into account a constitutive relationship, where nothing would
pre-exist these relations (Haraway Companion 9). In other words, “nature” and “culture”
would not exist as separate entities but would emerge only in relation, in the same way that
“abstract” and “material” could exist only as an emergent relation. A digital work that
emphasizes its material aspect (the environmental repercussion of algorithmic economies
in this case) could allow us to reconnect the binaries by exposing that they never exist in
isolation. This means, to understand code as an emergent relation that does not pre-exist
either material or abstract circumstance.
As I explain later, and for the purposes of this chapter on the relationship between code,
life, earth and land, this emergent model of relations further allows for a re-engagement with
the concrete material properties of life that calls for a rearticulation of national questions.
The nation (always an abstract concept) is dissolved in the natural properties of the Earth,
decentering the human, and situating it in co-constitutive relationship to nature. This neces-
sarily repositions Spain within all our contextual realities, taking subjects out of a nation
state and placing them in a network of emergent planetary matters. The kind of natural
deterritorialization that we see at place here, additionally, presents us with a strange reality
of politics not performed by humans, but done by machines, that is, “algorithmic politics.”

Defooooooooooooooooooooorest
Working from Barcelona and Berlin, the digital artist and researcher Joana Moll has been
exploring the global impact of domestic internet usage, as well as the environmental crises
that result from indiscriminate use of web-based technology. In a similar vein as her earlier
CO2GLE (2014) which displayed in real time the amount of CO2/per second emitted by
global visits to google.com, Defooooooooooooooooooooorest (2016) visualizes the num-
ber of trees needed to absorb each second of CO2 pollution generated by google.com. When
the reader opens the project’s site, over a million trees materialize on the screen, showing
23 every second, this being the abstract translation of the average 52,000 visits Google
received each second when the piece was conceived in 2016.8 As Moll explains, “[o]n aver-
age a tree can absorb 21,77 kg of CO2 per year. Thus, in order to counteract the amount of
CO2 emissions derived by the global visits to google.com, every second, we would need an
approximate amount of 23 trees/second” (CO2GLE). In Defooooooooooooooooooooor-
est, an incommensurable number of trees pop up and fill up the screen as it automatically
scrolls down in a frenzy. The result is an anxiety-provoking object that eventually forces the
reader to shut her browser, this being the only way to stop the visualization.
If in Tisselli’s Amazon the reader was forced to execute the code to participate in the
speculative visualization of the destruction of the Amazonian forest, triggering a sort of
complicit guilt in the reader, Moll makes the reader witness directly the impact of her online
participation until she eventually shuts it down. The result is not empowering, however,
since Moll’s piece is also an automatic abstract representation of the world’s trees using
small emoji-type icons, but the work does exploit the relation between human intervention
through digital technology in the destruction of natural resources. In her own words:

While humans are becoming increasingly machinelike and dependent on data, the
connection between humans and their life-giving natural habitats, is hastily fading

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Figure 44.2 DEFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREST in Motion, Screenshot.

away. We seem to have withdrawn into a machinic vacuum of reality which blinds us
to the complexities of the world.
(Defooooooooooooooooooooorest)

Here the artist is echoing the fallacy of immateriality attached to digital habits and
infrastructures that I mentioned earlier. “The actual configuration of technology reinforces
cultural dynamics (rituals) that stress disconnectedness. In our contemporary algorithmic
decision-making society, ecosystems are being increasingly considered as mere economic
externalities” (Defooooooooooooooooooooorest). Digital materiality and capital are
bound by their reliance on numerical abstractions, an abstraction that in Moll’s view pro-
duces the sensation of “disconnection” that allows for human tolerance to the destruction
of natural resources, as if these were not part of human life – or as if they were unlimited.
Nature is placed in a dichotomous relation to society, a situation which sits at the heart of
the neoliberal globalization narrative.
In this way, both Amazon and Defooooooooooooooooooooorest enact a violent exam-
ple of purportedly digital deterritorialization. Although coded from Barcelona, they use
algorithmic representation to expose how abstraction has always a material instantiation
somewhere else on Earth, which, in turn, will always carry an effect everywhere else as
well. Fittingly, the national and geographical situatedness of these artists in the first world,

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allows for the creation of these works that point to their unequal impact in the Global
South. Thus, the critical web materiality of these pieces establishes a relation to nature
similar to capital’s own relationship to nature:

[J]ust as capital does not have a relationship to nature but rather is a relationship to
nature, so too is that relationship always also a relationship with the state, and medi-
ated by the state. To put it even more directly: the state does not have a relationship
with nature, it is a relationship with nature because the web of life and its metabo-
lism – including the economy – exist upon the surface of the earth, and because the
state is fundamentally a territorial institution.
(Parenti 166)

Rejecting the mythical disconnection between land and neoliberalism’s free circulation,
Christian Parenti makes explicit the double and interrelated gaze that I am proposing in this
article. Digital objects and algorithms, in their existence within the network of capital, are a
relationship to nature, and so too to the state. Following the logics of biopower, where the
body is harnessed, channeled, enhanced or deployed at the scale of territorially defined pop-
ulations, Parenti has proposed “geopower” as the statecraft and technologies of power that
make territory and the biosphere accessible, legible, knowable and usable. This translates
into the construction of roads, canals and communication infrastructures as well as abstract
constructions like property rights. Geopower, however, is also enacted through surveying,
militarily policing and mapmaking technologies and all the applied physical and geosciences
that have increasingly relied on digital technologies and their abstract representations.
As the 2020 global pandemic has painfully shown, to those who control territory “flow
the utilities of specific spaces” (Parenti 175), but private property over space and nature
depends as well on larger systems of political control over that space. With this, the state
becomes the central mechanism of capitalism’s inherently violent political-geographic pro-
ject. In Parenti’s words: “At the heart of capital’s process is nature, and that dynamic inter-
play between violence and space which is the state process” (175). However, neither Moll
nor Tisselli refers specifically to the territory of Catalonia, or Spain, as the context of creation
to expose this relation, but, rather, they engage in a global/local emphasis on what domestic
internet participation unties in the world, focusing on the environmental interconnection of
us all. Their application of critical web materiality aesthetics forces users to face their home
computers and their own situatedness by focusing on the concrete material infrastructures
and their environmental impact, bypassing (yet implying) the geopolitical limits of the state.

Word Market
Abstraction and the correlating disconnection between human (action) and its conse-
quences on the physical world is also the main metaphor behind Belén Gache’s Word Mar-
ket (2012), an interactive web-based portal that acts almost as a social media platform
where users can broker words simulating a market-exchange environment, using a fictional
currency called the “wollar.” Like commodities on the stock market, each word has a
fluctuating abstract value attached to it that allows users to buy and sell according to their
interest, word availability and each day’s special deals. Users have also access to the value
records of each word, being able to see the declining or increasing trends of certain words
and their purchase history.

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 Algorithms, the Earth, and the Spanish State

Figure 44.3 Word Market’s Landing Page, Screenshot.

Like in Moll’s and Tisselli’s work, the fundamental mechanism behind Word Market is
a parodical, yet violent, algorithm that reflects on the arbitrary value of online economies
and, in Gache’s work in particular, the value of human language and its separation from the
material world. For example, as I was writing this on September 2, 2020, I bought the word
“trump” for 174 wollars. Buying “trump” allows me to “make immediate use of the word”
(Gache) since it comes with a certificate of ownership that theoretically grants me power to
sell, transfer, exchange, reproduce, distribute, copy “privately or in public,” modify in any
way or even dispose of and destroy my word while also excluding others from doing any
of these things. The certificate comes with a personalized warning link that you can send
to anyone violating your ownership rights.9 Obviously, the temptation to destroy or censor
a word is embedded in the game (yet there are no clear instructions on how to destroy any
of your property but by selling it again), and while real brokering exchanges have violent
repercussions in the world that can translate into financial crisis, massive migration, climate
change or anti-government uprisings, my desire to eliminate a word from the game empha-
sizes the impotence to carry out any real change in the world by playing with language. The
language of the algorithm and its politics are clearly severed from the user and her power

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to intervene in any real way in the world around her, turning her participation into a funny
conceptual gimmick that, just like a lot of contemporary clicktivism, has little translation
beyond the screen. This is not to say all these actions are worthless or immaterial in this
regard; they do get recorded, and they create an action in the virtual world that has material
impact on the environment where the site is stored and beyond. Language is then never as
dematerialized or as deterritorialized as may appear at first sight.
Commissioned by the New York–based New Radio and Performing Arts for their pio-
neering Turbulence.org site, Word Market had around 500 active users worldwide when it
was created. Once Turbulence.org closed down in 2016, what once was one of “the premier
web sites for net art” (Turbulence) hosting and commissioning digital art around the world
for 20 years is now preserved online by the U.S.-based Electronic Literature Organization
and the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC) in Bada-
joz, Spain. Users are still able to access Word Market and speculate with words, but they
do so by buying and selling from a work that is stored in the servers of a regional Span-
ish Museum, financed with public money. Further, the server that holds Word Market (IP
address 217.160.0.152) is not located in Badajoz but in the city of Strang, in Germany,
owned by the German internet service provider Ionos SE. The material and abstract net-
work that is drawn here by material and financial infrastructures is a good example of the
local and global entanglement of the digital web today, where tracking the effects of an
abstract work becomes exponentially distributed across the world. The materiality of Word
Market is clearly one of globalized interconnections, with local manifestations.
From a more formal approach to the language of the game itself, we can see this recip-
rocal entanglement taking place as well. Although the words we purchase are shown in
English (probably to reflect its status as global language, acting as a de facto language
of the internet), the underlying algorithm assigns value to them according to each letter’s
frequency in google searches in Spanish, as well as their variation on Google Trends. The
global-local translation of value is problematized, as the signifier, and in this case, the math-
ematical signified, are additionally disjointed. This could be understood as a radical take
on structuralist theories of semantics, where the layered nature of digital objects implies
a body that is distributed throughout space (personal and infrastructural hardware, local
and external servers, data storage infrastructures, etc.) and that is translated into several
human and computer languages (compilers, assembly languages, programming languages,
natural languages) to finally emerge as something that both the computer (first) and then
the human (always second) can read and process. The separation between signifier and sig-
nified becomes materially evident, as it did when Saussure first stated the arbitrary notion of
human language signs as sociocultural conventions that assigned concepts to morphemes.
And although the assignation of machine operations to symbols is also the product of
social conventions, there is a direct relation between compilers and assembly languages
specified by coding arrangements. As I explained elsewhere “language in a computer gains
a new layer of recursive materiality while maintaining a symbolic immaterial quality, now
grounded within the syntactical executions of code” (Saum-Pascual 82).

Digital Materiality, the Modern State and Other Dangerous Abstractions

Looking at critical web materiality is a productive way to understand the material impacts
of modern abstraction that is the basis of neoliberal exploitation of the Earth. As I men-
tioned before, thinking of the cloud to explain the extraction of minerals on the soil beneath

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us may seem contradictory at first, in part because we “inhabit a tradition (extending from
Karl Marx and Max Weber to Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard) within which the process
of modernization or of postmodernization has been understood as one of abstraction”
(Brown 50). Beginning with the grand sociological accounts of modernity (Émile Dur-
kheim, Max Weber and Georg Simmel), Bill Brown explains how abstraction came to be a
chief characteristic of the modernizing world. From Simmel taking money as a master trope
for the abstraction and rationalization of social and psychological life, to further theories
that explore abstraction as a process that shapes human perception and understanding –
Cassirer’s focus on the creation of symbolic forms, Benjamin’s critique of the effects of mod-
ern technology and commodity fetishism or Kracauer’s analysis of the role of mass culture
in alienating modern society. Following Marx, Lukács understood that the particularities
of any object or action eventually disappear within the regime of value, where quality is
translated into quantity because money facilitates calculation. This led him to conclude that
once the commodity has saturated society, “rational objectification conceals above all the
immediate – qualitative and material – character of things as things” (Lukács 92).
While this has been our traditional approach to materiality, it could be argued that
the arrival of digital technology has posed such a “threat” to materiality that a range of
disciplines from anthropology to history, art, cinema and cultural studies have taken a
turn to materiality, “inspiring research on a wide range of topics, from the material sub-
stratum of media to the human body’s interaction with technology to the socio-economic
systems which support that interaction (see, e.g., Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer 1994; Lenoir
1998; Mitchell and Thurtle 2004)” (Brown 50). Because its dematerializing effect is per-
haps digital media’s most essential aesthetic, it is not surprising to see how my inquiry into
dematerialization may extend to its mediation of our relationship with the Earth and how
the triple connotations of la tierra relate to its deterritorialization.
To avoid slipping into the maelstrom of these entangled relations I am drawing, it is use-
ful to examine their tangible, albeit at times miniscule, local manifestations. Jussi Parikka,
following thinkers like Kittler and Foucault, believes that what governs our contemporary
life is not only present in “the statements and rules found in books and libraries” but is
instead, “to be found in technological networks of machines and institutions, patterns of
education and drilling: in the scientific-engineering complex that practices such forms of
power that the traditional humanities theory is incapable of understanding or grasping”
(2). Instead, Parikka proposes to take a shift to geology, and various related disciplines such
as ecology and chemistry, to circumvent the hermeneutic meanings that operate with tra-
ditional sociological concepts. Thinking through geology, however, does not only provide
a new methodology, but it also allows me to examine the material components excluded
from the usual definitions of media.
In A Geology of Media, Parikka goes back to exploring mineral elements and com-
pounds to study media evolution. Lithium and platinum, for example, are seen as “preme-
diatic media” materials that are essential to the existence of technological culture but also
as elements that traverse technologies from jewelry to laptop batteries, as well as future
green technologies (like batteries but for hybrid cars, etc.). Tracking these materials in rela-
tion to a variety of technologies may provide an alternative media history focusing on the
story of the materials, metals, waste and so on, that runs digitally through all our culture
(high and low). Without digging much deeper, the role of the Earth and its materials thus
becomes important when considering the question of territory (and nation, for that matter)
if we think about mapping and the distribution of natural resources which are an essential

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part of nation building and the technical progress ideologies that are behind a country’s
narrative.
Writing from California in my MacBook, I cannot help but remember Apple’s famous
disclaimer printed onto each one of its devices: “Designed by Apple in California. Assem-
bled in China.” Those Chinese materials can be traced back to African land and human
exploitation, where Congolese children mine for the cobalt used in many of the company’s
batteries. How to delimit a nation, then, when thinking of its exploitation of resources
becomes as relevant and as complicated when considering imperial Spain and its exploita-
tion of the Americas, Asia and Africa. In A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2019),
Kathryn Yusoff traces the beginning of contemporary capitalism to the 15th-century Iberian
slave trade, noticing the semantic transformation carried out by Portuguese slave owners in
their resemantization of “black African bodies” into a de-humanizing labor force – “into
the geological lexicon of the inhuman (as matter and energy)” (35). This is the same lin-
guistic alchemy that allowed for the Spanish colonizers to treat American natives as exploit-
able abstract nature (as matter and energy), rather than fellow beings, during the country’s
imperial expansion. It also provided a framework for the ongoing exploitative (necrotic, as
McBrien would put it) capitalistic relationship with the land that would fuel Spain’s estab-
lishment as an imperial power – as it consolidated itself as a modern state.
The Spanish relationship to today’s immaterial global capitalism (while suspended in
the cloud) is also feeding on similar exploitation narratives, even if the country’s energy
and matter supply depend on different lands and bodies across the planet and is sustained
by almost untraceable networks. Because of this planetary entanglement, environmental
themes become a way to re-articulate narratives about globalization and the role and
definition of media (and “premediatic” media) within them. Dipesh Chakrabarty has pro-
posed to decenter the role of the human within natural histories, recognizing the impor-
tance of seeing humans as biological and geological agents which are inseparable from the
development of social and political patterns. From a postcolonial point of view, Chakra-
barty proposes to make nonhuman elements such as geological and natural resources that
contribute to capitalism’s surplus creation, as well as its related practices of exploitation,
more visible and understood (216). Further, as Parikka elegantly elaborates, historical
mappings of the environment are also “a mapping of the historical features of capitalism
as a social and technological planetary agreement” (20), leaving the local to negotiate
with the global.
It might be tempting to read, then, the anticapitalist posture found in critical web mate-
riality’s challenge to the aesthetics of abstraction as a reaction to the abandonment of ter-
ritoriality that comes with globalization, in a sort of rebuttal of the global by focusing on
regional topics and a return to nationalism. And yet we observe the opposite. All three
works are “written” in English, abandoning (or hiding, like in Word Market) the use of
Spanish and Catalan, and the focus is set in natural resources found outside of Spain (and
Mexico or Germany, for that matter). As I am emphasizing, however, this is not to be read
along the lines of the cosmopolitanism of digital literature and art. These works are not
global in their desire to suppress any dichotomies between the global and the local, but, as
Ana Marques da Silva points out when discussing global electronic literature, digital art is
able to zoom in “to the divergent and zoom out to the common, in a double movement able
to encompass the contradictions of globalization” (Marques). More granularly, the work
by Tisselli, Moll and Gache proposes the global as an international phenomenon that is, on
the one hand centralized (in the Silicon Valley I am writing from, perhaps) but also deeply

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intertwined with the margins it feeds on and sustains (i.e., the Spain from where they write,
and all other places in the Global South that their production touches).
The problematizing of the immateriality myth in these works about climate change and
destructive virtual markets, ultimately, brings to the fore the local tierra (the homeland, the
state) that is always behind any ideas of global capitalism. It also questions the role of the
individual within these larger networks, by returning to an important premise articulated
by new materialists, like Jason Edwards, who criticizes the notion of totality as a hierarchy
behind much of the poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, by noticing how “[f]or
most people, everyday life continues to be experienced in the shape of interactions with a
hierarchical ordering of material practices in a given, lived space that is governed by the
state and the geopolitical system” (296). All of us, as individuals, are also always part of
a place, a sovereign state that polices populations and borders, regulates the economy,
ensures internal security and uses its power to eliminate real and perceived threats to this
order or things. As Edwards elaborates, “Political power and economic production con-
tinue to be organized within distinct territories – principally the nation and the region – and
to be governed by hierarchies whose authority is derived from the legally recognized sov-
ereign state” (294).
As the COVID-19 pandemic and other environmental disasters have made painfully
clear, Earth emergencies force us to turn to the state and its agencies to solve legal and
material problems, giving the (local) state the protagonist role that neoliberalism tries to
obfuscate in its favoring of the global free market. Capitalism’s schizophrenic needs and its
negation of national policies and territory sit at the core of digital ecologies where

the laws of transnational environments are also negotiated in relation to national

practices and legislations. Yet the spaces of transnational digital media tend to con-
ceal the narratives – of nation, migration, language and culture, or personal experi-
ence – that undermine the narrative of technological and economic progress in much
political rhetoric.
(Karhio)

I do not read the lack of national narratives in the work of Gache, Moll or Tisselli as
another manifestation of this perverse logic of digital technologies and economies. Instead,
I observe the emergence of a new ethical relation to the Earth where the state must be
re-engaged with and transformed, opening an exciting opportunity to conceptualize what
we mean by “Spain” and its cultural production.
Re-engaging with the state, now conceptualized as the main political unit of capital-
ism, means looking outside and elsewhere, rather than inwards, in order to understand it
always in relation to the global flow of capital and energy. This is not to suggest we exam-
ine its particularities (the regional and national topics we tend to observe when we point
our gaze inwards) but to understand the state in its regulation, production and delivery
of human and nonhuman (territorial) nature as mediator in the process of global capital-
ism. In this regard, the climate crises that are referred to in these digital works do not
call for a new role of the Spanish state, but they do require a different version of the
“environment-making” that the state makes possible now (Parenti 183). While neither
Amazon, Defooooooooooooooooooooorest or Word Market are works about the Spanish
state per se (these works don’t engage with any themes, locations, traditions, or languages
of Spain) Joana Moll’s, Belén Gache’s and Eugenio Tisselli’s take on critical web materiality

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necessarily repositions Spain in relation to late capitalism which, in turn, puts the focus on
climate change at the center of any discussion of the Spanish state, even if this discussion
does not look anything like traditional nationalist battles. This does not mean these authors
dissolve local issues into an abstract idea of the global, but rather that they reinforce the
power and consequences of local (domestic) action within a shared Earth. Digital technolo-
gies’ dependency on natural resources is ingrained in the exploitative logics of capitalism,
putting the state right and center of the drama of globalization as I have reiterated through-
out. By criticizing the ways in which domestic, everyday-like online experiences have impli-
cations for life everywhere else in the globe, these works also allow us to reconceptualize
what it means to think environmentally, locally, about Spain.

Notes
1 This chapter has greatly benefited from conversations with Eugenio Tisselli, Milton Läufer and
Belén Gache, who generously shared their insights on the working of the code behind some of the
artworks I discuss here. I am also indebted to Eduardo Ledesma for his insightful feedback, to the
research group Exocanónicos: márgenes y descentramiento en la literatura en español del siglo
XXI (PID2019–104957GA-I00) funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and to Laurence
Saum for his careful and caring reading.
2 The idea of the Spanish state is itself fraught with tension and contradictions considering the efforts
at self-determination by Catalonia or the Basque Country. Although this topic is not necessarily
covered in this chapter, the regional divisions within the nation state show a different scale of this
global-local discourse. If the argument is to think in global environmental terms, Spain’s own geo-
political divisions should come second to the health of the planet itself. The argument is geological,
not geopolitical, even if geology is a type of politics.
3 Although Tisselli coined the term “algorithmic politics” in 2012, I believe his practice has been
reflecting on the concept from earlier on. Without engaging the environmental problem directly,
much of his earlier work questions the relation between machines and politics.
4 Joana Moll and Eugenio Tisselli are both founding members of Institute for the Advancement of
Popular Automatisms, a tongue-in-cheek platform for code experimentation. Please visit http://
ifapa.me/.
5 For an in-depth explanation of Hayles’s understanding of electronic literature’s materiality, read
Writing Machines (2002), where she first defines technotext, material metaphors and media-specific
analysis. A technotext is a literary work that “interrogates the inscription technology that produces
it, it mobilizes reflexive loops between its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying
that creation as physical presence” (25).
6 Although this is the promise of digital technologies, the realities of internet access, for instance,
are different across the world, where infrastructural development is uneven between the North and
South. Please see Eduardo Ledesma’s article “The Poetics and Politics of Computer Code in Latin
America: Codework, Code Art and Live Coding” on how Latin American artists explore this divide
through digital work that explores glitchy or obscure code.
7 Material ontologies aside, computer code is the product of human making and a such has embed-
ded ideologies, as Mark Marino explains in Critical Code Studies (2021). It can, then, serve largely
to expand and implement oppressive ideologies (as Safiya Noble has studied in her 2018 book
Algorithms of Oppression). The algorithm powering the Google search engine will promote these
systems of oppression, but can a different set of instructions, a different algorithm, create a differ-
ent system or have a different relationship to nature? In the examples I have chosen to analyze in
this chapter that is not the case; they merely replicate the neoliberal ideology that powers most of
computer code, choosing artistic mimicry as a way to expose the dangers of code that usually go
unnoticed. The question, however, remains.
8 Any given day during August 2020, Google searches surpassed 85,000 per second, according to
Internet Live Stats www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/#google-band
9 Please visit http://meiac.es/turbulence/archive/Works/word-market/warning.php?id=100232&word=
trump for proof of ownership.

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Tisselli, Eugenio. “On Amazon,” Talk at ELO2020 Annual Conference, 17 Jul. 2020.
Turbulence. “Turbulence.org.” Net-Art. Portal to Webrelated Art. https://net-art.org/turbulence.
Accessed 1 Sept. 2020.
Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. U of Minnesota P, 2018.

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 45
PERFORMANCE IN
CONTEMPORARY TIMES
Processes, Communities, and Audience

David Rodríguez-Solás

At the turn of the century the performing arts in Spain were going through a serious iden-
tity crisis. After two decades of public investment in national and regional theaters, the
exhibition of experimental works was relegated to alternative venues that operated with
a limited budget (Abuín González and Feldman 401). While this situation pushed many
artists into exile, among them Olga Mesa, La Ribot, and Juan Domínguez, they would
eventually return to Spain to present their works or lead workshops. In the first years of the
millennium there was a trend in performing arts to seek closer contact with audiences. This
trend responded to a process of institutionalization of a performing arts that had forgotten
about the commitment to reflect on social issues and connect with individuals (Cornago,
“Representar” 129). In this chapter I will discuss performative practices that break with
the epistemologies of their respective disciplines – dance, theater, performance. They share
a common interest in enacting a resistance to the conventions of representation and are
defined by their renewed relationship with their audiences, even if that relationship is a
contentious and challenging one. These practices seek a point of encounter in which social
and political relations are experienced along with the audience on the stage, exhibition
room, or the site-specific space of performance. In Spain, the artists behind these practices
have often faced resistance from a field that is only gradually overcoming a rigid classifica-
tion of embodied artistic practices, that has considered dance, theater and performance as
independent disciplines. In some cases, the growing interest in performance by museums
and galleries increased the opportunities to exhibit projects such as La Ribot’s work in pro-
gress Piezas distinguidas (Distinguished Pieces, 1993–2003) (Gutiérrez-Albilla). Theatrical
practices had a more difficult journey, as attested to by both Rodrigo García and Angélica
Liddell’s pioneering theatrical works. These artists had to achieve international recognition
before they were finally programmed at the Centro Dramático Nacional (National Drama
Center) and were able to reach a broader audience in Spain. Similarly, the younger artists
that I feature in this chapter, such as El Conde de Torrefiel and Vértebro, were initially
relegated to a very restricted international festival circuit, have managed to draw on the
growing interest in performance by a more diverse audience and have succeeded in show-
casing their projects in theaters and festivals throughout Spain. In this chapter I will feature
some recent examples of these changes in programing as I study how festivals in Madrid

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-51 
 Performance in Contemporary Times

and Barcelona connected producers, artists, and audiences. Additionally, my case studies
will help the reader to understand the process of how these new audiences were created,
as I examine select pieces by Juan Domínguez, El Conde de Torrefiel, Vértebro, and Los
Torreznos.
In Spain the term “performance” does not have much currency. Performance practices
usually are referred to as “actions” or simply categorized as “live arts” (artes vivas). A label
popularized in the UK in the 1990s, “live arts” described practices marginalized in art
circuits and characterized by their liveness and focus on the body. Among these live arts
we can count experimental theater, contemporary dance, and performance art (Albarrán
159–60). Although Spanish-speaking scholars have written about the nuanced meanings
provided by each word defining the various performance practices, the terms “action art,”
“live arts,” and “performance” are still used indistinctly (Taylor, Performance 35–51; Wert
36; Cornago, “¿Y después?”). In this chapter I will use “performance” as the term that
is widely accepted in the Anglophone academic field in which I work, and in which this
volume will circulate. Moreover, I am aware of the lack of consensus around the definition
of performance. Liveness and temporal immediacy were once a cause for dispute within
the discipline. For some time, there was the belief that a recording of a live performance
could not substitute for the real event. By now, media has become intrinsic to the realm of
performance, in part because technology is a staple in the presentation and circulation of
most performances. As a matter of fact, the performances I discuss here exist only in an
archival form. This archive traces a past to current performance practices in Spain, but also
signals a future for performance in Spain (Archivo Artea).1 I refer to the prospect for the
future of performance not as a utopia, but rather “as an extension of what is immediately
before us” (Sack 6). Some of the contradictory experiences that define performance prac-
tices, and that I will expand on, were perceptively summarized by Shannon Jackson, who
claims “performance is about doing, and it is about seeing; it is about image, embodiment,
space, collectivity, and/or orality; it makes community and it breaks community; it repeats
endlessly and it never repeats; it is intentional and unintentional, innovative and derivative,
more fake and more real” (15).
In the following pages I will focus on the institutionalization of performance, paying
attention to the perceived changes in academic research and the consolidation of epistemol-
ogies of performance practice. My aim is to avoid the artificial distinction between theory
and praxis, since both contribute to the “ ‘institutional genealogies’ of knowledge forma-
tion” (Jackson 5). Óscar Cornago offers an accurate account of the changes in perception
that have facilitated the consolidation of the live arts in Spain in the twenty-first century.
He underscores that the specificity of performance practice is not found in the exploration
of topics related to the body, or desire, but instead to “el modo como se presentan” (“the
way these topics are showcased”; “Representar” 127).2 Some of us who conduct research
in the performing arts might find ourselves represented by these words. It is the liveness of
the performance that brings us back to performing spaces, but also the thinking that these
practices generate. The expansion of the performing arts since the 1970s has welcomed
disciplinary crossovers that at the turn of the last century Hans-Thies Lehmann termed
“postdramatic theater.”3 Lehmann wrote a poetics for performing arts in the late twentieth
century that should be applied cautiously to current practices. In fact, this term has been
controversial among practitioners and academics alike, first because postdramatic refers to
a postmodern logic that seems obsolete, and second, because the label theater dilutes the
diverse manifestations of the performing arts. Nonetheless, José Antonio Sánchez noted in

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his prologue to the Spanish edition of Lehmann’s book that “postdramatic theater” offered
the critical tools to explain the development of performing arts in the last two decades of
the twentieth century and had helped performance to achieve artistic and academic insti-
tutionalization (“Para una” 19). Sánchez led a research group that produced important
contributions to our understanding of the genealogies of performance in Spain (Sánchez,
Artes; Cornago, Utopías). More importantly, the group’s research output has been made
accessible in a digital repository that has fostered a fluid conversation among artists and
academics (Archivo Artea).
Within recent performance research, the artist’s creative process has been clearly estab-
lished as the epistemology of performance (Sánchez and Pérez Royo 9–10). What matters is
the social articulation of the process, which includes how a performance has been received
and reshaped in contact with its audience. There are points of comparison here with other
artistic practices from this century, but this turn away from the “object” and toward the
“process” was a lengthy and complex undertaking that was finally consolidated toward
the end of the 1990s (Bishop, Artificial 194). Similarly, performance co-opted the visual
arts’ focus on the observer, to demand its audience to engage actively with the artistic
process (Lehmann 184). Here Jacques Rancière’s “emancipated spectator” comes to the
fore.4 His proposal to foster a new relationship between performers and audience assumed
that the audience “participates in the performance by refashioning it in her own way”
(13). Rancière describes the tasks of the audience as interpreting, comparing, selecting, but
above all, he attributes to it the capacity to compose, stating that “spectators see, feel, and
understand something in as much as they compose their own poem” (13). While Rancière
refers in his text specifically to theater audiences, he recognizes the same experience would
apply to other embodied practices such as dance or performance. These audiences could be
emancipated from passive spectatorship that has been encouraged by theatrical practices
that rely on representation. Audiences in performance projects are able to experience the
“blurring of the boundary between those who act and those who look; between individuals
and members of a collective body” (Rancière 19). It is this emphasis on community that
is particularly relevant for performance practices today. As members of this emancipated
community, the audience assumes the role of the interpreter and translator of the “story”
that is composed in the space of performance (Rancière 22).
By acknowledging that performance happens only when there is a community, theaters
and exhibition rooms become test grounds for a less hierarchical relationship between art-
ists and audience members. Ultimately, it is not the event itself but the revision of the rela-
tionship among the participants that allow us to talk about a sense of community. For this
to happen, its members need an identity, a history, and a common vocabulary (Cornago,
Ensayos 53). It is not unusual that, as part of the performance process, these vocabularies
are developed in post-show discussions, or even workshops. These discussions have been
included in festival programs, such as the “In-Presentable” in Madrid and “Sâlmon<” in
Barcelona. In Spain, this community building effort happened in these dedicated spaces, but
also was reflected in what took place in the main squares of major cities throughout Spain
(Pérez Royo 10). Most notably, on May 15, 2011, and in the following weeks, thousands
of people assembled to demand more participation in policy making, resulting in the 15-M
or indignados movement. Admittedly, 15-M has reconfigured the Spanish political and
cultural landscape. Since then, we have seen the creation of new political parties and media
outlets that depend on the participation of their constituencies. On the other hand, 15-M
contributed to the assessment that, both what takes place in a performance event and the

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outcomes of the various interpretations of that event, should be considered as part of the
artistic process (Cornago, Ensayos 37–41). This means that audience members as individu-
als, as well as members of a community, are asked to make a commitment to the artistic
process that they are helping to create. What 15-M generated in the realm of performance
was the confirmation that participation and engagement are as inherent to its practice as it
is to the fabric of a democratic society; for that realization to happen required “opening the
construction of knowledge and of values to participation by anyone” (Moreno-Caballud 4).
In the aftermath of 15-M, audiences were pushed to realize that responsibility, as seen
in some performances that placed the audience in the spotlight. In 2014, La Ribot, Juan
Domínguez, and Juan Loriente devised The Triumph of Freedom, a piece that did not use
any performers and only projected text on a screen, thereby requiring the audience to man-
age their own aesthetic experience through their imagination. Since this performance was
not embodied by actors, the audience was obligated to take the responsibility for the col-
lective reception of the event.
Emancipated audiences of performances like The Triumph of Freedom and the others
that I have referred to so far have little in common with audiences that attend immersive
theater and participatory performance, whose responses are usually prompted by the cast.
Immersive theater places “audience members in a thematically cohesive environment that
resources their sensuous, imaginative and explorative capabilities as productive and involv-
ing aspects of a theatre aesthetic” (Alston 2). In immersive theater plays, audience mem-
bers “are coerced, rather than liberated; manipulated, rather than emancipated; instead of
agency, they receive entrapment” (Freshwater 65). Nonetheless, as shown in some of the
examples that I include in this chapter, there are artists who seek the involvement of the
audience in what Claire Bishop has defined as “delegated performance.” Here, audience
members are selected to contribute to the project because of their expertise or socio-cultural
demographics. Bishop claims that these examples can produce “disruptive events that tes-
tify to a shared reality between viewers and performers, and which defy not only agreed
ways of thinking about pleasure, labour and ethics, but also the intellectual frameworks we
have inherited to understand these ideas today” (Artificial 239). Roger Bernat’s projects are
conceived as shared experiences in which the audience of his immersive pieces participates
in a delegated performance. In Pendiente de voto (Pending Vote, 2012), audience members
made decisions about the development of the performance using a remote control provided
upon entering the theater. In Numax-Fagor-Plus (2014) the audience was asked to partici-
pate and make decisions in a workers’ union assembly that was part of the performance.
In 2014, Bernat collaborated with Yan Duyvendak in Please, continue (Hamlet), a work
that put Hamlet on trial for his assassination of Polonius, his fate decided by a jury selected
from the audience. These projects present ethical dilemmas that the audience must face as
a group (Rodriguez-Solás). In addition, audiences are often confronted with the manipula-
tive nature of the performative devices that Bernat uses in his projects. For instance, the
spectator of Numax-Fagor-Plus has to take a side in order to participate in the decisions
of the assembly, and in Pendiente de voto participation is prompted because the rest of the
audience is watching you use your remote (Cornago, “Uno va al teatro” 222).
I would like to turn my attention to performative practices that have taken into con-
sideration the audience as one of the constitutive elements of contemporary performance.
This “audience turn” is not new in art, or specific to performance, but it is arguably more
prominent in performance than in theater or dance, categories I use despite the inevitable
exceptions that defy traditional classifications. The reason behind this prominence could

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be the open disposition of performance audiences, who contrary to most western theatrical
conventions are not required to suspend their disbelief.
Juan Domínguez is one of the driving forces in Spanish performance today. He begins
every project by selecting the title even before he knows how it will develop, as he admits in
All Good Spies Are My Age (2002). In this piece, Domínguez sits behind a small classroom
desk flipping pink index cards that contain the text of the performance that we simulta-
neously see projected on a screen. As in his other projects, he deceives his audiences by
generating narrative expectations that he later abandons. These false narrative leads at
times may function as a self-reflection on the creative process behind the performance or
as a primer on how to develop a piece. The story presents many false options which seem
designed to deliberately misguide the audience: A proposal to participate in an artistic resi-
dency in Montpelier, an application to a grant offered by Madrid’s regional government,
a tour that he has to cancel because of the impending opening of the piece we are seeing,
ideas for future projects, and so on. Additionally, other mundane details and anxieties are
intermingled with insights into his own creative process. We learn, for example, that he gen-
erated ideas for this project by emailing all his contacts and asking them to send him two
questions about the concept of “time,” one for him and another directed to someone else.
These questions are then integrated into the performance, when, at some point, Domínguez
makes explicit how he himself thinks about space and time, two concepts that are related
to his work as a choreographer. After Domínguez explains the graphic design of the cards,
the meaning of each font color, and the alignment of the text on the page – details that
seem distracting from his main argument so far – he shares how he decided on the timing
of each card and we realize that his movements are choreographed and that his presence
is necessary on stage. It is the transparency of this piece that makes it effective. Beside its
self-reflection, there is an intention to contribute to the idea of futurity in performance. It
is, indeed, one of the most controversial topics in performance studies, whether there is a
present time in performance, or “like the experience of subjectivity, performance passes
through time while never being quite present to itself” (Scott-Bottoms 211).5 To this point,
one of the projects that he talks about in the past tense and which he states took place in
2010 is actually a fictional event projected into the future, since the video archiving the
performance was shot in 2003 (Domínguez, All). In fact, one of the cards reads “Anticipa-
tion is the future in present time.” In the last part of the piece, he shares photos of himself
from the time he was a baby until the present. At some point, he shows photos in which he
is wearing the same clothes but where we see him gradually aging. All Good Spies Are My
Age ends with Domínguez wearing a mask that matches the photo of the seventy-year-old
person that we see on the screen – presumably a projection of the artist in his old age. If
what is presented in the performance is haunted by the past, and the present of the perfor-
mance is sometime in the future, Domínguez is also pointing at the future disappearance
and reinvention of what he has presented before us.
Juan Domínguez curated a weeklong program of performances that would eventually
contextualize and become part of his work All Good Spies Are My Age in 2003. This
initiative prompted the creation of In-Presentable (2003–2012), one of the festivals that
were a driving force in the institutionalization of performance in the Spanish state. Over
the next ten years at La Casa Encendida,6 In-Presentable showcased international artistic
works – mainly from Europe – and facilitated the development of new projects as artistic
residencies within the framework of the festival. Unlike more traditional festivals that to
a large extent focus on showcasing a cohesive program, In-Presentable instead aimed at

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the creation of an audience that was both receptive to these innovative performative prac-
tices and ready to assume their responsibility in the configuration of the field. This festival
facilitated exchanges between emerging artists, more established featured artists, and the
audience “to promote a collective exchange and to reflect upon working conditions and
modes of operation” (Sabisch 113). In fact, the pun present in the title (In-Presentable, or
un-representable) hints at the festival’s focus on the challenges posed by this type of trans-
gressive artistic process. In-Presentable provided an unparalleled space for exchange that
empowered local artists and audiences in Madrid and in the process created a much-needed
community. Regarding these shared experiences, dancer and choreographer Paz Rojo
observed that until the creation of this festival “the dance and theatre community were
completely separated and In-Presentable could broaden up [sic] and entangle these disci-
plines” (qtd. Sabisch 118).
In-Presentable coexisted with other live arts festivals in Madrid such as Escena Con-
temporánea (Contemporary Stage, 2001–2014), which had six different directors over
the years, and unlike In-Presentable lacked the intention of community building. The artis-
tic success of In-Presentable was instrumental in changing the focus of the live arts festival
writ large, now understood as an artistic process in which lectures, workshops, encounters
with the audience, and the featured works all “function as segments in a larger composi-
tion that uses its inevitable political charge as resistance and opportunity for discourse
production” (Spånsberg 133). In 2013, Domínguez reflected on the accomplishments of the
In-Presentable festival. In that spirit, he asked his collaborators at In-Presentable to send
him one hundred emails with questions. In his answers he claimed that this festival aimed
at creating a “collective ecosystem” that would include artists and academics and would
also spotlight the audience (Domínguez, In-Presentable 2007–2012 35). When one of his
collaborators asked him to define “audience,” Domínguez answered by saying that, in his
view, an audience is

siempre activo, acechante, ávido, inteligente, crítico. Que se da el tiempo, que se

preocupa, que cuida los detalles, que quiere, que aprende, que copia, que se apropia,
que enjuicia, que critica, que se enfada, que se implica, que se ilusiona, que se pone
cachondo, que se corre, que se desinfla, que tiene un gatillazo, que te pone en la
cuerda floja, que se pone en la cuerda floja, que se desnuda, que te desnuda, que se
arranca. (Domínguez, In-Presentable 2007–2012 139)
always active, stalking, avid, intelligent, critical. They take time, they care, they
take care of the details, they want something, they learn, they copy, they borrow,
they judge, they criticize, they get angry, they get involved, they get excited, they get
horny, they come, they get discouraged, they can’t get up, they make you walk on a
tightrope, they walk on the tightrope, they undress, they undress you, they dare.

As the quote shows, he recognized that an audience must learn from, and with, the art-
ists. Domínguez accurately predicted in 2013 that the effects of these performance projects
would have repercussions in the future, opening the door to new initiatives. It was this
shared responsibility between artists and audiences that facilitated the creation of a com-
munity in Madrid that would support future initiatives such as the Living Room Festival
and the Picnic Sessions at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, CA2M.
In 2012, as In-Presentable was coming to a close in Madrid, an exciting new festival
materialized in Barcelona. The Sâlmon< Festival profited from a more established live arts

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scene in Barcelona, consolidated since the establishment in 1983 of the Mercat de les Flors
as a venue originally specialized in contemporary dance. More recently, the city added El
Graner’s Creation Factory to bolster its well-established tradition in dance and the live arts.
Sâlmon< has showcased many of the companies that have enjoyed artistic residencies at El
Graner, but the festival works with other live arts venues such as La Caldera, La Poderosa,
and Antic Teatre.7 Both the artistic team and the mission of the festival are revised every
two years, thereby keeping things fresh. In the program for 2019, the organizers aimed
at serving as a meeting point for international and local artists as well as audiences and
producers. However, they made explicit that their goal was the “transmission of content
and ways of making.” In 2022, the curatorial team pointed out that the festival focuses on
“generar acciones de proximidad y de aprendizaje junto con los públicos. Eso es algo que
particulariza mucho la experiencia de trabajo con las audiencias en el festival” (“generat-
ing actions of proximity and learning together with the audiences, which is something that
makes the experience of working with audiences at the festival very special”; Diéguez,
Interview). Both In-Presentable and Sâlmon< Festival showcased most of the artists that
I have mentioned, and who have since been programmed in more commercial theaters,
thereby reaching a broader audience. This kind of broad commercial appeal was unthink-
able at the outset of the twenty-first century. Festivals were decisive in the institutionaliza-
tion of performance, but their short lifespan tells us as much about the precarious situation
of the performing arts in Spain, as it does about the scarce public subsidies that these pro-
jects depend on to guarantee their continuity.
El Conde de Torrefiel is one of the companies that benefited from the community build-
ing that was developed at these festivals. This collective originally based in Barcelona and
founded by Tanya Beyeler and Pablo Gisbert has created a recognizable aesthetic and estab-
lished a close complicity with their audience. Their stage design uses a distinctive white
box associated with dance, and they resort to choreographies that accompany a text that
is usually projected or spoken by a voiceover. Guerrilla was a project that evolved from
2014 through 2016, as the group tested various configurations of the piece, combining the
dancers with performers selected from the audience members, and experimenting with the
presence and absence of text. A form of documentary theater, Guerrilla projected text that
reproduced the intimate thoughts of those members of the audience that had participated
in this delegated performance. These thoughts were excerpted from interviews conducted
with the group of performers that had been pre-selected from a list of willing spectators.
In Guerrilla, these group of performers are placed in three different situations. The first
one is set in a future 2023 as the performers listen to a lecture by Italian director Romeo
Castellucci about the future of the theater. Then, in the next segment, some of these same
performers attend a tai chi class. And finally, they pack the stage as they dance to electronic
music. The audience members at the performance had to reconcile the visual cues of what is
happening on stage with the anonymous revelation of the intimate thoughts of the perform-
ers projected through text, and their own composition of the narrative, filtered through
their affective experience. In the program of the Kunstensfestivaldesarts in Brussels, where
Guerrilla officially opened in 2016, we can read that this piece explores “la guerre subtile,
organisée et dirigée qui se déroule dans les têtes de chaque individu d’une foule et qui con-
stitue une situation unifiée en apparence, mais qui indique une multiplicité d’univers quand
on lit entre les lignes” (“the subtle, organized and directed conflict that takes place in the
heads of each individual in a crowd. While apparently it is a homogenous situation, when
one reads between the lines, it reveals a multiplicity of universes”; Conde de Torrefiel). This

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project is impregnated by the specific anxieties of the residents of the cities where it has been
performed. In Paris, the company developed it just a few days after the Bataclan terrorist
attack. The collective trauma and the individual reckoning showed in the audience’s partici-
pation. As El Conde de Torrefiel and other companies decide to mediate the performative
text through spoken word or through the projection of supertitles, performance begins to
combine thinking, remembering, and imagining with the bodily presence of the perform-
ers on the stage (Cornago, Ensayos 83). In addition, the difference between actions and
words, between perception and imagination, works as a device that allows the audience to
resist a relational interpretation of what they see before them. It is precisely this creation of
conditions on stage, designed for the audience to be reflective, that El Conde de Torrefiel
has implemented in other projects. In Observen cómo el cansancio derrota al pensamiento
(Observe How Tiredness Defeats Thought, 2011) performers played a basketball game
that was accompanied by a voiceover in which a man and a woman debate transcendental
issues. La posibilidad que desaparece frente al paisaje (The Possibility That Disappears in
Front of the Landscape, 2015) features an imaginary tour of ten European cities narrated
by a voiceover that reads quotes attributed to several artists and intellectuals who speak
about nature and the body. The words of Sara Mesa, Paul B. Preciado, Michel Houellebecq,
and Spencer Tunick, among others, are juxtaposed with the choreographed movements of
four performers. The projects of El Conde de Torrefiel seem to challenge the separation of
images, bodies, and words, even as they reflect on the “mental drift that occurs whenever
we watch any performance” (Bishop, “Black Box” 38). No doubt, duration and fragmenta-
tion have had a presence in performance since at least the 1970s. However, these elements
have acquired a new meaning when situated in the audience, especially when distractions
challenge our cognitive capacity and force us to reflect on the performative event by using
all our senses.
Vértebro is a collective based in Cordoba and formed by Ángela López, Juan Diego
Calzada, and Nazario Díaz. In 2018, Mateo Feijoo commissioned them to make an all-night
durational piece to be presented at the institution he then directed, the Matadero Madrid.
Such durational pieces usually “subvert and subdue chrono-normative time and propose
(to the public and the performer) a direct co-formation of endurance” (Lepecki). For this
site-specific project entitled Madrugá (Good Friday Morning), Vértebro proposed to the
audience a collective and individual pilgrimage that had resonances with the Holy Week
festivities in their hometown and in Seville. In that regard, Madrugá reproduced both the
ritual component of the religious celebration and the festive all-night experience of a party
(see Figure 45.1). It aimed at creating a sense of community among the audience members,
a task that would have been challenging if the piece were only ninety minutes long, as the
organizers themselves admitted in an interview (Cornago, “De camino”). This overnight
project was developed without the physical presence of performers, who were replaced by
spoken word, music, and video projections. The audience had a schedule of the perfor-
mance, and they were free to enter and leave the room and participate in the celebration as
they wished. In this way, Madrugá created a performative device upon which the audience
might build their own experience. Vértebro has explored the tension between the sacred
and the profane in other projects, such as Dios tiene vagina (God Has a Vagina, 2017),
which follows a more recognizable structure to investigate questions of religious and gender
identity. In the piece, we see the performers’ naked bodies assembled into several structures
that recall the floats that parade during Holy Week, but without the religious statues. As in
Madrugá, the music becomes the counterpoint for the celebration. Both religious and party

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Figure 45.1 Audience Has Breakfast at the End of Madrugá at Matadero Madrid. Photograph by
Virginia Rota.
Source: Courtesy of Vértebro.

music alternate as part of a complex negotiation of identities that takes place on stage. The
performers parade by on the floats they have built, accompanied by flamenco clapping and
tap dancing, while singing popular songs typically used by Catholic pilgrims. In general,
objects and bodies are repurposed in God Has a Vagina. The final scene shows the three
performers setting several tables that will be used in a communal celebration with the audi-
ence (see Figure 45.2). For the duration of the piece, the parents of the cast have been slicing
jamón serrano (cured ham) upstage. At the end of this performance, ham platters and draft
beer are enjoyed in a festive communion-like celebration shared among performers and
audience, who together occupy the communal space of the ritual.
Unlike Vértebro, the Madrid-based collective Los Torreznos, formed by Jaime Vallaure
and Rafael Lamata, usually begin their performances by introducing themselves in a very
colloquial way that seeks to create a bond with the audience. In 2015, they presented one
of their first projects at the Teatro del Barrio in Madrid, 35 minutos (35 Minutes, 2002).
It consisted of the cast counting the 2,100 seconds that make up the thirty-five minutes of
the title. Their action here builds on the fast-paced or slow-paced rhythm, the inflection
of their voice, but above all, with it they create opportunities for the audience to abandon
their contemplative attitude and participate in the performance. For this they resort to a
strategy of duration, as in other examples that I referenced earlier. Cornago describes the
diverse reactions of the public as they participate. Some try to interrupt Los Torreznos,
others leave and come back later on with a drink from the theater’s concession stand,
actions which Cornago interprets as both part of the performance and the effects of the
performance taking place at the same time (Cornago, “¿Y después?” 28). Los Torreznos’
performative practice helps the audience to become aware of other audience members, to

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Figure 45.2 Performers Play with the Floats in God Has a Vagina. Photograph by Mila Ercoli.
Source: Courtesy of Vértebro.

search around for other people’s reactions as they share this experience. Sánchez claims
that “being together is more important than being a community,” because it allows us to
relate to others, regardless of our shared identity (Sánchez, “Nosotros” 40). Los Torreznos
question the role of the audience and in that regard, they hinder the community building
effort that Rancière saw as constitutive of the emancipated audience. In their project La
cultura (The Culture, 2007) the group highlights the individual and the collective identity
present through culture. In their distinctive performative style, they repeat short phrases
such as “I am/We are” or “I am not/We are not.” They also mingle with the audience and
interact with them, breaking any fictional filters or fourth walls. At the curtain call, Val-
laure and Lamata join the audience in their applause. What at first seems intended to praise
the audience is actually an extension of the performance that only ends when the last audi-
ence member leaves the room. In 2014, the museum CA2M held a retrospective exhibition
that replicated the contemptuous relationship established between Vallaure and Lamata
and their audience (Barenblit). Rather than dedicating exhibition rooms to the performers’
work, it was featured in the museum’s recorded welcome voicemail, in the elevators, and
on tv screens randomly placed throughout the building. One of the projects that Vallaure
and Lamata created for the exhibition was La visita guiada (Guided Visit). In this piece they
guided visitors to their videos located in different parts of the museum, but the audience
was not able to watch them because they were blindfolded. It is this emphasis on the spoken
word above other forms of meaning-making that differentiates them from other performers
that I analyzed earlier in this chapter. Additionally, their performances serve both as a point
of comparison with other takes on spectatorship and as a confirmation of the central posi-
tion granted to the audience in performance projects, even as they establish an adversarial
relationship with the audience.

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The prominence of performance at the beginning of the twenty-first century has unques-
tionably facilitated a diversification of the live arts and their showcase in commercial ven-
ues, a process that has expanded their reach to larger audiences. There is a possibility that
with this opportunity for broader appeal, there is a greater risk of commodification, as
contemporary theater and dance emulate a successful and trouble-free relationship between
performers and audience. But by asserting the need for a renewed role of the audience in the
construction of the performance, the performing arts are problematizing their dependency
on cultural policy, a policy that in Spain responds to electoral cycles and has never been
forward thinking. Performance has been able to efficiently respond to audience demands
for greater participation, demands that were amplified by societal changes springing from
the 15-M movement. This capacity for rapid adaptation could be a symptom of our con-
temporary times that is not exclusive to performance. Alternatively, performance’s focus on
community building could be understood as calling attention to the future, meaning that
our coming together is an affirmation of our sense of community and a political act, a real-
ity that we took for granted until the irruption of the pandemic. It is difficult to predict how
performance will look in the years to come, but if we agree that the future of performance
is always suggested by its present, it is difficult to believe that it could ever turn its back to
the audience.

Notes
1 The field of performance studies in Spain has benefited from the dedicated archive directed by José
Antonio Sánchez, Archivo Artea. It includes video recordings and photographs of many of the
performances that I refer to in this chapter. In addition, there is a growing repository of academic
work by scholars affiliated with Sánchez’s research projects.
2 All translations are my own unless noted otherwise.
3 Lehmann first published Postdramatic Theatre in 1999 in German. It was published in French
and English in 2002 and 2006 respectively. The Spanish translation appeared much later, in 2013.
Nonetheless, the idea of “postdramatic theater” was a well-known concept in both performance
research and practice. See Cornago, “Teatro posdramático,” and Sánchez “Para una lectura.”
4 Rancière initially introduced the concept of “the emancipated spectator” in a 2004 lecture and
since then the term has circulated widely, more so after it appeared in Artforum in 2007, and later
in an eponymous book along with other articles by the author.
5 This debate about performance’s liveness and mediation is a fascinating one that has been recently
summarized in Stephen Scott-Bottoms’ comprehensive review of Peggy Phelan’s influential study
Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993).
6 La Casa Encendida is a nonprofit organization in Madrid that offers cultural and educational
activities around visual and performing arts, and critical thinking. This cultural center is committed
to fostering civic participation in the activities of the program.
7 El Graner is a dance and live arts hub located in a former light bulb factory in Barcelona. This
center fosters experimentation and collective learning as part of its artistic mission. Both La Cal-
dera and La Poderosa are creation factories specialized in dance that support artists who have the
body as the center of their projects. Finally, Antic Teatre is located in a building dating from the
1650s and is a center of experimentation, creation, production, exhibition, promotion, and distri-
bution. Antic Teatre is considered one of the hubs of the live arts in Spain.

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Albarrán, Juan. Performance y arte contemporáneo. Discursos, prácticas, problemas. Cátedra, 2019.
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Archivo Artea. http://archivoartea.uclm.es/. Accessed 29 Nov. 2020.
Barenblit, Ferran, editor. Cuatrocientos setenta y tres millones trescientos cincuenta y tres mil
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Thousand Eight Hundred and Ninety Seconds. CA2M, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Comunidad
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Cornago, Óscar. “Teatro posdramático: las resistencias de la representación.” Artes de la escena y de
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versidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2006, pp. 219–38.
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Domínguez, Juan, ed. In-Presentable 03–07. La Casa Encendida, 2007.
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Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Teatro posdramático. CEDEAC, 2013.
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duration/andre-lepecki. Accessed 2 Feb. 2022.
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Neoliberal Crisis, translated by Linda L. Grabner-Coronel. Liverpool UP, 2015.
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del Teatre, Ediciones Polígrafa, 2016.
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and Jonathan Thacker. Liverpool UP, 2023, pp. 251–65.
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in Contemporary Europe: Structures, Aesthetics, Cultural Policy, edited by Manfred Brauneck and
ITI Germany, Transcript, 2017, pp. 43–274.
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Sánchez, José Antonio, ed. Artes de la escena y de la acción en España: 1978–2002. Ediciones de la
Universidad de Castilla La Mancha, 2006.
Sánchez, José Antonio. “Para una lectura posteatral de Teatro posdramático.” Teatro posdramático,
edited by Hans Thies Lehmann, CENDEAC, 2013, pp. 17–25.
Sánchez, José Antonio. “Nosotros: marcos para instituir el plural.” Componer el plural: escena,
cuerpo y política, edited by Victoria Pérez Royo and Diego Agulló. Ediciones Polígrafa, 2016,
pp. 31–56.Sánchez, José Antonio, y Victoria Pérez Royo. “La investigación en artes escénicas.
Introducción.” Cairón. Revista de estudios de danza, vol. 13, 2010, pp. 5–13.
Scott-Bottoms, Stephen. Review of “Unmarked: The Politics of Performance by Peggy Phelan.” Thea-
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Spånsberg, Mårteen. “What is the Meaning of Contemporary?” In-Presentable 03–07, edited by Juan
Domínguez, Caja de Ahorros, y Monte de Piedad de Madrid, 2007, pp. 121–55.
Taylor, Diana. Performance. Cuarto Propio, 2012.
Wert, Juan Pablo. “Sobre el arte de acción en España.” Artes de la escena y de la acción en España,
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Mancha, 2006, pp. 35–55.

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 46
THE AESTHETICS OF EPHEMERA
Migrant Subjects and the Unleashing of Place in
the Photography of Óscar Parasiego

Parvati Nair

A migrant, who is also a citizen, somewhere, sometime, someplace . . .

I write this chapter as the world struggled in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, when
a deep and sustained awareness of the ephemeral nature of time and of the specificities
of individual circumstances and locations forms key aspects of the experiences of many.
This chapter emerges not merely in the context of the pandemic, but also in the wake of
the departure of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU). As the conse-
quences of reneging European membership unfold across Britain’s workplaces, streets and
homes, many Europeans will have already made their exit from the UK, leaving behind
them the traces, shadows and memories of their presence. The pandemic and the subse-
quent closure of many workplaces have also triggered both arrivals and departures across
Europe. The free movement of people within the territories of the European Union, both
a foundational pillar and a key privilege, of the idea of contemporary Europe, has long
afforded European citizens the right to migrate and resettle across national borders at will.
This mobility has also led, over several decades, to the proliferation of languages, ethnici-
ties, cuisines and cultures across localities, turning European capitals into hybrid, culturally
effervescent spaces, marked by a dynamic of constant transit, as Europeans move freely
from place to place. As a result, the conceptual tools that we use to understand our world,
such as identity, citizenship, home, place and belonging have required revision and are now
best reframed in terms of the social-cultural practices and experiences that mobility has per-
petuated and deepened. Simultaneously, however, and as a direct response to the increasing
presence and speed of migratory flows at the heart of Europe, diverse social and political
trends such as populism have emerged which gather strength from the wholesale rejection
of any revision to our conceptual understanding of the ideas of identity and belonging and
their personal, public and political representations. If these are typical responses to existing
trends of uprooting, then clearly the pandemic will exacerbate them, unpinning our efforts
to revise and renew our understanding of identity, citizenship, home, place and belonging
to better coincide with the realities of time and place that a world of migrancy demands.

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-52
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

Óscar Parasiego, the visual artist whose work I consider in this chapter, is not untypical of
the many young Spaniards who have used the right of free movement in order to reside, for
some years, in the UK. A native of Asturias, he spent some years in the Midlands, alternating
between different modes of employment, whilst also using this time to explore other cultures
and places. In a series of images entitled Diáspora (2016), based upon his experiences of
living in Birmingham, Parasiego explores the dynamics of migration, as migrants adapt to
the places they go to. Focusing largely on domestic interiors, Diáspora is not so much about
the relation to homeland, as the title might have one believe, but about the transformations
that occur through migration as seen in the intimate details of de-homing/re-homing and
relocation. In an interview I conducted in 2020, Parasiego stated that his interest was on the
European migrant as a subject who arrives, adapts, is transformed and then departs (Inter-
view). His work gestures to processes of identity in and through transit, rather than to any
connection between diasporic communities and countries of origin or destination.
Indeed, the free flow of people across Europe challenges the very notion of diaspora, as it
does that of exile, as the EU defines itself specifically by means of a system of mobility that
propels capital, services and people within its spaces. For EU citizens, this free movement
permits mobility across national boundaries in ways that undocumented migrants or citizens
from outside of the EU cannot enjoy. It should be noted, however, that the EU’s facilitation
of mobility layers itself – as in the case of Spain, with its many regions, languages, traditions
and landscapes – onto an uneven socio-economic and cultural landscape, where precisely
the less developed or less cosmopolitan regions are those with long-standing attachments to
place, such as the rural areas of Spain and Parasiego’s own native Asturias. For those whose
identities have been constructed in terms of where they come from, which communities they
belong to and/or what landscapes define them, a move to another context, culture or coun-
try can still be challenging, demanding, as it does, adaptability and adjustment. Such shifts
in perspective form part of identity as a life-long process and ultimately position the subject
as removed from their “origins.” What is unsettling is not so much the act of relocation, as
it is the realization that the very idea of “belonging” is bound to context, changeable and
hence inconstant, and contingent upon time, place and memory. As such, to belong is not a
given, but a process that must constantly be articulated, revised and reconfirmed.
Parasiego’s visual art seeks to better understand and represent this move of identity, tak-
ing its cue from his own experiences. He is a native of Cangas del Narcea in Asturias, the
oldest municipality of this mountainous region composed of multiple small hamlets, an area
which has experienced a steady decline in its population over the past four decades, so that
migration, both to other parts of Spain and elsewhere, has long featured large in the social
landscape. Parasiego states that his own experiences of migration altered him profoundly,
forcing him to modify his behavior and adapt to new environments and to also note altered
perspectives of the very ideas of home and belonging. He also had to rethink the ideas that
he had taken for granted with relation to how identity is constituted and articulated: What,
then, happens to places – regions, countries, cities, localities, streets and homes – when peo-
ple come and go? These freedoms, of course, are the prerogative of European citizens, such
as Parasiego, and not the countless “other” migrants from the global south or elsewhere
without recourse to the option of leaving Europe, returning “home” or even easily finding
employment in their current locations, as was the case during the financial crisis of 2008,
rendered worse more recently by the pandemic.
One the one hand, as mentioned, there is the question of the places that Europeans like
him come from and the effects of depopulation, as many abandoned or depleted villages

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in Spain, Italy and elsewhere will show. As Parasiego’s fellow Asturian, the writer Julio
Llamazares, so brilliantly portrays in his novel La lluvia amarilla (The Yellow Rain; 1988)
about a village so abandoned that only a sole inhabitant is left, there are parts of southern
Europe and Spain, in particular, where the land has long defined communities and where
the values, traditions and ways of life of centuries have come undone by exit migration and
depopulation. Parasiego’s birthplace of Cangas del Narcea is one such example of localities
and communities slowly being undone by exit migration, especially of the young. In this,
it fits into the demographic patterns of depopulation that characterize much of southern
Europe, a process that forms part of the economic, social and political trends of the EU as a
whole. The circulation of people, services and capital has not been even in Europe, though
a hallmark of the imagination of Europe is precisely the mobility required for a neoliberal,
free market economy. Within this politically “smooth” space of Europe, economic and
social landscapes vary greatly, and the capital cities exert a pull on the youth from more
provincial areas. The concomitant ease of travel has created a class of European citizen,
often still young, who moves between locations and belongs partially to more than one
place. In this sense, European citizenship brings to the fore the fluidity of late capitalism’s
effects on the social fabric of small, local communities, long shaped by traditions, values
and attachment to place of origin. It upends traditional imaginations of the key markers of
identity and proposes instead fluidity and fragmentation. Parasiego thus seeks to trace the
subjective experience of transnational mobility in terms of the self and its shifting contexts
in and through transit. Diáspora is, in its intent, a reflection on the subjective journey of the
migrant. In turn, this series of images is also an invitation to reflect and revise questions of
home, place and belonging(s), in terms not of settlement, continuity or state of being, but
of mobility, transience and visitation.
The question that I address in this chapter is: if the visual art of Diáspora evokes the
ephemerality of processes of identity that stem from migrancy, then how do such images
reflect back onto the ideas of home and place via the sensibility of an aesthetics of the
ephemeral in Parasiego’s work?

Lily and Iván

Lily and Iván form two of Parasiego’s subjects. Both are set within their domestic scenes,
one near an open ironing board, the other in a kitchen that has clearly been used. Yet we
never see their faces or know what they look like. If much photography of migration has
focused on the image of the migrant, this is precisely what is replaced, in Parasiego’s work,
by a silhouette, a ghost-like outline of a person, who remains forever faceless, gender-less
but for the name assigned to them and anonymous. It is this eponymous shadow of the
migrant that troubles the viewer, who struggles to comprehend the unknown and instinc-
tively imagine the identity of the subject. To do so, however, means to cast the eye over the
fractured, indeed, broken surface of the image, as if to piece together the person from the
objects of their personal lives. Iván irons his clothes; Lily uses her kitchen. These most basic
elements of the everyday, almost trivial, form the only traces of the subjects themselves.
Metaphoric of their superimposition onto the places they are in or were in – for one never
knows whether these images are about presence or absence (or both) – is the disjuncture
within the images caused by technically lifting parts of surfaces, such as the kitchen counter,
to create a jagged line of vision. Multiple perspectives emerge, as the “transparent” figure
of the migrant allows viewers to make sense of their life through the objects and spatial

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Figure 46.1 “Lily.”

Source: Image by Óscar Parasiego.

Figure 46.2 “Iván.”

Source: Image by Óscar Parasiego.

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contours visible around and behind them. Viewers experience a somewhat disorienting
destabilization of normal definitions of a visual subject, opening onto an alteration in depth
of field and perspective.
Indeed, it is important to note that Parasiego’s images work at more than one level.
There is, firstly, the intimate and personal world of the migrant – her or his belongings,
rooms, practices, such as cooking or ironing. Each image contains a “home” remade in new
contexts, a home that confirms the migrant’s adaptations and make her/him no different
from anyone else. The ghost-like outline of the migrant confirms this blurring, which is also
at once a form of anonymity, as if the migrant had no face to be known by.
At a different level, the images come to us, as viewers, who remain as observers, search-
ing to better understand the glimpse offered of “someone else’s life.” Without face, race or
ethnicity, with only the bare essentials of home living on display, the migrant is both like
“us” and always alien, unknown. As viewers, we read into the images what we can or what
we recall from our own lived experiences. The dubious presence of the subject opens room
for the viewer to step into the space of the image and mobilize the imagination by drawing
upon memory. Parasiego states that his intention is to turn the image into a mirror, so that
viewers could fill the void of identity with their own particular imaginations (Interview).
The empty silhouettes of Lily and Iván could be Parasiego himself – or you, or me. Their
faceless outlines symbolize the many who have migrated, either from their hometowns and
villages to bigger cities or else across national borders to other places. The images reveal
the remaking of the migrant and his/her home in new places – and, with it, the fragility and
transience of the very ideas of home, place and belonging. By the same token, those markers
of difference that identify the migrant as a person in passing are absent, so that questions
of race, ethnicity, nationality or religion are all left blank and to be imagined by the viewer.
While this visual play in Parasiego’s work suffers from historical depth and definition, it
can also be a way of offering up the image as a space within which to imagine migrancy in
terms of the viewer’s own experiences as subject of modernity.

Contexts of Migrancy
According to Spain’s Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas (National Statistics Institute), just
over two and a half million Spaniards lived outside of the country between 2018 and 2019
(Instituto Nacional de Estadística). This is a trend that has been in place for several years,
as Spain’s youth population, raised with discourses of European identity and an awareness
of opportunities for personal and professional growth within Europe, embrace mobility as
a way of life. A significant number of these young Spaniards were people who had moved
elsewhere within the EU, many to the UK and France. Indeed, the European Union (EU)
has been concerned about the demographic implications of mass youth mobility for south-
ern and eastern Europe, as young people gravitate to the wealthier European capitals in
search of opportunities (Oltermann et al.). The freedom of circulation for goods and people
afforded by the EU has meant that many Europeans are able to relocate and move flexibly
between EU states. The politics of free movement potentially turns subjects into migrants,
as individuals can move between places and maintain diverse local and trans-local affilia-
tions. At the crux of such policies is the idea that citizenship can be plural and is no longer
confined to the nation state, thus reshaping the latter idea too in terms of plurality and
mobility, as opposed to singularity and bounded, settled communities. Nevertheless, what
Parasiego’s work does not broach is the fact that such fluidity, choice and freedom is the

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prerogative of European migrants within the European Union, as opposed to, for example,
undocumented migrants in European nations from the Global South.
Mobile subjects both contribute to, and are shaped by, contexts of migrancy. If, as Mar-
shall Berman established so clearly as long ago as in 1982 with his All that is Solid Melts
Into Air, the history of modernity has been one of maelstrom, of uprooting, scatterings and
dislocation, then the free circulation of goods, services and peoples in the EU has created
uneven, disjointed and multifaceted identities for many migrants, such as Parasiego. As the
global pandemic caused by COVID-19 raged, the dynamics of migration have been pro-
foundly affected across the globe, so that some have found themselves locked in and unable
to move, whilst others have returned to their places of origin either due to a shutting down
of employment or else because they felt safer at “home.”1 It remains to be seen what new
arrivals, departures and directions of relocation emerge as a response. As the pandemic has
proven, demographic trends are inevitably determined by context. Migration is as much an
individual decision for Europeans such as Parasiego, as it is a response to circumstances.

Of Context or Circumstance
Parasiego states that he drew the conceptual basis for Diáspora from the work of the philos-
opher José Ortega y Gasset. Citing the latter’s work, and especially his well-known phrase
“Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia” (“I am myself and my circumstance”; Obras completas
757), he highlights the importance of “circumstances,” or context in shaping individual
lives. Ortega y Gasset contested the Cartesian notion of Cogito Ergo Sum by showing the
insufficiency of this basis alone for demonstrating the uniqueness and individuality of life.
Instead, Ortega y Gasset proposed a dialectical approach to understanding life, by means
of a constant dynamic between individuals and their circumstances, whereby individuals
are both constrained, on the one hand, and constantly seeking freedom, on the other. As
Andrew Dobson has shown in An Introduction to the Politics and Philosophy of José
Ortega y Gasset (2009), Ortega y Gasset’s analysis of the modernization of society cen-
tered around the individual set within the context of circumstances. This approach was to
form the basis of his ideas around nation and nationhood, defined by individuals and their
contexts, ideas which originally positioned him somewhat ambivalently within the politi-
cal chasm of a Spain divided between Republicans and Nationalists, only for the latter to
subsequently claim his thought as a basis for their politics of the far right.
Parasiego does not engage with the political ramifications of Ortega y Gasset’s work.
Nor does he appear aware that his work lends itself to multiple interpretations, depend-
ing on questions of perspective – and the fact that hence it could have different ideological
ramifications. He simply takes this notion of the self in context as the point of departure
for Diáspora, a reflection on the ways in which a sudden change of circumstances or con-
texts, as experienced by migrants who move from one place to another across borders,
alters identity. As the self turns into an “other,” there is a both a sense of alienation, or
strangeness in new contexts and encounters, and a haunting from the past. The tension in
Parasiego’s work comes from his technical attempts to visually create this disturbance, or,
in line with Ortega y Gasset’s philosophy, this dialectic between the individual amid and
against new circumstances. There is also, without doubt, a sense of haunting that disturbs
the images, as well as one of fracture. The reverberations of memory, and with it, the shad-
ows of traditional approaches to place and community, are both at odds with and defining
of the flickers of meaning that emerge from the images.

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The Disturbance of the Sensible

It could be said of Díaspora that the reflexive turn in the images is internal, concerned with
questions of individual identity and well removed from the socio-political contexts that
turn cross-border migration into a deadly confrontation with borders and barbed wire.
The migrant subjects of Diáspora form part of the socio-political landscape of neoliberal
Europe, with no evidence of contestation. This apparently apolitical aspect of his work
reflects the absence of a political struggle for himself and other Europeans like him to relo-
cate across Europe and can well also be seen as an absence of constructive critique in and
through his work. It also speaks of a certain political naiveté and an eminently EUrocentric
perspective. Instead, his work could be said to lend itself to artistic and technical prowess
and to visual effect. Nevertheless, what is striking about Parasiego’s work is the fluidity
that comes to the fore and the sense of shadow, both as the fluctuation of memory and as
the fleeting instant, as migration turns presence into a foretelling of absence and vice-versa.
Diáspora is unusual precisely because it does not place the migrant at the precipice of
society: Instead, it opens up questions about home and place through a specifically overt
aesthetic of that which is transient and that which both disturbs and upholds visual norms
of representation. In this sense, the memorability of Parasiego’s work lies in his ability to
create a tension between fragmentation, erasure and identification. The silhouette of the
migrant is at once a form and also unidentifiable, lacking marks of age, color, gender and
much more. The work both questions and confirms norms of visual representation.
Parasiego’s aesthetic of silhouette and disjuncture calls upon the role of artwork in imple-
menting what Jacque Rancière has called a “redistribution of the sensible.” In his book,
The Politics of Aesthetics, Rancière proposes that aesthetics can be considered “as the sys-
tem of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience” (13). He goes
on to make the point that artistic practices, understood as the marriage of concept with
technique and presentation, are ways of doing and making that intervene in the general dis-
tribution of how mainstream society “makes and does,” as well as in the relationships with
forms of visibility. Writing on art and politics, Rancière maintains that the “distribution of
the sensible” refers to a regime of what is acknowledged. By this, he refers to that which is
felt, heard, seen and perceived within this space, implicated in particular familiar patterns,
inclusions and exclusions. By deliberately denying the migrant a face, Pasariego arguably
disturbs the expected norms of photography in general, and portraiture in particular, high-
lighting how individuals must be perceived in terms of their circumstances – the latter being
rendered explicit in their places of utmost intimacy, i.e., in their homes, albeit in locations
that remain forever indeterminate, if somewhat distinguishably urban and contemporary.

The Migrant Subject

Parasiego’s visual art diverges in technique and visual effect from much mainstream
image-making on migration, which is mainly documentary, but also echoes efforts by such
other image-makers to convey aspects of migration as lived experience. I refer here, by way of
example, to the work of another Spanish photographer of migrants on the Spanish-Moroccan
border, Samuel Aranda whose lens hones in on the grime, the wounds and the suffering of
the undocumented as they wait in limbo to cross over into Europe (Aranda). In tandem
with the rise of both internal and international migration, from the twentieth century to
the present day, the photography of migration has emerged as a genre in and of itself. In

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particular, since the mass displacement of Syrians due to war that began in 2010, there has
been a significant rise in the sheer frequency and numbers of images that flit through main-
stream and social media, documenting migrants and refugees in very challenging, risky, if
not deadly, contexts. This genre of migration imagery confirms photography’s dual, and at
times conflictive, position between documentary and art, as representations both gesture to
realities and yet rely on aesthetic forms to only ever approximate reality via the construc-
tion of the image. The photography of migration offers a frame within which to both shape
perspectives on mobility, often forced, as lived experiences and to use these glimpses to
reimagine and perhaps help to redraw the power dynamics that place migrants too often
on social, physical, emotional, financial and other precipices (Nair, “Still Photography”).
As such, the photography of migration is often allied to activism, to a humanist perspective
that places migrants and their lives – as also sometimes their needless deaths – in the center
of the frame. In turn, this perspective opens on to a critique of border and migration policies
that place questions of sovereignty over human rights. Ever since Dorothea Lange’s much
famed image of the Migrant Mother (1936), shot as part of her work for the FSA during
the Depression, the focus has often been on migration as displacement and dispossession
(Hermanson Meister). In recent years, the images of the migrant at sea, caught in the perils
of illicit and undocumented crossings, of migrants at borders, on buses or walking in long
lines, all have become common tropes for how migration is visually represented (Nair, “At
Sea”). Indeed, an iconic image that shocked the world in 2000 by the Spanish photogra-
pher Javier Bauluz set the bar for much migration imagery in this millennium (López). His
photograph, taken on a beach in Tarifa, of a couple relaxing under a parasol, merely yards
away from the face-down body of an African migrant that had been washed ashore, rever-
berated in mainstream media as a grim reminder of the inequalities and injustices that typify
undocumented migration at the borders of Europe. Subsequently, this image raised numer-
ous debates around what was included and excluded in the image, around the composition
of photography and the fine, if not entirely blurred differences between documentary pho-
tography and fictive photography – bearing in mind that both are constructs. Nevertheless,
and while such debates about art and documentary continue as around the photography of
Sebastião Salgado (Nair, A Different Light), the undeniable import of such images is that
they speak from and of grim social realities. Since that time, many photographers, such as
Samuel Aranda from Spain, Mark Powers from the UK or Thomas Dworzak from Poland
have focused their lens on the deadly borders of Europe, securitized and guarded precisely
to enable the free movement across national boundaries within the EU.
As displacement continues to grow globally due to environmental crises, conflicts, pan-
demic, socio-economic inequalities and other reasons, the photography of migration has
become a major visual pathway for understanding the human and planetary costs of avert-
able crises or crises caused by infringements of human rights. The genre of photography
that focuses on migration is largely colored by a deep political vein that seeks to address
the human costs of contemporary forms of border policing and practices. However, as T.J.
Demos states when writing on the politics and art of documentary and crisis,

it is important to avoid reading dislocation, in any of its guises, exclusively in the nega-
tive, as solely melancholic or chaotic, as if its identity were metaphysically rooted . . . .
Travel also holds the capacity to unleash a creative flight into the experience of multi-
plicity beyond the fixed categories of identities, mediums, and conventions.
(3)

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It is precisely in this tendency to typify the migrant as marginal, vulnerable, at risk and limi-
nal that Parasiego’s work intervenes. It should be borne in mind that of the 258 million or
so people who live in countries that are not theirs of origin, the vast majority are migrants
with access to a certain economic capital, of the type that Europeans mostly enjoy within
the EU (Migrant Data Portal).2 Many choose to migrate in order to enhance their careers,
cultural horizons and life experiences. As with settled communities, migration too is strati-
fied by socio-economic class. If we accept that demographic flows follow economic circuits
and together constitute key elements in the dynamics of globalization, then many who
migrate do so with cultural and economic capital to hand, even if they do so to overcome
a relative lack of opportunities and in order to empower themselves. With mobility written
into European policies, migration becomes an option for the citizens of the EU. Mobility
and freedom of movement is also part of being “European,” so that this identity requires
in-depth knowledge of more than one location in the continent. Diáspora focuses on such
migrants.
Nevertheless, migration poses its own challenges in the everyday, as well as opportu-
nities. To enter another country, with another culture and language, is to engage in the
everyday with that which was largely unknown. It is to translate the self in and within a
new context and to engage in the intimate remaking of the self in terms of new circum-
stances. It is to take memories away from the places they emerge from and to forge identity
in and through this translocation. Parasiego focuses on this encounter with alterity and
the processes unleashed over time for? adaptation. In so doing, and by means of his visual
technique, he invites the viewer to occupy this space of encounter, fracture and passage. His
artwork is not one of emergency or crisis. Unlike most photography of migration, it does
not call for action or contest existing power structures or systems. There is no subversion
suggested by his work, only reflection and a sense of disjuncture between a here and a there,
a now and a then, a sense of temporal and spatial fragility and jaggedness.

Uprooting and Unleashing

Diáspora diverges from much photography in the fact that, beyond the proper names,
there is little text, by way of contextualization. As such, they diverge sharply from much
documentary photography of migration that is reliant on text, caption and other referential
prose in order to contribute to larger narratives and discourses on migration. In a world of
mixed mass media and artwork, where viewers are inured to the marriage of image to text,
these images appear almost isolated, their meanings gleaned solely from what is within the
frame. As the images float though the sightline, viewers must superimpose onto them their
own perspectives, memories, perhaps, and interpretations. This makes the images migrant,
as they have an inherent mobility that allows them to offer a space where viewers can pro-
ject their own imaginations, free of the impositions of language.
Nor are the images transparent in and of themselves. With Diáspora, Parasiego also
constructs a visual means whereby any sense of wholeness or completeness within the frame
is undone, as perceived through the aesthetics of partial visibility that is a hallmark of his
work. Through digital intervention, Parasiego constructs compositions with two compet-
ing subjects, the anonymous silhouette of the migrant and the fractured setting that s/he
is placed in. This leads to a deliberate rupture of a sense of wholeness in the images: They
hide as much as they reveal, creating a sense of fracture and of the fleeting, of making and
remaking, or patching life together in its daily minutiae. His aesthetic is troubling because

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it offers a sense of both intimacy and anonymity. If photography is a medium that, above
all else, frames time and place by way of historical trace, then Parasiego’s images fundamen-
tally challenge these conventions. His images offer fracture, disruption, even disjuncture,
the shifting shadows between presence and absence, that which is at best glimpsed only ever
in silhouette and in transience. At the same time, they propose a life lived here, wherever
that “here” might be.
If Parasiego places the migrant at the heart of his visual enquiry into questions of iden-
tity, he does so precisely by stripping the migrant down to silhouette. Diáspora departs
from portraiture and focuses, therefore, on setting. What matters is not the individual’s
silhouette in and of itself: it is the silhouette in its setting. What is curious, of course, is the
idea of setting or “circumstances,” the conceptual touchstone of this series of images, being
within the home. Parasiego’s stated aim is to frame the uneven process of relocation and
adaptation to new contexts. Domesticity, the interior of apartments in the city, objects that
speak of other places, such as food that might have come from a supermarket, or a window
that looks onto a street below, suggest that question of remaking home in a new place.
Thus, Parasiego’s photographs also speak of place not as a fixed location but as contingent
upon undoing and remaking. Indeed, the protagonists of Diáspora are not so much the
flickering migrant subjects, but their dwellings. In this sense, the mobility of the migrant
reflects back to place, forcing a revision of the latter in terms of migrancy. In so doing, as
I argue here, this series of fractured images is also a reflection on the ephemerality imposed
on notions of home and place through the presence and the absence of the migrant subject.
Indeed, this very transience and mobility of the migrant subjects reframes place and home
in terms of mobility (Ahmed and Castada).
As studies of home show, home is not simply a dwelling. It is also a location for mate-
rial, emotional and imaginative engagement, local and transnational at one and the same
time, marked by symbols of memory and also by creativity. As Anne Kershen states in
her introduction to Annabelle Wilkins’ book Migration, Work, and Home-Making in the
City (2019), home “is now, but it is then. It is over here, yet over there. Real and tangible,
yet imagined and mythologised, home is deconstructed on departure and then constantly
reconstructed as the migrant experience and the life cycle evolve” (vii). Multi-sited and
moveable, home is also a connector of disparate geographies, as much cultural as emotional
and imagined. If there is a deep struggle that comes through in Diáspora, it is this complica-
tion and multi-dimensionality of home as that which can be undone and redone, unmade
and remade.

The Ubiquity of Place

Thinking through our ideas of home and identity and of how best to reframe these in terms
of the social-cultural practices and experiences that mobility has perpetuated and deepened,
leads also to a further reconfiguration in our understanding of place, not to mention family,
community or household. Long defined by landscape, geography and mapping, place, too,
needs to be revised in terms of both an overarching neoliberal context and the many arriv-
als, departures and transient stays that define it. On the one hand, the cities of Europe, like
its many airports and railway stations, increasingly bear reassuringly similar features and
traits; on the other, they become dispensable, swappable, interchangeable. As the images
of Diáspora go to show, viewers piece together what they can from the fractured interiors
of homes that are temporary in order to draw a sense of migrant experiences from migrant

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circumstances. Yet there is nothing viewers can know about the larger circumstances within
which these domestic interiors sit. The locations, like the subjects, remain as guesswork,
open to imagination.
Writing on the idea of place in the contemporary contexts of global and local mobilities,
Tim Cresswell states that the evocation of place is a key element in much social and cul-
tural discourse and interactions. Yet, he states, “given the ubiquity of place, it is a problem
that no one quite knows what they are talking about when they are talking about place”
(6). To conceptualize place in the context of the European free market requires multi and
inter-disciplinary interventions, ranging from economics to geography to cultural studies
and beyond. To attempt to identify place must then also be to recognize the multiple ephem-
eral and contingent frames, those of migrant subjects, reinvented homes, hybrid engage-
ments and shifting, transnational, transcultural connections, within which it can be, if only
in passing, located. Indeed, Parasiego’s work defies any framing of the nation as such, as
his subjects could be from anywhere and in any location. Neither the United Kingdom nor
Spain emerge as country locations that frame his work, even if this very free-floating aspect
is the result of the policies of ease of mobility of the European Union. If we accept that
nations are constructs of collective imagination that require reiteration, then the question
must be asked if the impossibility to frame Parasiego’s work as “Spanish” per se, or “Brit-
ish” per se, signals the increasingly fragmented and partial relevance of this notion of the
nation – a threat to those who espouse it that has no doubt been a factor in the Brexit vote
of 2016 and that is also at the heart of the many ongoing political dynamics in Spain, such
as the emergence of the Vox party that reclaims Spanish nationalism (Torcal).
To return to Ortega y Gasset’s phrase “Yo soy yo, y mis circunstancias,” then, is to
understand from Diáspora that mobility reframes both people and places. Without greater
contextualization, the dwellings in these images are not merely transient homes, but also
flickering points of reference for shadowy subjects lacking definition in broader, undefined
locations, ephemeral, nameless and ill-defined, struggling to reinvent themselves even as
they are rendered migrant by the forces of mobility that cross them.

Notes
1 For this and other migration related data see Migration Data Portal at www.migrationdatapor-
tal.org.
2 See Migration Data Portal.

Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara, Claudia Castada, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller, eds. Uprootings/Reground-
ings: Questions of Home and Migration. Routledge, 2003.
Aranda, Samuel. “Ceuta, Spain.” Pathos Pictures. https://library.panos.co.uk/stock-photo/as-a-full-
moon-rises-a-west-african-migrant-looks-on-as-a-moroccan-migrant/search/detail-0_00303851.html.
Cresswell, Tim. Place: An Introduction. Blackwell-Wiley, 2014.
Demos, T. J. The Migrant Image. Duke UP, 2013.
Dobson, Andrew. An Introduction to the Politics and Philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset. Cambridge
UP, 2009.
Hermanson Meister, Sarah. Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother. Nipomo. California. MoMA P, 2019.
Instituto Nacional de Estadística, “Statistics of Spaniards Resident Abroad.” Press Release, 1 Jan.
2019. https://www.ine.es/en/prensa/pere_2019_en.pdf.
Llamazares, Julio. La lluvia amarilla. Seix Barral, 1988.

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López, Manuel. “Javier Bauluz: “Muerte a las puertas del paraíso.’ ” Peridodistas en español.com, 11
Aug. 2013. https://periodistas-es.com/javier-bauluz-muerte-a-las-puertas-del-paraiso-14823.
Migration Data Portal. “Migration Data Relevant for the COVID-19 Pandemic.” 11 Jul. 2023.
https://www.migrationdataportal.org/themes/migration-data-relevant-covid-19-pandemic.
Nair, Parvati. A Different Light: The Photography of Sebastião Salgado. Duke UP, 2011.
Nair, Parvati. “Still Photography and Moving Subjects: Migration in the Frame of Hospitality.” Migra-
tion Across Boundaries, edited by Parvati Nair and Tendayi Bloom, Ashgate, 2015, pp. 181–98.
Nair, Parvati. “At Sea: Hope as Survival and Sustenance for Refugees.” Refugee Imaginaries: Research
Across the Humanities, edited by Emma Cox, et al., Edinburgh UP, 2019.
Oltermann, Philip, Sam Jones, Jennifer Rankin, and Pamela Duncan. “Germany and Spain Scram-
ble to Reverse the Flight of Youth,” The Guardian, 2 Mar. 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/
world/2020/mar/02/germany-spain-scramble-reverse-the-flight-youth-eastern-europe.
Ortega y Gasset, José. Obras Completas, Vol. 1. Editorial Taurus, Fundación José Ortega y Gas-
set, 2004.
Parasiego, Óscar. “Personal Interview.” 3 Sept. 2020.
Rancière. Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, edited and translated
by Gabriel Rockhill. Continuum, 2004.
Torcal, Mariano. “¿Ideología, nacionalismo español o inmigración? Las claves del voto a la ultradere-
cha.” Ctxt conrexto y acción, no. 248, 20 Nov. 2019. https://ctxt.es/es/20191120/Politica/29662/
Mariano-Torcal-ultraderecha-ideologia-nacionalismo-inmigracion-Vox.htm.
Wilkins, Annabelle. Migration, Work, and Home-Making in the City. Routledge, 2019.

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 PART 7

Connections and Fractures

 47
APOCALYPTIC VISIONS
OF THE CRISIS
The Imaginary of the Flood in Contemporary
Spanish Culture

Natalia Castro Picón

The Perpetual Apocalypse of the Spanish State:

Crises and Imaginaries of Deluge
The specter of the dissolution of Spain emerges at various periods throughout history.
In the early modernity, immersed in the convulsive political and cultural climate of the
Baroque, Quevedo foresaw the anticipated decadence of the nation in his sonnet “Enseña
cómo todas las cosas avisan de la muerte” (“He shows how all things warn of death”):

I looked at the walls of my homeland

hometown which, if they were mighty once, were now dilapidated
tired by the race of time
which was already causing their courage to atrophy.
(Barnstone trans. 33)1

In 1898, the loss of sovereignty over the remaining colonies of the former Empire compelled
a reconfiguration of the attributes of the Spanish nation that crystallized the fears of disin-
tegration. It was probably Ramiro de Maeztu, essayist and part of a group of intellectuals
that persistently addressed the new socio-political reality of the country, who expressed the
resulting anguish most categorically: “Ya no es una mera pesadilla hablar de la posibilidad
del fin de España” (“It is no longer a mere nightmare to talk about the possibility of the
end of Spain”; Defensa 29).2 The crisis of imperialist centralism, together with the progres-
sive and federalist projects of the left, always in tension with developing capitalism, will
constitute the great threats to Spanish nationalist ideology in the coming decades. During
and after the Civil War, the coup side and Franco regime (1939–1975) obsessively warned
of how leftists and regionalists sought to destroy Spain, which served as a subterfuge to sus-
tain 40 years of dictatorship. But the supposedly chronic tendency to self-destruction also
pervades the discourse of some anti-fascist and democratic sectors. As a proof, we can recall
Alfonso Guerra’s statement at the PSOE congress in 1974, in which the party recognized
the right to self-determination as part of its political program: “España es el país más fuerte

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 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

del mundo, lleva siglos intentando destruirse a sí mismo y todavía no lo ha conseguido”

(“Spain is the strongest country of the world. It has been trying to destroy itself for centu-
ries and has not yet succeeded”; qtd. in Juliana).3
Centralist and imperialist concerns, fueled by the lack of navigable accesses to Madrid,
fed a longstanding and obsessive dream: That of bringing the sea to the nation’s capital.
Since the 16th century, Spain’s central governments have unsuccessfully tried to open water-
ways to Madrid through large-scale infrastructure projects in order to facilitate political
dominion and resource management (Merchán Gabaldón). This failed aspiration has built
a specifically Madrilenian culture defined by a “nostalgia for the sea” that is manifested in
everything from the staging of ancient naumachias in the Retiro Park to the Batalla Naval
(Sea Battle), a popular festival held in the neighborhood of Vallecas (Merchán Gabaldón 85,
97). Interestingly, that utopian imaginary of the sea within the city as a symbolic response
to the precarity of metropolitan rule will return in dystopian form during late capitalism
and the 2008 crisis.
The rest of this chapter will focus on the apocalyptic culture that emerges after the 2008
crisis, and was later projected onto different political conflicts. I will start by outlining why
critics interpret apocalyptic narratives as a cultural current that serves the self-preservation
of the capitalist state during the crisis (Álvarez-Blanco; Fisher; Prádanos; Garcés). I will
illustrate current critical theories through a brief commentary on Sangre a borbotones
(Blood on the Saddle in the English translation; Reig) and Madrid: frontera (Madrid: bor-
der; Llorente). Both novels are set in a flooded Madrid and invert the historical utopia of a
navigable metropolis into a dystopia and a dystopic apocalypse, respectively. In the same
section, I will also delve into some aspects of the debate on the apocalyptic culture of late
capitalism, initiated by Fukuyama and developed by Jameson, as well as into Jameson’s
dialogue with Benjamin’s theses on history. Jameson and Benjamin coincide in their under-
standing of revolution as an apocalyptic instant (Jameson) or a moment of redemptive
destruction (Benjamin) that would serve to break with the closed temporality with which
capitalist culture obstructs any possibility of emancipatory transformation. Convergences
and tensions between their positions will help to understand the nature of the apocalyptic
poetics that is politically activated by the social movements that I will finally examine. I will
focus on three cases of social movements that have articulated themselves through images
of hydraulic catastrophes: The Marea Ciudadana (Citizens’ Tide), emerging from the 15M
cycle of anti-crisis protests; the Feminist Tsunami, the latest transnational and massive
wave of opposition to patriarchy; and the Tsunami Democràtic (Democratic Tsunami), a
technopolitical platform against the repression by the Spanish state in the context of the
Catalan independence struggle. While it is true that apocalyptic discourses often reproduce
ideologies that serve the dominant system, I will demonstrate that these movements refor-
mulate images of hydraulic catastrophes (tides and tsunamis) to envision a possibility for
the end of capitalism.

Revolution and the Political Culture of Apocalypse

The radicalization of neoliberal policies after the 2008 economic crisis triggered the resur-
gence of the apocalypse in the Spanish cultural imaginary. As noted by Palardy, the pro-
spective fiction – which encompasses narratives that project alternative temporalities such
as dystopias, uchronias and apocalyptic stories (Palardy 6) – transform during the transition
from the period of hyperdevelopment (1990s and early 2000s) to the crisis (2008 onward).

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In the earlier period, during the years of overaccumulation of wealth, the narratives “focus
on excessive power of multinational corporations, overconsumption, materialism, and the
commodification/exploitation of individuals and their labor” (33). In the context of crisis,
austerity policies and the shrinking of social welfare, fictional works “tend to be set in a
post-apocalyptic future” (109). The sociocultural scope of significant changes in represen-
tation, is well illustrated by a comparison between two novels: Sangre a borbotones (Reig)
and Madrid: frontera (Llorente),4 both set in prospective universes in which the city of
Madrid is flooded. In Reig’s novel, published in 2002, fuel depletion finally leads to fulfill-
ing, by necessity, the fantasies of transforming the city into a network of navigable canals.
In Llorente’s novel, published in 2016, the flood is caused by a relentless and unexplained
deluge that causes sea levels to rise. Both novels link the advent of environmental catastro-
phe to the actions of the economic elites, although they do so in different ways, reflecting
the different contexts in which they were written. In Reig, Spain is colonized by the United
States and subjected to rule by a genetic modification company. Written at the time of
widespread expansion of the American business model, Reig’s dystopian formulation func-
tions as a hyperbolic representation of the effects of neoliberal globalization (Knutson 57).
Llorente combines the image of the biblical punishment of the flood with a dystopian figu-
ration of the state, describing a social, environmental and economic crisis that condemns
citizens to misery, as they are forced to survive on the streets with hardly any resources and
are subjected to extreme violence. In both cases, the overflowing of the waters suggests the
overflowing of forms of violence and dispossession. During the hyper development period,
however, dystopia reflects how power embraces neoliberal reason, subduing democracy;
meanwhile, in times of crisis, the dismantling of public structures of protection and the
intensification of precariousness prompts catastrophic representations of a helpless society.
The widespread nature of both dystopic and apocalyptic representations of the crisis
has led scholars to criticize their depoliticizing character. Despite the admonitory intent
of these works, Álvarez-Blanco points out that they ultimately reinforce capitalist ideol-
ogy and foster states of paralysis, repressing possible reactions and forms of resistance.
She understands apocalyptic fiction as participating in “capitalist realism,” a cultural logic
according to which “not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system,
but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2).
Likewise, the culture of commodification makes it such that the stories’ attempts to raise
awareness fail, due to the phenomenon known as “interpassivity,” which results in an effect
that is contrary to what was intended: Fiction “performs our anti-capitalism for us, allow-
ing us to continue to consume with impunity” (Fisher 12).
The prospective narrative radically determines the perception of time as the raw material
of any social transformation. The philosopher Marina Garcés delves into the debate using
her concept condición pósthuma (“posthumous condition”). She understands that the pre-
vailing fascination with apocalyptic imagery is symptomatic of the exhaustion of historical
progress and the notion of the future. Within the current economic and environmental cri-
ses, the posthumous condition defines the generalized sense that the remnant of the future is
nothing but the (presumably brief) “extra time” before the assumed end of human societies
(16). As a new dominant ideology, it reproduces a generalized state of alarm that mobilizes
the dilemma between apocalypse or solutionism. It is, in short, a disciplinary logic imposed
by the idea that the survival of society depends on overcoming any threat to the dominant
system, which leads citizens to turning over sovereignty to a capitalist decisionism disguised
as technocracy (Garcés 15, 56). In this sense, the closure of time as a force for change seems

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to have a specific deactivating effect on social movements and their historical role as engines
of radical transformation. Álvarez-Blanco finds that apocalyptic imaginaries are directly
mobilized by the dominant culture to dissuade possible rebellions. Along the same lines,
Prádanos argues that the trope of revolution has been superseded by that of catastrophe as
a means for imagining social change (212). Similar concerns have been expressed by some
political activists. In December 2018, the Marxist-ecologist collective “Contra el diluvio”
(“Against the deluge”) launched a virtual micro-story contest inviting participants to imag-
ine the Christmas of 2050. The number of catastrophic representations (74% of the stories
submitted) raised the alarm and led the collective to issue a statement on the subject:

Uno de los principios básicos que guían nuestra acción como colectivo es que no
es tarde para actuar. . . . Creemos que un discurso apocalíptico, aparte de no estar
basado en la realidad, produce más parálisis que otra cosa. (“Contra el diluvio”)
One of the basic principles driving our work as a group is that it is not too late to
act. . . . We believe that an apocalyptic discourse, besides not being based on reality,
produces paralysis above all.

The collective, in its very name, recuperates the famous critique by Karl Marx of the quote,
attributed to Louis XV, that he believes condenses the capitalist disinterest in working-class
survival: “Après moi le déluge!” (“After me, the flood!”) is the watchword of every capital-
ist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of
the labourer, unless under compulsion from society” (388–9). Being “against the deluge,”
means for the collective to enact resistance against apocalyptic ideology and call for an
effective social struggle against climate change. However, as I will demonstrate in what
follows, some other social movements of the same period recover an apocalyptic imagi-
nary both for their self-articulation and to create new aesthetic-political configurations.
These movements put into circulation the same imaginary precisely to overflow the narrow
socio-political confines of the neoliberal, patriarchal and neocolonial state; to destroy the
sociopolitical structures that dominate the postcrisis scene; and to establish new life systems
that are fairer and more egalitarian. Their use of the apocalyptic imagination as a source
of revolutionary cultural vigor differs from the depoliticizing approaches I have just men-
tioned, and connects with a different tradition that needs to be addressed.
Though articulated in numerous ways, the fantasy of world disintegration is essentially
linked to the preconception of a linear development of universal history, which would cul-
minate in some form of fulfillment. For Christianity, the “end of the world” is the result
of an eschatology of salvation covenanted with God, whose divine right protects the weak
from the powerful, the oppressed from the oppressors. Besides, the Book of Revelation was
written in the context of the persecution of the first Christians by the Roman Empire in the
first century, which is why it was understood from the beginning as a text that heartens
political resistance (Alegre et al.). Apocalypse as a politics of the oppressed appears in mul-
tiple traditions (Martino). In Asia, for example, natural catastrophes (such as tsunamis) are
interpreted as “divine punishments” for bad governance in order to force political transfor-
mations (Rambelli 53–4). Consequently, the effect of tsunamis and earthquakes has often
been understood as the administration of cosmic justice in favor of the weak (67). However,
in the 1960s, Ernesto de Martino noticed that, despite the West’s proclivity toward an apoc-
alyptic imagination, it was devoid of any emancipatory inspiration (469–70). In the 1990s,
Francis Fukuyama’s thesis about the end of history articulated the debate on the imaginings

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of the end of the world directly around the question of historical progress and its possible
culmination in the universalization of the model of liberal capitalist democracy. Supported
by Hegel’s idea that the French Revolution secularly realized the Christian theological ideal
of a free and egalitarian paradise (199), Fukuyama asserts that the liberal state and the free
market create “a kind of de facto equality before such equality arises de jure” (206). His
argument generated many critiques, but decades earlier, Walter Benjamin already warned
of the implications of this type of liberal idealism. According to Benjamin, the teleological
principle of historical progress deactivates revolutionary eschatology as a political potency.
Oppressed classes are then relegated to a sacrificial role, exploited today to liberate future
generations, and equality is projected as an “infinite task” (394, 401–2). Conversely, Ben-
jamin points out that “there is not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary
chance,” because a revolutionary potential lies at the heart of every present, which makes,
in his words, any and all instants “Judgment Day” (390). In Benjamin’s messianic notion,
apocalypse does not consist of divine providence administered by God or by any teleology,
but can be found in the working class’s own agency, whose messianic action unites revolu-
tionary destruction and redemption.
In 2005, Fredric Jameson opens an interesting dialogue with Benjamin’s thesis. Jameson
holds that the “incapacity to imagine historical difference” is the fundamental feature of
late capitalism (Archaeologies 345). Cultural logic of late capitalism captures temporality
in the iterative cycle of accumulation – the “Moebius strip of late capitalism” (“City” 76) –
colonizing the future and depriving it of “its explosiveness” (Archaeologies 228). On that
note, Jameson establishes that “[w]here Benjamin observed that ‘not even the past will be
safe’ from the conquerors, we may now add that the future is not safe either” (Archaeologies
228). However, in moments of crisis, the degraded image of the dominant system unveils
the possibility of imagining its end and reopening the future that it took from us. Jameson
considers that apocalyptic fiction, which tends to reemerge during moments of crises, elicits
a political imagination that “focuses on a single baleful tendency, one that it expands and
expands until the tendency itself becomes apocalyptic and explodes the world in which
we are trapped” (“City” 76). Nevertheless, Science Fiction’s apocalyptic gesture remains
in the space of representation, it solves within narrative what culture cannot in reality
(Archaeologies 359). Thus, Jameson’s thesis reproduces the distance between imagination
and action, whereby “[d]isruption is, then, the name of a new discursive strategy” (231). In
a somewhat voluntarist way Jameson thought apocalyptic imagination as “an intense spir-
itual concentration and preparation for another stage which has not yet arrived” (233). In
this way, he re-idealizes the messianic principle of revolutionary desire, somehow relapsing
into teleological aporia, which is at the basis of the current interpretation of the apocalyptic
discourse as a mechanism of capitalist self-preservation. Same aporia raises the question of
whether the apocalyptic-revolutionary imagination can leap the barrier of representation
toward an effective realization.
It is my hypothesis that the real potentiality of the apocalyptic imagination is to be
found at the crossroads between the shape and action of social movements. It is necessary
to recover Benjamin’s revolutionary scheme, for whom apocalyptic thinking is a constitu-
tive part of revolutionary action as a transformative disruption. In the cases I study here,
the apocalyptic imagination is an expression both of the way in which those movements
organize themselves and of the revolution that they aim for – and partly carry out in their
interventions. The use of the imaginary of hydraulic catastrophe is an expression of the
collapse of the frameworks of meaning imposed by the dominant cultural logic (capitalist,

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patriarchal, colonial, etc.) caused by the disruption of a new political counterculture.

Moreover, it sets in motion a world to come that begins to take shape in a “time full of
now-time” (Benjamin 395) in which change opens up to the present in the very political and
aesthetic configuration of the movement’s interventions.

Aesthetics and Politics of Flooding in Spanish Culture and Social Movements

15M and Marea Ciudadana

Acampada Sol was an informal settlement that lasted 28 days in Puerta del Sol, symbolic
center of Spanish capital, to protest austerity policies and demand real democracy. After
three days of gatherings, the Acampada as such took its paradigmatic form on the night of
May 18, when the heavy rain that had hindered the protest led the Indignados to cobble
together the first roofs of the encampment. The improvised response to the storm introduced
the technologies whose stability would lend political impetus to the movement, imprinting
it also with a concrete aesthetic. The water downpour required the construction of more
solid structures (Ramírez Blanco 222), making it harder to dismantle the Acampada, and
the large blue plastic tarps that would become one of its most iconic images: The aerial
photo that shows the encampment as a seafaring image (Ramírez Blanco 226).
The imaginary of the flood in Sol is reproduced and reformulated in various activist and
countercultural works. For example, the song “Desborde” (“Overflow”), by Nacho Vegas,
uses the same iconic image to develop a representation of several movements emerging
from 15M. The song takes up the image of the sea overflowing the capital, but displacing
its traditional symbolism. If the imperial project of a navigable Madrid sought to expand
the city’s dominion to the peripheries, Vegas’s flood flows centripetally from the edges of
the country until it finally floods the capital.5 In his formulation, the capital city replaces
Babylon – the cradle of corrupt and unjust rulers – in an apocalyptic tale that dissolves
Madrid’s metropolitan condition as it gives way to the overflowing waters: “hoy es océano
lo que era antes Madrid” (“What used to be Madrid is now an ocean”). With images of a
thaw or tsunami, Vegas’s flood imaginary represents the multitude assaulting the territory
of state power. Tidal irruption functions as an apocalypse that punishes the powerful and
establishes a new social order: The politicians and the rich drown, while the common peo-
ple happily inhabit the new aquatic paradise (“un nuevo acuático orden social”). Vegas’s
song also alludes to the Marea Ciudadana, another of the widespread movements that
emerged from the cycle of protests against precarization and austerity policies during the
crisis. Organized by various social sectors, the Marea Ciudadana united workers and oth-
ers affected by the crisis in defense of public services – green tide (education), white tide
(healthcare), red tide (unemployment). Through the occupation of public institutions and
the self-management of resources, social services and welfare went from being understood
as something administered by the state – and increasingly tied to capitalist logic – to being
claimed as part of the commons.
Juan Luis Sánchez, journalist and activist, describes the origin of the Marea Ciudadana
in a way similar to Vegas’s vision:

Un terremoto en alta mar llamado 15M desató el cambio en todas direcciones. Una
onda expansiva que recompone el océano político en España, que redibuja corrientes,
que ahoga líderes . . . y que pone una gran ola al servicio de causas que hasta ese

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momento iban a la deriva. . . . Una gran fuerza colectiva que . . . llega a las costas
por oleadas y que rompe contra el dique fortificado que las defiende para proteger un
mundo injusto y basado en la estafa. (10)
An earthquake on the open sea called 15M unleashed change in all directions.
A blast that recomposes the Spanish political ocean, redrawing currents, drowning
leaders . . . and that puts a great wave at the service of causes that until that moment
were drifting. . . . A great collective force that . . . reaches the coasts in waves and
breaks against the fortified dike that defends them to protect an unjust world based
on fraud.

Although they may be somewhat romanticized, lyrical representations around the trope of
hydraulic catastrophe configure a political imaginary that reverses the devastating experi-
ence of the crisis. As we see in the aquatic poetics activated by the Marea Ciudadana, it
is the movement itself that is instituted as a transformative force that reopens a space for
action, as opposed to the cultural logic that had captured this power: “Hay una gran marea
política donde antes había una piscifactoría” (“There is a large political tide where there
used to be a fish farm”; Sánchez 10). Finally, the symbolically destructive character of the
political tidal wave reveals its foundational nature: “Se está formando una duna con lo que
trae la marea. . . . Un espacio nuevo para estar, para pensar, para refugiarse, para vivir, para
disfrutar” (“What the tide brings is forming a dune. . . . A new space to be, to think, to
take refuge, to live, to enjoy”; Sánchez 11). In the Marea Ciudadana, tides, tsunamis and
deluges, all images of natural catastrophe transculturally linked to the principle of divine
punishment, recover their place in the political theology of the oppressed – except that
they are no longer the result of divine justice, but a redemptive enterprise of the oppressed
themselves.

Feminist Tsunami
Uses of the tsunami just mentioned compete in the culture of late capitalism with dozens of
films in which the symbol is taken up again as part of a catastrophic dynamic, reinforcing
society’s sense powerlessness by implying that it cannot intervene to avoid the tsunami’s
effects. Either the tsunami comes about for unavoidable reasons (e.g., earthquakes), or it
is the result of an already unstoppable climate crisis. In both cases, films tend to focus on
the protagonists’ battle for survival in a hostile environment where social structures have
decayed. The paradigmatic case of this trend in the Spanish film industry is The Impossible
(Bayona; 2012), that tells the survival story of a wealthy, white, European family vacation-
ing at a Thai resort when they are struck by the Pacific tsunami of 2014. Iñaki Prádanos
analyzes the film from a decolonial and ecocritical perspective, revealing how the story of
individual salvation betrays an overt Eurocentrism and instrumentalizes non-white victims:
Dispossessed locals are at the service of the spectacularization of the tragedy and the pro-
tagonists’ path to self-improvement (221). This “manufactured catastrophe” uncritically
naturalizes a principle of individual salvation restricted to those who have the sociocultural
and economic privilege to escape the apocalypse (226).
Just as these types of works are managed by the large entertainment industries and dis-
tributed globally, which promotes a cultural imperialism to form around the apocalyptic
story, we can also easily find examples of political imaginaries built around the hydraulic
catastrophe that travel transnationally “from below,” through the networks that intertwine

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social and countercultural movements. One example is the feminist movement, which early
on adopted a hydraulic image – of waves – to structure the periodization of its struggles.
The feminist fourth wave (which began in 2018) has been termed by many a “tsunami,”
due to its massiveness and transnationality. Nuria Varela returns to the same image in the
opening of her 2019 book Feminismo 4.0. La cuarta ola (Feminism 4.0. The Fourth Wave).
According to Varela, by alluding to a tsunami, feminist movement underlines its overflow-
ing nature and symbolically liquidates the geographical borders and formal limits of its
struggle (17–8). In the same vein, intellectuals and activists speak of the last wave as an
inherently transnational struggle that links mobile and expanding forces from around the
world, which is why it is not state centered – although fourth wave feminists also under-
stand the importance of enacting legislation (Gago and Gutiérrez Aguilar 6–8).
Since 2018, the publishing house Sexto Piso has released several anthologies of testimo-
nies by feminist activists titled Tsunami. In an interview, Gabriela Jauregui, editor of the
Mexican volumes, was asked about the violent and destructive aspect of that title, to which
she replied:

[E]l tsunami pues es algo, sí, que arrasa . . . pero yo lo veía en el sentido como posi-
tivo . . . de algo que arrasa con lo que ha estado violentándonos, con diques que han
estado frenando a las mujeres. . . . Ahora diciéndolo me viene a la mente Kali, la diosa
de la destrucción y la regeneración. O sea, para que haya algo nuevo, también se tienen
que destruir las cosas malas. (Jauregui, “De las olas al tsunami” 00:13:06–14:39)
The tsunami is something, yes, destructive . . . but I saw it in a positive sense . . . of
something that sweeps away what has been damaging us, with dikes that have been
holding women back. . . . Now, saying it, Kali, the goddess of destruction and regenera-
tion, comes to mind. I mean, to create something new, bad things need to be destroyed.

Jauregui alludes to the Hindu goddess Kali to depict the idea of the collapse and rees-
tablishment of the world as a sign of the revolutionary aims of the feminist struggle. The
choice, moreover, vindicates a transculturality opposed to the dominant and patriarchal
Western one.
Finally, the tsunami names a new, massive and collective political subject. The traditional
imagery of water emphasizes the notion of interdependence, a key concept for feminism
that is often associated with vulnerability. Paradoxically, by invoking the tsunami, this
interdependence becomes the cornerstone of its political strength and radicalness. As in the
comic strip published by the cartoonist Bernardo Vergara, entitled “. . . hasta enterrarlos en
el mar” (“. . . until they are buried at sea”) published in Eldiario.es, in 2021 February 23,
40th anniversary of the 1981 failed coup by Spanish military officers. In the strip a huge
purple wave formed by female names drowns a green figure (brand color of the far-right
party Vox) saluting in the fascist style. Representations like this one show how tsunami and
revolution overlap in the feminist political imaginary within a code of political radicalism
set up against the apparatuses of power and preexisting dominant structures, which must
be liquidated if the movement is to achieve its objective.

Tsunami Democràtic
I will close the chapter by analyzing the Tsunami Democràtic, a technopolitical platform
created in 2019 in Catalonia that served to organize citizen protests against the political

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persecution of pro-independence leaders.6 Tsunami operated from a clandestine core group

of individuals that, through digital tools, called for and coordinated actions that, in the
most radical cases, sought to boycott infrastructure critical to government administration
(such as highways, train lines or the airport).
The Tsunami initiative is modeled on the protest culture of the 2019 movements against
the repression and interference of the Chinese government in Hong Kong. In addition to
imitating protests such as the occupation of the airport, Catalan pro-independence activists
have incorporated some the Hong Kongers’ poetics into their repertoire, such as the state-
ment from actor Bruce Lee, “be water my friend,” used as a hashtag in calls and virtual
messages (Bruni). The slogan refers to the tactical capacity of the movement, due to its
networked configuration, to adapt to the circumstances and emerge disruptively in different
forms and spaces.
However, the way in which Tsunami operates, as reflected in its forms of poetic enun-
ciation, make it differ in essence from the tsunami movements mentioned previously. The
platform’s slogan, “el Tsunami és fet de gotes” (“the Tsunami is made of drops”) already
establishes an interesting interplay between individuality and collectivity that is confirmed
by the few public statements issued by its participants. In a report on the movement by the
Catalan tv broadcast 30 minuts, two activists explained their involvement in the movement
by saying: “la sensació és que som una gota mes d’aquest tsunami, un tsunami que quan
crida, la gent està disposada a mobilitzar-se”; “Si Tsunami digués alguna cosa, doncs ja
valorarem ho que feríem” (“the feeling is that we are just another drop in this tsunami,
a tsunami that, when it calls out to the people, makes them mobilize”; “If Tsunami says
something, we’ll assess what to do”; CCMA 00:28:36–47). Such a statements shows a sub-
jective distance and a vertical relationship between the clandestine core of the group and
the citizens who respond to its call.
The role of the tsunami in the platform’s political imaginary differs from its uses by
other horizontally organized movements. Such a difference is essentially linked to its
clandestine character, which does not allow for the transparent management of the core
group’s decisions, and therefore leads to operating in a type of obscurantist providence.
Nevertheless, Tsunami Democràtic provides evidence of a breakdown in the political cul-
ture of confrontation between the Spanish state and the Catalan independence move-
ment, which is closely related to the mobilizations against the financial crisis. The latter
were among the elements that worked to dissolve the social consensus generated with the
1978 Constitution (Sampedro and Lobera 62–3), which, in its effort to neutralize social
conflict, confined the Catalan issue to a space of institutional negotiation. In this way,
the threat of national disintegration was transformed in the national imaginary into a
constantly updatable phantasmagoria, reinforcing the hegemony of both governments,
Spanish and Catalan.
The dissolution of the national consensus of 1978 has resulted in the Catalan independ-
ence movement experiencing a “change of approach away from institutional strategies to
a more broad-based mobilization” (Della Porta, O’Connor and Portos 5). Such mobiliza-
tions, with their own forms of confrontation and their agenda for radical transformation,
allow the possibility to imagine a future of self-determination. In the face of the rigidity of
the state’s political and legal channels, Tsunami’s sabotage actions take a liquid form that
is echoed by the constant reference to aquatic metaphors (Bruni). Both poetics and politics
shape collective aspirations to break with the moebius strip that encapsulates the political
conflict within sterile institutional politics while criminalizing dissent.

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The Apocalypse Returns: The Eschatology of the New Normal

Ultimately, the global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a sweeping
increase in apocalyptic representations of the immediate present. Although I do not have
space to discuss the particularities of the renewed apocalyptic imaginary, it is important to
note how the trope is being mobilized by the dominant culture for disciplinary purposes.
The much-vaunted “new normal” actualizes the eschatological promise of the capitalist
state, always contingent upon the preservation at any cost of the same social and productive
system that has led to the current situation.
The difference this time is that, beyond some interesting and humorous reformulations
of the trope of the apocalypse that have appeared on social networks, it is not yet possible
to trace any countercultural uses that, from a place of profound crisis, could galvanize
revolutionary aspirations. Such a disappearance is alarming, because the recent past reaf-
firms that whoever gains dominion over the imaginary of the apocalypse will have control
over the design of its aftermath. It is not a question of whether Spain or the world will
collapse tomorrow, because as T. S. Eliot said, the way the world ends is not with a bang,
but a whimper (92). It is rather about the contest between the hegemony of destructive
capitalist-colonial-patriarchal-ecocidal force, which for a long time has been suffocating the
conditions for a dignified life, or its obliteration by a collective force capable of reimagining
and bringing about alternative worlds.

Notes
1 All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
2 Maeztu is concerned with rebuilding (post)colonial relations with Latin America. His project was
ideologically sustained by the shared Catholic religion and culture, together with the commonality
of the Spanish language.
3 Statement apocryphally attributed to Otto von Bismarck.
4 In addition to the novels analyzed here, several additional fictional works about floods in crisis-era
Spain come to mind: Todo está perdonado (All is Forgiven; Reig) – a continuation of the imaginary
universe of Sangre a borbotones, El sistema (The System; Menéndez Salmón) and “Al garete” (“To
Hell”; Bueso). For an overview of Spanish dystopias during this period, see Palardy.
5 The song also alludes to the 2014 “Marchas por la Dignidad” (Rallies for Dignity) where thou-
sands of people from all over the country marched on foot to the capital (15Mpedia).
6 Its activity begins after the decision in the trial for the 2017 independence referendum in Catalonia,
in which politicians and public figures were accused of sedition and sentenced to prison.

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 48
TIES THAT BIND
Madrid’s 2011 Protest Camp as a Transversal
Community

Julia Ramírez-Blanco

After the international crisis that erupted in 2008, the Spanish population needed a utopia,
and it was found unexpectedly. A week before regional and municipal elections, a recently
created platform called Democracia Real YA (DRY; Real Democracy Now) – breaking
away from political parties and trade unions – called for a series of demonstrations in vari-
ous Spanish cities. The call was supported by hundreds of blogs and by organizations such
as Juventud Sin Futuro (Youth With No Future) and groups related to internet freedom
advocacy, such as #nolesvotes and Anonymous. The text which summoned people to take
to the streets focused above all on the antisocial measures that the government had taken
in response to the economic crisis, notably rescuing the banks and cutting welfare spending
(“Manifesto del movimiento 15M”).
On May 15, 2011, there were demonstrations in fifty-seven cities across Spain. In
Madrid, demonstrators numbered 20,000 according to police estimates and 50,000 accord-
ing to DRY. The banner at the head of the march proclaimed, “No somos mercancía en
manos de politicos y banqueros” (“We are not merchandise in the hands of politicians and
bankers”). When the demonstration ended at the Puerta del Sol, Madrid’s emblematic cen-
tral square, some people decided to go to Gran Vía (a nearby thoroughfare and one of the
city´s main avenues) to stop the traffic with a sit-down protest. The police prevented this
action, wielding truncheons, firing rubber bullets and arresting twenty-four people (Mar-
tínez and García, 159–184).
As a protest against the arrests, a group of people decided to spend the night in the
Puerta del Sol square (Sánchez). In Spain, this is a highly symbolic space, as it is not only
one of the capital city’s main squares placed in the center of the city, but it is also the geo-
graphic center of the country which marks the point from which geographical measure-
ments are taken, literally hosting “km 0” (kilometer 0 in Spain). It is more usual to sleep
in front of the courts when protesting against arrests linked to political events, but here the
chosen place had changed. And what began as a protest against repression soon became
something much bigger.

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-55
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

Building a Shared Space

The act of sleeping on the ground in the Puerta del Sol had clearly been inspired by the Egyp-
tian revolution. The journalist Olga Rodríguez, who had covered the Arab Spring for the inde-
pendent online publication Periodismo humano, tells how she received a phone call in which
the young people camped out asked her what they had done in Tahrir Square; she replied that
the first thing had been to seek shelter and food (Rodríguez). So, in Madrid, sleeping bags and
blankets were brought from nearby houses, carboard was gathered to isolate and cushion the
floor and leftover food from restaurants in the area was sought. Nacho Miranda, one of the
first people to set up camp, recalls that they ate squid and pizza (Miranda).
During these first hours the group gathered at the square was about forty people. Some
chanted “¡Esta noche nadie se marcha!” (“Tonight, no one is going to leave!”). There was
already talk of setting up a camp and staying until the elections (“Los primeros 40 de Sol”).
Among the group were people coming from the squatter’s movement, known in Spain
as okupas. It was probably under their influence that the form of organization also used
by self-managed social centers was adopted in the square, based on establishing working
groups and decision by assembly methodologies (Martínez and García 157–84). Over the
following days, with an increase in capacity, a more complex settlement was configured.
The first assembly was held on May 17, reaching a thousand people, and that night the
foundations were laid for the camp itself. Its appearance and atmosphere recalled those of
Egypt’s Tahir Square and generated an environment of otherness, reminiscent of a souk or
a medina, with tarps filtering the light in blue tones. The pillars holding up the tents were
made with found elements, combining rolls of carboard with rubbish bins, jerrycans and
even a toilet bowl. The ground was paved with cardboard, which created a springy surface
and provided a certain degree of thermic insulation.
This space was occupied by a series of stands, furnished with tables, representing various
committees (comisiones): Health, legal, food, long-term politics and so on. The combination
of their location varied, making it necessary to draw maps that were very quickly out of date
given the mutability of the space (Ramírez Blanco 127). Once the square was too full, the
working groups started to meet in adjacent streets or in the city’s social centers. In the Puerta
del Sol there was also a zone set aside for rest, with tents and sleeping bags arranged to sleep
on the ground. Immediately adjacent to one of the subway station entrances (el metro), there
was a space allocated to the General Assembly, the camp’s organ of self-government.
Daily life in the square was organized around sharing the space, making donations,
doing voluntary work and attending meetings. It was an example of prefigurative poli-
tics – a new society grows inside an already existing society, generating its own structures
and ways of relating. Connected to the principles of direct action, this kind of politics seeks
to create a more just society without trusting other sectors to make social changes and
without looking to the future as the always postponed moment for making change (Leach).
Those who demand a better world take on the task of building it here and now. And this
is profoundly empowering and represents the demonstration of autonomy of these move-
ments in relation to the ruling class.

Performative Assembly
They call it democracy, but it isn’t.
No, no, they don’t represent us!

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One of the most chanted slogans in the square was “Lo llaman democracia y no lo es”
(“They call it democracy, but it isn’t”). Another is “Que no, que no, que no nos represen-
tan” (“No, no, they don’t represent us”). Another still, “Nuestros sueños no caben en sus
urnas” (“Our dreams don’t fit into their ballot boxes”). This disenchantment with the politi-
cal class recalls the protests in Argentina in 2001, with their categorical theoretical demand:
“Que se vayan todos” (“Get rid of the lot of them”). Spain in 2011 had multiple triggers for
this collective feeling. Amid corruption scandals and a climate in which politicians showed
little appreciation for peoples’ problems, the political class no longer appeared legitimate,
and the bipartisan approach to politics did not seem to offer alternatives.
This crisis of political representation would be addressed in a symbolic way through the
assembly practice in the square. As a collective forum, the camp seemed to constitute itself
as a mirror image of the nearby Madrid city council. But, in contrast to the deficient repre-
sentation that went on there, this “Madrid Assembly” demonstrated a spectacular politics
of presence (Labrador 176).
Gemma García Fernández is an activist, teacher and art historian and for years was part
of the Escuela Popular de la Prospe, a project for the education of adults in the Madrid
neighbourhood of Prosperidad. During that May of 2011, she participated in the so-called
General Assembly Dynamization Commission, dedicated to providing an infrastructural
framework for these assembly meetings. This group drew up a Quick guide for the dynami-
zation of popular assemblies, which reflected on the notion of collective thinking:

Normalmente ante una decisión dos personas con ideas opuestas tenderán a enfren-
tarse y defender ferozmente sus ideas poniendo como objetivo convencer, ganar o a lo
sumo llegar a un punto medio. El objetivo del pensamiento colectivo es construir. Es
decir, dos personas con ideas diferentes ponen sus energías en construir algo. No se
trata entonces de mi idea o la tuya. Son las dos ideas juntas las que darán un producto
nuevo que a priori no conocíamos ni tú ni yo. Por eso es tan necesaria la escucha
activa en la que no solo estamos preparando la réplica que vamos a dar. El pensami-
ento colectivo nace cuando entendemos que todas las opiniones, las nuestras y las
diferentes, todas, son necesarias para generar la idea de consenso. Una idea que tras
su construcción nos transforma. (Normally, faced with a decision two people with
opposite ideas will tend to confront each other and fiercely defend their own idea,
with the aim of convincing, winning or at best reaching a middle ground. The aim of
collective thinking is to construct. That is to say, two people with different ideas put
their energies towards constructing something. It is then no longer my idea or your
idea. It is the two ideas together that will create a new product that a priori neither
you nor I were aware of. For this, active listening is so important, during which we
are not just preparing the reply that we are going to give. Collective thinking is born
when we understand that all opinions – our own and different ones, all of them – are
necessary to generate the idea of consensus. An idea that, after its construction, trans-
forms us) (Guía Rápida).

Nonetheless, this kind of approach is not easy to achieve. Most of the people who had
gathered had no experience in following the assembly model, which made constant educa-
tion necessary. Within the square, there were many interventions that were purely cathar-
tic, displaying personal dramas or launching inflammatory harangues. Unlike a “normal”
assembly led by a stable group, in the Camp, people came and went all the time, and the

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assembly was as heterogeneous and changing as the community that fluctuated around the
square. This means that, often, the same questions were debated over and over again.
Despite these problems, the assemblies were a splendid sight. A surprising and original
element had appeared in the Puerta del Sol: The regular celebration of massive and public
assemblies. The size of the meetings fluctuated between one and three thousand people. The
sociologist Cristina Flesher Fominaya speaks of the astonishment of activists who experienced
the application of the assembly methodology to a scale that they had never anticipated (Flesher
Fominaya, 94–95). The dazzle of this powerful image also implied a certain mirage. The size
of these meetings would become an insurmountable obstacle to participation. In the words of
sociologist Miguel A. Martínez, “Tú sabías que en una asamblea de mil personas que levantes la
mano y digas una opinión pues a lo mejor . . . no vale para nada, ¿dónde están las otras 999 que
podrían hablar? No habría tiempo para que hablasen todas” (“you knew that in an assembly
of a thousand people that you raise your hand and give an opinion that maybe . . . is not worth
anything – where are the other 999 that could speak? There would not be time for everyone to
speak”) (Martínez). In addition, the timing of the assemblies and their long duration excluded
de facto those who had work or care-giving responsibilities. This is related to the fact that the
great part of the population around the square was made up of young middle-class individuals
with few family obligations. While the assemblies of the working groups had a more embrace-
able scale and this analysis does not apply to them, Gemma García Fernández says she became
aware early on that the General Assemblies in the Puerta del Sol over these weeks were not
really assemblies: “Una asamblea de 2.000 personas que fluctúan, además, que no son fijas, no
puede ser una asamblea” (“An assembly of 2,000 people who fluctuate, who are not fixed, can-
not be an assembly”). What was it then? And why did it become a central element of the camp?
The role of the General Assembly as a place of debate and reflection – where concepts
previously restricted to the fields of activism and the university were popularized – seems
clear enough. In relation to the deliberative process that took place there, García Fernán-
dez views the General Assembly as “un laboratorio de experimentación democrática” (“a
laboratory of democratic experimentation”) (García Fernández). In relation to this idea,
the anthropologist Carlos Diz understands the movement as a whole as an “escuela de
democracia” (“school of democracy”) (Diz, 367–90). But beyond what seems to be at its
core – speech – the assembly had other powerful functions. Through the use of repeated
shared protocols and gestures, the assembly also acquired the sense of a ritual of cohesion.
Hand signals were used to express agreement, opposition or veto. Movements such as the
assembly’s gesture for applause or agreement – raising open palms and wiggling the fingers–
bound the community together at the same time as celebrating it. Various bodies moving
in the same way seemed to abolish the differences between them in the face of the will to
do something together. And, as with all ritual, there was also something theatrical about it.
According to the filmmaker Cecilia Barriga, within the camp “la gran performance era
la asamblea” (“the great performance was the assembly”) (Barriga). Barriga uses the term
“performance” in the sense that it is given in art, as a staging that takes aesthetic interven-
tion into the field of time and space. As a performance, the assembly generated scenes that
condensed the very meaning of democracy. Using the central spaces of cities normally given
over to tourism and commerce for debate would seem to revive from the past the notion
of the Greek agora and its mythified reading as a space for decision-making through com-
mon discussion. This reference, which many made explicit at the time, remains problematic
as Athenian democracy was only ever a system for the elites, in which slaves and women,
along with children, were excluded from participation.

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There is also a sense of play in many of the practices of prefigurative politics, which is a
kind of political practice that, rather than waiting for the revolution, rehearses and enacts
other worlds in the here and now. In this, there is an element of playing at governing. The
heated debates about which were the best solutions for society generated real passions as
if the conclusions reached would have an effect. The assembly participants were not totally
mistaken. Amador Fernández Savater, adopting the theory of political fiction from phi-
losopher Jacques Rancière, speaks of how political fictions generate “efectos de realidad”
(“reality effects”): “La ficción es una fuerza material desde el momento en que creemos en
ella y nos organizamos en consecuencia” (“Fiction is a material force from the moment that
we believe in it and organize ourselves as a result”) (Fernández Savater 166).
In any case, the images of thousands of people waving their hands in a gesture of applause
implies potent affirmations of the possibility of managing things in a different way. Simi-
larly, the gestures of these meetings demonstrate the lie in the stereotype of people’s politi-
cal apathy, a view that has led to the idea that political parties are needed to manage things
because of the general lack of interest.

The Spectacle of Community

This organization was the movement’s ideology.
(Graeber 84)

The feeling of community and contagious enthusiasm during the 15M protests turned Sol
into a magnetic center. There are many expressions of joyful transcendence among those
who remember their participation during those months. Aurora Gómez Delgado was going
to emigrate to England but, seeing what was taking place, decided to stay (Gómez Del-
gado). For her, the camp “básicamente era una emoción y un sentimiento y una posibilidad
de conexión con mucha gente” (“was basically an emotion and a feeling and a possibility
of connecting with many people”). She adds, “La emoción la recuerdo intensa y luminosa
porque además hacía un tiempo precioso” (“I remember the emotion as intense and lumi-
nous because the weather was also very fine”). Marta G. Franco refers to “una comunidad
basada en los afectos sobre todo en el sentido de que no había habido ninguna discusión
previa, como pasa por ejemplo en algunos centros sociales antes de okupar” (“a commu-
nity based on affection. Above all in the sense that there had been no prior discussions,
as occurred for example in some social centers before they were squatted”). At times this
was “muy emocional” (“very emotional”) and also “muy intuitivo” (“very intuitive”) (G.
Franco). The Spanish-Chilean Cecilia Barriga recalls “una experiencia de acuerpamiento”
(“an experience of embodiment”) and a capacity to listen that, in her opinion, had not been
found previously in Spain (Barriga). The experience of emotional intensity by the partici-
pants is a visceral political factor as well as one that can agitate and change political identity.
The environment of Sol enabled the navigation of age, class and gender barriers, and
provided a context for novel encounters. There was a continuous insistence on the idea that
anyone who wanted to participate was welcome to do so, and to a large extent this was
true. People who were confronting the consequences of the crisis on their own found a place
to share their experiences.
Any massive event has a certain vagueness, a lack of concreteness. In Sol, the degree
of commitment and the type of intentionality would vary considerably, from those who

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wanted only to spend time at the camp to those with various political projects. The emo-
tional aspect also allowed the convergence of a hugely heterogeneous floating population,
which included diverse social movements and people with no previous explicit involvement
in politics. The journalist Juanlu Sánchez claims that the camp “hacía sentir a mucha gente
cómoda” (“made many people feel comfortable”) (Sánchez). In part, this was related to the
express prohibition of political parties, trades unions, and flags.
People who belonged to earlier groups participated as individuals, calling themselves
only “personas” (“people”). This (in)definition of the political subject as “people” was
already present in the calling of the demonstration of 15 May and had been transferred to
the manifesto drawn up on the first night of the Madrid camp. The word “people” implies
proposing a neutral political subject, without connotation of class, politics or gender. Ama-
dor Fernández-Savater considers it a success:

Vacía de color y peso político, “personas” podía cargarse por ello mismo de una
potencia inédita y circular como una palabra creíble. Indicaba el deseo de otro
comienzo, de otro punto de partida por fuera de la política desprestigiada de los
políticos. “Personas” recoge al mismo tiempo la confianza en lo personal, una de las
pocas dimensiones de la vida contemporánea que aún merece nuestra estima (Empty
of color and political weight, “people” could be charged with an unprecedented
power and circulate as a credible word. It indicated the desire for another beginning,
another start outside the discredited politics of politicians. At the same time, “people”
gathers confidence in the personal, one of the few dimensions of contemporary life
that still merits our esteem).
(Fernández-Savater 165)

Luis Moreno-Caballud has studied the cultures of anybody (Moreno-Caballud) and the
“artivist” Leónidas Martín refers to “la fuerza sin nombre” (“the strength without a name”)
(Martín). Groups ceased to be visible: “diluir, diluir, diluir . . . diluir tanto que ni siqui-
era Juventud Sin Futuro y Democracia Real Ya significaban nada el miércoles” (“diluting,
diluting, diluting . . . diluting so much that not even Juventud Sin Futuro and Democracia
Real Ya meant anything by Wednesday”), according to Juanlu Sánchez (Sánchez interview).
In this sensation of shared identity without labels, new identities appear, and many people
claimed to be “15M” or “la plaza” (“the square”).
Group anonymity, however, also played a role in making important influences invis-
ible. This is the case of the squatter movement, which from the start provided practical
know-how and organizational forms. Barriga recalls it thus:

Se notaba la presencia de los okupas que ya tenían una tradición, y viéndolo con per-
spectiva había grupos de poder. . . . Desde muy pronto hubo grupos que venían de los
espacios okupados que se hicieron con el liderazgo interno, aunque no había figuras
individuales que se vieran . . . pero yo creo que los grupos sí manejaron la dinámica, la
dinámica de las asambleas, porque tenían un método de organización muy estudiado,
muy practicado porque se venía del espacio asambleario okupa. En ese sentido eran
más organizados porque traían un método que se aplicó (You could see the presence
of squatters who already had a tradition and, looking at things with perspective, there
were power groups. . . . From very early on, there were groups coming from the squat-
ted spaces that took over the internal leadership, although there were not individual

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figures . . . but I think that the groups did manage the dynamic, the dynamic of the
assemblies, because they had a method of organization that was well studied and
much practiced, because it came from the squatters’ assembly space. In this respect,
they were more organized because they brought a method that was applied).
(Barriga)

On the other hand, despite the appearance of spontaneity, Sánchez speaks of “jerarquías y
protocolos” (“hierarchies and protocols”) (Sánchez interview). And sometimes the concen-
trations of power or the perception of legitimacy derived from physical involvement with
the camp. Adriana Razquín complains that in the camp in Granada, people who remained
permanently at the camp gained influence. To a certain extent, her words can be applied to
the Sol camp as well:

Para una parte del 15M era, precisamente, permanecer, dormir, pasar veinticuatro
horas en la acampada (por encima de cualquier otra cosa) lo que le otorgaba a un par-
ticipante la posibilidad de hablar con propiedad, con conocimiento de causa del futuro
de la acampada y del movimiento. Aunque no se participara en ninguna comisión, no
se desarrollasen tareas de mantenimiento, o se permaneciera escuchando música con
un ordenador en el contorno de la acampada mientras se desarrollaba la asamblea
general. En aquel momento era como exigir pasar todo el día y toda la noche en la
acampada para poder expresar la opinión sobre el futuro del 15M (For one part of
the 15M, it was specifically remaining, sleeping, spending twenty-four hours a day in
the camp (above anything else) that gave a participant the possibility of speaking
properly – with knowledge of the future of the camp and the movement – even if
they did not take part in any commission or perform maintenance tasks, or if they
remained listing to music on a computer within the camp while the General Assembly
was taking place. At that time, it was like a demand to spend all day and all night at
the camp just to be able to express an opinion on the future of the 15M).
(Razquín, 194)

This legitimacy through presence makes sense, considering that the utopian discourse of the
camp took shape through the self-staging of everyday life. In the camps, everyday gestures
became more visible than usual: Actions such as sweeping, cooking or serving food were
done in a visible way and in front of a multitude of observers. They thus became militant
gestures of another possible everyday life, and their performance emphasized values such as
civicism, work and generosity.
The camps were making a spectacle of utopia, demonstrating through their own prac-
tice that another way of life was possible. The central location put the Sol Camp in front
of everyone’s eyes. Like any demonstration (and the 15M emerged from one), it was a
spectacle. Many people visited the space, as a kind of tourism, but at the same time, it
was a community, which in exhibiting itself demonstrated the real possibility of a differ-
ent system. All those gestures carried out in the square were rapidly converted into images
that circulated through the press and on social media. The spectacularized everyday life of
the square spilt over into different communication media, and those who received it were
impelled to replicate it.
One of the most powerful performances of the Sol Camp consisted precisely of an exer-
cise in silence and non-verbal gestures. A midnight on the date of the Day of Reflection,1

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the city’s Electoral Commission declared that the settlement would be considered illegal and
should be cleared out. The crowd was then summoned to the Puerta del Sol and asked to
remain in silence while the twelve chimes of the square’s clock sounded. The artist and poli-
tician Marcelo Expósito highlights how the “Grito Mudo” (“Silent Scream”) functioned
as a great ritual, which marked the group’s passage towards civil disobedience (Expósito).
When, despite the tension, the police did not charge, those in the crowd raised their hands.
The assembly gesture of the hands functioned as a liturgy of cohesion, which had already
dispensed with all speech. The camp’s existence had continued despite the context of strong
political, media and commercial pressure calling for its dismantling and the participants’
eviction. After the elections, won by the right-wing Popular Party, the Sol Camp continued
in the square, with an ever-increasing number of working groups and commissions, while
constructions in the Puerta del Sol expanded and extremely long assemblies were held.
Gradually, the inhabitants were getting closer to the milieu of a politicized counterculture.
Eventually, attendance at the camp declined, and among many activists there was a sense
that all their energies were going into sustaining the space. In addition, serious problems
of cohabitation – including cases of sexual violence – became evident (“La Comisión de
feminismo”; “En terminos legales”).
Already on May 29 there had been a debate that lasted several hours about the possibil-
ity of taking down the camp, but in the end it was decided that it would remain (Flesher
Fominaya). Nonetheless, the question was raised again in a stronger way and, at a given
point, it started to be put forward at all the General Assemblies. In extremely tense meet-
ings the decision was blocked by a few people who wanted to remain in the camp longer.
Dissent was expressed in a violent way. This apparent impasse was resolved by removing
the gesture of the veto and replacing it with another that expressed a disagreement that
yielded to the will of the majority (García Fernández). On June 12, it was finally decided
to leave the square, several weeks after having established neighborhood assemblies in the
various districts of the city, thereby seeking a decentralized and potentially more sustain-
able movement.
The participants in the camp left behind in the Puerta del Sol an information point and
a ground-level monument: A metal plaque with the text “Dormíamos, despertamos. Plaza
tomada” (“We were sleeping, we woke up. The Square was taken”), which had been made
in the workshops of the Complutense University of Madrid´s School of Fine Arts (Jurado).
When City Hall removed both on August 2, it was trying to erase the memory of a moment
when it had seemed that another world was possible, and that that world looked like the
Camp. That ephemeral city became a foundational myth for an activism that would later
be refracted in a myriad of struggles and diverse campaigns during the dark years of the
ensuing crisis.

Note
1 In Spain, the day before elections is called the Day of Reflection during which campaigning and
demonstrations are prohibited.

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primeros-40-Sol_6_387821268.html. Accessed 8 Jun. 2020.
Sánchez, Juanlu. “Interview with the Author,” 26 Jan. 2012.

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 49
IBERIAN MULTILINGUALISM,
GENDER, AND TRANSLATION
AS COLLABORATION
Leslie J. Harkema

In the introduction to her study Corpos exorbitantes: Rosalía de Castro, tradutora femini-
sta, en diálogo con Erín Moure (Exorbitant Bodies: Rosalía de Castro, Feminist Translator,
in Dialogue with Erín Moure), the translator, critic, and activist María Reimóndez writes
of a need to consider translation in the context of Galician letters, noting that “a tradución
é, sen dúbida, un dos espazo[s] mais significativas de invisibilidades, un lugar que se define
como non-lugar, onde interesa que as tradutoras sexan invisibles para poder seguir con-
tribuíndo aos discursos do heteropatriarcado e da colonidade” (“translation is, without
a doubt, one of the most significant spaces of invisibility, a place defined as a non-place,
where it is of interest that female translators be kept invisible so that they may continue
contributing to heteropatriarchal and colonialist discourses”; 9–10).1 Speaking in part from
her own experience as a female translator working in Galicia, Reimóndez highlights how
dominant cultural discourses seek to render both the practice of translation and the women
who carry it out invisible. In this, she draws on theorists who have demonstrated that the
relationship between original works and translations is a gendered one. As Sherry Simon
explains, “The hierarchical authority of the original over the reproduction is linked with
imagery of masculine and feminine; the original is considered the strong generative male,
the translation the weaker and derivative female” (1).
Reimóndez’s essay establishes a transhistorical link between the nineteenth-century Gali-
cian poet Rosalía de Castro and the contemporary Canadian translator Erín Moure on
the basis of their practices in translation, in order to construct what Reimóndez calls, in
Foucauldian fashion, a genealogy (xinealoxía) of feminist translation in Galicia (14). In
this chapter, I offer a series of reflections on the discursive treatment of translation in early
twentieth-century Spain as steps toward a similar, genealogical understanding of transla-
tion and its significance in today’s officially plurilingual Spanish state. Over the last several
decades, the expansion of translation studies in Spain and the growth of Iberian studies as
an academic field have revealed a need for this type of understanding. While the history
of translation has been documented in each of Spain’s languages and literatures (Castilian,
Catalan, Galician, and Basque), these histories often continue to exclude or marginalize the
work of female translators in particular. A case in point is that of Zenobia Camprubí, well
known as the translator of numerous works by Rabindranath Tagore and unrecognized

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-56 
 Multilingualism, Gender, and Translation as Collaboration

collaborator in nearly all of the translations of British and North American writers carried
out by her husband, Juan Ramón Jiménez, who never mastered English. Soledad González
Ródenas has recounted her surprise at learning that Camprubí did not receive her own entry
in the Diccionario histórico de la traducción en España edited by Francisco Lafarga and
Luis Pegenaute in 2009 (González Ródenas 240–1). In these editors’ earlier Historia de la
traducción en España (2004), the female translator’s name is never mentioned – she is only
alluded to as part of a couple (“el matrimonio Jiménez”). Later in this chapter I will discuss
a comparable case, that of Camprubí’s contemporary María de la O Lejárraga García (alias
María Martínez Sierra). Lejárraga’s work in translation and cultural mediation among the
literatures of the Spanish state is of particular interest for its illustration of the intersection
between translation, gender, and Iberian multilingualism in the twentieth century.
In recent years a number of scholars of various Iberian literatures have worked to recover
the stories of women like Camprubí and Lejárraga. Those who specialize in the “periph-
eral” literatures of the Iberian Peninsula have called attention to the compounded margin-
alization that conditions the work of female translators in these languages (Bacardí and
Godayol, Castro). What remains to be done, even as this work of recovery continues, is to
analyze the discourse surrounding translation in contemporary Spain, taking into account
the ways the gendering of the activity intersects with the multilingual reality of Spain’s cul-
tural landscape. As I argue here, in the most dominant and influential discourse, translation
is viewed as a sign of literary and cultural dependence, and therefore associated with shame,
impossibility, and tragedy. Yet this is by no means the only nor the most accurate vision of
translation practices in and among the many languages of the Spanish state.
Christiane Stallaert has suggested that an “ideal of non-translation” operates within the
nationalisms of modern Spain (113). Focusing on the Castilian and Basque cases particu-
larly, Stallaert argues that this ideal parallels the aspiration to ethno-religious purity that
characterized Spanish civilization beginning in the late fifteenth century. Viewed this way,
translation, like religious conversion in the early modern Iberian world, becomes an object
of suspicion, a potential threat to and corruption of national identity because it cannot
but carry with it a residue of alterity. Indeed, as Antoine Berman has affirmed, the mixing
(métissage) implied in translation is “diametrically opposed to the ethnocentric structure
of every culture, that species of narcissism by which every society wants to be a pure and
unadulterated Whole” (Heyvaert 4). In early twentieth-century Spain, the desire to forge
a modern nation on par with other European states (and to recover from imperial decline)
exacerbated the suspicion of translation, even as prominent intellectuals recognized the
importation of texts and models from elsewhere on the continent as necessary for Spain’s
advancement. Internal linguistic difference – that is, the perception of a need for translation
within the Spanish state – stoked this anxiety especially when it entered the realm of poli-
tics. As Joan Ramon Resina and Aurélie Vialette have pointed out, Miguel de Unamuno’s
1908 article “Su Majestad, la Lengua Española” (“His Majesty, the Spanish Language”)
is a prime example of this fear. In it, Unamuno sharply denounces the use of Catalan to
address the King of Spain and argues that employing this non-Castilian language is only
appropriate in the cultural sphere. Though, as I have argued elsewhere, in this instance
Unamuno does not take issue with translation per se (Harkema 825), he does reject the
affront to the notion of Castilian as the language of the state, the single language that unites
and identifies all Spaniards. In restricting the use of Catalan (or Galician or Basque) to the
cultural sphere, Unamuno also draws on the gendered division between public and private
domains. As he writes in the article, “No; la única lengua nacional de España es la lengua

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española; la única lengua, lengua íntegramente española, y, además, lengua internacional,

lengua mundial. En ella pronuncia sus discursos el presidente del Consejo de Ministros, y
no en la lengua de su infancia, no en su lengua materna, no en mallorquín” (No; the only
national language of Spain is the Spanish language; the only wholly Spanish language that
is also an international and global language. The president of the Council of Ministers gives
his speeches in this language, and not in the language of his childhood, not in his mother
tongue, not in Mallorcan”; Vialette 322). The association with maternal inheritance, with
hearth and home, that was central to the revival of Spain’s peripheral languages in the
nineteenth century, here becomes a limiting factor. The language of the state is paternal and
male, like His Majesty the King.
The allergy to mediation in the public domain of national politics continues to be present
in the twenty-first century, where one of what Luisa Elena Delgado has called Spain’s “fan-
tasias de la normalidad” (“fantasies of normalcy”) is surely the fantasy of a “natural state”
of monolingualism. The “idea de un estado democrático sin antagonismos internos” (“idea
of a democratic state without internal conflict”; Delgado 65) explains recent phenomena
like the resistance to the inclusion of a rapporteur (relator) in talks between the Catalan and
central Spanish governments in 2019, or the arguments against a proposal to allow the use
of Basque, Catalan, or Galician on the floor of the Spanish Senate in 2010. In that debate,
Mallorcan senator Pere Sampol i Mas responded to colleagues who maintained that provid-
ing simultaneous translation for those who do not understand Spain’s co-official languages
would be costly and inconvenient with a question: “¿Sienten vergüenza del pinganillo?”
(“Are you embarrassed by the earpiece?”; Diario de Sesiones 4877).
To understand this continued embarrassment or shame surrounding translation, we can
look to the way influential writers described and represented this activity at the beginning
of the twentieth century. One of these was philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. While Ortega
was one of the greatest proponents of cultural exchange with Europe in the 1910s and 20s
as founder of the Revista de Occidente and supporter of numerous other intellectual initia-
tives, many of his writings also reflect his view of non-translation as an ideal. At least when
he theorizes about it, Ortega views translation not so much as a tool to overcome linguistic
difference as a reminder of the unbridgeable gaps between languages and cultures. In his
1937 essay “Miseria y esplendor de la traducción” (“The Misery and Splendor of Transla-
tion”), the philosopher describes the act of translating as a utopian endeavor, destined to
fall short of its goal. While praising translation for attempting to approximate the ideal
of unhindered intercultural communication, he insists that it will always fail. Therein lies
translation’s misery. In Ortega’s view, the translator should respond to this situation by
being a “good utopian” (17): One who recognizes the impossibility of his task and accepts
the secondary status of the translation in relation to an original work. Yet even as he praises
this figure, Ortega has already emasculated him. Early in the essay he characterizes the
translator as a timid character (“un personaje apocado”) who has chosen his insignificant
occupation (“la mínima”) out of apprehension and cowardice – this in contrast to the
writer, who takes on a heroic and subversive act of original creation (8). The implicit gen-
dering of writing as masculine and translating as feminine in these characterizations is rein-
forced by the essay’s title. Alluding to Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (The
Splendors and Miseries of the Courtesans; 1847), Ortega’s pairing of misery and splendor
likens translation to prostitution, building on and surpassing the misogyny of the French
expression les belles infidèles (the beautiful infidels) by accusing the act not only of faithless-
ness, but of a transactional and ultimately ill-fated promiscuity.2

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For Ortega, translation’s splendor is always conditioned by its misery. This tragic view
of interlinguistic communication has parallels in Ortega’s approach to relations between
the Spanish state and Catalonia, and a similar vision appears in the work of other early
twentieth-century Spanish writers. Translation plays a brief but significant role in Pío Baro-
ja’s El árbol de la ciencia (The Tree of Knowledge; 1911). A coming-of-age tale about a
medical student in Madrid during the last years of the nineteenth century, this novel fol-
lows protagonist Andrés Hurtado in a quest for scientific and philosophical modernity that
he does not find in his home country. Solitary and misanthropic, Hurtado is continually
dismayed by and dissatisfied with Spanish society, whether in the urban slums of Madrid
or the oppressively traditional towns of rural Castile, where he works as a country doctor
for a time. Nevertheless, he finds an uncharacteristic peace in the final section of the novel,
when he secures a job working as a translator of scientific articles for a medical journal.
This occupation fits Hurtado’s particular sensibilities; as his wife Lulú remarks, he is eccen-
tric and obsessive, “ideático” (281). More a man of contemplation than of action, he recoils
from the exterior world that disappoints him. Yet he is content in his translation work,
which allows him to import scientific knowledge from the hegemonic languages of Europe
(he translates from French and English) into Castilian, contributing in some small measure
to the intellectual modernization of the country.
In several ways, Andrés Hurtado resembles the “good utopian” described by Ortega.
Resigned to his position, he accepts the secondary status of his work, and acknowledges
the superiority of the European originals he reproduces for a Spanish audience. Even when
he begins to author studies of his own, the narrator tells us that his analyses are “casi siem-
pre sobre datos y experiencias obtenidas por investigadores extranjeros” (“almost always
based on data and experience obtained by foreign researchers”; 282). Translation is under-
stood as importation, not as exchange, and Hurtado does not seem to intervene in his
renderings in any way – though, significantly, he does aspire to move on from translating
to producing original work. His passivity as a translator not only affirms the hierarchical
elevation of writing over translating, but also supports a cultural hierarchy that places the
intellectual tradition of northern Europe above that of Spain.
As instructive as the image of Andrés Hurtado is for comprehending geopolitical rela-
tions and Spain’s sense of cultural inferiority in fin-de-siècle Europe, it does not accurately
depict translation practices at the time. Indeed, this model of the translator contrasts
sharply with that represented by Baroja’s contemporary, Carmen de Burgos, who in 1904
published a translation of German neurologist Paul Julius Möbius’ pamphlet The Physi-
ological Mental Deficiency of Women (Burgos gave it the Spanish title La inferioridad
mental de la mujer). Accompanying her translation, Burgos included a prologue, footnotes,
and an extended appendix that all served to question Möbius’ arguments and encourage
debate.3 Lola Sánchez has called Burgos’ translation “an act of militancy and of public agi-
tation” (75). With this rendering, Burgos did not simply import knowledge, but created a
new conversation about women and feminism in Spain.
It is precisely the question of generating something new that reveals the contradiction
between the desire for modernization and the ideal of non-translation in El árbol de la cien-
cia. Just as Andrés begins to have success writing his own reviews and is asked to contribute
regular original articles to the medical journal (285), Lulú begins to press him to have a
child. As he attempts to progress beyond the reproductive activity of translation, biological
reproduction presents itself as a new obstacle. The prospect terrifies Andrés, as he consid-
ers himself “un producto envenenado y podrido, que no debía tener descendencia” (“a

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poisoned, rotten product that ought not to have descendants”; 287). When Lulú becomes
pregnant, Hurtado receives the news as the harbinger of tragedy (288), and indeed, the
novel comes to a tragic end with a stillborn baby, Lulú’s death in the wake of childbirth,
and Andrés’ suicide. Such a calamitous conclusion reflects early twentieth-century Spain’s
unease with reproduction and translation as a means of national advancement. As Berman
states, “Every culture resists translation, even if it has an essential need for it” (Heyvaert 4).
In this canonical early twentieth-century novel, the preference for originality and autonomy
over cultural dependence runs aground on the ideal of non-translation, the resistance to
vital exchange with other cultures.
While the closing chapters of El árbol de la ciencia illustrate the tragic view of transla-
tion that posits the activity as a problematic undertaking, akin to what many prominent
twentieth-century intellectuals referred to as “el problema de España” (“the problem of
Spain”), the image the novel presents is not representative of actual practices in translation
throughout Spain. Most basically, this is because the intellectual culture Baroja depicts
in the novel is uniformly masculine, and heavily Castilian-centric.4 Andrés Hurtado’s tale
reflects on the challenge of modernizing Spain in the wake of imperial loss, but the model it
offers does not correspond to the cultural activity that was already taking place and would
emerge in the Iberian Peninsula in subsequent decades.
Indeed, in these other arenas, translation was not approached as tragic or problematic.
Early twentieth-century Catalan intellectuals saw it as crucial for the development of a
newly revived literary tradition in the wake of the nineteenth-century Renaixença (Mur-
gades 93; Ortín 675). The expansion of the Catalan language’s literary repertoire in fact
played a role in the macro-translation of the Catalanist movement from the purely cultural
to the political sphere, and from the private to the public domain. Eugeni d’Ors linked
translation to the notion of Catalan imperialism that had been put forth by Enric Prat de la
Riba in the foundational essay of Catalan nationalism, La nacionalitat catalana (1906). In
his 1911 article “Les incorporacions” (“Incorporations”), d’Ors affirmed, “[S]e pot ésser
imperial traduint. Ara traduim volent incorporar el món de la Cultura a la nostra petita
cultura. Y sabent que aquest és el millor camí pera incorporar aviat la nostra petita cultura
a la Cultura del món” (“One can be imperial by translating. Right now we translate out of
a desire to incorporate the world of Culture into our own small culture. And also out of the
knowledge that this is the best way to incorporate our small culture as soon as possible into
the Culture of the world”; 1).
As numerous scholars have noted, Itamar Even-Zohar’s theory that peripheral cultures
rely more heavily on translation, and therefore it occupies a more central role in their liter-
ary systems, bears itself out in the cases of Catalan, Galician, and Basque, which have all
incorporated translation into their nation-building projects. In the case of Basque, the liter-
ary component of this project did not take off until the second half of the twentieth century,
but as Mari Jose Olaziregi has maintained, translation has played a fundamental role in the
enhancement of literary language in Basque since that time (35). In Galicia, as in Catalo-
nia, the rise of political nationalism brought with it a turn to translation to enrich literary
culture. Following the pivotal year of 1916, the influential Galician nationalist journals A
nossa terra (Our Homeland) and Nós (Us) made a habit of including translations. Accord-
ing to Beatriz Real Pérez, translation functioned in these publications principally to contrib-
ute to the creation of a Galician identity, reinforcing cultural affinities with foreign nations
as a counterweight to Castilian influence and to hone a sense of Galician particularity (27).

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Of special note in this regard is the inclusion of translations from Catalan and even Portu-
guese, this last despite its linguistic proximity to Galician (Real Pérez 15).
If translation was perhaps not as suspect5 in peripheral literatures as in the Castilian
arena, it was still enlisted to contest the marginalization and feminization of non-Castilian
cultures by the dominant culture. Several Galician scholars have paid close attention to the
way gender functioned in the construction of national identity. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
has articulated how in making its own translation from the cultural to the political realm
the post-1916 nationalist project in Galicia responded to “a cultural logic that has asso-
ciated emotional forms of affiliation with femininity, while enhancing public forms of
political activism with a specific notion of masculinity” (103). Olga Castro attributes the
fact that A nossa terra and Nós did not include translations by women to the patriarchal
character of Galician nationalism, judging that translation’s role in the political movement
necessitated that it be framed as men’s work (“Traductoras” 117). Citing the work of Neal
Baxter, Reimóndez has also affirmed this idea, noting that translation has been fashioned as
a masculine activity in Galicia since the early twentieth century (“We Need” 48).
The Iberianist movement that flourished in some cultural sectors during the late nine-
teenth century and the beginning of the twentieth provides another example of a positive
view and enthusiastic use of translation. This intellectual and cultural movement, inspired
by proposals to unite the two nation-states of the peninsula as well as by the Federalist
model of government that existed briefly under the presidency of Francesc Pi i Margall
during the First Spanish Republic (1873), sought the unification of peninsular civilizations
through a recognition of their cultural and linguistic differences. While the political posi-
tions of individual Iberianists ranged from monarchism to republicanism, they all shared
a commitment to mediation between the different cultures and languages of Iberia, often
through translation. In contrast to Baroja’s portrayal of the activity in El árbol de la ciencia,
for the Iberianists translation did not function simply as importation, but as circulation and
cross-pollination.
Thomas Harrington has called attention to this exchange of ideas in his account of the
work of Catalan translator and anthologist Fernando Maristany and the group of writers he
assembled around him in the 1920s. Harrington stresses the Iberianist vision that inspired
Maristany’s editorial projects, which included several anthologies of “the best one hundred
poems” in various languages: French, Italian, German, and Portuguese, among others (“El
Cercle Maristany” 115). Iberianism also undergirds Maristany’s approach to his anthology
of “Spanish” poetry, which differs from the others in that it does not limit itself to a single
language. Among the Castilian-language poems, the collection includes Castilian transla-
tions of Ausiàs March, Rosalía de Castro, Jacint Verdaguer, Curros Enríquez, and Joan
Maragall. In the prologue to Las cien mejores poesías españolas (líricas) (The One Hundred
Best [Lyrical] Spanish Poems), published in 1921, Maristany writes,

Al ofrecer al público una selección de poesías líricas españolas, hemos entendido

que no podían excluirse de ella algunas de sus manifestaciones más exquisitas, por
el mero hecho de no estar escritas en castellano. Hemos, pues, escogido unas poesías
indiscutiblemente bellas, desde el punto de vista lírico, de los mejores poetas gallegos
y catalanes, y las hemos mezclado – cuidadosamente vertidas a la lengua común – con
las propiamente castellanas, cosa que, a nuestro modo de ver, tiene un interés real
para la historia de nuestra literatura. (Maristany 15)

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When offering a selection of Spanish lyric poems to the public, we have considered
that some of the tradition’s most exquisite examples ought not to be excluded merely
because they were not written in Castilian. We have thus selected a few poems that are
undeniably beautiful, from a lyric standpoint, by the best Galician and Catalan poets,
and we have mixed them – carefully carried over to the common language – with the
strictly Castilian ones, something that, in our view, is of great interest to the history
of our literature.6

The emphasis on lyricism in this passage is characteristic of Maristany. Manuel Gallego

Roca has argued that the commitment to a carefully defined concept of trans-linguistic
lyricism characterizes and drives all of the Catalan anthologist’s work (63–5). In this text,
Maristany advocates for a vision of Spanish literature that in no way holds to the ideal of
non-translation, appealing to the value of aesthetic beauty as the factor that motivates,
indeed obliges the inclusion of non-Castilian poems. He does not lament translation’s
imperfections or impossibility, but views it as requisite for a full understanding of Spain’s
literary patrimony.
This attitude toward translation, unlike that articulated by Ortega, is echoed elsewhere
in the writings of the Iberianists, most of whom were translators themselves. In their work
we find a different discourse about the act – one that focuses not on the dichotomies of mis-
ery or splendor, fidelity or betrayal, but on mutual recognition, friendship, and love. This
is especially the case of Catalan poet Joan Maragall, who aligned translation with his own
Iberianist vision on a number of occasions: in his prologue to Ignasi Ribera i Rovira’s Poesia
i prosa (1905), which included a number of translations of Portuguese poems into Catalan;
in his own critical prose; and in his correspondence with Unamuno, who translated some of
his work.7 (Indeed, in those letters Unamuno stresses a link between translation and friend-
ship with a tone altogether distinct from the one he used in “Su Majestad la Lengua Espa-
ñola.”) For Maragall, translation facilitated the cultivation of what he referred to in 1903
as a “espíritu peninsular” (“peninsular spirit”) corresponding to a “sueño de unión espon-
tánea entre pueblos que se sientan libres en su amor” (“dream of spontaneous union among
peoples who feel free in their love for each other”; Helios 470). To be sure, this dream is
also an idealization, yet one altogether different from the fantasy of monolingualism.
Despite this discursive shift in the way translation was perceived in Iberianist circles,
the almost complete absence of female figures (with the exception of Rosalía de Castro)
maintains the masculinity of the literary space. Maristany’s Las cien mejores poesías espa-
ñolas (líricas) includes only three female poets, none of whom were living at the time of
the anthology’s publication: three poems by Santa Teresa de Jesús, one by Carolina Coro-
nado, and 12 by de Castro. Only one female contemporary of Maristany appears to have
contributed to this collection: Matilde Ras, translator of Maragall and Víctor Català into
Castilian, whose rendering of Maragall’s “Después de la tempestad” (“After the Storm”)
appears alongside Maristany’s and Alfonso Maseras’ versions of the Catalan poet’s works.8
The glimpse of Ras’ name in Maristany’s anthology reminds us that women were involved
in mediation between the cultures of the Iberian Peninsula. Carmen de Burgos is again a
relevant example here, as she traveled to Portugal in the late 1910s as a correspondent to
cover attitudes toward the First Portuguese Republic (Johnson and Castro, “Historical”
214). Others are more difficult to identify, particularly because translations often appeared
without attribution in magazines and journals of the period. Take, for example, the 14
November 1903 issue of the journal Helios. Víctor Martínez-Gil has cited this journal as

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one of the intellectual fora that displayed interest in the peripheral literatures of the pen-
insula (213), and it was in this issue that Maragall published the statement I have quoted
previously. The November 1903 issue especially reflects receptivity to a plural vision of
Iberian cultures and to literature in translation in general. The issue includes poems by
Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez, prose by Alejandro Sawa, and drama by
Jacinto Benavente, alongside poems by French poet Maurice Rollinat in both the originals
and prose translation, the letter from Maragall, and a Castilian translation of a chapter
from Santiago Rusiñol’s El poble gris (The Gray Town; 1902).
The issue in fact opens with a review of this book, signed by Helios’ director, Grego-
rio Martínez Sierra. In this piece, the reviewer praises the Catalan writer, and moreover,
defends the beauty of the Catalan language for the journal’s Castilian-reading audience:

Yo he aprendido el catalán leyendo a Rusiñol y a Mosén Jacinto Verdaguer. Grata

cosa es por cierto entrar en una lengua por la puerta de su poesía. – Janua coeli.
Dícenme que es esta lengua catalana áspera y ruda; pero yo, aun cuando sea cierto,
no lo quiero creer; antes de oírla hablar, había yo leído aquellos versos y estas pro-
sas, y habiendo gustado en unos y en otras inefables sabores de belleza, esme difícil
no encontrar suave el habla que me los supo decir; quisiera en castellano, en mi
muy amado, muy noble y muy hermoso castellano, poder decir celistia, para decir
resplandor de noche estrellada, y nombrar moradença a ese matiz del aire en la hora
violeta del crepúsculo. (Helios 386)
I have learned Catalan by reading Rusiñol and [poet] Jacinto Verdaguer. It is a
truly lovely thing to enter a language through the door of its poetry. – Janua coeli.
I am told that the Catalan language is coarse and rude; even if that is true, I don’t
want to believe it. Before I heard it spoken, I had already read the aforementioned
verses and prose, and having tasted in both indescribable flavors of beauty, I cannot
but find pleasant the tongue that spoke them to me. I would like to be able to say in
Castilian, my very beloved, noble, and beautiful Castilian, words like celistia, for the
gleam of a starry night, or moradença for the feel of the air in the violet hour of dusk.

A translator’s sensibility lies behind these words; indeed, they constitute a type of transla-
tion or mediation between two cultures and languages recognized as distinct. Yet it is likely
that the translator who wrote them was not Gregorio Martínez Sierra, but his wife María
de la O Lejárraga.
Today it is widely acknowledged that Lejárraga authored much if not all of the writ-
ing that appeared under Gregorio’s name. As Juan Aguilera Sastre has commented, while
there is still some debate about the nature of Gregorio’s involvement in their publications,
it seems evident that the vast majority of the translations the couple published are María’s
work (60–1). In her memoir Gregorio y yo. Medio siglo de colaboración (Gregorio and I.
Half a Century of Collaboration), María wrote of the couple’s relationship with Rusiñol
and acknowledged that she had translated many of his dramatic and prose writings. Agu-
ilera Sastre includes El poble gris in the long list of titles by Rusiñol that María translated
(62). The chapter “Las viejas” (“The Old Women”) that appears in the Helios issue is
therefore almost surely her work, as are the translations of Rollinat’s French, which are
signed “G. M. S.” (500).
As a translator of Rusiñol, Lejárraga played a key role in relations between Catalan and
Castilian cultural worlds in the early decades of the twentieth century. Her translations

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facilitated the circulation of the Catalan playwright’s work throughout Spain, and contrib-
uted decisively to the intercultural exchange fomented by Gregorio Martínez Sierra – both
factors that David George has considered central to the rich relationship between the
theater worlds of Barcelona and Madrid in the early twentieth century (George 40–2, 52).
Lejárraga also confronted gender discrimination on multiple fronts: if marginalization of
women’s writing led her to publish translations and original work under her husband’s
name, her relationship with the Catalan painter and playwright was marked by Rusiñol’s
famous misogyny, as she relates in Gregorio y yo (102). Nevertheless, she managed to take
advantage of the particular situation in which she found herself, especially as she began
to disseminate progressive ideas about the status of women in Spanish society. Between
1916 and 1932, she published several collections of essays on women’s issues directed to
a female readership, all under Gregorio’s name.9 Though this acceptance of authorial ano-
nymity might seem paradoxical (O’Connor 92–3), the masculine pseudonym also allowed
her to express herself more freely. As Alda Blanco has argued, this “hábil estrategia” (“agile
strategy”) allowed her to skirt potential criticism of her person and publish her writings
in a space that many of her female contemporaries could not access (16). Notably, it is in
translation that Lejárraga seems to have feel most able to recognize her own agency, at least
in her later publications. As Aguilera Sastre notes (61), in Gregorio y yo María uses the first
person singular freely when discussing her translations. While she tends to speak of original
authorship in the plural, her “yo” appears when referring to translation.
In terms of her approach to translation, it cannot be said that María Lejárraga employed
the activist or interventionist strategies of Carmen de Burgos, or those Reimóndez sees
in Rosalía de Castro’s translations. The entry dedicated to Lejárraga in the Diccionario
histórico de la traducción en España aligns her translation practice with the invisibility
that characterizes her career in general: “Como en su vida, adoptó en sus traducciones un
estatus de ‘mujer en la sombra’, renunciando a los prólogos e incluyendo escasas notas”
(“As in her life, in her translations she adopted the position of ‘woman in the shadows’,
eschewing prologues and including few footnotes”; Soubsol 686). Nevertheless, she did
manage to emerge from the shadows in another sense, when she entered the political realm
of the Second Republic, ultimately serving in the Congress of Deputies alongside another
female translator, Margarita Nelken. In this, Lejárraga managed to carry her previous expe-
rience with cultural mediation, particularly between Castilian and Catalan, into the politi-
cal sphere.
In 1931, Lejárraga delivered a series of public lectures titled La mujer española ante la
República (Spanish Women and the Republic), which concluded with a reflection on the
topic of “Federación” (“Federation”). In this speech, she articulates a vision reminiscent of
the Iberianist sentiments expressed by Maragall at the turn of the century as she describes a
federalist model for the new Republic as “una cooperación de voluntades libres unidas para
un fin común” (“a cooperation among free wills united toward a common end”; 183). Her
consideration for the cultural and linguistic diversity of Spain is clear, and responds to the
fact that the Catalans in particular sought to establish a federalist government. Lejárraga
tells her audience in Madrid that the Catalans embody the best of the federalist spirit, par-
ticularly because of their ability to work together: “Hombres y mujeres de Cataluña saben,
desde que nacen, cantar juntos, en exaltación, en esperanza, en indignación, en protesta
común. Esto significa que saben cooperar y quieren federarse que han conservado . . . la
estimación – ellos llaman al amar estimar – de la acción conjunta” (“The men and women
of Catalonia know, from birth, how to sing together in jubilation, in hope, in indignation,

642
 Multilingualism, Gender, and Translation as Collaboration

and in protest. This means that they know how to cooperate and want a federation, that
they have maintained . . . esteem – estimar means ‘to love’ in Catalan – for collaborative
action”; 190).
Collaboration is clearly a key concept in María de la O Lejárraga’s work; one needs
look no further than the title of her memoir to recognize this. Yet that title also indicates
how the shared endeavors that Lejárraga valued and praised were also sites of conflict and
imbalances of power. In her foundational essay “Gender and the Metaphorics of Transla-
tion” (1988), Lori Chamberlain called for the theoretical mobilization of collaboration,
writing that “what is required for a feminist theory of translation is a practice governed by
what Derrida calls the double bind – not the double standard. Such a theory might rely . . .
on the double-edged razor of translation as collaboration, where author and translator are
seen as working together, both in the cooperative and the subversive sense” (318). In the
Spanish context, the view of translation as miserable in its limitations and capable only of
a conditional splendor reflects more on attitudes and anxieties regarding the political status
of a monolingual, Castilian-speaking nation than on the diverse forms of cultural mediation
that took place within the Spanish state in the early twentieth century and that continue
today (Santana). Approaching translation as collaboration allows us to trace alternative
genealogies like the one Reimóndez proposes for Galicia. One of these might link Lejárraga,
as a translator and disseminator of feminist ideas in pre-Civil War Spain, to feminists of the
1960s and 70s like Catalan writer and translator Maria Aurèlia Capmany (Godayol 46–8;
Johnson and Castro, “Spanish Feminist” 270). In any case, I hope to have demonstrated in
this chapter that an understanding of the role of translation in contemporary Spain requires
a consideration both of the state’s plurilingual cultural landscape and of the ways gender
has shaped relations among its languages.

Notes
1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
2 On “les belles infidèles,” see Chamberlain 307–309.
3 See Sánchez, Simón Alegre 64–71. Sánchez notes that Burgos also published a review of her own
translation to spur public discussion of Möbius’ ideas.
4 Unlike others of Baroja’s novels, El árbol de la ciencia depicts little of the author’s native Basque
Country.
5 Suspicion was not entirely absent in these literatures, however, as Stallaert’s analysis of Sabino
Arana’s Basque nationalism suggests. In her study of A nossa terra and Nós, Real Pérez notes that
Galician nationalist Vicente Risco also affirmed the secondary status of translations (13, 26).
6 For more on Maristany’s anthologies, see Gallego Roca 58–116.
7 On Ribera i Rovira’s translations and his relationship with Maragall, see Martínez-Gil, Harrington
“Hidden History.”
8 On Matilde Ras’ translation work, see Fraga.
9 Cartas a las mujeres de España (Letters to the Women of Spain; 1916), Feminismo, feminidad,
españolismo (Feminism, Femininity, Spanishness; 1917), La mujer moderna (The Modern Woman;
1920), and Nuevas cartas a las mujeres de España (New Letters to the Women of Spain; 1932).

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 50
SPAIN AND THE SHIFTING
LIMITS OF “EUROPE”
Luis Martín-Estudillo

The idea of “Europe” has been one of the most influential notions operating within Spanish
culture and politics throughout modern times, particularly from the early 1900s onwards.
Despite its forceful role in debates and aspirations, the term is hardly a straightforward
one. It groups different and very loaded meanings under a noun which is itself charged
with a variety of significations. These range from its mythical origins with a noticeable
gendered disposition – the mythical Europa was a Phoenician princess raped by Zeus – to
its geographical value designating a diverse region whose diffuse political contours are the
object of perennial negotiations, as the Brexit vote and the ensuing discussions made visible
once again. This semantic instability of “Europe” mirrors the complex relationships which
individuals, interest groups and whole nations have established over time with the myriad
ideas it denotes.
In Spain, for the last two and a half centuries, “Europe” conveyed mostly a certain idea
of modernity – one which seemed to elude the Iberian nations, whose adequacy in rela-
tion to it was hotly debated. The discussions often boiled down to an issue of belonging to
Europe, a polemic which continues to have ebbs and flows. At the core of these debates is
an anxiety concerning national identity as a price to be paid for accessing modernity. Ques-
tions about the nature and moral implications of this notion were also raised, insofar as the
liberal concept was itself a product of Europe’s self-interrogation (discussions about “other
modernities” notwithstanding).
The preoccupation about Europe acquired great urgency in Spain in the early years of
the twentieth century, but it had been present in deliberations about national identity and
politics at least since the 1700s. The polyglot military man and author José de Cadalso
(1741–1782) dealt with it in his Cartas marruecas (Moroccan Letters). This epistolary novel,
first published in book form in 1793, discussed some of the similarities and peculiarities of
Spain with regards to the rest of Europe – to a certain extent, as a response to the dismissive
treatment that the country received from French authors, from Montesquieu’s Lettres Per-
sanes (Persian Letters; 1721) to the Encyclopédie edited by Diderot and D’Alembert (1751).
Cadalso’s work is presented in a polyphonic mode in which the voice which stands out is
that of Gazel Ben-Aly, an African diplomat who informs his old teacher Ben-Beley of what
he learns about the country through his own observations and from his new friend Nuño

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-57 
 Spain and the Shifting Limits of “Europe”

Núñez, an analytical, prudent Spaniard. Through this veiled, highly mediated treatment of
the “national character” of Spain (which includes layers of fictional editing and transla-
tions), the well-travelled Cadalso attempted to find a middle ground between reactionaries
unwilling to see anything wrong with their country and those “que se avergüenzan de haber
nacido de este lado de los Pirineos” (“who are ashamed of having been born on this side
of the Pyrenees”; n.p.). With this exercise in perspectivism, where Spain’s European-ness is
subtly posed against its Muslim African roots, Cadalso approached successfully “el asunto
más delicado que hay en el mundo, cual es la crítica de una nación” (“the most delicate
matter there is – the critique of a nation”; n.p.). At the same time, he was wary of a poten-
tially disrupting “mezcla de las naciones en Europa” (“mixture of nations within Europe”;
n.p.) which could dilute their idiosyncrasies. A similar sort of inward critical look was cast
by Mariano José de Larra (1809–1837) in his most lucid articles. Like Cadalso, Larra had
benefitted from a cosmopolitan education. His work also shows a very acute awareness of
the importance of submitting critique itself to a close examination. Texts such as “En este
país” (“In this Country”; 1833) based a heartfelt patriotism on the combination of looking
out to Europe (mostly implicitly) and then turning that gaze back to Spain. Yet the point
was not merely to imitate foreign models but finding local solutions for the problems that
such an exercise would reveal.
It was in the period between Cadalso’s birth and Larra’s suicide that Spain became
the paradigm of internal alterity which Europe demanded for its own autonomous (and
self-engrossed) construction as the center of the globe and the culmination of its history
(Cabo; Dainotto). The Northern European gaze found traits in the Spanish culture and
landscape which rendered Asia virtually unnecessary for a Eurocentric narrative in search
of differential elements through which Europe could define itself without recurring to
outside entities. At the same time, that Northern perspective negated full European sta-
tus to the Iberian nations which had jump-started the period of Western global hegem-
ony with their colonial pursuits across the seas: The explorers would become explored.
Nineteenth-century travelers from England, France or Germany found their preconceptions
fulfilled by their selective appreciation of the country, which fully satisfied their romantic
desires for exoticism. From the grand buildings of Muslim Andalusia to the philosophical
dramas of Calderón de la Barca or the anti-Napoleonic guerrillas, eccentric Spain offered a
richness of unique elements which thrilled their imagination. These travelers went back to
their homes to invent a series of enduring stereotypes ranging from the colorful to the maca-
bre. Remnants of that exoticized image are still at work in Spain’s coverage in the media,
which continues to present the country’s people as more passionate or disorderly than the
average European. Since this narrative also has an alluring side to it, local officials have
done little to modify the stance that Francoism sought to exploit when it started marketing
the nation as “different.”
From the inside as well as the outside, then, Spain was seen as an anomaly in the conti-
nent’s history. Explanations for Spanish “belatedness” or “failure” in a series of key Euro-
pean developments (such as rationalism, the Enlightenment, or the industrial revolution)
dominated the discourse of historians and less specialized interpreters for most of the twen-
tieth century. They referred to a long chain of frustrated attempts at regeneration or to
obstacles new and old which alienated Spain from the core of Europe and thus from moder-
nity. Given the grossness of many of those generalizations, it was not surprising that the
rhetoric of weakness and failure shifted dramatically since the 1990s toward a discourse
marked by the perception of Spain’s “normality” within the European context. The sense

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of marginality was eroded by the country’s efforts at publicizing its progress, which received
the seal of approval when it joined the European Communities (now called the European
Union) in 1986. The change was epitomized with the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, an enact-
ment of the country’s modernity designed for both global and local consumption – as many
Spaniards themselves were still to be persuaded by the new narrative. On the other hand,
the eruption of the Eastern bloc as a new site of internal alterity further advanced Spain’s
perception as a “normal” European nation, whose government was eager to give lessons in
how to transition from (un-European) authoritarianism to neoliberal democracy. However,
the country’s peripheral condition was not erased for good, as we shall see.
It was not until the late 1890s that the most salient episodes of the idealization of Europe
in Spanish culture began to take shape, becoming a favored topic of “intellectuals” just
as they were being initially labelled as such. It was then that the academic and republi-
can activist Joaquín Costa (1846–1911) first proposed Europeanization as the solution
to Spain’s predicaments, primary among which was their defeat in the Spanish–Ameri-
can War in 1898. The event was taken as a wake-up call for the nation which led to
major self-examination – a look inside which meant, above all, comparing itself to its
neighbors to the North. Costa set “Europe” as the goal to be achieved through a series
of reforms that included everything from the construction of new dams to the diversifica-
tion of crops. At the same time, he warned against what he saw as the impending “Africani-
zation” of the country – its conclusive underdevelopment and alienation from modernity.
His 1898 Reconstitución y europeización de España (Reconstitution and Europeanization
of Spain) was a program for national regeneration which exerted a powerful influence on
the politics of the following century.
Shortly after Costa made his commanding call for the Europeanization of Spain, a com-
parable line of thought produced a counter-discourse which has been largely underplayed.
For some, it was not so obvious that a nebulous notion of “Europe” could be the solu-
tion to the country’s dismal situation. Towering among these was Miguel de Unamuno
(1864–1936), who may be considered the founder of Spain’s own modern tradition of
Euroskepticism. He had been an early supporter of Costa’s campaign for a regeneration of
the nation in a European mode. However, soon he moved away from the emphasis on struc-
tural changes toward a more spiritual approach. He lay his hope in the common people,
who could unleash their potential if stirred by the stimulus of European models. Yet Una-
muno’s enthusiasm had wound down in 1906, when in a letter to a rising intellectual star he
declared feeling “furiosamente anti-europeo” (“furiously anti-European”; Epistolario 42).
The addressee of his comment was none other than José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955),
who had studied philosophy in Germany and traveled around Western Europe in constant
awe of its visible progress. While Ortega saw the solution to Spain’s ills in European science
and technology, Unamuno rejected what he considered a crass instrumentalization of rea-
son. The latter feared the deeper consequences Europeanization might bring about, those
which would affect common people’s lives and thus alter the “essence” of the nation. For
Unamuno, Spaniards could not just passively accept the European influx. A more equal
relationship was needed, he argued – one involving a mutual absorption of values, with
what he presented as a balancing of European reason and the African affective wisdom
which only Spain could provide.
Unamuno’s appeal to amend the principles which had come to define the European
project of modernity included a critique of the way the very notion of Europe was con-
structed. In his noted essay Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (Tragic Sense of Life; 1912),

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he called attention to the fabrication involved in the sublimation of a geographical term

into a loaded political ideal. “¡Europa! Esta noción primitiva e inmediatamente geográfica
nos la han convertido por arte mágica en una categoría casi metafísica. ¿Quién sabe hoy
ya, en España por lo menos, lo que es Europa?” (“Europe! They have magically turned
this primitive and immediately geographic notion into an almost meta-physical category.
Who knows what Europe is anymore, at least in Spain?”; 511). That rhetorical move from
geographical description to ideological agenda enacted from the self-proclaimed intellec-
tual powerhouses of the continent also denied the contributions generated from what they
regarded as an intellectually irrelevant periphery.
The indetermination of what was meant by “Europe” had ambivalent consequences, as
the term’s fluidity could be mobilized for a variety of causes. Even though its liberal creden-
tials had been tainted by fascist appropriation – as exemplified by the always outlandish
yet occasionally intriguing work of Ernesto Giménez Caballero (1899–1988) – the prestige
of a renewed notion of Europe continued to grow during the twentieth century as it came
to represent the hope of a peaceful and prosperous future for the weary people of the con-
tinent. Little attention was paid to its critics, many of whom worked from the margins.
María Zambrano (1904–1991), a pupil of Ortega who nonetheless was closer to Unamuno
in her thinking, concurred with the latter’s assessment of the blind mythification of Europe
with her inquiries into the roots of the violence which had shaken the continent. In the
sorrow that the devastating wars generated she perceived one of the elements which made
palpable, on the one hand, the folly of unbridled rationalism, and on the other, the inner
spiritual unity of Europe as well as her (“our”) attachment to it. She argued thus in one of
her earliest works, the essay La agonía de Europa (Europe’s Agony), first published as a
book, tellingly, in 1945 in Buenos Aires. The worst manifestations of the violence ingrained
in the continent had motivated her double exile: from Spain, from Europe.
For those who had been expelled from Spain, and for many who lived under Franco’s
dictatorship, overcoming the provincialism and dogmatism of the regime and fully inte-
grating the country into the Western European mainstream became the greatest of aspira-
tions. From the 1950s onward, the evolving European Economic Communities (EEC, most
commonly referred to as EC) gave programmatic form to Spanish citizens’ hopes; it was
seen, as Antonio Moreno Juste calls it, as a “utopía factible” (“feasible utopia”; 13) – a
term which reminds us of the elusive nature and location of that promise of improvement.
Even the dictatorship perceived it as an opportunity, once the autarky policies attempted
in the 1940s proved to be ruinous. As new, better prepared and less politicized government
officials prioritized economic development over isolationism, Western Europe came to be
perceived as the locus with which Spain needed to be closely associated to maximize its pro-
ductive potential. The Franco regime first applied for EC membership in 1962. But the kind
of modernity that the organization tried to embody was not based merely on an economic
structure, and it excluded non-democratic regimes, Spain among them.
The death of the dictator in 1975 removed the main obstacle that had prevented Spain’s
acceptance into the EC. Since in official rhetoric “Europe” was repeatedly reduced to the
EC, being European had finally acquired a precise meaning: Belonging to that organization.
The democratic establishment presented the Europeanization goal as the nation’s historical
destiny, rather than as the result of political choice and negotiations. Once parliamentary
rule was formally established and political caveats were mostly overcome, economic con-
siderations gained relevance in the negotiations. In the early 1980s, Spain was significantly
poorer than the standing members (with the exception of Greece), yet it nearly matched the

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largest ones in area and population. Although the social model of the nations that formed
the European Community was still regarded as a “third way,” between US capitalism and
Soviet communism, the EC had already started its march toward economic neoliberalism,
and newcomers had to adapt to that paradigm. The EC was just emerging from a dif-
ficult decade marked by a weak identity within the Cold War context, the global oil crisis
and a sluggish economy, factors that slowed the integration project. In 1983, the lyrics of
“Europa,” one of the most celebrated songs of post-punk band Derribos Arias (1981–1987),
stated that Europe was “la decadencia letal” (“lethal decadence”). The uneasy musical set-
ting, in addition to the ostensibly disharmonious singing of the band’s leader Poch, suits
the challenge that the lyrics posed to the conventional wisdom of the time, which presented
“joining Europe” as the successful culmination of an indisputable historical process. Still,
voices from the margins attempted to bring dissonance into a mainstream discourse which
was becoming increasingly acritical.
When Spain was finally accepted as a member in 1985, a decade after the death of the
dictator, many felt that European-ness had become a reality. Europeanization was per-
ceived as the greatest collective achievement imaginable, even though the implications of
the process were rarely stated with any clarity. Once the nation was accepted as a full-right
member of that exclusive organization, no one – not even Spaniards themselves – would be
able to deny their privileged status. However, the weight of the past could not be quickly
dismissed – of course, belonging to “Europe” would not magically transform the coun-
try. Modernization required revising the heritage of a traditionalism whose worst aspects
included toxic gender relations and ingrained forms of clientelism in all spheres. During the
subsequent years, a series of tangible measures continued to reinforce that sense of belong-
ing, such as the abolition of border checks with other European countries and the adoption
of the euro as common currency. The changes were gradual but noticeable, and Europe,
either as a hazy standard or as a forceful entity capable of guiding or imposing reform, had
a vast influence in the transformation of Spanish society.
One of the fundamental pillars of the consensual democracy that emerged in Spain after
the end of the dictatorship was the discourse that identified EU membership with that new-
found political and societal normality. This association derived from the sanctified position
that “Europe” occupied in the hegemonic national narrative, appearing along with other
prevailing notions upheld by the new regime, such as the cohesion reflected in the admin-
istrative configuration of the territory (composed of “autonomous communities”) and the
type of government (parliamentary monarchy). In the push to reach the coveted status of
“normal European nation” expeditiously, social agents hardly debated Spain’s necessary
concessions. Whereas Spain’s participation in NATO, another essential foreign policy mat-
ter, was hotly debated in the first half of the 1980s (the question was settled with a referen-
dum in 1986), “Europe” remained a nonissue – even though membership in the European
Community was much more consequential for Spaniards’ daily lives. The consensus was
that there was no choice: Joining the EC was a necessary step for the nation to consolidate
its modernization. Adherence to the continental partnership represented a key measure in
preventing Spain’s sliding back toward authoritarianism and in producing economic effects
which liberal democrats considered undesirable. Few raised their voice to criticize an ideal-
ized Europe, to contest European Union policies or to question the developments which
had apparently transformed a backward nation into an example worthy of imitation in
just a few years of so-called institutional “transition” from dictatorship into a democratic,
parliamentary monarchy. A long-standing aspiration had been fulfilled.

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Europeanization was promoted as a new form of identification which, on the surface,

effaced the most visible undesirable traces of Francoism while preserving values such as
political conformism and a specific view of economic relations (neoliberal free-market capi-
talism). It became a key factor in the configuration of a new period of political consensus
and cultural acquiescence. Since Europe had served as a horizon in the agreements which
founded democratic Spain, its advocates acted as if debating Europeanization would jeop-
ardize the newly designed coexistence. Two assumptions became commonplace: First, that
by the 1980s Spain had finally overcome its secular underdevelopment and occupied its
rightful place in Europe, and second, that the EC embodied the apex of civilization – and,
specifically, in the form that many Spanish progressives had aspired to for about a century
when referencing to their European ideal.
The issue of European integration was not raised for thorough debate, but rather pre-
sented as a phenomenon to be accepted – indeed, to be celebrated – as part of the nation’s
post-authoritarian reconfiguration. Civil society did little to balance that lack of debate, and
the cultural arena played along with that acritical stance. The mainstream cultural sphere,
increasingly associated with (and dependent on) the public and private institutions that
largely defined the new democracy’s terms, rarely questioned the widespread enthusiasm
about integration. Nevertheless, a few artists and intellectuals advanced critiques which
would become common in the twenty-first century, when a majority of citizens began see-
ing the flaws of the Europeanist project. Starting in the 1980s, their works disrupted the
ideal of Europe or of a Europeanized Spain. For the most part, they were dismissed at the
time as alternatives that were futilely swimming against the tide of history.
Not everyone was happy to discard images of Spain as unique within its context, to
repudiate the memory of empire or to give up on the idea of the virile, militaristic and
ultra-Catholic nation propagated by Francoism. These transmutations generated anxiety
among members of the conservative intelligentsia, who worried that Europeanization might
mean a loss of identity, especially at a time when clashing nationalisms within the country
and the incipient trends of globalization and multiculturalism provoked growing insecu-
rity regarding Spanishness. Ortega y Gasset’s disciple Julián Marías, for example, worried
that the price to be paid for Europeanization was mainly cultural, with the sacrifice of
autochthonous forms of life. This cost could not be compensated by acquiring a European
identity, which he saw as a shallow discourse – regardless of how political leaders may
have presented it – because there was very little reciprocal knowledge between the nation
members. This problem was not exclusive to Spain; in Marías’s opinion, this same pro-
cess of homogenization was driving most European countries to become humdrum entities
(381–2).
Europeanization was not exclusively dealt with by philosophers like Marías. Popular
and mass culture also examined the issue. These interventions were scarce (in spite of its
importance, the topic was unattractive), but on some occasions critics questioned the offi-
cial narrative. The mockumentary series Ya semos europeos [sic] (Europeans at Last), cre-
ated in 1989 by the Catalan theater group Els Joglars for public television (the only one
that existed at the time) played on the clash between Spanish society and a certain model
of “Europe” that corresponded to the mainstream view of the EC at the time, revealing the
less-than-ideal reality of that mystified Europe. The seven episodes of Els Joglars’ satirical
portrait of the Iberian nation and its northern neighbors showcased the futility of declaring
that the country could suddenly “become European” without engaging in a radical exercise
of debate and transformation. Defining the parameters of European-ness could not be as

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simple as the political elites presented it. The EC was portrayed as a heterogeneous group
of countries that, far from being the balanced, cosmopolitan and intellectually advanced
nations presented in the official discourse, often embrace racist, chauvinistic and irrational
attitudes and policies.
It was becoming clear that the new, expansive and overtly cosmopolitan Europe was
not without its own self-absorption and provincialism. Attempts to tame the enthrallment
with Europe that had been one of the pillars of democratic Spain’s imaginary came from
artists and intellectuals who were, nevertheless, generally supportive of considering Euro-
peanization as positive for their society. Their goal was not to delegitimize the process of
continental integration but to contribute to its sound democratic progress by advocating for
a historically aware reflection which pushed unification beyond mere economic goals. They
contributed to the demystification of the process by questioning the larger implications of
the darkest episodes of European history, insisting on the specificity of those developments:
the events of the past and the circumstances leading to them were largely determined by
the logic of European modernity. They also stressed the role that culture, as an instru-
ment both of domination and of critique, had played in the atrocities generated by Europe.
Some claimed that Spain’s economic growth and the renewed self-image of Spaniards had
not been accompanied by a parallel, deep development of civic and cultural attitudes in
the country. Writer Juan Goytisolo (1931–2017), for instance, repeatedly denounced the
racism and arrogance of what he saw as “una sociedad de nuevos ricos, nuevos libres, y
nuevos europeos” (“a society of nouveaux riches, new free, and new Europeans”; 1193,
his emphasis), putting a critical accent on both the novelty and the insecurity Spaniards
felt upon their nation’s entry into the EC. Some of the paintings which Patricia Gadea
(1960–2006) included in her series Circo (Circus) welcomed ironically the 1992 Treaty on
European Union signed in Maastricht, linking the captivating European ideal to undercur-
rents of racism, sexism and capitalism most of her fellow citizens preferred to ignore. Span-
ish manifestations of this type of critically constructive Euroskepticism are both typical of
“peripheral” Europe and rich in particularities.
For the most part, the European Union (as it was to be called following the 1992 treaty
mentioned previously) was presented as an innovative experiment that was reinventing
the region and allegedly making it exemplary again. Yet that historical construct com-
mingled oblivion and selective memory, as is the case with any process of nation building
or redesign. The artists and intellectuals who were ready to dismantle that discourse were
convinced that Spaniards still had to confront the implications of the most troubling events
of their history, from the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 to the most recent civil war and its
aftermath. Likewise, they posited that violence and exclusion were defining elements of the
Europe that Spain was “joining,” just as much as the humanitarian and democratic values
the Union claimed to stand for. They maintained that this negative heritage should not be
repressed or cleansed with mere gestures. Managing this problematic legacy required fully
acknowledging its roots as well as facing its latest manifestations, exemplified in issues such
as the treatment of immigrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East. The assertion
of Spain’s European-ness also had to include a reflection on the less virtuous chapters of the
national and continental histories, which overlapped in many important ways.
Beginning in the 1990s, the growing interest in European history’s bleakest hours led
to a wave of works which underscored the Spanish connections to those events. That this
surge in attention occurred then, and not earlier, may have had to do with the intersection
of two major factors. First was Spain’s admission into the EC, which increased the sense

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of belonging to Europe and thus the attention to defining elements of what it means to be
European. This led to the second factor: The critical revision of the continental memory,
prompted by the commemorations of the fiftieth anniversaries of the beginning and end of
World War II, often presented as the foundational event of contemporary Europe. Yet this
conception of Europe’s origins might bolster the old view of Spain as a nation operating on
the continent’s fringes. As is well known, Spain’s involvement in the conflict was compara-
tively marginal. That some Spanish authors examined the war and its larger implications
from a perspective that emphasized their country’s ties to it, is symptomatic of the new per-
ception of Spain’s symbolic position within Europe that was emerging in the last two dec-
ades of the twentieth century. The attention that World War II and the Holocaust started
to receive in Spain during the early 1990s was symptomatic of an aspiration to inscribe the
nation in the mainstream of European affairs, even those of a most traumatic nature and,
perhaps more significantly, in the ensuing historical and ethical debates about them. At the
same time, it became clear that there was something rotten in Europe and its modernity that
Spaniards, in their idealization of those two entities, had failed to address. Anti-Semitism
and totalitarianism stood out among the connecting points of Spanish and European his-
tory which authors such as Jorge Semprún, Juana Salabert, Antonio Muñoz Molina or Juan
Mayorga pointed out in works that, around the turn of the century, challenged the ideal of
European-ness. Interestingly, colonialism did not receive the same kind of attention. For-
tunately, some institutions such as museums and universities began to address the lasting
racial and economic effects of Spanish and European imperialism, albeit timidly. However,
surprisingly enough, these initiatives often have found inspiration in developments originat-
ing in the USA or other parts of the world rather than in local histories.
The resilience of the idealizing narrative about Europe was seriously threatened only
with the advent of the so-called Great Recession. The backlash produced by the post-2007
crisis showed that even if Spain’s role and symbolic weight within Europe might oscillate,
there could be no doubt that Europe is where it belonged – for better or worse. The crisis
went beyond the financial realm, transforming the region’s social, political and cultural
landscape. In Spain, as in other countries, its effects had a powerful impact on citizens’
perceptions of the European ideal and the institutions that had come to embody it, which
suffered from the lowest popular support levels in their history: The standard Eurobarom-
eter poll of Spring 2013 indicated that 75 percent of Spaniards tended to “distrust” the EU.
Changing images of self and other had the greatest impact on the European countries
identified as “peripheral,” an adjective normally – and tellingly – used for those in the con-
tinent’s southern areas. Journalists around the globe who reported on the socioeconomic
difficulties of southern Europe embraced a sneering denomination for those nations: PIGS,
short for Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. Notwithstanding the many differences among
the four countries, a number of influential financial media deemed the term a valid one to
describe them as nations that had “failed” to complete an ever-elusive process of moderni-
zation (a.k.a. Europeanization), a process whose ideal model was embodied primarily by
Germany. The economic vulnerabilities of these countries became especially apparent in
the wake of the Great Recession, when their banks’ undercapitalization, their record-high
levels of unemployment and the prohibitive amounts of interest they had to pay for their
sovereign debt seriously destabilized the euro in the area and, as a result, endangered the
unification project. The North–South cleavage was one of the key manifestations of a Euro-
skepticism that was rising with unprecedented strength and scope. As regional divisions
appeared, old stereotypes were reinforced and new ones emerged.

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Rightly or wrongly, millions of citizens throughout the continent blamed the EU for
some of their principal concerns, from the dwindling of the welfare state to the inadequate
management of migration or public health crises. The various post-2007 crises tested the
resilience of European integration like never before, prompting responses that went in two
main directions. Some of the critics aimed to reform and improve the union, invoking the
need for “more Europe”; others sought its disappearance, or at least to shrink the project
back to little more than a free-trade zone – thus, they wished for “less Europe.” The Brexit
vote of June 2016 was a clear sign of this position’s popular strength. Equally telling, and
perhaps even more complex, was the movement for an independent Catalonia within a
borderless Europe, whose stance toward the European institutions grew ambivalent par-
ticularly after they expressed their opposition to secessionism. Both phenomena raised
fascinating and often paradoxical conundrums regarding the direction of the unification
project.
Popular discontent with the EU had an additional, more positive outcome: It gave the
institution a more concrete presence in the daily lives of its citizens. It is undeniable that,
although the Union had been a decisive actor on the continental stage for years, its influence
was seldom recognized. In the case of Spain, but also in that of other member nations, the
EU had never been the subject of much debate prior to the post-2007 crises, even during
the period when accession was being negotiated. It took the EU’s losing its mystique for it
to gain the relevance it should have had in the public eye, given its undeniable impact on
civic life.
Among the problems which gained visibility was that the EU had become an increasingly
abstruse project. The Union lacks a narrative that a majority of its citizens can grasp and
relate to; it has been repeatedly said that it needs, in one form or another, “una teoría de
Europa que no sea ni una mera descripción de la mecánica institucional ni una vaga nebu-
losa cosmopolita” (“a theory of Europe that is neither a mere description of institutional
mechanics nor a vague cosmopolitan nebula”), as Daniel Innerarity has pointed out (13).
For this narrative to take shape and become a debatable reality there is critical potential in
the artistic corpus that engages the issue of European integration in ways that also engage
emotions. Questioning and reassessing the EU is vital for the future of the transnational
organization as it struggles to connect with its people. Many works of art of the last few
decades can be seen as indexes that point to the root of popular discontent and offer unex-
plored answers to the challenges it faces, proposing a constructive form of Euroskepticism
(Martín-Estudillo 193–5). The Union’s critical and aesthetic acquis should prove to be a
useful tool for the improvement of the European project and for fostering the citizenry’s
awareness of it through a new legitimizing narrative. This narrative should include a rec-
ognition of the project’s darkest aspects, since, as Marina Garcés notes, “lo europeo es una
construcción histórica que resulta violenta también hacia los propios habitantes, pueblos,
lenguas y realidades sociales y humanas” (“is a historical construct that is violent also
toward its own inhabitants, peoples, languages and social and human realities”; 50). The
successes of the EU cannot contribute to erase the history of conflict which is also part of a
European ideal under examination.
While the Great Recession reactivated the commonplace which claims that the moves
toward European unification are best propelled by the most severe crises, the coronavi-
rus pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine renewed Europeans’ awareness of the
need to take charge of their own future, starting by carefully assessing their connections –
internal and external, of solidarity and of rivalry. The challenging context that the pandemic

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created, in combination with the changing relationship with the United States, the emer-
gence of China as a new superpower and Russia’s imperialistic urges, moved political lead-
ers to assert European sovereignty. Europe’s attempts to place itself adequately between
the urgency of global issues and the confinement of isolationism resonated in Spain, which
finally saw its future deliberately associated to the hopes and fears of fellow European
nations. The trials of the 2007–2020 period were a reality check which tested the strength
of mutual commitment between the country and the EU. During those challenging times,
the organization lost its aura in the eyes of the Spanish people – it was its turn to become
normalized. The centuries-old issue of European belonging had been settled for Spaniards,
at least for the moment. But the same is not so clear for others who still aspire to join
an idealized Europe. Spain, whose ethnic and cultural makeup have changed visibly since
“Europe” was first envisioned as an attainable utopia, is poised in the twenty-first century
to contribute as a confident partner to a discussion about multiculturalism and inclusion.
These debates, which are becoming increasingly relevant for common citizens, cannot be
the responsibility of traditional political actors alone, and much less are to be left to the
manipulations of those who see Europe not as a horizon of hope but as a crumbling fortress.

Works Cited
Cabo Aseguinolaza, Fernando. El lugar de la literatura española. Crítica, 2012.
Cadalso, José. Cartas marruecas. Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. https://www.cervantesvir-
tual.com/obra-visor/cartas-marruecas--0/html/. Accessed 15 Jul. 2020.
Costa, Joaquín. Reconstitución y europeización de España. Programa para un partido nacional. Liga
Nacional de Productores, 1900.
Dainotto, Roberto. Europe (In Theory). Duke UP, 2007.
Els Joglars. Ya semos europeos. Director Albert Boadella. TVE, 1989.
Garcés, Marina. Filosofía inacabada. Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015.
Goytisolo, Juan. “Nuevos ricos, nuevos libres, nuevos europeos.” Obras completas, vol. 6. Ensayos
literarios (1967–1999). Galaxia Gutenberg, 2007.
Innerarity, Daniel. La democracia en Europa. Una filosofía política de la Unión Europea. Galaxia
Gutenberg, 2017.
Larra, Mariano José de. Artículos. Obras completas, vol. I., edited by Joan Estruch. Cátedra, 2009.
Marías, Julián. España inteligible. Razón histórica de las Españas. Alianza Universidad, 1993.
Martín-Estudillo, Luis. Despertarse de Europa. Arte, literatura, euroescepticismo. Cátedra, 2020.
Moreno Juste, Antonio. “Presentación: Cambio y continuidad en los relatos sobre las relaciones
España-Europa.” Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea, no. 117, 2020, pp. 13–19.
Unamuno, Miguel de. Epistolario completo Ortega-Unamuno. El Arquero, 1987.
Unamuno, Miguel de. Del sentimiento trágico de la vida. Obras completas, Vol. 10, edited by Ricardo
Senabre. Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 2007, pp. 273–533.
Zambrano, María. La agonía de Europa, edited by Jesús Moreno Sanz. Trotta, 2000.

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 51
BETWEEN RAQUEL MELLER
AND ROSALÍA
Popular Spanish Music, (Trans)National and
Local Narratives

Julio Arce

Translated by Linda Grabner

Academic research on popular music in Spain is a recent but thriving field, as shown by the
incessant increase of academic groups and projects, published works, and educational insti-
tutions dedicated to its study (Piquer 59–63). However, there continue to be certain areas
that remain in the shadows and that obstruct the development of a balanced account of the
panorama of 20th-century popular music. This chapter seeks to shed light on some mar-
ginal territories that have been the object of biased studies or that have not, until recently,
enjoyed the esteem of the academic world.
The international consolidation of popular music studies, starting in the 1980s, involved
a paradigm change in the selection and treatment of music to be studied; nevertheless, it priv-
ileged certain objects of analysis and methodological perspectives, such as Anglo-American
styles of music from the second half of the 20th century, and anthropological and socio-
logical approaches. The purpose of this chapter is to illuminate the vast territory of Span-
ish popular music from the 20th and early 21st centuries, with particular attention to the
creation of national and local narratives, Spain’s relationship with its former American
colonies, and the prominence of women in music.
For this purpose, I have selected as a temporal frame of reference the artistic tra-
jectories of two singers who have been active during a long, complex period of Span-
ish culture. More than one hundred years separate Raquel Meller (Tarazona, Zaragoza,
1888–Barcelona, ​​1962) and Rosalía (San Esteban de Sasroviras, Barcelona, ​​1993), dur-
ing which women have had, in one way or another, a pronounced influence on the Span-
ish popular music scene. Likewise, this period has been crucial for Spain’s modernization,
despite political and social tensions, economic crises, and conflicts between a central
power – supported by the concept of a national identity – and substate nationalisms and
regionalisms.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-58 
 Between Raquel Meller and Rosalía

Raquel Beneath the Bridges of the Seine

In 1933, three Sevillian authors who had never been to Paris composed for Raquel Meller
a Java waltz entitled “Bajo los puentes del Sena” (“Beneath the Bridges of the Seine”). The
artist was at the peak of her career, but the cuplé, a genre that had made her internation-
ally famous, was beginning to lose popularity at that time. Rafael de León (1908–1982)
and Salvador Valverde (1895–1975) wrote lyrics with references to places in the French
capital (“Noche de verano en la Place Pigalle/Luces en el cielo claro de París, música en
el aire, aspas del Moulin” (“A summer night in the Place Pigalle/Lights in the clear sky of
Paris, music in the air, blades of the Moulin”) that created a first-person recollection of
an encounter between a “virginal” teenage girl and her occasional bohemian lover. In the
second stanza, the young lady, who has succeeded and left behind the bohemian life (“Ya
París es mío y ahora luzco yo/joyas y vestidos de la Rue de la Paix” (“At last Paris is mine
and now I shine/in jewels and gowns from the Rue de la Paix”), tells of once again meeting
her former casual lover, who still lives, penniless, “donde locos y mendigos van” (“where
madmen and beggars go”).
This song is significant because it shows the ties between the cuplé and popular French
music. This Spanish genre popular in variety shows (variedades) has been indebted to its
French namesake since the end of the 19th century. In fact, the word cuplé derives from the
French couplet, which means copla, specifically each one of the verses that make up a song.
In Spain, cuplé denominates a short song with a simple musical structure and satirical, pica-
resque lyrics loaded with double entendres, designed to entertain the spectator.
Finally, these songs have women as their protagonists, both in the content of the lyr-
ics and in the performances, as the actual performers. Although the cuplé is made visible
through women, all the other agents who bring it to life are mostly men (composers, lyri-
cists, businessmen, and above all, the consumer public). Cuplés are, therefore, songs cre-
ated by men and sung by women in spaces managed and frequented by men. Not a single
woman figures in the index of authors of cuplés, just as no men figure among their singers,
with the exception of transvestites, who had a special importance during the 1920s (Arce,
“Imitadores” 95). The cuplé spectacularized the female body, a consequence of a mass
culture that assumed the “otherness” of a modernism at times associated with the femi-
nine (Anastasio). This circumstance led to a paradoxical situation, since the cuplé allowed
women massive access to popular theatre and gave them visibility, but it also objectified
them. In Anastasio’s opinion, the cuplé made it possible for women to articulate meanings
and make the stage, deliberately or not, a space for the creation or contestation of estab-
lished values. The lyrics of “Bajo los puentes del Sena” contain a story about a woman’s
social advancement in the world of performance, which can be extrapolated to the one that
was constructed about the cupletistas (the cuplé singers) themselves, and later, about the
singer-actresses who starred in the films pejoratively known as “españoladas,” or films with
exaggerated stereotypes of “Spanishness” (Woods 40).

Could the Cuplé Amount to Anything?

During the early decades of the 20th century, two musical typologies erupted onto the
panorama of Spanish popular music: The cuplé and dance music. The crisis of the “little

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genre” – género chico, a modality of musical theatre, like the zarzuela, that combines musi-
cal numbers with spoken parts in brief shows; these were established in the final quarter
of the 19th century within the theatre system known as teatro por horas (“one-hour thea-
tre”) – was caused, in part, by competition from new kinds of shows like variety shows
(teatro de variedades) and the cinema. Variety shows replaced a play, or plays, with a
succession of numbers of various types: Dancers or performing dance partners, magicians,
circus numbers, and especially, cuplé singers.
Manuel Machado, brother to Antonio and son of the folklorist Antonio Machado Álva-
rez – known by the pseudonym Demófilo – wrote a poem, apparently inspired by Raquel
Meller, in which he questions the nature of the cuplé and reveals its ambiguity and mul-
tiplicity of meanings (Aragón Guerrero 8–9). He describes it as “Apachesco, sicalíptico,/
ingenuo, picante,/(monostrófico o políptico),/declamatorio o danzante” (“Apache-esque,
suggestive,/ingenuous, risqué,/(a single verse or many),/rhetorical or dancing”; Aragón
Guerrero 8–9). It is difficult to define the cuplé as a musical genre; although some constants
can be discerned in its structure and tonal components, like the use of a strophic song,
accompaniment by a small instrumental group, and the prominence of the female voice, the
cuplé deploys staging resources that surpass the strictly musical, such as gestures, dances,
recitations, spoken exchanges with the public, and so on.
Thus, the cuplé should be understood as a system of entertainment and spectacle that
is connected to two Spanish cultural currents: Lyric theatre and popular songs. From the
theatrical tonadilla (“tonadilla escénica”) of the 18th century to the “little genre” of the
last third of the 19th century, Spanish lyric theatre was linked to the popular or to
the castizo – an adjective derived from casta, which describes something genuine, pure, and
typical of a certain place – in the use of subjects, melodies, and musical patterns tied to
folklore. Some theaters adapted to the new tastes of the public, leading to the creation of
new spaces called cabarets, music-halls, variety halls, dancings (dance halls), and so on. The
cuplé singers, despite not having a storyline, dramatized their songs by utilizing small deco-
rations and rich costuming, and making use of gestures, mimicry, pantomime, and dancing.
The cuplé occupied the popular Spanish scene from the end of the 19th century through
the 1930s. It is true that there were different phases and types of cuplés, which ranged from
the “pornographic” (or suggestive, erotic) to the “apto para todos los públicos” (“appro-
priate for all audiences”), and included the “comical,” the“castizo” (“traditional”) and the
“regional” varieties. Musically and literarily, there are simple, banal cuplés, and others that
are more elaborate and sophisticated; however, all of them share a staged, theatrical nature
(Salaün 167).
After the Civil War, the cuplé declined because the society that had seen its birth had
changed, forced by new political circumstances; some characteristic elements were elimi-
nated (such as showing off the female form, sexual double entendres, political criticism,
etc.) and other paths were reinforced, such as the regional cuplé, which would lead to the
consolidation of the copla or, as it was called then, the “Andalucian song” or “Spanish
song” (Arce, “Del apogeo” 291).

The Regional Cuplés That We the Vedettes (Cabaret Stars) Sing

In 1929 the writer Luis de Tapia (1871–1937) and the musician Manuel Font de Anta
(1889–1926) created for Encarnación López Júlvez “La Argentinita” (the little Argentine
lady; 1898–1945) a song titled “El cuplé regional” (“The Regional Cuplé”). On the record

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that the singer recorded years later you can hear, after a brief orchestral fanfare, an intro-
ductory recited text that claims: “Sensational words with their notes and falsettos of the
regional cuplés that we the leading ladies sing.” La Argentinita goes on to sing a series of
verses of cuplés related to different regions of Spain. She parodies a cuplé from Galicia and
others from Valencia, from Andalusia, and finally, one from Madrid. The authors turned
their hand to themes and stereotypes of the various regions without hiding the comic inten-
tion of the song. This parody shows how by the end of the 1920s the regional cuplé had
become a highly cultivated modality; the singers sang in the languages or regional dialects
of the Spanish regions, in support of the nationalist and regionalist fervor that had perme-
ated not only politics but also popular culture.
The first third of the 20th century in Spain, in particular the decades of the 1920s and
30s, was a politically convulsive period (marked by social instability, despotism, Primo de
Rivera’s dictatorship, an unstable Republic, and a coup d’état that led to the Civil War). It
was also, however, a period of great creativity and unprecedented cultural modernization
(Alonso, “Mujeres” 136). It is undeniable that the beginnings of the cuplé are related to
the rise of mass culture, which implies the mediatization and industrialization of music and
songs. At the same time, the genre used nationalist, regionalist, and localist discourses; the
exploitation of resources that were identified with the idea of nation in the Herderian sense,
such as folklore, furnished some cuplés with an added value of authenticity and contributed
to the alliance of the music industry with the rising consumer-nation.
The centrality of popular traditions in founding the creation of a national music harkens
back to the previous century. The music of the nation was considered to be a substance or
essence of a differentiated compositional tradition; hence the drive, in the second half of the
19th century, for the systematic collection and dissemination of music based on the oral
tradition. In this process of recognition and self-affirmation, the idea of a sound associated
with “Spanishness” began to take shape. Musicologists such as Carreras (“La invención”
200) and Alonso (Creación musical 90) have lavishly described the process of construction
of the idea of Spanishness in music, analyzing the historiographic tradition, the discovery
of folklore, and the reflected image of Spanishness abroad. The authors of popular music
in the early decades of the 20th century had at their disposal a catalog of typical musical
themes and conventions, some created by the popular musical theatre of the second half of
the 19th century, others derived from folklore or extracted from academic musical works.
Composers like those cited earlier used this imaginary catalog to create some songs that
were recognized as Spanish (Alonso, “Símbolos y estereotipos” 205–232). Based on popu-
lar rhythms or tunes, like the seguidilla, the pasodoble, the jota, the muñeira and the zam-
bra, to cite just some of the patterns considered to be native to Spain (and hence, without
an English translation), melodies adorned with triplets were created, Phrygian (also called
Andalusian) scales and cadences were frequently used, rhythms in three/four and three/two
time were preferred, and so on. The musical themes of Spanishness became so stereotyped
that even two Belgian composers, Leo Caerts and Leo Rozenstraten, composed a pasodoble
(a “double-step” or military march) titled “Eviva España” (“And Let Spain Live”) – popu-
larized by Samantha in 1972 (the singer Samantha Gilbert Garrido), and later by Manolo
Escobar in Spanish – that has become an emblematic song and was even used to celebrate
the victory of Spain’s selection for the 2010 soccer World Cup (the Mundial de fútbol, in
Spain).
One of the peculiarities of Spain’s construction of a national identity has been the tension
with peripheral nationalisms and with some cultural regionalisms that gave rise, in the last

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quarter of the 20th century, to various political regionalisms. These nationalisms in Spain
arose for extraordinarily complex reasons, from long historical processes of consolidation
of the regions’ own particular identities (several essays in this volume cover these subjects in
depth). These nationalisms were founded on the existence of linguistic, historical, cultural,
and ethnographic elements and the influence from particular institutions (Fusi Aizpurúa
181–194). The differences between regionalist and nationalist movements reside in the
degree of collective consciousness about the differential identity, political belligerence, and
economic strength of each region (Alonso, Creación musical 108).
However, an obvious element in the construction of a national music was the significance
of “Andalusian” as an exotic territory that represented Spain as a whole. The exoticiza-
tion of the country was the result of a European – in particular, French – interest in turning
certain peripheral zones, such as Spain and Russia, into border zones between themselves
and non-European cultures (Alonso, Creación musical 84). Beginning in the 19th century,
travelers during the Romantic period saw Andalusia and its inhabitants as the quintes-
sentially imagined Romantic Spain, and although foreigners “invented” Andalusia, this
image was supported by the centralized powers of the state itself. As Josep Martí argues,
the part was taken for the whole and Andalusia became the representative culture of all of
Spain, formed by limited cultural elements selected by both Spaniards and Europeans, and
thus contributing to the construction of a false image of cultural homogenization within a
diverse territory (Martí 153–173).

I Am Spain’s Carmen, Not Mérimée’s

In 1925 Raquel Meller starred in the film Carmen by Jacques Feyder, the Belgian director
who established himself in France. Although it is a silent movie, the filmmaker chose the
Spanish actress-and-singer because she represented with a degree of verisimilitude both the
physical and temperamental characteristics of the gypsy woman described by Mérimée.
Raquel Meller sang and danced at different times throughout the film, although the accom-
panying music ordered by the producer to be performed live – recalling that this was a silent
era film – was composed by the Spanish musician Ernesto Halffter. It was not unusual for
cuplé singers to perform in movies, despite the fact that their voices would not actually be
heard. Many singers were placed before a camera because the directors sought the kind of
expressiveness in acting that opera, zarzuela or cuplé singers brought to the stage (Baliñas).
Feyder’s intention was to obtain greater realism and capture the essence of the landscapes
and temperaments distorted by those products marked as “españoladas”; this was the rea-
son why the film was inspired by Mérimée’s novel and filmed in Spain in natural settings,
and why Meller, the actress selected as the protagonist, was one who the French considered
best represented the national character of Spain.
The myth of Carmen serves to introduce an idea that has been proposed by various
authors to explain the construction of Spanish identity. Spanishness has been constructed
since the 19th century by combining elements from popular and academic culture, but also
by adopting the image that foreigners had of Spanish identity (Alonso, Creación musical
57–82). For his part, Juan José Carreras asserts that throughout the 19th century, Spanish
music was “invented.” According to this critic, the concept of national music has more to
do with the active self-awareness of the community in question, rather than being inher-
ent to the music itself; a music becomes national when it is accepted and perceived as such
by the community, sanctioned by an elite, disseminated by the educational system, and

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integrated into the national culture. In the case of Spain, it was not only domestic opinion
that was decisive in determining what counted as national music, but also the perspective
from abroad – as seen with Feyder’s film. Both the creation and the reception of works by
Spaniards and about Spain in the main centers of European musical creation, like Paris,
London and Vienna, contributed to the construction of Spanish national music (Carreras
151–152).
The title of this section – “Yo soy la Carmen de España y no la de Mérimée” (“I am
Spain’s Carmen, not Mérimée’s”) – is a verse from a song written by Rafael de León and
Antonio Quintero and set to music by Manuel López-Quiroga. The song is called “Car-
men de España” (“Carmen of Spain”) and was written for a play by Juanita Reina titled
El puerto de los amores (The Port of Loves), which premiered in Madrid in 1952. The
lyrics attempt to humorously settle the score with the image of Carmen popularized by
the French opera: “no es verdad la historia/que de mí escribió un francés” (“the story is
not true/that was written about me by a Frenchman”). The real Carmen of Spain reasserts
herself as “manola” (“a native of Madrid”), “valiente” (“courageous”), “con bata de cola”
(“with a flamenco dress”), but “cristiana y decente” (“a decent Christian woman”). This
song reveals how even the myth of Carmen had to be adapted to the new morality imposed
by the Francoist state when it finished off the Republic after three bloody years of war.
Even so, the original text by Rafael de León was censored in the later recording made by
Juanita Reina in 1953. The verses “Tengo fuego en las pestañas/cuando miro a los gachés”
(“I have fire in my eyelashes/when I look at the guys”) were replaced by “Tengo el llanto en
las pestañas/a las horas de querer” (“I have tears on my eyelashes/in times of love”), which
served to change a seductive Carmen into a selfless, suffering one, more in line with the new
regime. Years later, well into the period of developmentalism (desarrollismo or late Franco-
ism, lasting from 1959 to 1975 and characterized by some cultural liberalization), Carmen
Sevilla popularized this song with the original text in a 1967 film production without being
censored.
This anecdote serves to bring us into the political, social, and cultural panorama of
Francoism. The moral principles of the dictatorship did not accept frivolity, exhibitionism,
or behaviors condemned by Catholic doctrine. This was the reason why many cuplés that
were considered offensive were exiled from the stage, and the door was instead opened to
a repertoire of songs that, besides not violating the prevailing morality, supported Franco’s
political program. Part of the cuplé’s repertoire was saved and approved by the new regime;
Andalusian cuplés were nationalized and became part of what was called the “Spanish
song” (canción española). The frivolous genre was domesticated by censorship and by the
change in systems of theater production which were themselves at the confluence of three
theatrical currents: The zarzuela, which since the 19th century had offered a view of native
music through a picturesque, idealized folklorism; the North American system of produc-
tion, whose ultimate representatives were Broadway comedies; and dance shows inspired
by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. According to Romero Ferrer, in this way “a new Spanish-
ness” was created in a “poor theatre” (teatro pobre) that had to deal with a fairly rudi-
mentary theatrical and corporate infrastructure due to economic, artistic and intellectual
scarcity (77).
It was in this context that recycled cuplé singers like Concha Piquer developed their
career. After her time on Broadway, in film (where she triumphed as a Charleston dancer),
and on the variety show scene, Piquer created her Gran Compañía de Arte Folclórico Anda-
luz Escenificado (Grand Company of Staged Andalusian Folkloric Art). The idea was not

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new, as la Argentinita had already done something similar in 1933 in the show Las calles
de Cádiz (The Streets of Cadiz), but Piquer’s triumph in her 1942 show Ropa tendida (The
Walls Have Ears) consolidated this new theatrical modality. This is how Quintero, León,
and Quiroga understood it, and they nearly monopolized not only its creation, but also its
publication and copyright. It was also adopted by other artists, including Juanita Reina,
Manolo Caracol, and Lola Flores.
The identification of postwar popular culture with Francoism was so strong that this
was used as justification for its outright rejection and lack of interest from the academic
sphere once democracy arrived. Likewise, popular music (disseminated through theatre,
film, radio, and record sales) was considered a product in service to Francoist interests
in consonance with the postulates of National Catholicism. Azahara Palomeque Recio
states that,

el régimen hizo [uso] de la imagen femenina de la tonadillera como estandarte de

los principales valores morales atribuidos a la mujer: honradez, castidad, – poten-
cial – maternidad y sumisión, en un contexto de absoluto control mediático como vía
para alcanzar la deseada unidad nacional, territorial e ideológica. (153)
the regime made [use] of the feminine image of the tonadilla singer as the banner of
the primary moral values attributed to women: Honor, chastity, (potential) mother-
hood, and submission, in a context of absolute media control, as a means of achieving
the desired national, territorial and ideological unity.

Thus, the identification of the Spanish song with Francoism has been a common element
in the assessment of the popular culture of the 1940s and 50s, a culture that has been dis-
seminated much more by the media than by academic studies.
In her works on postwar cinema, Jo Labanyi considers that popular music allowed audi-
ences to elaborate readings of resistance. Although they were not opposition or protest
songs, since Francoism established some strict mechanisms of control over dissidence, the
songs, by using innocent seeming disguises, allowed some glimpses into the hidden reality
of Francoism (Labanyi 22–42). Manuel Vázquez Montalbán expressed this sentiment in
similar terms in 1972 when he published his Cancionero general del franquismo (General
Songbook of Francoism):

La canción nacional testimonia un voluntarismo ideológico determinado: efecti­vismo,

nacionalismo, majeza, pero no se puede evitar cierto número de contrasentidos: el
inmoralismo evidente en la mayor parte de los personajes femeninos y una tristeza de
fondo que se correspondía al temple a satisfacer de un pueblo que había pasado por
la experiencia de una Guerra. (Vázquez Montalbán xviii)
National music testifies to a certain ideological voluntarism – effectivism, national-
ism, elegance – but also a certain number of contradictions cannot be avoided: The
immorality evident in most of the female characters, and a deep sadness that corre-
sponded to a temperament necessary to satisfy a people who had gone through the
experience of a war.

Stephanie Sieburth, for her part, links songs by Concha Piquer specifically with the grief of
the losers and those forgotten by the Franco regime.

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I Am a Pop Flamenco Dancer

In a television commercial recorded in the mid-sixties, Carmen Sevilla advertised Philips
household appliances by singing a song written by Rafael de León called “Flamenca ye-yé”
(“Pop Flamenco Dancer”). Beneath a melody constructed on the Phrygian style or Anda-
lusian scale can be heard some arrangements in the choruses, the electric guitar, and the
drums associated with pop – or ye-yé, also yeyé – music. British pop and the teen fashions
of France and Italy had reached Spanish youth, despite the political situatrion. From the
end of the 1950s, Francoism progressively abandoned its international isolation and vari-
ous plans for development were instituted that led to rapid economic growth and the mod-
ernization of society (the so-called desarrollismo). Spain made tourism one of its principal
industries, which brought Spaniards in contact with new behaviors and attitudes, including
new music.
“Modern music” was based on rhythms like rock ‘n’ roll and its derivatives, such as
the twist and the Madison, from Great Britain and the United States, and on the melodic
music of Italy and France. It was a music that demanded movement, an attitude, and a body
image that were diametrically opposed to the that of “Spanish song.” The stars belonged
to a bourgeois (middle-class) urban youth born in the years just before the end of the Civil
War. Liberalization and economic developmentalism allowed for an increase in the number
of university students, who were the first to create rock ‘n’ roll bands; many young adults
also joined the labor market in a Spain that was moving rapidly from an autarchic, almost
subsistence-based economy to a consumer society, in which the younger generation became
a significant segment of the market.
However, we must remember that in Spain, as well as in other western nations, the pro-
cesses of change that led to a new, more youthful style of music were not only determined
by artistic or generational codes. The changes in the recording industry – including the
spread of the microgroove (microsurco) and vinyl formats – and in communications – the
arrival of television and the format change of radio programs aimed at a younger audience,
as well as the growth of a music-oriented specialized press – made it possible for “modern
music” to gain a greater relevance over the preceding musical styles.
The singers of previous decades, like Concha Piquer, Lola Flores and Juanita Reina,
became known pejoratively as “folkloric” singers (folclóricas). But the folkloric quality
(its characteristics) was not entirely banished from Spanish popular music. Despite this
folkloric quality’s link to the older Spanish song traditions, from the 1950s onward, its
differentiation from another foundational genre – flamenco – became ever more distinct.
In the preceding decades, cante jondo (flamenco singing) and dancing were included in the
theatre shows that starred the famous singers of the Spanish song, like Concha Piquer. That
said, the dynamics of the pop music market tended towards the replacement of live shows
by media distribution through records, radio, and film.
Parallel to this process of mediatization was a change in the conception of flamenco as an
artistic and cultural object. Steingress highlights the initial appearance, in the mid-1950s, of
“flamencology” to designate a new attitude and a new way of thinking about the art of fla-
menco. Authors like Anselmo González Climent, and especially Ricardo Molina and Anto-
nio Mairena, proposed a reorientation towards the more “authentic” and “serious” forms
of flamenco, which, in their opinion, were in danger of disappearing due to the proliferation
of mass communication and the media. The Franco regime also reacted to the instrumen-
talization of flamenco, trying to turn it into a meaningful element of Spanish authenticity.

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In addition to the renewed theoretical interest in flamenco, this musical genre began to be
institutionalized and academized as a field of study thanks to the creation of chaired profes-
sorships in universities, musical competitions, and flamenco clubs (Steingress 115).
Beginning in the 1950s, the distance between flamenco and the Spanish song grew, to
a certain extent, both in cultural practice and in the collective imagination. Flamenco was
appreciated as an authentic, original, genuine, Andalusian, and gypsy expression; the Span-
ish song, on the other hand, was seen as a deceptive, mediatized, industrial, feminine crea-
tion, subordinate in quality and prominence to flamenco.
The hybrid nature of the Spanish song, however, allowed its hybridization with other
currents, styles, or aesthetic trends of popular music from the 1960s on. The echoes of
Manuel López-Quiroga’s songs, for example, can be found in the pop and national rock
of the seventies and eighties. Following the death of the dictator in 1975 and during the
process of political transition to democracy, flamenco was subjected to these hybridiza-
tion dynamics, and styles such as “flamenco pop” and “gypsy rock” arose. The publica-
tion in 1979 of the album La leyenda del tiempo (The Legend of Time), by the flamenco
singer-songwriter Camarón de la Isla served as a catalyst for the emergence of “new fla-
menco” and its hybridization with jazz, blues, soul, rock, etc. (Bethencourt 32)
Although the Spanish song or cuplé continued to develop, and even grow stronger dur-
ing the seventies – with singers such as Antonio Molina, Manolo Escobar (Otaola 33–52),
Rocío Jurado and, later, Isabel Pantoja – during the eighties it was subjected to a process
of historical revision. The political left attempted to disassociate the Spanish song from
the stigma posed by Franco’s appropriation of this modality. It became known as “copla”
(instead of cuplé) and it was finally vindicated by authors like Carlos Cano. From the
institutions of power, attempts were made to restore the memory of singers like Miguel de
Molina who had been silenced by Francoism (Arce, “Imitadores” 1–11). For his part, Pedro
Almodóvar contributed to the dissemination of the copla through a campy reinterpretation,
which can be appreciated, for example, in his 1984 film ¿Qué he hecho yo pare merecer
esto? (What Have I Done To Deserve This?), and the singer Martirio did the same using a
postmodern, kitschy sensibility.

I Carry Camarón in My Glove Compartment (De la Isla)

In the videoclip of the hit “Con altura” (“Classy”), sung by Rosalía (also Rosalia Vila
Tobella) and J Balvin (also José Álvaro Osorio Balvín) and produced by Pablo Díaz-Reixa
“El Guincho” and Frank Dukes, the singers simulate a plane trip that could easily be trans-
atlantic, given the cultural references cited from both sides of the ocean. For example,
Rosalía sings that “de Héctor aprendió la sabrosura” (“from Hector she learned delight”)
(referring to the Puerto Rican salsa singer Héctor Lavoe); she places “las palmas sobre la
Guantanamera” (“her hands together over Guantanamera”), alluding to the flamenco cus-
tom of accompanying songs with rhythmic clapping, in this case over the famous Cuban
guajira or folksong composed around the poet José Martí’s Versos sencillos (Simple Verses,
1891). Rosalía also quotes the mythical flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla; carrying it “en
la guantera” (“in the glovebox”) means that, besides having his albums on cassette or CD
in the car, she feels like the heir to his musical legacy.
In recent years, so-called “urban music” has gained particular relevance. It is character-
ized by the rise of genres born in marginal communities that are inheritors, in many cases,
to Black culture and hip hop, which has melded in the Hispanic world with genres like

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reggaeton and Rio de Janeiro funk (Arias 22). However, the symbiosis between the music
from both sides of the Atlantic has been a constant since the 18th century, which has given
rise to “round-trip” music, or music “de ida y vuelta.” In the 19th century, for example, the
presence of criollo elements, and especially Cuban music, is evidenced in the Spanish con-
text in salon music for the piano, and especially in the zarzuela. Tangos, guajiras, habaneras
and other tunes from overseas were used to articulate theatrical musical numbers. The rela-
tionship was so strong that the habanera, for example, became an icon of Spanish music, as
attested by its use by French authors such as Bizet, Lalo, Chabrier and Saint-Saëns (Alonso,
Creación musical 98). The use of the habanera as a favored strategy by French musicians
to represent Spain shows that musically, Hispanism “disdained the truth” and that Spain
was interesting as an imaginary place and “a province of the French Orient” (Llano 118).
As Celsa Alonso notes, Latin America is a geopolitical reality to keep in mind for looking
at ourselves “in the mirror”, and it is fundamental for understanding the process of con-
structing the Spanish identity (Creación musical 97). In 1898, scarcely three years before
the turn of the century, Spain lost her last colonial territories overseas. The impact of this
event was not only economic and political; the first years of the 20th century were marked
by the idea of the need for regeneration, a project on which many intellectuals embarked,
wanting to resolve “Spain’s problem” (Martínez del Fresno 640).
Since the second half of the 19th century, efforts had been made to strengthen ties with
the former colonies, and by century’s end, the term Hispanism had begun to be used to
allude to the spiritual and cultural union of Spain with Latin America. During the Franco
regime, “la Hispanidad” became the banner of the providentialist view of Spain’s history,
an ideology with the goal of legitimizing a regime that had come to power illegally and
violently, and with the intent of overcoming the international isolation imposed by Western
powers at the end of the Second World War. In this process, cinema was fundamental for
the symbiosis between the music of one side of the Atlantic and the other. Rancheras, cor-
ridos, and rumbas were fused with the Spanish song in films like Una gitana en México (A
Gypsy Woman in Mexico; José Díaz Morales, 1945), Jalisco canta en Sevilla (Jalisco Sings
in Seville; Fernando de Fuentes, 1948), Una gitana en La Habana (A Gypsy Woman in
Havana; Juan José Martínez Casado, 1950), and Una cubana en España (A Cuban Woman
in Spain; Luis Bayón Herrera, 1951). The “fraternal” hispanidad advocated by Francoism
explains, in part, the success of Latin American music since the forties, represented by the
songs of the Mexican Agustín Lara or Antonio Machín’s boleros.
In the 1940s and 1950s, boleros acquired a notable relevance; however, the impact of
rock ‘n’ roll on young people in the sixties temporarily relegated boleros to the background.
To counteract the impact of Anglo-American music, the bolero was modernized with the
introduction of electric guitars, 12/8-time signatures, lyrics about adolescent love, and opu-
lent orchestrations (Party 9). Out of this mélange arose the romantic ballad, a new style
created by musicians on both sides of the Atlantic. The Spaniard Manuel Alejandro com-
posed for Julio Iglesias, Paloma San Basilio, José José, Emmanuel, and others; there were
also leading producers like Rafael Trabucchelli, an Italian living in Spain, and the Argentine
Waldo de los Ríos.
Towards the end of the 20th century, a phenomenon arose that has been defined as
the “Miamization” of popular Latin American music (Party 3–19). The North American
city of Miami became the center of the Latin musical industry and a preferred spot of
many Spanish artists, like Julio Iglesias, Bertín Osborne, Alejandro Sanz, and David Bisbal,
wanting to take their careers international. Party cites reasons such as the political and

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economic stability offered by the North American city to record producers, in contrast
to the political fluctuations and instabilities of Latin American cities (3–4). The relatively
equal distance between Madrid, Los Angeles, New York, and Buenos Aires facilitated the
musicians’ moves. In short, as a transnational economic center and Latin Americanized (or
Hispanicized) city, Miami, became a neutral space to avoid rivalries between different Latin
countries.

Conclusion
Throughout the 20th century, popular music in Spain has gained great social relevance in
parallel with the growth of mass culture. However, we must look back to the 19th century
to see the beginnings of the mediatization of music, which began with the strengthening
of the publishing industry, the invention of the phonograph and subsequent development
of the record industry, and then later yet, the invention of cinema and radio broadcasting.
These changes in dissemination and consumption in turn gave way to new forms in popu-
lar music. In this sense, the cuplé and the music of variety shows from the first third of the
20th century are related to the industrialization and mediatization of Spanish music in the
emerging context of mass culture.
The cuplé was the most relevant genre of popular music in Spain during the early decades
of the 20th century. It was heir to the music and the popular theatrical tradition of the 19th
century, and despite French – and European in general – influence, it evolved some of its
own characteristics that marked the later development of the rest of Spanish popular music.
One of its varieties, the regional cuplé, was the fruit of the alliance of musical entertainment
with the idea of native (autochthonous) music. The notion of Spanishness in music has
been, as we have seen in this chapter, amply debated by contemporary historiography, espe-
cially to explain the musical production of nationalist composers or that of those who, like
Manuel de Falla or the musicians of the so-called “Generation of the Republic” (connected
to the poets and writers of the Generation of 27), undertook the task of bringing music to
more avant-garde territories without forgetting the “essences” of what they considered to
be “natural” music (native, local, popular, rather than erudite music). In popular music, the
“national,” the “native,” or the “Spanish” is articulated through a limited set of musical
themes that are easily recognized, derived from national and regional stereotypes that had
been under construction since the 19th century, both from the academic world and from
popular musical theatre.
Just as in the academic sphere, the idea of Spanishness in popular music has raised many
controversies. “Andalusianism,” together with “orientalism,” encouraged by the exoticiz-
ing view that other countries have of Spain, led to a simplification of the diversity of Span-
ish musical traditions and to the consideration of Andalusian music as representative of the
whole country. I believe it is important to emphasize, as Carreras notes, that the tendency
to conceive of Spanish musical culture from a primarily nationalist angle reveals a hierar-
chical view that locates “nationalism” at the periphery (Carreras 154). Spain, as a country
far removed from the cultural centers, exoticized and orientalized, should concern itself
with defining its identity and seeking accommodation in European culture.
The presence of women in leading roles has been a constant in the musical genres ana-
lyzed in this chapter. The cuplé, the Spanish song, the copla, and to a lesser degree, modern
music from the 1960s until today have had women in prominent roles, although they were
primarily the visible face of an industry dominated by men. However, as Anastasio suggests,

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I consider that the cuplé and later genres like the Spanish song or the copla, enabled women
to articulate meanings and change the stage, whether consciously or unconsciously, into a
space for the creation or contestation of established norms. Popular culture has served to
articulate processes of negotiation and integrate emerging elements into Spanish social life.
Popular music, for example, was used as a symbol of modernity, as opposition to Franco-
ism, and as a vehicle for transmitting values very different from National Catholic rhetoric,
starting in the 1960s.
During the 21st century, Spanish popular music, following the globalizing trend of the
music industry, has taken on the new genres called “urban music.” The work of Rosalía,
for example, signifies the culmination of the process of construction of a national music
in a context in which Spanish has become global and where Spain’s musical relations with
Latin America cannot be ignored.

Works Cited
Alonso, Celsa. “Mujeres de fuego: ritmos ‘negros’, transgresión y modernidad en el teatro lírico de
la Edad de Plata.” Cuadernos de Música Iberoamericana, vol. 18, 2009, pp. 135–66. Alonso,
Celsa. Creación musical, cultura popular y construcción nacional en la España contemporánea.
ICCMU, 2010.
Alonso, Celsa. “Símbolos y estereotipos nacionales en la música popular de los años sesenta: entre la
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Slide, Anthony. The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville. UP of Mississippi, 2012.
Steingress, Gerhard. Sociología del cante flamenco. Signatura Ediciones, 2005.
Una cubana en España (A Cuban Woman in Spain). Directed by Luis Bayón Herrera, performances
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Una gitana en La Habana (A Gypsy Woman in Havana). Directed by Juan José Martínez Casado,
performances by Paquita de Ronda and Juan Jose Martínez Casado. Latina Films, 1950.
Una gitana en México (A Gypsy Woman in Mexico). Directed by José Díaz Morales, performances by
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Willis. Manchester UP, 2004, pp. 40–59.

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MUSIC’S MIRRORS
Identity, Tradition, and Modernity in Spanish
Popular Music1

Héctor Fouce and Fernán del Val

Translated by Linda Grabner

Introduction: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Mirrors

The discipline of popular music in Spain is a privileged space from which to observe the
diverse tensions and fractures that have manifested themselves in Spanish culture from the
19th century onward. In this chapter, we will analyze those tensions starting from the sec-
ond half of the 19th century and focusing on three elements: The identity conflicts between
center and periphery, the role of the new middle classes in the growth and legitimation of
popular music, and cultural relations between Spain and Latin America in the moderniza-
tion of these genres and scenes.
As sociologist Motti Regev has suggested, throughout the 20th century popular music
has gone global (“Pop-rock”). To analyze these processes, Regev uses the concept of aes-
thetic cosmopolitanism, suggesting that in these dynamics of musical globalization, a dia-
logue is produced between the formal and aesthetic aspects of pop-rock (its sound and
electric instrumentation, studio recording techniques, the artistic canon) and certain native
cultural elements (themes in song lyrics, the language in which they are sung, the use of
local music or instruments). Thus, in almost all current cultural products, autochthonous
elements merge with foreign ones, dissipating national borders. Pop and rock are trans-
formed in non-English-speaking countries according to their cultural characteristics, their
social determinants, and their historical evolution.
From Regev’s approach (“Cultural Uniqueness” 135), it can be concluded that the glo-
balization process of pop-rock originates from the rock’n’roll “metropolises” (England,
the United States) and moves out toward other cultures. For native musicians, the field of
Anglo-American pop-rock is the model from which to begin to modernize their ethnona-
tional cultural fields. But, according to Shain, the processes of cultural globalization are
not always generated from a north–south perspective; rather, there are also south–south
dynamics that promote these cultural exchanges (Shain 137). In that sense, the influence of
musicians and groups from other countries in the region (France, Italy), and primarily Latin
America, has been key to the modernization processes of the musical field in Spain beyond
the Anglo-American influence (Fouce and Val 6).

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 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

Therefore, in this chapter we depart from the idea that the history of contemporary
popular music in Spain boils down to the tension between national and foreign sounds:
Every political era will articulate this tension in a different way, putting tradition at odds
with cosmopolitanism. But the construction of national images has the peculiarity of having
to depend on the active collaboration of other nations, as explained by Ismael Sanz (quoted
in Alonso 83). The image of contemporary Spain “está construida en gran parte como un
juego de espejos en el que la mirada ajena, desde fuera, desde otros países, ha sido a veces
tan importante como la propia mirada de España hacia sí misma” (“is constructed in large
part like a game of mirrors in which the foreign view, from outside, from other countries,
has sometimes been as important as Spain’s own view of itself”; Sanz quoted in Alonso 83).
This tendency could already be seen in the travels of the 18th-century Romantics, who
forged a Spanish musical identity defined by the sounds of flamenco. As Alonso observes,
“los viajeros románticos vieron a Andalucía y sus habitantes como quintaesencia de aquella
España romántica imaginada, y se encargaron de subrayar sus elementos diferenciales y
extravagante” (“Romantic travelers saw Andalusia and its inhabitants as the quintessence
of that imagined Romantic Spain, and they took it upon themselves to underscore its dif-
ferential and extravagant elements”; 85). In the emotion and “authenticity” of flamenco
singing and in the expressiveness of its dance, the Romantics found the representation of
a Spanish soul that was more imagined than real: Tormented, suffering, and primitive but,
because of that, pure and far from the corrupting influence of the emerging mass culture.
That idealized image, already consolidated by the intervention of “ciertas élites culturales
que . . . afirmaron su ancestralidad” (“certain cultural elites who . . . asserted the ancestry
[of this Romantic image]”; Alonso 87), was then appropriated by Francoism.

Francoist Pop
The dictatorship used music as one of the propaganda tools of a regime that was closed to
the outside world both economically and culturally, and it promoted the copla (Andalusian
song) as a hegemonic musical genre. Franco never shared fascism’s dreams of modernity
(Malefakis quoted in Alonso 210); Francoism’s cultural policy sought to demobilize the
population rather than inflame the masses, and it did so by promoting the idea that the
Spanish nation was a natural, eternal reality. This idea fit perfectly with the populist move-
ment driven by the Falange (the Spanish fascist party) to revive traditional folklore.
From its origins, the copla adopted the Spanish stereotypes that originated from the fan-
dango and flamenco: This entailed the use of the Spanish scale in combination with a tonal
center in a major key, the figurations of descending triplets and the themes that persist in
the mystification of popular types (Alonso 209). These Andalusian-style musical character-
istics allowed the regime to appeal to popular cultural sentimentality in order to construct
a stereotyped image of Spanishness that erased cultural differences.
The defeat of the Axis powers in the Second World War forced the Franco regime to seek
its geopolitical space among the victorious countries. The accords signed in 1953 with the
United States, which allowed for the installation of US military bases within Spanish terri-
tory, were also correlated to the orientation of the regime’s cultural policies: For example,
in the early years of the dictatorship, jazz had been condemned as inferior music and as a
sign of the corruption of modernity. But after the accords were signed, the US forces spon-
sored concerts in Spain by famous figures such as Louis Armstrong, as a form of musical
diplomacy (Iglesias 282).

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But cultural autarchy was not overcome automatically; Spain continued to be a dic-
tatorship, even if the regime’s fascist elements were becoming increasingly sidelined. The
eruption on the scene of rock’n’roll scandalized the white middle classes of economically
growing democracies like the United States and the United Kingdom. It is not surprising,
then, that it was difficult for this music to find an audience in a country that was deliberately
resistant, at least in the official sphere, to foreign cultural influence. Furthermore, the social
conditions that facilitated the emergence of rock’n’roll (racial mixing, economic growth, the
baby boom, the increase in the ages of mandatory school attendance) did not exist in Spain.
For these reasons, the arrival of rock’n’roll in Spain was not always well received by
political leaders or by the record industry itself. If we look at some of the works that have
sought to analyze the origins of rock’n’roll in Spain (Domínguez; Pardo; Vogel), we can see
that the arrival of this new genre happened through various channels. On the one hand,
the North American military bases established on Spanish soil beginning in 1953 (Torrejón
de Ardoz [Madrid], Zaragoza, Morón [Seville], and Rota [Cádiz]) served as disseminators
of rock’n’roll music and culture (Fouce and Val 7). On the other, the record industry and
mass media also helped to popularize this genre, which was understood as a new fashion
that came from the United States.2 In this sense, the role of tourism was also critical in this
process of cultural globalization. As both Diego García Peinazo and Adrián Vogel point out
in their studies on the subject, musical scores for rock’n’roll, the fox trot, the mambo, and
the twist could be found in the repertoires of many dance orchestras of the era. Many of
these orchestras played for tourists, so they had to be up to date with the new genres that
their audiences demanded (Fouce and Val 8).
But, as we suggested in the opening of the chapter, evolution in the field of Spanish music
has not always followed a process of emulation of musical advances occurring in the United
States or England. Cultural relations with neighboring countries like France and Italy, and
with Latin American nations, have also been key in the processes of musical modernization.
Groups like the Mexican band Los Teen Tops or the Cuban band Los Llopis were impor-
tant in showing Spanish groups that it was possible to do rock’n’roll in Spanish (Pardo 26).
The former adapted to Spanish hits such as “Good Golly, Miss Molly” by Little Richard
(changed to “La Plaga” [“The Plague”]) and “Jailhouse Rock” by Elvis Presley (“El rock de
la cárcel”). Los Llopis had learned about rock’n’roll in the US before returning to Havana
to form their band (Fouce and Val 9). Their best-known song was “Estremécete,” a His-
panized version of “All Shook Up,” which was a number-one hit for Elvis on the music
charts. Pardo also calls attention to the Italian singer Adriano Celentano and the French-
man Johnny Halliday, who in the early 1960s were already composing original material in
their own languages, and who served as examples of how to make rock’n’roll from cultures
other than the North American (12).
The space of antagonism previously occupied by jazz was filled, in this new era, by rock.
The explosion of British rock, led by the Beatles, was viewed with suspicion by the regime,
as they were aware of this music’s ability to attract a youth sector that identified less and
less with Francoism. Although the 1966 Fraga Law (Ley Fraga) denoted the liberalization
of the system of censorship in the country, it nevertheless broadened the control of record
production (Valiño). At the same time, the regime’s propaganda was fully employed in
minimizing both the cultural relevance and the impact in Spain of those manifestations of
youth culture that caused such a furor around the world. For example, when the Beatles
staged concerts in Madrid and Barcelona in 1965, “the government deliberately denied the
fans a mass experience and orchestrated a media campaign to discredit the group” (Marc

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118). The high price of the tickets and heavy police presence made it impossible for many
young people to access the Las Ventas bullring. According to Marc, “the objective was not
only to preserve national pride and cultural independence but also, and principally, to pre-
vent the socio-cultural change associated with pop music” (118).
Still, a segment of Spanish youth had already incorporated rock into their musical cul-
ture. Toward the end of the 1950s, the first rock’n’roll groups began to appear in Spain,
in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia. Broadly speaking, the young people who
formed the first groups were part of the upper and upper-middle classes – especially in
Madrid – who had access to musical instruments and imported records through their fam-
ily networks. It is worth noting that in Barcelona the social origins of band members were
more diverse, with greater participation from the lower classes. Most of these bands began
recording versions of foreign hits, but their interests in the music industry led them to start
creating their own repertoires and exploring new styles as well.
Los Brincos provide a good example of an early Spanish rock group. The idea of creat-
ing a group with “aire español y ritmo marcado” (“a Spanish air and a marked rhythm”)
(Alonso 221) was born in parallel with the creation of the record company Novola (a con-
traction of “Nueva Ola” [“New Wave”]) as the youth-oriented subsidiary of the established
label Zafiro. After recording an album with the aforementioned Cuban band Los Llopis,
the company heads decided that the way to compensate for their lack of an international
catalogue was to take a gamble on young Spanish bands. This allowed them to connect with
the new rhythms that were in vogue, with the aspiration to bring to Europe “música espa-
ñola joven, moderna, con personalidad, en lugar de copiar del extranjero” (“young Spanish
music, modern, with personality, instead of copying from abroad”; quoted in Alonso 222).
Thus, from the English beat, Los Brincos adopted the use of vocal harmonies and electric gui-
tars, fusing them with traditional Spanish elements, both visual (like capes and trajes de tuno
[traditional suits for university student musicians in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America])
and sound-based (the use of flamenco tones and rhythms in songs like “A mí con esas” [“To
me with Those], “Pareces gitana” [“You Look Like a Gypsy Woman”] and “Flamenco”).
The emergence of the Spanish beat was an indicator of an initial generational disaffec-
tion toward the regime, but also of the vigor of the cultural stereotypes cultivated during
Francoism. Along these lines, Alonso has stated that,

Muchos jóvenes españoles de ascendencia burguesa, aunque mayoritariamente

apolíticos, deseaban alejarse de la moral nacionalcatólica, y lo hicieron público a
través del consumo de música pop, con la adopción de ritmos foráneos y un rechazo
a la copla y el flamenco. Ahora bien, esto no significa que aquellos jóvenes hubieran
de renunciar al conjunto de estereotipos nacionales que aún funcionaban en la senti-
mentalidad colectiva. (222)
Many Spanish bourgeois youth, although mostly apolitical, wanted to distance
themselves from the National-Catholic morality, and they made it public through
their consumption of pop music, with the adoption of foreign rhythms and their rejec-
tion of the copla and flamenco. However, this does not mean that those young people
had to renounce the whole set of national stereotypes that still functioned within the
collective sentimentality.

The regime was aware of rock music’s ability to mobilize a social sector that, in its vision
of an eternal nation, was necessary to ensure the continuity of the political system, hence

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the reinforcement of record censorship combined with social control. In 1963 the Matinales
del Circo Price, modern music festivals where Madrid’s rock and pop bands performed,
were closed after denunciations printed in the Francoist-leaning newspaper Pueblo insinu-
ated that the sessions incited teenagers to excess and debauchery. But neither the censorship
of records nor the repression of concerts abated the younger generations’ thirst for rock.
The success of developmentalism (desarrollismo), which began to instigate a middle class
more closely connected with the outside world, and the previously mentioned affluence
of tourists were factors that contributed to opening the cultural borders that had been
enforced by Francoism.
The response to Francoism from the music world would integrate lyrics that defended
freedom and democracy (Lucini) with the cultivation of musical traditions from peripheral
regions, with regard to both the use of their languages and the acceptance of their folklore.
Joan Manuel Serrat’s refusal to sing in Spanish in the Eurovision Festival held in 1968 in
London – which Spain ended up winning with the female singer Massiel – is an example
of these challenges that were presented to the regime from those “historic” regions whose
uniqueness was granted political form in the 1978 Constitution.
These singer-songwriters (cantautores) established a bridge between a reimagined Span-
ish tradition (marked by a diversity of languages and rhythms in contrast to the homoge-
neity of the Francoist project) and a cosmopolitan outlook that had France as a model.
The manifesto Ens calen cançons d’ara (We Need Songs for Today) explicitly states that
the French chanson is the model to follow (Ayats and Salicrú-Maltas 31). Because of its
geographical proximity, the vitality of its culture and its attitudes toward secular freedom,
France was in competition with English-speaking culture to be the primary international
influence on Spanish culture (Marc 122).
According to the journalist Diego A. Manrique, the end of the 1960s precipitated the
entrance of rock into the catacombs (quoted in Val 252). The attempts by Spanish rock
bands to follow the advances of rock at the international level (psychedelic rock, progres-
sive rock, symphonic rock) and the influence of the counterculture did not please the indus-
try, which stopped supporting the progressive experiments of these groups (Los Brincos,
Los Salvajes, Lone Star) to focus instead on the more melodic singers (Raphael, Julio Igle-
sias, Camilo Sesto), as well as on the so-called “grupos de canción del verano” (“summer
song groups”) such as Formula V, Los Mustang, or Los Diablos. Even so, at the same time
that the Franco regime was slowly perishing, the political resistance of the youngest Spanish
citizens was giving way to a cultural resistance anchored in the counterculture that came
from Paris and California (Pecourt, Malvido).

Musical Culture During the Spanish Transition

With the death of the dictator, rock once again surfaced with two iconic events held in
1975. The first was the Festival Canet Rock (in Canet de Mar, Catalonia), promoted under
the slogan “doce horas de música y locura” (“twelve hours of music and madness”). Fran-
coist authorities prevented the performance of the psychedelic singer-songwriter Jaume
Sisa, to which the festival responded by presenting his song “Qualsevol nit pot sortir el sol”
(“Any Night the Sun Might Come Up”) on a stage in which only the microphone was lit.3
That same year, in Burgos (the fascist capital during the Civil War), a crowd of long-haired
young people at a hard rock/progressive rock festival found themselves facing the hostility
of the local press, which dubbed the event “la invasión de la cochambre” (“the invasion

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of filth”; Domínguez, “Los hijos”). Although the results of the festivals were not the same,
they demonstrated the interest of an entire generation in this type of music, which was also
connected to a booming scene for alternative press, in the music magazines Disco Exprés,
Popular 1, and Vibraciones and the counterculture magazines Star and Ajoblanco.
The Transition to democracy was a period of profound tension, both political and cul-
tural. It is important to highlight that the Transition was conceived not only as a political
matter, but also as an opportunity to integrate Spain into the order of Western nations, well
represented by the European Union, which Spain joined in 1986. The change offered by the
Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers Party) in the elections
that it won by absolute majority in 1982 was not only an institutional transformation, but
also a social and cultural one. The direction of this cultural change offered various possi-
bilities, and the Transition was a period in which different proposals that sought to resolve
the tension between tradition and modernity coexisted. These tensions were also echoed in
the conflicts between the younger generations, inclined to realize the promises of freedom
in their daily lives, and their parents and older siblings, who were in large part disillusioned
because the promises of transformation made during the anti-Franco struggles had been
curtailed, even with the coming to power of the socialists (Labrador). In that sense, the field
of music was a space in which the conflicts between tradition and modernity, at the cultural
and political levels, would become highly visible.
The early years of the democracy led to a loss of influence on the part of the
singer-songwriters: They had assumed the task of giving voice to a population silenced
by repression and fear, but this particular social function of music lost significance with
the establishment of freedom of expression. Even so, different music scenes would remain
important in the construction of regional identities during the early years of the democracy,
such as Layetano rock in Catalunya, Andalusian or gypsy rock in Andalusia (García Pein-
azo), and progressive rock in the northwest of the country (García Salueña). These assorted
musical scenes borrowed from progressive rock, symphonic rock and hard rock, hybridiz-
ing those sounds with folkloric music (flamenco, sardana), native regional languages (Cata-
lan, Galician, Asturian, etc.), and pertinent regional cultural topics. This pattern could also
be seen in other European countries (Italy, Sweden, France), where bands sought to create
authentic rock by bringing it closer to their cultural patterns. In Spain, these scenes would
be celebrated by critics and the public until the 1980s, a decade when a segment of the
music press would criticize the nationalism of these scenes for being “provincial,” at the
same time that they praised the cosmopolitanism of the Movida, a countercultural move-
ment based in Madrid (Val, Sing as You Talk).
The activist legacy of the singer-songwriters was updated with new musical languages,
again from the English-speaking rock tradition. In the larger Spanish cities, the neighbor-
hoods that had absorbed an enormous influx of immigrants from the countryside during
the years of developmentalism, urban rock and heavy metal channeled the frustration of a
generation of young people trapped in spaces that were poorly connected to the rest of the
urban fabric, with inadequate infrastructure and resources (health centers, schools, public
transportation) and in which unemployment and hard drug use characterized the youth
experience. Mass media did not pick up on the enormous popularity of these new forms of
rock; bands capable of filling stadiums and bullrings hardly received any media attention, in
contrast with the bands of the Movida, which had greater cultural capital (Val Rockeros).
The cultural capital associated with La Movida allowed these bands to connect both with

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the media and with a political class for which modernity and change meant leaving behind
the activist culture embraced by hard rock and heavy metal.
In this context of change and evolution in the music scene we again see the relevance
of the cultural exchanges between Spain and Latin America. The arrival in the mid-1970s
of Argentine musicians who were fleeing from the military dictatorship helped to modern-
ize and revitalize some musical characteristics and styles. The group Tequila, which was
formed by two young Argentine musicians and three Spaniards, provides an example of
this occurrence. The group gained the attention of music critics and the industry for the
incorporation of Spanish into its lyrics. Moris Biravent, a veteran rocker in Argentina, was
also an important figure at this time.4 His texts did not fit either with the prevalent rock
sensibility, which was centered on social denunciation and a critique of the urban sphere,
nor did they fit with the bucolic idealism of the singer-songwriters. His influence has been
recognized by musicians like Joaquín Sabina, who would later delve deeper into the combi-
nation of rock music and singer-songwriting (Val and Green).

Modernity and Cosmopolitanism

At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 80s, a musical shift occurred that would
change the rock scene: Punk and New Wave emerged in England, and in just a few months,
Spain’s youth had already discovered these new styles. Once again, it was the children of the
upper middle classes who began to emulate the Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello. Journalists
like Jesús Ordovás, in Disco Exprés, began to cover the early concerts of groups like Kaka
De Luxe, Nacha Pop, Zombies, Los Secretos, and Mamá while beginning to write about
“la nueva marea” (“the new wave”) or “la Nueva Ola madrileña” (“Madrid’s New Wave,”
later better known as La Movida. Thus, the 1980s entailed the triumph of a discourse that
celebrated the modernity and cosmopolitanism of a democratic Spain, as if both concepts
were harmoniously coupled. International band tours began to make obligatory stops in
Spain at the same time that the charts were filled with songs by the young groups of La
Movida.
In 1985, on the tenth anniversary of the dictator’s death, the primary international pub-
lications turned their eyes again toward Spain, and they found a country in which the spirit
and the uproar of urban youth had replaced bureaucratic and police control in the streets
of the major cities. Madrid, the epicenter of the new youth culture, and the origin of its new
sounds, generated a discourse that celebrated Spain’s capital as the most entertaining city
in the world; the view from abroad acted in coordination with the political will of the city’s
socialist mayor Tierno Galván to promote this reinvention of a capital that had been previ-
ously identified with the centralism of the Franco regime. In 1983, Bob Spitz, a reporter for
Rolling Stone, explained that “Madrid has been transformed into a cultural oasis, where
new music, crafts, intellectualism, drugs, free love, all-night clubs and boundless idealism
have all become part of the daily scene – much like San Francisco in the Sixties. A city
reborn to run.”
Punk’s influence on the music scene, and that of its variants, was felt in other autonomous
communities. This was the case in the Basque Country, where punk rock groups began to
emerge, including La Polla Records, Kortatu, Barricada, and others. Radikal Basque Rock
had a more aggressive social and musical agenda than that of La Movida and connected
with some ideological positions of the pro-independence left.5

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Throughout the 1980s, La Movida became the new mainstream, and it brought about
a significant change in the style of some bands, which incorporated new sounds from both
the Latin American and Latino repertoire and from Spanish musical traditions. The press
dubbed this “rock torero” (“bullfighter rock”; Laiglesia), and the variant included such
groups as Los Coyotes, Gabinete Caligari, and Kiko Veneno. The copla had been reclaimed
via a campy sensibility in Pedro Almodóvar’s films, which portrayed a new urban culture
that partook of both popular and mass culture. In addition, Martirio, who recycled the
popular peineta (decorative comb) of the tonadilla singers in an ironic sense, recouped
certain elements of the copla to update it with references to drug use (“Estoy mala” [I’m
feeling bad]).
Gabinete Caligari was a pioneering group in the fusion of Hispanic elements with the
dark themes of goth rock; the macabre elements of rock siniestro (death rock) hybrid-
ized perfectly with bullfighting imagery. Songs like “Que Dios reparta suerte” (“May God
Hand Out Luck”) invoke the pasodoble (double-step military march) through sound and
thematic content, although dressed up with electric guitars. Castanets can be heard along
with Andalusian scales and rhythms, while the lyrics narrate a bullfighter’s contemplation
of death before a bullfight. Gabinete Caligari became a best-selling group, whose songs
include celebrations of the Spanish literary heritage (Bécquer and Machado in “Camino
Soria” [“Soria Way”]) and of popular urban life (“Al calor del amor en un bar” [“To Love’s
Warmth in a Bar”] and are suffused with cheli expressions (urban Madrid slang typical
of La Movida). By adopting into their music elements closely associated with Francoist
culture, such as bullfights, the copla, and the rumba flamenca (with its roots in both Anda-
lusia and Cuba), this young generation distanced itself from their parents, who were often
pejoratively categorized as progres (progressives). But these bands also had a desire to make
something of their own, to not systematically copy the latest trends from London, which
followed the model of aesthetic cosmopolitanism mentioned earlier.
At the same time, Radio Futura gradually incorporated new sounds and influences into
their music. This group deserves credit for bringing the rumba into the range of styles
of cosmopolitan modernity, with their 1987 song “La negra flor” (“The Black Flower”).
That record’s producer, Jo Dworniak, also produced the album Échate un cantecito (“Sing
a Little Folk Song”; 1992), which was a commercial success for Kiko Veneno, one of the
mainstays of rock gitano (gypsy rock) and of the new flamenco – his song “Volando voy”
(“I go flying”) is included on the album La leyenda del tiempo (The legend of time) by
Camarón de la Isla.

Moving Toward the Turn of the Century

The 1990s can be characterized by a new process of generational rupture within the music
sphere. For the younger generations who grew up during the second half of the 1980s, the
groups of La Movida represented a kind of commercialism they reacted against. These new
cohorts looked to other aesthetic influences, including the incipient grunge movement from
Seattle, California hard rock, noise pop, North American indie, Brit-pop, and hardcore.
The appearance of indie music implied a break with the centralism of prior scenes;
whereas both La Movida and the heavy metal scene had unfolded mainly in Madrid, the
“translocal” scene is constructed from multiple local scenes, emerging groups, lounges, fan-
zines, and labels from Madrid, Barcelona, Andalusia, and Asturias (Bennet and Peterson).
In its early years, this translocal scene was characterized by its use of English deployed as a

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way to create distance from the groups of La Movida, as well as to express a certain politi-
cal apathy toward current events in Spain. Through the work of Nando Cruz, it becomes
apparent that, just as had happened in the 1970s and 80s, the first indie cohort in Spain
was composed of the offspring of the new middle classes, a sector – the middle class – that
was now expanding in the aftermath of the early Transition governments sluggish economic
policies.
Thus, while indie rock in its early years advocated for Anglophilia, other groups and
soloists continued the line of musical hybridization seen during previous scenes. We have
already discussed Kiko Veneno’s success, to which can be added that of Seguridad Social
with “Chiquilla” (“Little Girl”; 1991), a hit rumba-rock song. In 1993, Los Rodríguez,
a group created by the Argentines Ariel Rot (formerly of Tequila) and Andrés Calamaro,
released Sin documentos (Without Documents), whose title song is also a rumba rhythm.
Despite their musical antecedents, music critics credited Los Rodríguez with reclaiming the
rumba for rock audiences. Moreover, they emphasized the fact that it was Argentine musi-
cians who valued the patrimony of Spanish popular music, in the face of indie rock’s imita-
tion of Anglo-American musical projects. And again, we see the game of mirrors present in
Spanish culture: The need for a foreign gaze, cast from without to validate the autochtho-
nous cultural production.
Although the 1990s appeared to be a decade that consolidated the depoliticization of
Spanish culture (Martínez; González Férriz; Maura), another critical presence in the music
scene during that decade was rock urbano [urban rock], which reclaimed the legacy of
1980s hard rock, keeping lyrics with social themes while opening up to the influence of new
sounds like punk and hardcore. In the mid-nineties, the scene moved from the alternative
world toward participating in mass markets, thanks to the success of the group Extremo-
duro, although, again, their popularity was not reflected in the attention they received from
the media. However, it is worth noting that groups like Extremoduro and Reincidentes
turn to flamenco in some of their compositions (“Adiós abanico, que llegó el aire” [“Good-
bye, Fan, the Air has Arrived”], “Ay, Dolores”). This pattern of hybridization would be
extended at the turn of the century with the appearance of different groups and new music
scenes (Los Delinqüentes, Manu Chao, Ojos de Brujo, Chambao, La Cabra Mecánica,
Estopa, Amparanoia, etc.) that borrow from Latin music, rumba, flamenco, and pasodoble,
reflecting a society that is today the product of an influx of immigration which, in a very
short time, has turned Spain into a multicultural country.
After the appearance of indie rock, now with groups singing in Spanish, and of the fes-
tival scene, the 2008 crisis led the middle classes to show their political disaffection in con-
nection with social movements like 15M (Val and Fouce). But it was the trap music scene (a
subgenre of hip-hop), through its construction of a hedonistic, pragmatic discourse that is
little given to idealism, that best reflected the youngest generations’ growing disillusionment
with the reality of contemporary life in Spain (Castro).

Conclusion: Towards a Globalized Modernity

Popular music in Spain has historically been a space where tensions around national iden-
tity have been staged, counterposing Spanish tradition with cosmopolitan modernity. On
the one hand, the historical weight of 40 years of dictatorship has marked this confronta-
tion and has left the musical tradition with some negative connotations that are only now
beginning to be overcome. On the other hand, the very idea of modernity employed in

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this dispute has been in constant flux as globalization continuously expands. The streets
of Spanish cities are now more diverse, and along with that reality, the sounds of Spanish
popular music have also gained in variety. If during the last decades of the 20th century
modernity was equated with the sounds of the English-speaking world, the increasing pres-
ence of Latino and Latin American music in the principal cultural markets is also modulat-
ing the music being produced in Spain.
In the global world post-2020, cosmopolitanism is no longer a characteristic of certain
privileged groups based on their cultural capital, but rather a characteristic of a planet
shaped by constant migrations and displacements. There is no doubt that the new urban
music is a space open to global hybridization, mixing the heritage of Black music from the
United States with the rhythms of the Caribbean, the sounds of rap, and flamenco sounds
and rhythms as well. Undoubtedly, the work of Rosalía provides us with an apt illustra-
tion of the new fusions and hybridizations of Spanish popular music. But despite her many
novel contributions, once again we see the dynamic of the mirror at work: Many of the
assessments of Rosalía’s musical accomplishments come from outside of Spain, again, the
validation from without.
The innovation she provides, however, from the viewpoint of cultural dynamics, lies in
where the mirror has been located: This time it is not foreign travelers captivated by Span-
ish idiosyncrasies who produce the discourse, but rather a young Spanish woman who is
navigating the complex spaces between her classical music training, her deep knowledge
of the flamenco tradition and her received influence of global urban music. Her cultural
discourse regards Spain from the border, with a dual vision, looking at once towards the
inside and the outside, the local and the global, in a position which surely reflects the global
environment in which we now live.

Notes
1 Note from the editor of the volume: I would like to thank Kristina Pittman for her valuable assis-
tance in editing this chapter.
2 Thus, in 1957 the first records by Elvis Presley and by Bill Halley and His Comets were released,
with this last group playing in Barcelona in 1958, although the Francoist police force quickly broke
up the concert for fear of altercations (Vogel 198).
3 See the documentary filmed by Francesc Belmunt (1975), available online: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=_riYwamq9cs.
4 As Julio Ogas notes, we must keep in mind that the musical production by these groups, especially
in the case of Moris, does not correspond directly to the cultural standards of either Spain or
Argentina but to a combination of both.
5 The politicization of this scene had political and legal consequences for some groups. Mota offers
a review of the censorship and the accusations levied against these bands for their alleged praise of
terrorism.

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 53
FROM THE MEDITERRANEAN
DIET TO GASTRONATIONALISM
Cultural Studies and Spanish Foodways

Rebecca Ingram

In the past decades Spanish food and Spanish eating practices have been the subject of
much attention, with two particularly interesting, and interrelated, foci. They can refer to
the Mediterranean Diet, a shared practice of “eating together” so distinctive as a founda-
tion of cultural identity and social exchange that it has appeared on one of UNESCO’s
lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage since 2013 (“Mediterranean Diet.”). These food and
eating practices can also refer to a contemporary nationalist agenda; for example, the Aso-
ciación de Amigos de la Real Academia de Gastronomía’s website “Gastro MarcaEspaña,”
frames it as placing “nuestro país en la primera línea del panorama gastronómico global.”
Institutionalized in the last decade, these two discourses – one oriented towards transna-
tional Mediterranean commonalities and the other promoting Spanish eating to the global
marketplace – exemplify the disconnections and contradictions that characterize food as a
category of meaning. This chapter treats two powerful paradigms, the Mediterranean Diet
and the gastronationalist, neoliberal marketing campaign of Gastro MarcaEspaña, to dem-
onstrate how cultural practices like foodwork are mediated by power.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, eating in Spain could be associated with dem-
onstrating one’s bourgeois sophistication and modernity by partaking of foods identified
with France (Anderson Cooking Up the Nation, Ingram “Popular Tradition”). Or it could
mean eating for the sake of necessity, according to the scraps of meat one could afford to
put in the olla (cooking pot), as well as significant quantities of bread and wine.1 Since
then, foodscapes associated with Spain and considered representative of the nation-state
have been variously linked to divergent threads of nationalism (Anderson, Riera and Song).
They also inform cosmopolitan and transnational ideas of modernity articulated in the
early twentieth century and linked to new and newly affordable processed food products
and ingredients (Ingram, Women’s Work). Spanish foodways reflected a Fascist prescribed
diet, inculcated by women’s obligatory domestic education and hiding more than a dec-
ade of widespread hunger following the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) (Dunai; Anderson
Control and Resistance). The Franco regime’s promotion of tourism brought with it the
well-known “menú del día” (day’s menu) in the 1960s (Afinoguénova), while Spain’s crea-
tive “haute” cuisines born in early democracy participated in the cultural hedonism of the
transition and have become part of a renewed discourse of tourism promotion since the

 DOI: 10.4324/9780367810207-60
 The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion

early twenty-first century. Moreover, as Spain has become a site of immigration, begin-
ning in the 1980s–1990s, rather than emigration, demographics mean that foodscapes and
marketplaces have shifted according to the tastes and practices of migrants and racialized
Spaniards, even if these changes remain marginal to hegemonic representations of Spanish
foodways.
As the editors of this volume note, contemporary Spain is politically vibrant, pluralistic,
resilient, and frequently at the vanguard of artistic and social change. At the same time, as
the previous examples suggest, a dark political legacy and differences in language, class,
and race challenge unified narratives of nation(s) and culture(s). This chapter will show
how food cultural studies can account for the tensions and disconnections produced by gas-
tronomic nation building – gastronationalism – and by constructions of culinary/cultural
heritage in Spain. The chapter will first discuss the critical questions presented by the study
of food texts and then outline how food studies and cultural studies can intersect to offer
new methodologies.
Since the early 2010s food studies in relation to Spain has emerged as a critical approach
that utilizes the tools of literary and cultural analysis to analyze food – in its materiality,
discourses, and practices – as a text. Historian María del Carmen Simón Palmer established
a key foundation for this subfield with her critical culinary and gastronomical bibliog-
raphy, as did María Ángeles Pérez Samper’s early analysis of eighteenth-century recipe
manuscripts. Hispanists have developed this approach further. Ana Gómez Bravo has
explored how foods denoted race, religion, and belonging in the Middle Ages. Her website
“The Converso Cookbook” provides a compelling collection of resources for classroom
use along with her textbook, Food and Culture in the Hispanic World (2017). Carolyn
Nadeau’s Food Matters (2016) offers an extensive analysis of the food practices and mean-
ings represented in Don Quijote. Closer to the period of study of this volume, María Paz
Moreno’s De la página al plato (From Page to Dish; 2012) serves as an overview of modern
cookbooks and culinary writing. Lara Anderson’s Cooking Up the Nation (2013) docu-
ments the construction of a Spanish national cuisine, while her more recent Control and
Resistance (2020) discusses the “talk of food” (Parkhurst Ferguson) during early Franco-
ism. Anna Riera and H. Rosi Song’s A Taste of Barcelona (2019) details that city’s cul-
tures, history, and politics through its cuisine. These monographs are complemented by two
special journal issues: “Writing About Food: Culinary Literature in the Hispanic World”
in the Cincinnati Romance Review (2012), edited by María Paz Moreno; and the issue
“Transhispanic Food Cultural Studies” in the Bulletin of Spanish Studies (2020), edited by
Lara Anderson and myself. Furthermore, the volume edited by Rafael Climent-Espino and
Ana Gómez Bravo discusses how food texts and food concerns span economic, environ-
mental, political, and cultural issues, demonstrating that “food is a junction where diverse
disciplines in the humanities, social and natural sciences, health and nutrition, and medicine
can meet and begin productive dialogues and collaborations” (2). This emerging body of
scholarship strengthens the case for a critical reading of culinary and gastronomical writing
as well as other food texts that offer new perspectives on cultural phenomena related to
nation-building, gender, social class, the environment, migrations, and race.

Food Cultural Studies

In 2004, Bob Ashley, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones, and Ben Taylor first addressed the roles
of food within cultural studies by exploring them in relation to “the complex relationship

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between power structures and various types of human agency” (1). Fabio Parasecoli has
addressed the interconnected disciplines of cultural studies and food studies, highlighting
how they borrow from similar critical apparatuses. Food studies examines food in “its
material, representational, and symbolic aspects” (275), and both fields critique the hier-
archies imposed not only upon food itself, but also upon its consumers, practitioners, and
producers. They also similarly address the negotiations that food engenders with commu-
nities and across cultures relating to aesthetic, moral, and historical values (275–77). As
Anderson and I have observed elsewhere, Iberian and Latin-American articulations of cul-
tural studies have not included food as a cultural text even though it involves lived practices
that, like other cultural products, leave their residue in printed texts. Food is performative
and produces artefacts (Labanyi and Graham 5). Food texts also carry a “sociohistorical
symbolic meaning,” and we can engage with how food and food texts are “intertwined
with various discursive formations,” to acknowledge Abril Trigo’s framing of cultural texts
in relation to Latin American cultural studies (3–4). Yet, until very recently, despite the fact
that food practices are far-reaching and touch on issues of race, social economy, class, and
gender, as well as the environment, medicine, identity, nation-building, and the way that
communities come to understand themselves, food as a cultural text and practice has been
sidelined from serious academic inquiry. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado affirms that even “foun-
dational texts that engage with the very question of cultural practice, like Néstor García
Canclini’s Consumers and Citizens or George Yúdice’s The Expediency of Culture,” ignore
food culture as a category of meaning (“Diana Kennedy” 573–74).
Why is this the case? One could argue that the association of food with women and
domesticity has discouraged serious consideration, even among feminist scholars who con-
tinue to frame the kitchen and food practices as spaces of oppression rather than creativity
(Meah 88). The study of foodwork and foodways has also been hampered by inherited
notions of beauty and value. Jennifer Davis traces how food and taste were treated by
eighteenth-century Western philosophers: Essentially, physical work and a bodily depend-
ence on food negated an individual’s capacity for taste. Both Davis and Krishnendu Ray
outline how Immanuel Kant’s hierarchy of taste in Critique of Judgement (1790) ranks the
gustatory at the bottom (8). In his view, ways of knowing that have to do with the body
and lived experiences, in contrast to thought and thinking, are inferior. Ray stresses the
need to pay attention to theories of taste, aesthetic value, and knowing that open up new
possibilities for considering cooking and thinking, and of understanding food as the hinge
between subjects and objects (xv). To understand food critically and discover what it can
tell us about Spain we must endeavor to think about it and with it, and consider the bodies
that labor in its production, circulation, and consumption.2
What most people prepared and consumed was based largely on subsistence until well
into the twentieth century. Representations of culinary practices have come down to us
in texts from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period; examples include the early
fourteenth-century book of Catalan recipes Llibre de Sent Soví, Rupert de Nola’s Llibre de
Coch (1520), thirteenth-century Arabic manuscript Fudalat-al Hiwan Fi Tayyibat (Best of
Delectable Foods and Dishes from Al-andalus and Al-maghrib), and Francisco Martínez
Montiño’s Arte de Cocina (The Art of Cooking, Pie Making, Pastry Making, and Preserv-
ing; 1611).3 These works chronicled the diets of monarchs and nobles, while literary texts
such as Don Quijote (1605, 1614) and La Lozana andaluza (Portrait of Lozana: The Lusty
Andalusian Woman; 1528) among many others, revealed what commoners consumed
and how their communities thought about food. What most people ate depended upon

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seasonality, hyperlocal foodways, the price of meat, and how religious strictures were nego-
tiated and interpreted (Nadeau; Gómez Bravo “Food, Blood, and a Jewish Raza”). But in
the twentieth century, as more and more of the Spanish population moved from eating for
necessity to exercising more dietary choice, cooking and eating came to signify a conscious
reflection of personal, community, and political identities. Eating and cooking practices
and their representation in text or other media have therefore taken on new relevance for
cultural and political analysis.
As a starting point, Bourdieu’s social theory offers a useful framework for understand-
ing and mapping these meanings created by eating and cooking representations. Because
they are situated within specific social conditions and determined by structures of state,
community, and institutional authority, food texts are part of Bordieu’s “cultural field.” In
Distinction (1979) he demarcates the relationships between social class and food choices or
a lack thereof: taste of luxury and taste of necessity. And in The Logic of Practice (1990),
he provides “a systematic critique of power structures in their material functioning,” espe-
cially as related to how power works in practice (Sánchez Prado “Introduction” 1). Food
practices operate on matrixes of power that shape identities and belonging according to
political interests.
Specific to the cases discussed in this chapter, one that represents foodways in Spain as
participating in a transnational heritage construct and another coherent with a Spanish
nationalist agenda, the following concepts are also useful. Recall that Anderson shows that
the construction of a Spanish national cuisine was one that unified regions and territories
via the textual representation of Spain’s regional diversity. Eric Storm argues further that
Spain’s domestic sphere – its cuisine and architecture – was nationalized between the years
of 1890 and 1930 as an example of the power of “banal” forms of nationalism in contrib-
uting to the “success of the nation-state” as the “hegemonic form of statehood over the last
two centuries” (205–8). The creation of the European Union, according to Michaela De
Soucey, has given nation-states new impetus for designating what material goods are spe-
cific to territories and how they should be protected (433). Similar concerns motivated by
territorialization and deterritorialization drive the interests of groups that seek designation/
protection within organizations like UNESCO. Jean-Louis Tornatore explains that heritage
constructs relate to creating new territorialities in a “constant game of territorialization,
deterritorialization and reterritorialization” (344). Whether for the sake of a transnational
territoriality or one belonging to an existing nation-state, both processes and their rep-
resentations of food are politically inflected. Nation-states or groups of them “brand” a
territory and/or their material expression – such as food (Tornatore citing Deleuze and
Guattari 344). De Soucey, in her development of the idea of gastronationalism, further
identifies how nationalist sentiments, demarcated and sustained by national attachments to
food production, distribution, and consumption, “shape the production and marketing of
food” (433). These theories indicate that politics, capital, and territorialization are involved
in contemporary understandings of food identities and how their representations circulate
and gain support.

A Case Study: Reading the Mediterranean Diet

Eugenia Afinoguénova identifies the rise of the “slow food” movement and the inclusion
of “Gastronomic Meal of the French,” by UNESCO among the lists of Intangible Cul-
tural Heritage of Humanity in 2011 as two examples of how public/private associations to

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achieve UNESCO recognition; they provide models to be followed for Spanish, Catalan,
and other national cuisines. She also notes that the 2016 launch of the Gastro MarcaEs-
paña, which elicited wide public participation, has been coopted for political purposes
and can now be interpreted as an expression of “banal nationalism” (515). By contrast,
the “Mediterranean Diet” framework initially seems to offer a compelling alternative for
understanding food and Spain in ways that may avoid the political thorns of other contem-
porary gastronational projects.4
Foodways existing in Spain form part of UNESCO’s 2013 recognition of the “Mediter-
ranean Diet” as an example of intangible cultural heritage, the articulation of a transna-
tional cuisine that involves a number of nation-states surrounding the Mediterranean Sea
that share not only a landscape but also distinctive agricultural products and practices. To
be designated as intangible cultural heritage, the element must

(1) be recognized by communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals as part of

their cultural heritage, (2) be transmitted from generation to generation and be con-
stantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their
interaction with nature and their history and (3) provide them with a sense of identity
and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity.
(“Report” 5)

It is important to question why and how cultural institutions legitimize certain foods and
practices because, once these are officially awarded the status of intangible cultural heritage
and protected as such, they acquire a specific cultural capital that can be mobilized in favor
of pursuing the interests of governments and states, hegemonic groups within those states,
and transnational capital.
According to the UNESCO nomination packet, the “Mediterranean Diet” involves
“skills, knowledge, rituals, symbols and traditions, ranging from the landscape to the table,
which in the Mediterranean basin concern the crops, harvesting, picking, fishing, animal
husbandry, conservation, processing, cooking, and particularly sharing and consuming the
cuisine” (“Nomination” 6). Further, the nomination materials indicate that at the table
“the spoken word plays a major role in describing, transmitting, enjoying and celebrating
the element [the Mediterranean Diet]” (6). The Barcelona-based Fundación Dieta Medi-
terránea promotes an updated version of the diet and identifies ten basic characteristics:
The use of olive oil as the primary fat; eating five servings of fruit, vegetables, legumes,
or nuts per day; consuming grain-based carbohydrates for energy; minimal processing of
foodstuffs; the daily consumption of dairy products, preferably in the form of yogurt and
cheese; a moderate intake of red meat, preferably within stews or other recipes; moderate
consumption of eggs and abundant consumption of fish; water as the “beverage par excel-
lence,” with wine taken in moderation with meals; fruit for desserts; and keeping physically
fit (Fundación).
Participating nation-states include Cyprus, Croatia, Spain, Greece, Italy, Morocco, and
Portugal; communities in these nation-states – specific towns and regional capitals – “found
their identity and continuity in great part on the collective and ancestral experience of
the Mediterranean Diet,” according to the nomination packet. Spain’s participation in the
Mediterranean Diet designation involves Soria as its “emblematic community” (“Nomina-
tion” 2). With a relatively small population of 39,987 in 2011, the nomination was sup-
ported by three local organizations: The Fundación Científica Caja Rural, the Federación

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Provincial de Asociaciones de Vecinos de Soria, and the Asociación de Amas de Casa,

among others (21). It was also supported by the Spanish state (10), in addition to non-profit
organizations like the aforementioned Fundación Dieta Mediterránea that are committed
to promoting research on the diet and safeguarding its “ancient heritage” and its practition-
ers – essentially authenticating the diet as belonging to the Mediterranean world in contrast
to its global promotion as a way of eating conducive to good health and longevity (Fun-
dación).5 Although it may seem incongruous that Soria would represent Spain’s participa-
tion in the Mediterranean Diet given its north-central location, distance from the sea, and
traditional diet distinct from communities located directly on the water, the Mediterranean
Diet construct and nomination participates in historian Fernand Braudel’s broad concep-
tion of the Mediterranean. He established the geophysical, environmental, and human ele-
ments of the Mediterranean world in foundational ways that have contributed to the idea
of the Mediterranean as a shared ecosystem that has nurtured foodways and food practices
in common.6
Although the previously mentioned sources seen to indicate a straightforward descrip-
tion of food practices in existence for many thousands of years, a number of features in
the UNESCO nomination packet stand out for the explicit ways in which they tie con-
temporary agricultural, culinary, and gastronomical features to the past. For example, the
packet includes quotations from Classical writers to connect contemporary practices to
those existing in antiquity. First, they specify that the entire concept of the Mediterranean
Diet is derived the from the classical Greek word díaita, or lifestyle (“Nomination” 6).
Second, in describing the commensality that serves as a defining characteristic of the diet,
nomination authors cite Greek philosopher Plutarch: “ ‘We do not sit at the table to eat, but
to eat together’ (Plutarch, s. I-II)” (7). They further elaborate that sharing a meal at a table
exists as a “ ‘quasi-religious’ ritual moment – both intense and solemn, more or less explicit
but always felt – of social exchange and communication, affirmation and ‘rebuilding’ of the
family, the group or the community, its values, history, environment, symbols, beliefs, and
way of life. It is an inherited secular value” (7). In an additional reference to the Roman
poet Juvenal, “mens sana in corpore sano” (S. I-II), the nomination ascribes cultural func-
tions to the diet “based on physical and emotional well-being and creativity” (7). These
references indicate that practices of sociability and commensality have endured across this
landscape for millennia, resisting the encroachment of differing values and dynamics, in
particular modernity.
These references to Classical writers and history evoke “pastness” and elide specific
historical, economic, and political contextualization, a gesture that Justin Crumbaugh
has identified as part of heritage-making process. Despite its associations with foodways
detailed in ancient Greek and Roman texts as well as Arabic ones (which the nominating
packet remarkably does not cite), Monica Truninger and Dulce Freire’s study shows that
the concept of the diet was a construct born from nineteenth-century dynamics that juxta-
posed the advanced, urban and industrial northern Europe with the backward, rural, and
agricultural south (193–4). The diet was assembled and appropriated by epistemic com-
munities in nutrition and the health sciences in the mid-twentieth century, who legitimized
it as a healthy plant-based way of eating for urban dwellers (193–4).7 Key actors in the
designation and promotion of the diet were not from the Mediterranean world, but from
North America. In this sense, the diet itself clearly exists as an “invented tradition.” As an
invention, the Mediterranean Diet mythologizes a commensality that rural communities
rarely attained in practice due to differing mealtimes, domestic routines, or other work

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activities. Instead, the ideal represented by the diet reflects middle-class expectations of
proper and wholesome meals (Truninger and Freire 199). This fact, along with ideas of
rural food heritages, suggests that the Mediterranean Diet relates more to stereotypes about
rural spaces, which became more pervasive and significant as waves of country dwellers
migrated to urban areas in different periods of the twentieth century (199).
Additionally, while the nomination stresses that the Mediterranean Diet was practiced
for millennia by participating communities, it glosses over the fact that its components were
based largely on subsistence and need. This reality is acknowledged indirectly at best, as
in the following statement about the diet’s transmission: “For centuries, our communities
have internalized the transmission of the element as a gesture of survival for their way of
life and identity. The knowledge and practices of the element are vital to transmitting the
heritage from generation to generation” (9). And yet it is well known how pervasive hunger
impacted the nutrition of rural Mediterranean populations well into the twentieth century.
Food scarcity and hardship were regular features in the lives of people who ate this way
(Truninger and Freire 194). The ideas of rural eating embodied in the conceptualization of
the Mediterranean Diet can therefore be understood as Romantic constructs of idealized
lifestyles that mask nutritional deficiencies.
The role played by tourism is also made explicit in the nominating packet. In one sense,
this indicates the existence of a tourism market to which Mediterranean food heritage can
be offered as an appealing product enhanced by the UNESCO designation. In this way, the
diet functions as heritage: A commodified way of life deployed within the tourism industry
as both an economic enterprise and a cultural paradigm (Crumbaugh 86). At the same time,
this specific construction of heritage also serves to protect autochthonous areas and prac-
tices from outside influence. It becomes an “an instrument of local . . . self-understanding”
(86) that extends throughout the identified community, its nation-state, and transnationally
to include the communities who participate in the designation.
As a final point, I would like to consider how the nomination packet recognizes difference.
One of the criteria for UNESCO designation is how the intangible cultural element aligns
with “international human rights instruments or with the requirement of mutual respect
among communities, groups and individuals, or with sustainable development” (“Nomina-
tion” 7). The nominators emphasize how innate characteristics of “intra- and intercultural
social practices” can promote respect for cultural diversity. They also state that,

the Mediterranean Diet, because of its transversality, is the paradigm for biological,
environmental and cultural diversity. Moreover, this element grew, developed and
thrived thanks to exchanges, recognition and respect for the Other, the acceptation
and integration of neighbours’ knowledge and know-how or of contributions from
beyond the basin. The element draws as much from ancestral tradition as from per-
manent innovations, given that creativity is one of its distinctive and essential traits.
(7)

On the one hand, studies abound that evaluate the Mediterranean Diet as a sustainable
practice, one that connects nutrition, biodiversity, and local food production (Burlingame
2285). Or, as Helen Macbeth and F. Xavier Medina propose, the diet serves as a con-
struct that promotes a “holistic biosocial approach towards achieving food sustainability
through culture” (142). Nutritionists, public health scholars, and sociologists are certainly
exploring this aspect of the diet with energy and verve. On the other hand – and taking

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a longer view – it is jarring to hear new ingredients, practices, and technology described
as “creativity” or “recognition of the Other” when the violent dynamics of colonialism
and conquest are what produced the most significant modern shift in European foodways,
namely the Columbian exchange.8 Such vague allusions to “creativity” and neighborli-
ness mask the violence inherent in importing products by force and obfuscate how these
dynamics may extend in recent times toward “others” outside or within the already deline-
ated landscape of the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean Diet is certainly a transnational
concept, but a key characteristic of the states that support it today is the demographic
impact of migration: A high point in 2015 showed 1,032,408 migrants and refugees arriv-
ing in Spain, Italy, Greece, and Malta alone.9 A valid question would be to consider if
the supporters of this designation are hoping, in part, for a way to ward off not only the
globalized influence of industrial farming and highly processed ingredients but also how
people from other places – citizens and noncitizens alike – further threaten rural ways of
life that twentieth-century modernization processes have already disrupted.
Anthropologists Marcelo Álvarez and F. Xavier Medina have discussed the emergence of
two tendencies regarding the creation of cultural patrimony, both linked to the democra-
tization of society and the expansion of civil rights. The first tendency has encouraged cul-
tural, ethnic, and religious minorities to activate patrimony-designating processes in order
to affirm a collective identity and resist invisibility, discrimination, and social exclusion
(14). The second relates to the example under analysis: Inspired by global politics and inter-
national organizations like UNESCO, nation-states have sought to involve new constituen-
cies, social groups, and practices that were previously excluded from patrimony-building
exercises (14–15). In these scenarios, stakeholders come together to create an institutional
arena to “operationalize” a given cultural element and then negotiate to finally arrive at
consensus about its meanings (15). And yet, power and politics are central to the construc-
tion of both the arena and the negotiations that take place.
The case of Peru’s search for UNESCO designation for its food gives additional evi-
dence for how complicated such negotiations can be. Raúl Matta’s work has revealed that
“despite a discursive emphasis on cultural continuity and intercultural dialogue, food incur-
sions into the UNESCO intangible cultural paradigm operate more as an elite-driven com-
petitive global concept than as a tool for cultural safeguarding and inclusive development”
(338). Efforts to recognize foodwork and foodways as culturally significant are susceptible
to ideologically driven agendas. For example, one Peruvian anthropologist demurred when
approached about participating in Peru’s proposal, stating that she did not wish to be
affiliated with a process that was at its heart an “invention of tradition” (344). Further,
Matta demonstrates that elite stakeholders often want the foodways of a particular place
to be represented to achieve specific aims that have little to do with safeguarding cultural
practices, for example, tourism, greater agricultural development, or a consolidation of
gastronationalist concerns under a single banner or brand.10
Ultimately, creating heritage is a folkloric practice. Strongly aligned with nineteenth-
century nationalist political movements, folklore seeks to search for and identify the
authentic in order to satisfy “a longing for an escape from modernity” (Bendix 7). Folklore
evolved into “intangible cultural heritage” when it began to involve the contexts and tools
of cultural practices in addition to their expression (Álvarez 32–35). While “folklorization”
encourages reevaluating cultural practices by promoting participation and stimulating feel-
ings of pride, connection, and identification among community members (Hafstein 128), it
also constructs a hierarchy defining those with a legitimate, political claim to authenticity.

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Despite the significant scholarship urging researchers and stakeholders to adopt a criti-
cal stance toward the concept and its application, authenticity has become a normative
value, both in heritage schemes generally and in UNESCO’s definition of intangible culture
(Gfeller 760). Through these processes, the power and politics behind identifying “authen-
tic” food and food practices as legitimate markers of culinary and gastronomical identities
turns them into another arena through which insiders and outsiders are distinguished.

Food Practices and Representation

As a discipline, food cultural studies can guide scholars toward thinking about how and
why certain food practices acquire institutional legitimacy and, in doing so, interrogate
the power structures that inevitably surround the concept of “representative foods.” Some
representations and circulations of food culture open new avenues of recognition or cel-
ebration for cultures that have been rendered invisible or marginal, for example, Mexico’s
Michoacán paradigm or traditional Mexican cuisine rooted in ancestral, ongoing commu-
nity culture.11 Others, however, further the circulation of food and food cultures as another
example of commodification in the neoliberal cultural marketplace. A salient example of the
latter in relation to Spain is the website that Afinoguénova highlights, Gastro MarcaEspaña
(Gastro Brand Spain), a project of the Real Academia de Gastronomía (Royal Academy of
Gastronomy) supported by the Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y Cooperación (Ministry
of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation), el Ministerio de Agricultura, Alimentación y Medio
Ambiente (Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment), ICEX España Exportación
e Inversiones (ICEX Spain Exports and Investments, a state entity promoting business and
internationalization), and the Cámara de Comercio de España (Spanish Chamber of Com-
merce). Creators of this project have indicated that their goal is to place “our country at the
forefront of the global culinary scene” (Asociacíon, “General Criteria”) where “culinary
scene” must be understood as a global marketplace. They allude to culture, tradition, and
quality of life as elements of gastronomy that have been “siempre vinculada[s] a los atribu-
tos más fuertes de la imagen de España” (“always linked to the most salient attributes of
the image of Spain”) without mentioning specific details about those elements or indicating
which parts of Spanish society, for reasons of social class, education, or insider status, have
enjoyed access to them. Further, this vision of what it means to eat in Spain engages the
ideals of eating healthily, eschewing “unhealthy” and “alien” practices of eating alone or in
front of the television and valuing instead the tradition of dining with family or friends. This
“global vision” of Spanish gastronomy, with references to the commensality and healthful-
ness associated with the Mediterranean Diet, is accompanied by a lengthy description of
criteria for “Innovation and Creativity” that frames the global reputation of contemporary
Spanish chefs as an integral part of Spanish gastronomical identity. While offering neither
a scholarly nor a particularly nuanced reflection, this website is still revealing. It gestures
weakly toward history and tradition while emphasizing sociability and healthfulness. And,
just like UNESCO designations on intangible culture that prioritize the interests of elite
stakeholders, this text tells a neatly packaged story of food identity without apparent con-
flicts or tensions. The languages available for reading the website – Spanish, English, and
Chinese – suggest an imagined audience of outsiders with little knowledge of the country’s
complexities or political nuances (Asociación).12
By contrast, a critical study of food would make visible how the practices of every-
day life – individual and collective food choices and construction of food identities – only

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tangentially intersect with how prevailing paradigms represent contemporary Spanish food
cultures. One key example, thus far radically understudied, is the area of migrant food-
ways, which are completely absent from both the Mediterranean Diet construct and Gastro
MarcaEspaña. Anderson has explored multicultural food identities in Spain by examining
how official discourses and cultural texts represent immigrant foodways, finding a fun-
damental tension between homogenization and disruption. Enric Bou has also looked at
recent representations of migrants’ everyday practices and their relationship to Spanish
foodways, arguing that migration has created new spaces of communication and coexist-
ence in which food is connected to social transformation (681). These contributions should
become part of a broader investigation of the reasons why certain food practices and cul-
tures are visible while others remain out of sight. If the presence of immigrant protagonists
in movies and literary texts has encouraged audiences to reflect on and imagine a more
heterogenous identity for twenty-first–century Spain (Donovan 370), at what point will
such reflection also extend toward its foodways?
To conclude, this chapter presents food cultural studies as a new approach to under-
standing the cultures and contexts of Spain, both in contemporary times and in the past.
By treating the construction of two paradigms – the transnational Mediterranean Diet
and one manifestation of gastronationalism, Gastro MarcaEspaña – scholars and cultural
practitioners can better understand how food writing and food texts make and communi-
cate meaning and how they are mediated by power. To paraphrase Fabio Parasecoli, food
and ingestion – along with choice, preparation, and excretion – are intrinsically part of
hegemonic struggles (279). What gets represented and what circulates as a legitimate or
legitimized representation of Spanish foodways is part of this struggle. All too often the
dominant, highly visible paradigms that frame food and food identities are accepted uncriti-
cally. Focusing on food – a practice in which all humans engage and through which they
participate in their communities and families – through a critical lens enables us to see and
understand its role in the (re) creation and dissemination of specific, and often contradic-
tory, narratives of Spain.

Acknowledgments
Thanks to Martin Repinecz for sharing sources for migration data, and also to the members
of the fall 2020 seminar at the University of San Diego on Food and Politics in Spain whose
insights and observations helped me think through the motivating questions of this chapter.

Notes
1 Pierre Bourdieu associates the “taste for necessity” with the working class. It is distinct from
middle-class practices (“taste of luxury”) defined by striving to distance oneself from those below
and to aspire to items or practices of the privileged (Distinction 372). See Nadeau on the food
practices of the peasantry since early modernity; Idelfons Cerdà offers clear details about the
food purchasing power and kitchens of Barcelona’s working class in Teoría de la construcción de
ciudades (Theory of the Construction of Cities; 1859). See also Isabel Segura Soriano, Cuines de
Barcelona (Barcelona Kitchens; 2018).
2 Regarding food studies terminology: “Foodway” refers to the eating habits and culinary practices
of a community, in addition to a group’s “beliefs and behavior” about food production, distri-
bution, and consumption (Counihan 2). “Foodscape” acknowledges food’s spatiality and how
people, groups, and institutions interact with food items (Wenzer 83–4). “Foodwork” references
the labor involved in making meals (See Ingram, Women’s Work).

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3 See translations and critical editions of these foundational works by Manuela Marín (Relieves
de las mesas, acerca de las delicias de las comida y los diferentes platos, 2007), Nawal Nasrallah
(Best of Delectable Foods and Dishes from Al-andalus and Al-maghrib, 2021), and Nadeau (The
Art of Cooking, Pie Making, Pastry Making, and Preserving: Arte de cocina, pastelería, vizcoche-
ría y conservería, 2023).
4 Michaela DeSoucey develops the concept of gastronationalism as “the ways in which food pro-
duction, distribution, and consumption can demarcate and sustain the emotive power of national
attachment” in addition to how “nationalist sentiments . . . shape the production and marketing
of food” (432).
5 The “Consent of Communities” document that accompanies the nomination includes letters of
support from organizations that represent Spain as a whole, including the Asociación Academia
Española de Nutrición y Ciencias de la Alimentación (Association of the Spanish Academy of
Nutrition and Food Science; 1), the Consejo de Patriomonio Histórico (Counsel on Historical
Patrimony) within the Ministerio de Cultura (Culture Ministry; 33), and the collective of Spain’s
“Centros UNESCO” (63). It also includes support from various Ayuntamientos (City Halls) from
municipalities in Jaén, around Catalonia and surrounding Soria. Commercial support comes from
national associations representing fish and meat vendors in addition to market systems in Madrid,
Barcelona, Córdoba, Sevilla, and Las Palmas. Overall, however, the project moved forth with
significant support from organizations and stakeholders located in Catalonia, specifically the Fun-
dación Dieta Mediterránea (Mediterranean Diet Foundation), which highlights a key political
divide where the use of the identifier “Mediterranean” allows some groups to avoid an association
with the Spanish state.
6 See also Sabores del Mediterráneo. Aportaciones para promover un patrimonio alimentario
común, edited by Jesús Contreras, Antoni Riera, and Xavier Medina (2005).
7 Authors cite three major studies: Rockefeller Foundation (1948), Ancel Keys’ “Seven Countries
Study” (1950s) and the EURATOM study (1963).
8 See Earle’s The Body of the Conquistador (2012) and Laudan’s Cuisine and Empire (2013).
9 Countries participating in UNESCO’s Mediterranean Diet designation are tracked under the
Mediterranean and South Eastern Europe situation areas identified by the United Nations’ High
Commissioner for Refugees website: data2.unhcr.org/en/situations.
10 Jean-Louis Tornatore, writing about the 2010 designation of the “Gastronomic meal of the
French,” outlines how “politics informs the entire process” (343).
11 See UNESCO, “Traditional Mexican cuisine – ancestral, ongoing community culture, the Micho-
acán paradigm.”
12 At the time of publication, the website Gastro MarcaEspaña no longer exists. Instead, references to
it and a summary of its original contents live on the homepage of the Cámara de Comercio de España
(www.camara.es/gastro-marcaespana-una-web-para-poner-en-valor-la-gastronomia-espanola-
en-el-mundo).

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 54
IBERIA AND THE AMERICAS
Hispanism and Its (Dis)Encounters

Diana Arbaiza

Speaking at an event in October of 2021, Pablo Casado, leader at that time of the Spanish
Partido Popular (Popular Party or PP), concluded as follows:

Desde España no tenemos que pedir perdón, pero tenemos que dar las gracias a una
historia común que ha sido, en mi opinión, el mayor hito de la humanidad después de
Roma: La Hispanidad, a ambos lados del Atlántico. Gracias a México desde España
y con el gran orgullo de sentirnos una nación hermana. (“Mesa” 55:14)
From Spain, we do not have to ask for forgiveness, but we have to thank a com-
mon history, which has been, in my opinion, the biggest milestone of humanity after
Rome: La Hispanidad, on both sides of the Atlantic. Thanks to Mexico from Spain
and with the great pride of feeling that we are sister nations.1

Casado has often exalted La Hispanidad in a triumphalist manner, but on this particular
occasion he praised it in response to a contentious political climate. A few days earlier, the
president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, had criticized Pope Francis for
having recognized “the mistakes from the past” in a letter to Mexico, while José María
Aznar, a previous Spanish president, ridiculed the Mexican leader Andrés Manuel López
Obrador for his repeated requests that Spain acknowledge the violence of colonization.
With his pronouncement, Casado insisted on his colleagues’ denial of historical revisionism
but invoked La Hispanidad as a mollifying discourse. Yet the concept of La Hispanidad
would more likely raise new tensions while intensifying existing ones.
Such appeals to a shared transatlantic identity, and the contentions around them, are
hardly new. From the late 19th century various interpretations of the common bonds that
supposedly unite Spain and Latin America have periodically resurfaced, with the goal of
stimulating transatlantic relations and providing Spanish cohesion. Iberian Hispanism, the
movement of transatlantic rapprochement that emerged during the Restoration, consti-
tuted for some decades a big tent for conservative and liberals, though it was by no means
exempt from many controversies. La Hispanidad, a reactionary derivation of Hispanism
forged between the 1920s and 1930s, would be even more polarizing: The notion that the
Spanish-speaking countries constituted a spiritual and cultural community, La Hispanidad,

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as the legacy of Spanish colonialism, attracted traditionalists, Catholics and fascists but
alienated the Spanish and the Latin American left. In recent years, the notion of La Hispani-
dad as the spiritual and cultural community of the Spanish-speaking nations has once again
pervaded Spanish public discourse, spreading beyond the typical state interpellations on
October 12 (Spain’s national day), to become a recurrent staple in political speech. I see this
recycling of La Hispanidad as a conscious way with which the far-right and the self-described
“moderate” right are simultaneously constructing and exacerbating a radicalized electorate
in Spain. One wonders whether the right genuinely imagines that La Hispanidad could help
to improve Spain’s image in Latin America or whether they risk jeopardizing transatlantic
relations for the sake of maintaining an internal nationalistic discourse. While Latin Ameri-
can conservatives have intermittently engaged in Hispanist discourse, they have typically
done so to instrumentalize this notion for their own nation-building purposes, often diverg-
ing from how the idea was conceived in Spain. Those discrepancies are logical: Departing
already from a reductive imagination of Spain as a singular nation, the neo-imperialistic
fantasy of La Hispanidad not only obliterates the diversity and multiculturalism of the
societies that it supposedly comprises, but its rhetoric of horizontal sisterhood with Latin
America is betrayed by its perpetual insistence on Spain as the “Madre Patria” (“Mother
Country”), a frequently used term despite its obvious hierarchical connotations.
Despite the resilience of this discourse, most of these Hispanist appeals unfailingly con-
clude in dead ends, weighed down by their contradictions and the incompatibility of the
various agendas they mobilize. In this chapter I will explore the key dynamics underly-
ing aspirations of transnational union throughout the 20th century. I will not provide an
exhaustive vision of each Hispanist articulation2 but rather describe a set of latent para-
doxes and tensions that have constantly framed Spanish rapprochements to Latin America
as they evolved. From the very inception of the movement, the entanglement of economic
and cultural interests in Hispanism highlighted antagonistic conceptions around identitar-
ian narratives and capitalist modernity. This generated distrust across the Atlantic that con-
tinues to this day. Furthermore, while Iberian Hispanism originated as a fairly transversal
movement, with the rise of fascism in the 1930s, it became increasingly ideologized and
revealed many opposing imaginings of the relationship between Latin America and Spain.
The current return to such radical usage of La Hispanidad displays quite clearly its ultimate
and most essential contradiction, which is the instrumentalization of nationalistic discourse
for the purpose of transatlantic rapprochement.

Economic and Cultural Tensions in Early 20th-Century Hispanism

Iberian Hispanism, the movement from which La Hispanidad was derived, can be traced
back to at least the last quarter of the 19th century. A broad and diverse phenomenon,
Hispanism attracted intellectuals, entrepreneurs and politicians who professed their belief
that the Spanish-speaking world constituted a distinct cultural unity, a unity that ought
to strengthen their common bonds. In a pioneering study, Fredrick Pike explained that
as the movement attracted liberals and conservatives, Hispanists were quite divided on
fundamental issues (1), a differentiation later elaborated by Isidro Sepúlveda Múñoz, who
distinguished three branches of Hispanism: The early Restoration, progressive or liberal
Hispanism and the reactionary derivation La Hispanidad. Most studies have indicated the
imperialist nostalgia of this movement and its relationship with Spanish nationalism, but as
I have argued elsewhere, Hispanism could also be seen as a response to Spain’s peripheral

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position within global capitalism and simultaneously as a gambit for economic and cultural
reconquest (Arbaiza).
Even before the defeat of 1898 (also referred to as “the disaster”), Spanish entrepreneurs
and intellectuals tried to create a new relationship with the country’s former American colo-
nies, one based on culture and commerce rather than territorial domination. By the early
20th century, Hispanists endorsed transatlantic commerce by appealing to racial solidarity
while promoting the notion of “Hispanic idealism,” an allegedly antimaterialistic ethos in
contrast to Anglo-Saxon materialism. To develop the concept of Hispanic idealism, Iberian
Hispanists reappropriated works by Latin American authors such as Juan Zorrilla de San
Martín, José Enrique Rodó and Rubén Darío, who denounced U.S. imperialistic aspirations
and self-identified against the purported Anglo-Saxon commercial character. Within this nar-
rative, Iberian Hispanists presented Spain’s alleged ineptitude at both commerce and modern
colonialism as a virtue rather than a liability, thereby explaining away the country’s marginal
status in relationship to European modernity. Nonetheless, the fact that Hispanism was also
mobilized as a strategic instrument to further economic ties to Latin America rendered the
movement a site of intense debate about how to harmonize commercial and moral interests.
During the first decades of the 20th century, a series of progressive Hispanists con-
nected to the University of Oviedo tried to reconcile cultural and economic initiatives in
the transatlantic rapprochement, describing one sphere as reinforcing the other. Progressive
Hispanists were influenced by economic Krausism, an approach to economics derived from
the idealist Krausist philosophical school that argued that chrematistic activities (those
involving wealth accumulation) should be guided by the pursuit of an ideal, common good
rather than self-interest. Intellectuals such as Rafael Altamira and Adolfo Posada believed
that transatlantic commerce embodied this transcendent good, since a protectionist front
within members of the “Hispanic race,” excluding trade with other nations, would serve to
protect the “common family” from foreign interferences (Arbaiza 116–26). Thus, Altamira
and Posada maintained links with Catalan and Basque Hispanists interested in expanding
commerce with Latin America.3 While entrepreneurs from the Catalan and Basque cir-
cles depicted trade as the foundation to consolidate a Hispanic common culture, Altamira
argued that the basis of Hispanic identification ought to come from intellectual exchange
and historiographical recovery of Spain’s “imprint” on America. Despite their discrepan-
cies, these groups worked to integrate commercial and cultural enterprises, although they
ultimately encountered strong resistance from Latin Americans and other Hispanist groups.
The action of progressive Hispanists produced a significant volume of historiographic
works and dynamized cultural transatlantic exchanges undertaken through the Junta para
Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas or JAE (Board for the Promotion of
Scientific Study and Research)4 and through various cultural institutions created in Latin
America under the stimulus of Rafael Altamira’s trip through the continent between 1909
and 1910. Nonetheless, their results were far from the high expectations with which they
contemplated transatlantic exchange at the beginning of the century. The Latin American
intellectuals soon accused the Spanish of not only attempting to exert symbolic hegemony
but also of concealing economic interests under a rhetoric of linguistic and cultural union.
Fernando Ortiz famously attacked Altamira’s trip, arguing that

Esa cruzada española por la raza y el idioma es una reconquista espiritual . . . encu-
briendo una campana de expansión mercantil . . . es un mimetismo imperialista, . . .
es un egoísmo idealizado, es la triste figura de Sancho con celada y con lanzón. (105)

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The Spanish crusade for the race and the language is a spiritual reconquest . . .
concealing a campaign of mercantile expansion, . . . it is an imperialist mimetism, . . .
it is an idealized selfishness, it is the pathetic figure of a Sancho with helmet and spear.

The criticisms also brewed at home as the Catholic conservative intellectuals distanced
themselves from the values of the moderate bourgeoisie and believed that entrepreneurial
involvement could menace the bonds with Latin America and pollute the Hispanic ascetic
essence. At the recently inaugurated Centro de Cultura Hispanoamericana de Madrid
(Hispano-American Cultural Center), the traditionalist writer Blanca de los Ríos admon-
ished the “utilitarian, mercantile Hispanism,” claiming that this ideology made of the Span-
ish language “un vehículo rápido y seguro de los intereses mercantiles, . . . de la pingüe
conquista de la América latina, fabuloso El Dorado con que sueña la codicia universal”
(“a fast and safe vehicle to further the mercantile interests . . . of the fat conquest of Latin
America, the fabulous El Dorado dreamt of by universal greed;” 16).
As Iberian Hispanism became more ideologically fragmented, the tensions around
the entanglement of economic and cultural interests exacerbated. The controversy in the
1920s between the Spanish economist Luis Olariaga and the Argentinean author Leopoldo
Lugones illustrated that even as Spanish immigration and some Hispanist circles grew in
South America, attempts of commercial expansion under the frame of a Hispanic alliance
were still regarded with suspicion. In Spain, Olariaga was similarly admonished but this
time not by rightist intellectuals such as Blanca de los Ríos but by socialists such as Luis
Araquistáin, who feared that Hispanism was reduced by economic liberals to an asym-
metrical exchange that would ultimately lead to a fracture with Latin America.
Araquistáin viewed the mixture of democrats, economic liberals and authoritarian nation-
alists under the rubric of Hispanism with great concern for the image it projected in Latin
America and for the possibility of ideological contagion. He called to purify “liberal His-
panism” from economic interests (1), thus setting it apart from a conservative Hispanism.
Araquistáin’s articles evinced the polarization within progressive Hispanism and showed
how the Krausist proposal to harmonize the economic and moral spheres constituted an
obsolete framework for both transatlantic rapprochement and unifying Iberian Hispanists.
During the same period in the 1920s, intellectuals and diplomats from various currents
within the Spanish right-wing ranks, such as Santiago Magariños, José Antonio Sangróniz
and José María Pemán penned Hispanist works that varied in their protofascist or tradi-
tionalist undertones and in their prioritization of cultural and economic bonds. Despite the
heterogeneity and lack of originality in these conservative programs, progressive Hispan-
ism faltered: In addition to the inherent contradictions enumerated previously, they found
it increasingly challenging to differentiate themselves from right-wing currents as Miguel
Primo de Rivera became more involved in the Hispanist campaign.

La Hispanidad
By the 1930s, progressive Hispanism, as understood by the figures who shaped it at the
beginning of the 20th century, had mostly disintegrated while the radicalization of the right
reached its most defined expression in the emblematic Defensa de la Hispanidad (1934)
by Ramiro de Maeztu, a kind of antiliberal umbrella that appealed to various rightist ide-
ologies. As part of the terminological confusion around transatlantic rapprochement, the
word “Hispanidad” had been used since the early 20th century with multiple meanings.

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Nevertheless, Maeztu’s essay, as well as works by Isidro Gomá, Manuel García Morente
and Zacarías de Vizcarra, gave shape to a specific vision of La Hispanidad as the spiritual
community of the nations colonized by Spain and thus infused with its essential values
before Spain was itself corrupted by the advent of liberalism.
Castile was often regarded by this group as the cradle of La Hispanidad, but Maeztu’s
ultimate push for his conception of La Hispanidad took place in Argentina, where he served
as ambassador between 1928 and 1930. In Buenos Aires not only did he establish contact
with Spanish priests connected to pro-Hispanic circles, such as Zacarías de Vizcarra, but he
also stayed in frequent dialogue with the editorial team of the Argentinean journal La Nueva
República, the flagship of a Catholic nationalism that sympathized with the militaristic val-
ues of Italian fascism. Influences would go back and forth in the coming years: Although it
was apparent that La Hispanidad in Defensa constituted a kind of Spanish “surrogate impe-
rialism” (Hennessy 106), Argentine fascists also appropriated Maeztu and other Spanish
intellectuals’ works on La Hispanidad to create an “Argentine-centric notion of Hispanidad”
and to assert their imperial place in Latin America (Finchelstein 146–9). In the late 1930s
and early 1940s La Hispanidad not only inspired some Catholic scholars and traditionalist
writers throughout the whole Latin America, but it also became one of the foundations of
the right-wing nationalism endorsed by José de la Riva Agüero y Osma in Peru or Laureano
Gómez Castro in Colombia. As Ricardo Pérez Monfort and Rafael Ángel Simón Arce have
studied, La Hispanidad was also integrated as part of the vocabulary of the Falangist move-
ment that emerged in both Mexico (Pérez Monfort) and Puerto Rico (Simón Arce).
One of the paradoxes of Defensa is that despite being instrumentalized by internal and
transnational rightist groups, the text was far from programmatic. It did not provide clear
guidelines for transatlantic cultural or political rapprochement and even Maeztu’s obses-
sive search for a Hispanic economic ideology, a thematic thread that links all his works,
only emerged in a labyrinthine and timid way. A mercurial intellectual, Maeztu advocated
throughout the 1920s that Hispanic nations should develop a “reverential sense of money,”
a belief in the moral possibilities of capitalism, to stimulate their economies and defend
themselves from the Anglo-Saxon threat. As Maeztu’s capitalist reverie crumbled with the
crisis of 1929, he tried to elaborate in Defensa a response to both socialism and economic
liberalism, but he ended up proposing a vague economic utopia in which Catholic values
could inspire a trade animated “by the spirit of Trento” (103) and barely recommending a
protectionist turn for the Hispanic nations to avoid selling the national economy to foreign
hands (200). To some extent, the absence of fixed directions within the stentorian identi-
tarian narrative of La Hispanidad was a key to its success since its malleability allowed
diverse rightist actors across the Atlantic to give this notion its own imprint. The sublima-
tion of race within Defensa also long facilitated Spain’s use of La Hispanidad to justify its
colonial endeavors in Equatorial Guinea or to resist, along with some Latin Americans, the
actors who vindicated the role of indigenous cultures in shaping Latin American culture.
While arguing that La Hispanidad was a spiritual and not an ethnic community, Defensa
enhanced the widely diffused claim that Spain was free from racial thought. But as Joshua
Goode studies, the concept of mestizaje was as racist as the politics of racial exclusion, since
the notion of “fusion” still entailed a rigid hierarchy between groups (14), a contradiction
displayed by Maeztu who affirmed the irrelevance of race for Spaniards (15–16) yet pro-
claimed the salvation of “backward races” within Hispanidad (8).
During the first years of the dictatorship, the Francoist regime capitalized on the mal-
leability of La Hispanidad to use the term as an instrument of foreign policy as well as a

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nationalist narrative that exalted the regime’s values. The first problem the regime faced
was how to transform Maeztu’s vision into a tangible state program. Ultimately, they
made only slight deviations from the existing frameworks, although they subordinated
the “scientific orientation” of such institutions to further legitimize themselves (Delgado
Gómez-Escalonilla 245). “Voces de la Hispanidad,” the conference organized in 1940 and
broadcast in Latin America by Radio Nacional de España, showcased that the regime held a
wide range of cultural, political, economic and philosophical goals but framed them within
the Francoist monolithic vision of La Hispanidad. The desire of the dictatorship to monop-
olize the Spanish rapprochement towards Latin America was exemplified by the creation
later that year of the “Council of la Hispanidad,” a state institution that aimed to silence
other Hispanist associations. Naturally, some of the Hispanist activity during the first years
of the regime could not avoid reflecting discrepancies between the different factions assimi-
lated by Francoism, though the primacy of a falangist undertone in the regime’s Hispanist
discourse would soon form a key obstacle in Latin America.
If in the past, Latin Americans had criticized Spanish rapprochement as a form of cultural
and/or economic neoimperialism, now anti-fascist groups, composed of Latin Americans
as well as Spanish republicans in exile, forged a new fierce opposition to La Hispanidad.
As Sebastiaan Faber examined in Exile and Cultural Hegemony (2002), the leftist Spanish
intellectuals in exile sometimes exhibited a contradictory position, proclaiming progres-
sive views but still envisioning Latin America as their sole remaining sphere in which they
might exert cultural hegemony. Nonetheless, the republican exiles attempted to distinguish
the allegedly horizontal relation they sought with their Latin American counterparts from
the neoimperialist and fascist designs concealed under the notion of La Hispanidad. As the
Spanish author in Mexico Francisco Carmona Nenclares put it:

La Hispanidad . . . sería la reivindicación de Ibero-América para España. Pero no

para cualquier España sino para la España teocrática-falangista. . . . Reivindicación
espiritual, en principio; reivindicación material en cuando los factores materiales sean
propicios. España se autodeclara Imperio y reclama su ex Imperio. (51)
La Hispanidad . . . would be the reconquest of Ibero-America for Spain. And not
just for any Spain, but for the theocratic and falangist Spain. . . . It is a spiritual recon-
quest in principle, but it will be a material reconquest as soon as the international
conditions allow it. Spain declares herself an Empire and demands her ex-Empire.

Statements such as Carmona’s proliferated not only in the journals of the exile community
in the region but also in the Spanish-American leftist press, highlighting two obvious points:
On the one hand, the complexity of invoking a discourse of recalcitrant nationalism as an
instrument of transnational rapprochement. On the other hand, if La Hispanidad already
implied a violent ideological imposition in Spain, it would hardly find immediate accept-
ance in other national contexts in which there were parallel ideological battles between
left and right-wing groups. While some of the Latin American right was willing to disre-
gard the neoimperialistic essence of La Hispanidad to reappropriate it for a Catholic and
authoritarian ideal that rendered the indigenous presence invisible, the Latin American left
was increasingly returning to Panamericanist positions, emphasizing the particular circum-
stances of their societies and in some cases even including an indigenist vindication.
Interest in La Hispanidad declined in Latin America after the defeat of the Axis Alliance.
A more tempered, less fascist version of La Hispanidad offered by Francoist institutions

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in Latin America from the mid-1940s onwards not only failed to be convincing, but for a
significant part of the Latin American right, the move to deepen the association with Spain
was also not practical. The modest activities that the Consejo de la Hispanidad undertook
in the late 1940s revealed that Spain lacked the means to compete with Washington’s Pan-
americanism. As Lorenzo Delgado has rightfully noted, in the new political map after the
Second World War, most Latin American republics favored a continental positioning versus
a transatlantic alliance with Spain: While the left distanced itself from Francoist Spain,
the Latin American right began to consider that economic interests with Washington con-
stituted a more tangible element than the vague “spiritual interests” that La Hispanidad
invoked (Lorenzo Delgado 301). Certainly the Francoist regime strove to increase economic
bonds under the cultural and political action taken in the name of La Hispanidad, but in
practice, the Spanish state was unable to rival the commercial activity that the United States
would spread across the region. The Hispanist institutions and publications created by the
regime would not disappear, but its original aspirations were drastically curtailed in the
following decades, becoming a mere vehicle for the regime’s self-legitimization than a true
instrument for transatlantic influence.

Transitioning to New Relations

In May of 1976, King Juan Carlos I visited the Dominican Republic, making him the first
Spanish monarch to make an official trip to Latin America. Joaquín Balaguer, the presi-
dent of the Dominican Republic and former associate of dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo,
praised the common bonds that united the two nations, sentiments that Juan Carlos echoed
while calling for the Caribbean nation to help organize the Third Ibero-American Exhibi-
tion in Spain as part of the celebrations of the 5th Centennial. Juan Carlos concluded his
speech by stating that he would become “patrocinador de vuestro esfuerzo y portavoz de
vuestro espíritu” (“sponsor of your effort and spokesman for your spirit”), yet the 1992 cel-
ebrations in Spain were not conceived to showcase a collective of nations but rather to pre-
sent Spain as a modern country that was historically bound to become the natural mediator
between Europe and Latin America. In a recent review of the “Spanish ’92,” Manuel Pala-
cio commented that from a contemporary perspective there was a surprising lack of pro-
test and criticism within Spain around the commercialization of culture or the absence of
indigenous voices in the historical reconstruction of the 500th anniversary (8). Indeed, the
reaction was not impressive, though some intellectuals, such as Eduardo Subirats, did not
hesitate to connect the nationalist instrumentalization of the celebrations of the 5th Centen-
nial with “ideario protofascista de la hispanidad” (“the protofascist idearium of La Hispa-
nidad”; 15). From the Latin American side, leftist intellectuals highlighted, during the years
leading to the Centennial, the need to reinterpret the historical narrative of the “Encounter”
and to analyze the contemporary Latin American situation as a consequence of a repeated
plundering initiated since the Spanish colonization began (Dieterich). Yet the Latin Ameri-
can left faced with openness the possibility of strengthening relations with post-Franco
Spain. As Eduardo Galeano himself explained, against the “conservative, fascist Hispani-
dad,” they were eager to build “another Hispanidad,” a democratic Hispanidad that could
open “espacios de encuentro y de reencuentro, de descubrimiento y de redescubrimiento,
entre España y América, para que juntas digan y caminen” (“spaces for encountering and
reencountering, for discovery and rediscovery, between Spain and America, so together
they might speak and march together”; 324). The Spanish celebrations did not particularly

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emphasize the bidirectionality of cultural influence as these authors hoped, but nonetheless,
much of the Latin American intellectual left still imagined a positive potential for Spain’s
transatlantic role. Not only were they seduced by the image of a democratic Spain but,
outraged by President Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, they were ready to embrace the idea
of transatlantic solidarity.
In reality, the model of economic modernization and memory politics – or better, an
absence of memory politics – surfacing in Spain during the 1980s and 1990s had little in
common with the Latin American left, but before this divergence became too obvious, Spain
enjoyed a romance with the left while simultaneously attracting conservative elites. The activ-
ities of the 5th Centennial Commission helped to frame Spain’s politics in the region – for
example, the Ibero-American Summits began to meet annually since 1991 – inspiring a
great number of transatlantic collaborations within the cultural sphere and clearing the
path for the arrival of Spanish multinationals such as Repsol, Endesa, Iberdrola, Telefónica
or the BBV (now BBVA, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria) across Latin America. The dec-
ade of the 1990s became, as Ramón Casilda Béjar has noted, “the golden age of Spanish
investments in the region,” including the Spanish cultural industry, which also attained an
unprecedented level of expansion (Bonet and de Gregorio 88). After the prominent role
played by Seix Barral in the internationalization of the Latin American literary Boom, Span-
ish publishing houses gained ground in Latin America during the 1970s and 80s, absorbing
national presses which disappeared with the economic crisis shaking the region. Yet the
phenomenon intensified in the 1990s, when Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez commented
that, to be read in their neighboring countries, Latin American authors ought to publish in
Barcelona: “Cruzar la frontera implica atravesar el Atlántico” (“Crossing the border, entails
to go through the Atlantic”; 11). Throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s, Spanish pub-
lishing companies such as Alfaguara, Seix Barral, Lengua de Trapo or Anagrama, developed
a series of prizes and congresses which, as Eduardo Becerra has noted, revealed the aspira-
tion to create a common Hispanic cultural space while maintaining the marketable “Latin
American” label for authors from the other side of the Atlantic (289). Paradoxically, many
of the Latin American authors who attended the First Congress of New Hispanic Narrators
in Madrid in 1999, or the First Meeting of Latin American Writers in Sevilla in 2003, inter-
rogated themselves about the accuracy of speaking of a “Latin American” literature (Bolaño
et al.), which implicitly made the idea of “Hispanic” literature even more elusive.
The hegemony of Iberian publishing houses over the cultural market in Spanish language
persists to this day, but from the 2000s, other political and economic factors have led to
the deterioration of transatlantic relations. In 1984, the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti
complained about Europe’s relation to Latin America and expressed his hopes for a dif-
ferent relationship with Spain: “Del resto de Europa no esperamos mucho; de España, sí”
(“We do not have many expectations from the rest of Europe, but from Spain, we do”;23).
After intensive Spanish entrepreneurial activity in the area during the 1990s, economic
analysts reported that Latin Americans felt disappointed with the performance of Spanish
companies, having expected a stronger commitment for the benefit of the region given their
shared language and cultural values (Noya 58). Also, during the second term of the Partido
Popular in Spain (2000–2004), the altruistic character of the Spanish organization Official
Development Assistance (Ayuda Oficial al Desarrollo, or AOD) was called into question,
accused of constituting a neocolonial instrument to promote Spanish culture as well as
further commercial and political interests in the region (Sanahuja 200). The return of the

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Socialist party (2004–2011) did not fully manage to reverse this tendency and indeed, with
the consolidation of the “New Left” in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Nica-
ragua, transatlantic political relations degraded and languished – well exemplified by the
reduction in 2014 of the Ibero-American Summits to a biannual instead of annual meetings.
The presence of Spanish multinationals in Latin American countries came under renewed
scrutiny and the growing vindication of indigenous rights clashed with dogmatic Spanish
discourses about the shared historical bonds, which only gave perfunctory and fleeting
recognition of colonial violence. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, statues of Columbus
and various conquistadores have been periodically painted, toppled or removed throughout
Latin America. Despite the destructive character of some of these acts, their characteriza-
tion as simple “acts of vandalism” by some of the local and Spanish press diminishes their
political intention of resignifying public space and calling attention to the perpetuation of
official history.
An increasingly radicalized Spanish right is actively counteracting such movements
to decolonize memory, education and public space by rescuing La Hispanidad from the
intellectual ruins of National Catholicism. This process is fueled by media groups such
as the Intereconomía corporation and authors such as Borja Cardelús, the founder of
the “Hispanic Civilization Foundation,” or Elvira Roca. In her bestseller Imperiofobia
(2016), Roca argued that Hispanophobia has unfairly guided past and current evalu-
ations of Spanish interventions in Latin America – though she herself disregards the
nuanced historiography about the colonization and the Black Legend produced by schol-
ars inside and outside of Spain. Despite being contested by academics such as José Luis
Villacañas, Ricardo García Carcel or Josep María Fradera (among others), Roca’s work
has encouraged the embellishment of Spanish colonialism and emboldened the “unapolo-
getic discourse” recently exhibited by the Spanish right when referring to the relation-
ship with Latin America and their “shared past.” Apart from the Partido Popular, the
ultra-right party Vox is deploying the imperialist rhetoric of La Hispanidad to subsume
different cultures within Spain and to attack the Spanish left, blaming them for yield-
ing to peripheral nationalisms and internalizing the Black Legend. According to Mateo
Ballester, within their use of history as a political tool, Vox pays particular attention to
the colonization of Latin America, regarding this as the most distorted episode of what
they call the leftist tendency toward national self-rejection (10). Indeed, in exchange for
approving the budget of the regional government of Andalusia in 2019, Vox demanded
the creation of “Programa 1492: Un nuevo mundo” (“Program 1492: A New World”),
a plan for schools to celebrate October 12, also known as “the Day of La Hispanidad,”
with a series of events related to the American colonization. Despite the development of
an institutional framework, a website and contents around this plan, the representative
of Vox in the Andalusian parliament complained in 2021 about the low impact of this
initiative (“Vox critica”), which indicates that the measure has been divisive within the
region’s school system. In 2018, the traditionalist Miguel Ayuso Torres argued in his La
Hispanidad como problema (2018) that the notions of La Hispanidad had not been more
successful because it had only been treated as a cultural or a spiritual concept, thus calling
for the transformation of La Hispanidad into a political movement. Contrary to Ayuso
Torres, I find that recent events demonstrate that now, like in the past, the idea of La
Hispanidad has been deployed as a political tool, but its failure lies in the capacity of the
fractious concept to dissolve all that it touches.

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Conclusion: La Hispanidad Disolvente

After various heated pronouncements around La Hispanidad by rightist politicians
throughout September and October of 2021, the Instituto Cervantes and the Spanish Royal
Academy warned that such imperialist discourse could threaten their ongoing “Panhis-
panist” work (Ruiz Mantilla). Meanwhile, a study from the Real Instituto Elcano by Igna-
cio Molina and Jorge Tamames advised that a response would be needed to face the wave
of decolonial anti-Spanish sentiment spreading across the continent and surrounding the
figure of Columbus (59). Without pointing fingers, the authors of this study cautiously
recommended to “exercise extreme caution to avoid simplistic controversies” (62), yet they
tellingly praised the promotion of “Pan-Hispanism” by the Instituto Cervantes and the
Spanish Royal Academy (61). The ongoing radicalization of the Spanish right might ensure
them a portion of the electorate within Spain, but it does not bode well for further rap-
prochement with Latin America: Such statements will alienate the Latin American left,
while the Latin American right will only embrace Hispanism when it is to their benefit.
Conservative Latin Americans have to sustain specific identitarian narratives excluded by
the homogenizing logic of La Hispanidad. It was quite revealing how Felipe Calderón,
former Mexican president and prior member of the conservative National Action Party
(PAN) responded to Pablo Casado during the presentation quoted at the beginning of this
article. While Casado began his intervention by referring to the “Spaniards from both hemi-
spheres” (“Mesa” 12:40), Calderón identified himself as “proudly Mexican,” depicting his
nation as a composite of multiple roots (“Mesa” 51:05). A harsh critic of López Obrador’s
administration, Calderón called to avoid controversies and eluded the topic of historical
revisionism, yet it was clear that he could not commit to Casado’s Hispanist line without
alienating part of his electorate. The right-wing Spanish press praised Casado’s speech as an
inspired way to put an end to the polemic between Aznar and López Obrador, yet the way
in which Calderón diplomatically dodged Casado’s identitarian narrative indicates that the
notion of La Hispanidad only holds a limited appeal for Latin Americans, even for those
ideologically closer to the Spanish right such as Calderón.
Also, if the current Spanish right trusts that La Hispanidad can smooth entrepreneur-
ial investment in the region, they are oblivious to its inefficacy as a tool of rapproche-
ment in the past and in considering how discourses of transatlantic union weaken when
neoliberal romances end. However, there is little sign of relinquishing such a discourse
in the immediate future. In January of 2022, King Felipe VI visited Puerto Rico accom-
panied by Reyes Maroto and Ángeles Moreno, the ministers of trade and foreign affairs
of the Socialist Party, respectively. The trip was motivated by the fifth centennial of the
foundation of San Juan by Juan Ponce de León and the celebration of an Economic and
Entrepreneurial Forum, in a country that since 2017 has struggled to face its debt crisis
within its precarious framework as a free associated state of the United States. Inter-
ested in foreign investments, the mayor of the capital city, Miguel Romero, welcomed
Felipe VI, yet, hours before his arrival, the group Fuerzas Libertarias de Boriken toppled
the statue of Ponce de León and the Independentist Puerto Rican Party (PIP) protested
that the Spanish came to the island to “profit from a fiscal paradise” and regarded the
visit as a “second act of colonization” (Rivera Guisti). Felipe omitted explicit references
to these acts, but in his first speech he closely reproduced the phrasing of the Spanish
right, defending “the model of Spanish presence in America” and praising the common
past and La Hispanidad.

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While leftist media and intellectuals in Spain have criticized recent Hispanist outbursts
by the members of the PP and Vox, the positioning of Felipe VI was only timidly discussed
by the left while vociferously applauded by conservative journalists. During the last 15 years,
the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism has been a central question
in Spanish political debates, with any claims for its recuperation facing adamant resistance
by the right, but such revindications have been vehemently pushed forward by political and
cultural actors from the left. One wonders whether there will be enough political will from
the left to critically review Spain’s colonial past5 and follow the path that other European
countries have initiated, despite their shortcomings and contradictions. The statements by
the PIP and the Fuerzas Libertarias de Boriken have been disregarded as actions of a minor-
ity, but while the small constituency of these groups is undeniable, they are part of a much
wider-scale movement spread across Latin America. Iconoclastic destruction and political
tensions will continue until we engage in a collective and transnational dialogue about
colonial history, because, as Achille Mbembe argued, “Having a past in common does not
necessarily mean sharing it” (4). Mbembe was criticizing French colonial discourse, but his
comment fits the unyielding insistence of the Spanish right around “the common past” and
the existence of a community derived from it. The resilience of La Hispanidad as an idea,
reappearing once and again in Spanish public discourse, stems from the malleability and
apparent capacity of Hispanist discourse to encompass a variety of conflicting yet simulta-
neous goals. However, it has repeatedly fractured the relations that it aspires to unite, con-
stituting a most unconvincing means for Spanish cohesion as well as an incongruous tool
for transnational rapprochement. After more than a century of Hispanist iterations, this
new surge of La Hispanidad cannot by any means serve as a substitute for a long-postponed
review of the colonial past nor as a hackneyed framework for transatlantic relations.

Notes
1 All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
2 When I refer to Hispanism, I do not mean the academic field (though Hispanism as a field of study
is historically and ideologically related to this movement). By Hispanists, I mean a wide group of
actors, from the cultural, economic and political fields, who believed that Spain and Latin America
ought to have a stronger bonding on the basis of the alleged common Hispanic identity they shared.
3 Many Catalonian Hispanists belonged to the Lliga Regionalista, and thus their discourse substan-
tially differed from the Spanish nationalist undertones of Castilian Hispanism. By contrast, Basque
Hispanism displayed a “vasco-españolista” character.
4 Established in 1907, JAE (Board for the Promotion of Scientific Study and Research) was connected
to the principles of the Instituto Libre de Enseñanza and the Krausist circles, although some tradi-
tionalist intellectuals such as Menéndez Pelayo also participated in it. The institution disappeared
in 1939, when the Francoist regime founded the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas or
CSIC (Spanish National Research Council).
5 See Sara Santamaría Colmenero’s article about the absence of colonial memory in Spain in relation
to the pact of silence about Francoism.

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 INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the
corresponding page.

8M movement 366 – 75 the telecomedia 535 – 7; Word Market

15M movement 27, 618 – 19 578 – 80, 579
atmospherics of modernity 513 – 18, 514 – 16;
abolition see prison abolition and the physicality of flight 518 – 22, 520;
abstraction 580 – 4 Viaje a la aldea del crimen 522 – 6
acoustic conflict 195 – 204 audience 586 – 96, 594 – 5
activism 445 – 7; housing 49 – 61 auditory culture 529 – 31; and aesthetic
aesthetics liv–xlvi, 669 – 70; auditory culture spatialization of sound 533 – 5; mediatic
529 – 40; cinema 543 – 54, 557 – 67; digital art convergences of sound, art, and technology
571 – 84; flight in the literary and popular 531 – 3; and radio voice 537 – 40; and the
imagination 513 – 24; of flooding 618 – 21; telecomedia 535 – 7
performance 586 – 96; photography 599 – 609; authorship, design 22 – 3
spatialization of sound 533 – 5 automobiles 21 – 5
affect 499 – 508 autonomy/autonomies 216 – 17; and cinema
Africa 325 – 7, 338 – 40; and intelligence tests 557 – 67
327 – 35; and psycho-technical tests 335 – 8
agency 557 – 61, 564 – 7; and digital Barcelona 17 – 18; BUITS Plan 20 – 1, 25 – 8;
democratization 561 – 4 public space as thresholds 28 – 9; Superblocks
algorithms 571 – 3; Amazon 573 – 6, 574; 20 – 5; urban movements and new
Defooooooooooooooooooooorest 576 – 8, municipalism 18 – 20
577; and digital materiality 580 – 4; Word Barga, Corpus 518 – 22, 520
Market 578 – 80, 579 Basque Country 221 – 2, 231 – 2; and Catalonia
Amazigh/Berber ethnicity 355 – 64 222 – 3; Catalunya 27, 176, 674; Euskadi
Amazon (Tisselli) 573 – 6, 574 168, 214, 216, 228, 316; Galicia 9, 210 – 19,
Americas, the 695 – 6; economic and cultural 549 – 52; and political competition 227 – 31,
tensions 696 – 8; La Hispanidad 696, 228 – 9; secessionism in 223 – 31
698 – 701, 703 – 5; Hispanism 695 – 705; Basque Nationalist Party (Partido Nacionalista
transitioning to new relations 701 – 3 Vasco – PNV) 169 – 70, 214 – 17, 221 – 31
apocalypse 613 – 22 Berber see Amazigh/Berber ethnicity
art 531 – 3, 571 – 3; Amazon 573 – 6, 574; binaries 571 – 3
Defooooooooooooooooooooorest 576 – 8, biopolitical colonial tool 335 – 8
577; and digital materiality 580 – 4; of boats 342 – 53

708
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bodies xl–xlii, 342 – 53; and the 8M movement circumstance 604

366 – 75; criticisms and backlash against citizens 49 – 52, 59 – 61, 60; citizen homeowners
memory campaign 124 – 5; and disability 415 – 16; and housing financialization 55 – 9,
403 – 12; evolving memory laws and legacy 57, 59; and radical squatting 52 – 5, 54
of memory movement 126 – 7; and gender in CiU see Convergència i Unió (Convergence and
the Maghreb 380 – 90; and homeownership Union, CiU) 225 – 7
414 – 22; impact of exhumations 123 – 4; and Ciutadans (Citizens) 228
Instituto de Estudios Africanos 325 – 40; civil death 418 – 22
limitations and setbacks to memory Civil War see Spanish Civil War
campaign 122 – 3; mass graves and mass class 474 – 5, 484 – 5; Campesinos 475 – 8; La
silences 116; national and international Mina 481 – 4; Tea Rooms 478 – 81
legal frameworks 121; and patera literature collaboration 634 – 43
342 – 53; post war repression and memory collective backyard 27 – 8
politics under Franco 116 – 17; recovery collectivities xlii–xliv; Chinese contributions
of historical memory and exhumation of to Spanish culture 438 – 49; class 474 – 85;
mass graves 119 – 21; and Saïd El Kadaoui Muslims and Jews 451 – 8; poetry 499 – 508;
Moussaoui 355 – 64; transition to democracy popular mobilization and labor movements
and the pact of silence 117 – 19; and Veneno 427 – 37; punk 462 – 72; social responses to
393 – 401 material inequality 487 – 96
borders 342 – 53 colonial genderings 380 – 90
Borrás, Tomás 535 – 7 colonial science 325 – 7, 338 – 40; and
brain drain 271 intelligence tests 327 – 35; and
BUITS Plan (Buits Urbans amb Implicació psycho-technical tests 335 – 8
Territorial i Social; Vacant Lots with commons 17 – 18; BUITS Plan 20 – 1, 25 – 8;
Territorial and Societal Implications) 20 – 1, public space as thresholds 28 – 9; Superblocks
25 – 8 20 – 5; urban movements and new
bullfighting 77 – 8, 78, 84 – 7; and COVID-19 municipalism 18 – 20
81 – 4; performing the environment 78 – 81, community/communities xlii–xliv; and the
79 – 80 BUITS Plan 25 – 8; Chinese contributions
to Spanish culture 438 – 49; class 474 – 85;
cabaret 658 – 60 Madrid’s 2011 protest camp as 625 – 32;
Campesinos (Arderíus) 475 – 8 Muslims and Jews 451 – 8; and performance
Capa, Robert 131 – 2, 134, 136 – 40 586 – 96, 594 – 5; poetry 499 – 508; popular
capitalism 49 – 52, 59 – 61, 60; and housing mobilization and labor movements 427 – 37;
financialization 55 – 9, 57, 59; and radical punk 462 – 72; social responses to material
squatting 52 – 5, 54 inequality 487 – 96; spectacle of
Capitalocene, the 571 – 3 629 – 32
Carmen 660 – 2 Concordats 249 – 52
Catalonia/Catalan 221 – 2, 231 – 2, 355 – 64; conflict: acoustic 195 – 204; narrating 93 – 103
and Basque Country 223 – 5; and political connections xlvi–xlviii; and apocalypse 613 – 24;
competition 227 – 31, 228 – 9 secessionism in cultural studies and Spanish foodways
225 – 31 681 – 94; and Hispanism 695 – 707; and
Catholic Church 248 – 57 Madrid’s 2011 protest camp 625 – 33;
certification of Spanish as foreign language multilingualism, gender, and translation
280 – 2 634 – 45; and popular music 656 – 68,
chaos: and democratization 181 – 2 669 – 80; and shifting limits of “Europe”
cheapening strategies 69 – 74, 70, 72 646 – 55
China 438 – 42, 448 – 9; ethnicity and activism conquistador, figure of 84 – 6
445 – 7; immigration from 441 – 2, 446, 448; consensus 184 – 8
recognition and institutionalization 447 – 8; construction of the commons 17 – 18; BUITS
self-orientalism and exoticization 444 – 5; Plan 20 – 1, 25 – 8; public space as thresholds
whitewashing, yellowface and humor 442 – 3 28 – 9; Superblocks 20 – 5; urban movements
cinema 543 – 5, 554, 557 – 8; Costa da Morte and new municipalism 18 – 20
549 – 51; and digital democratization 561 – 4; contested nations 209 – 10, 217 – 19; Civil War
and gender 559 – 61; La isla mínima 551 – 3; and Francoism 213 – 15; origins of substate
Mimosas 545 – 8; and women 558 – 9, 564 – 7 nationalism 210 – 12; renationalization and

709
 Index

Republican decentralization 212 – 13; Spanish demographics 34 – 9, 36 – 8

transition and democratic consolidation design: design authorship 22 – 3; designing the
215 – 16; the State of Autonomies 216 – 17 commons 28 – 9; inclusive design processes
context 604 22 – 3
conventions 142 – 53, 143, 145, 147, 150 dictatorship 311 – 13, 313 – 17
Convergència i Unió (Convergence and Union, digital art 571 – 3; Amazon 573 – 6, 574;
CiU) 221 – 3, 225 – 31 Defooooooooooooooooooooorest 576 – 8,
cosmopolitanism: aesthetic 669 – 70; and 577; and digital materiality 580 – 4; Word
modernity 675 – 6; ruralities 40 – 4, 42 – 3, 44 Market 578 – 80, 579
Costa da Morte 549 – 51 digital democratization 561 – 4
COVID-19 pandemic 77 – 8, 78, 81 – 7; digital materiality 580 – 4
performing the environment 78 – 81, 79 – 80; digital spaces: normative interventions 278 – 80
post-pandemic city 23 – 4 disability 403 – 12
crisis: apocalyptic visions of 613 – 22; economic disappointment 504 – 8
403 – 12 dispossession 342 – 53
critical infrastructure studies 68 – 9 disturbance of the sensible 605
critical tourism 74 diversity: family relations 237 – 9, 237 – 8
critical web materiality 571 – 3
cultural ecology 63 – 4; and cheapening strategies Earth 571 – 3; Amazon 573 – 6, 574;
69 – 74; and critical infrastructure studies Defooooooooooooooooooooorest 576 – 8,
68 – 99; and critical tourism 74; and cultural 577; and digital materiality 580 – 4; Word
studies 64 – 6; and urban political ecology Market 578 – 80, 579
66 – 8 ecology 20 – 1
cultural geographies 3 – 12 economic crisis 403 – 12
cultural history xxxi–xxxv economic tensions 696 – 701
cultural mirrors 669 – 70 “Edad de Plata” 264 – 7
cultural studies 681 – 2; case study 684 – 9; food education 267 – 70; ghosts of 270 – 2
cultural studies 682 – 4; food practices and El Kadaoui Moussaoui, Saïd 355 – 64
representation 689 – 90; and tourism 64 – 6 encounters, narrative of 695 – 6; economic and
cultural tensions 696 – 701 cultural tensions 696 – 8; La Hispanidad
cultural turn 39 – 40 696, 698 – 701, 703 – 5; transitioning to new
culture, auditory 529 – 31; and aesthetic relations 701 – 3
spatialization of sound 533 – 5; mediatic environments xxxvi–xxxvii; bullfighting and
convergences of sound, art, and technology COVID-fighting 77 – 87; cultural geographies
531 – 3; and radio voice 537 – 40; and the 3 – 12; housing activism 49 – 60; rural Spain
telecomedia 535 – 7 33 – 45; tourism 63 – 74; urban landscapes and
culture, imaginary of the flood in 613 – 22 construction of the commons 17 – 29
cuplé 657 – 60 ephemera, aesthetics 599 – 603, 602;
circumstance 604; disturbance of the sensible
death 467 – 9; civil death 414 – 22 605; migrancy 603 – 4; migrant subject
decentralization 212 – 13 605 – 7; ubiquity of place 608 – 9; uprooting
Defooooooooooooooooooooorest 576 – 8, 577 and unleashing 607 – 8
de la Isla, Camarón 664 – 6; and flamenco eschatology 616 – 17, 622
664, 676 ETA see Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA)
Delgado, Elena xxviii–xxx ethnicity 445 – 7
deluge, imaginaries of 613 – 14 “Europe,” idea of 646 – 55
democracy 317 – 20; democratic consolidation Euskadi see Basque Country
215 – 16; religious pluralism 248 – 57; and Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) 169 – 76
sport 302 – 4; transition to 117 – 19, event, landscape as 543 – 5, 554; Costa da Morte
195 – 204 549 – 51; La isla mínima 551 – 3; Mimosas
democratization 49 – 52, 59 – 61, 60, 180 – 1, 545 – 8
184 – 8; chaos or stability 181 – 2; digital exception, state of 481 – 4
561 – 4; exemplary transition 183 – 4; exhumation of mass graves 119 – 21; impact of
forgiveness and reconciliation 188 – 90; and 123 – 4
housing financialization 55 – 9, 57, 59; and exiles 155 – 64
radical squatting 52 – 5, 54 exoticization 444 – 5

710
 Index

expelled Second Republic 155 – 64 geometrics 543 – 4, 546, 552, 554

exploitation 475 – 8 geopoetics 544, 547
Germanetes 27
Familia Socialista, La (Fernández) 504 – 8 ghosts 106 – 14
families 234 – 5, 242 – 4; plurality and diversity of globalization 39 – 40, 317 – 20; globalized
family relations 237 – 9, 237 – 8; policy change modernity 677 – 8
and gender equality 235 – 6; women’s new governments xxxix–xl; contested nations
role in the labor force 239 – 42, 240 – 2 209 – 19; football 310 – 21; institutional
far right see Spanish far right religions 248 – 57; marriage and families
FC Barcelona 310 – 13, 320 – 1; and the Franco 234 – 44; party competition approach to
dictatorship 313 – 17; transition, democracy secessionism 221 – 32; prison abolition
and globalization 317 – 20 285 – 95; regulatory policies and institutions
feminist protests 366 – 75 of language 274 – 82; schools and scientific
Feminist Tsunami 614, 619 – 20; see also mareas institutions 261 – 72; sporting institutions
ciudadanas 297 – 307
Fernández, Fruela 504 – 8 grammar, urban 25
fiction, narrative 98 – 9 graves see mass graves
financialization, housing 55 – 8, 57 “ground-truthing” 522 – 6
flamenco 408 – 10, 661 – 4, 670 – 8 Guinea, Equatorial (formerly Spanish Guinea)
flight 513 – 18, 514 – 16; physicality of 518 – 22, 327, 335 – 9, 336 – 7, 699
520; Viaje a la aldea del crimen 522 – 6
flood, imaginary of 613 – 22 Hispanidad, La 698 – 701, 704 – 5
fluid identities 380 – 90 Hispanism 695 – 6; economic and cultural
foodways 681 – 2; case study 684 – 9; food tensions 696 – 8; La Hispanidad 696,
cultural studies 682 – 4; food practices and 698 – 701, 703 – 5; transitioning to new
representation 689 – 90 relations 701 – 3
football 297 – 301, 303 – 7, 310 – 13, 320 – 1; and historical memory: criticisms and backlash
the Franco dictatorship 313 – 17; transition, against memory campaign 124 – 5; evolving
democracy and globalization 317 – 20 memory laws and legacy of memory
forgiveness 188 – 91 movement 126 – 7; and exhumation of mass
fractures xlvi–xlviii; and apocalypse 613 – 24; graves 119 – 21, 123 – 4; limitations and
cultural studies and Spanish foodways setbacks to memory campaign 122 – 3; mass
681 – 94; and Hispanism 695 – 707; and graves and mass silences 116; national and
Madrid’s 2011 protest camp 625 – 33; international legal frameworks 121; post war
multilingualism, gender, and translation repression and memory politics under Franco
634 – 45; and popular music 656 – 68, 116 – 17; transition to democracy and the
669 – 80; and shifting limits of “Europe” pact of silence 117 – 19
646 – 55 history/histories xxxi–xxxv; acoustic conflict
Franco/Francoism 213 – 15, 313 – 17; Instituto de 195 – 204; criticisms and backlash against
Estudios Africanos 325 – 40; legacy 99 – 102; memory campaign 124 – 5; evolving memory
memory politics under 116 – 17; and pop laws and legacy of memory movement
music 670 – 3; and sport 298 – 302 126 – 7; football in historical context
future/futurity: of indignation 507 – 8; queer 310 – 21; impact of exhumations 123 – 4;
393 – 401 legacies of expelled Second Republic
155 – 64; limitations and setbacks to memory
gap, rural 44 – 5 campaign 122 – 3; lost bodies and missing
gardener, figure of 84 – 6 histories 116 – 27; mass graves and mass
gastronationalism 681 – 2; case study 684 – 9; silences 116; national and international
food cultural studies 682 – 4; food practices legal frameworks 121; periódicos murales
and representation 689 – 90 142 – 53, 143, 145, 147, 150; photography
gender: in cinema 557 – 67; as collaboration 131 – 41; politics of historical memory
634 – 43; equality 235 – 6; in the Maghreb 93 – 103; post war repression and memory
380 – 90 politics under Franco 116 – 17; prison
generational turn 445 – 7 abolition 285 – 69; recovery of historical
geographies: cultural 3 – 12; stereophonic memory and exhumation of mass graves
537 – 40 119 – 21; representing loss 106 – 14; rupture

711
 Index

and reconciliation 180 – 91; terrorism and intelligence tests 327 – 35

peacebuilding narratives 169 – 70; transition international legal frameworks 121
to democracy and the pact of silence 117 – 19; interventions, normative 278 – 80
see also historical memory intimacy/intimate worlds 557 – 8; and digital
housing/homeownership 414 – 22; activism democratization 561 – 4; and gender 559 – 61;
49 – 61, 60; and democratization 49 – 52; and women 558 – 9, 564 – 7
financialization 55 – 9, 57, 59; radical isla mínima, La 544 – 5, 548, 551 – 4
squatting 52 – 5, 54
humor 442 – 4 Jews 451 – 8
hybridization, rural-urban 40 – 4, 42 – 3, 44 justice, transitional 188 – 91

Iberia 634 – 43, 695 – 6; economic and cultural labor: labor movements 427 – 37; women in the
tensions 696 – 8; La Hispanidad 696, labor force 239 – 42, 240 – 2
698 – 701, 703 – 5; transitioning to new landscape/landscapes 17 – 18, 543 – 5, 554;
relations 701 – 3; see also Iberian Peninsula BUITS Plan 20 – 1, 25 – 8; Costa da Morte
Iberian Peninsula 9 – 12, 17, 249, 274, 285, 549 – 51; cultural geographies 3 – 12; La isla
355 – 6, 436, 453 – 5 mínima 551 – 3; Mimosas 545 – 8; public
IDEA see Instituto de Estudios Africanos (IDEA) space as thresholds 28 – 9; social 33 – 45;
identities xl–xlii, 209 – 10; and the 8M Superblocks 20 – 5; urban movements and
movement 366 – 75; and disability 403 – 12; new municipalism 18 – 20
fluid 380 – 90; and gender in the Maghreb language see Spanish language
380 – 90; and homeownership 414 – 22;and laws, memory 95 – 6, 120, 122, 126 – 7
Instituto de Estudios Africanos 325 – 40; left revisionism 95 – 8
nations with multiple identities 218 – 19; and legacies: of the expelled Second Republic
patera literature 342 – 53; in popular music 155 – 64; Francoist 99 – 102; of Muslims and
669 – 78; and Veneno 393 – 401; in the work Jews 451 – 8; of the Republican memory
of Saïd El Kadaoui Moussaoui 355 – 64 movement 126 – 7
imagination/imaginary: flight in 513 – 26; of the legal frameworks 121
flood 613 – 22 life-capital conflict 63 – 4; and cheapening
immigration: and homeownership 416 – 17 strategies 69 – 74; and critical infrastructure
inclusive design processes 22 – 3 studies 68 – 99; and critical tourism 74; and
independence 221 – 2, 231 – 2; and Basque cultural studies 64 – 6; and urban political
Country 223 – 7; and Catalonia 222 – 3, ecology 66 – 8
225 – 7; and political competition 227 – 31, literary imagination 513 – 18, 514 – 16; and the
228 – 9; of women 234 – 44 physicality of flight 518 – 22, 520; Viaje a la
Indignados 77 – 9, 97, 191, 487 – 9, 504, aldea del crimen 522 – 6
588, 618 literature 474 – 5, 484 – 5; Campesinos 475 – 8; La
inequality 487 – 96 Mina 481 – 4; Tea Rooms 478 – 81; see also
information 77 – 8, 78, 84 – 7; and COVID-19 patera literature
81 – 4; performing the environment 78 – 81, local narratives 656 – 7, 666 – 7; Camarón de
79 – 80 la Isla 664 – 6; Carmen 660 – 2; the cuplé
infrastructure see critical infrastructure studies 657 – 60; flamenco 663 – 4
institutionalization 447 – 8 loss 106 – 14
institutional religions 248 – 57 lost bodies: criticisms and backlash against
institutions xxxix–xl; of contemporary Spanish memory campaign 124 – 5; evolving memory
language 274 – 82; contested nations 209 – 19; laws and legacy of memory movement
football 310 – 21; institutional religions 126 – 7; impact of exhumations 123 – 4;
248 – 57; marriage and families 234 – 44; limitations and setbacks to memory
party competition approach to secessionism campaign 122 – 3; mass graves and mass
221 – 32; prison abolition 285 – 95; regulatory silences 116; national and international
policies and institutions of language 274 – 82; legal frameworks 121; post war repression
schools and scientific institutions 261 – 72; and memory politics under Franco
sporting institutions 297 – 307 116 – 17; recovery of historical memory
Instituto de Estudios Africanos (IDEA) 325 – 7, and exhumation of mass graves 119 – 21;
338 – 40; and intelligence tests 327 – 35; and transition to democracy and the pact of
psycho-technical tests 335 – 8 silence 117 – 19

712
 Index

Madrid’s 2011 protest camp 625 – 32 Francoist pop 670 – 3; musical culture during
Maghreb, the 380 – 90 the Spanish transition 673 – 5
Manada, La 368 – 9 Muslims 451 – 8
marea ciudadana 618 – 19
marriage 234 – 5, 242 – 4; plurality and diversity naming 475 – 8
of family relations 237 – 9, 237 – 8; policy narrative fiction 98 – 9
change and gender equality 235 – 6; narratives/narrating 474 – 5, 484 – 5; acoustic
women’s new role in the labor force conflict 195 – 204; Campesinos 475 – 8; in
239 – 42, 240 – 2 democratization 180 – 90; disability and
mass graves 116; exhumation of 119 – 21 Snow White 403 – 12; of the “Encounter”
mass silences 116 695 – 705; legacies of expelled Second
material inequality 487 – 96 Republic 155 – 64; lost bodies and missing
materiality: critical web materiality 571 – 3; histories 116 – 27; La Mina 481 – 4; periódicos
digital 580 – 4 murales 142 – 53; photography 131 – 41;
media 529 – 31; aesthetic spatialization of politics of historical memory 93 – 103;
sound 533 – 5; convergences of sound, art, and popular music 656 – 67; representing
and technology 531 – 3; radio voice 537 – 40; loss 106 – 14; rupture and reconciliation
telecomedia 535 – 7 180 – 91; Tea Rooms 478 – 81; terrorism and
Mediterranean Diet 681 – 2; case study 684 – 9; peacebuilding 168 – 77
food cultural studies 682 – 4; food practices national legal frameworks 121
and representation 689 – 90 national narratives 656 – 7, 666 – 7; Camarón de
Meller, Raquel 656 – 8, 660 la Isla 664 – 6; Carmen 660 – 2; and the cuplé
memoirs 469 – 72 657 – 60; flamenco 663 – 4
memory see historical memory nations, contested 209 – 10, 217 – 19; Civil War
memory laws 95 – 6, 120, 122, 126 – 7 and Francoism 213 – 15; origins of substate
Mérimée, Prosper 408, 660 – 2 nationalism 210 – 12; renationalization and
migrant subjects 599 – 603, 602, 605 – 7; and Republican decentralization 212 – 13; Spanish
circumstance 604; and disturbance of the transition and democratic consolidation
sensible 605; and migrancy 603 – 4; and 215 – 16; the State of Autonomies 216 – 17
ubiquity of place 608 – 9; uprooting and neoliberalism 52 – 5, 54, 500 – 502
unleashing 607 – 8 networks 571 – 3
migration 342 – 53, 414 – 22 new municipalism 18 – 20
Mimosas 545 – 8 new normal 622
mina, La (López Salinas) 481 – 4 normative interventions in/of digital spaces
mirrors, cultural 669 – 70, 677 – 8 278 – 80
mobilities 39 – 40 normative regulation of Spanish language 275 – 8
mobilization, popular 427 – 37
modernity 513 – 18, 514 – 16, 676 – 8; and oppressed, the 481 – 4
cosmopolitanism 669 – 70, 675 – 6; and
cultural mirrors 669 – 70; Francoist pop pandemic see COVID-19 pandemic
670 – 3; globalized 677 – 8; musical culture Parasiego, Óscar 599 – 603, 602; circumstance
during the Spanish transition 673 – 5; and 604; disturbance of the sensible 605;
the physicality of flight 518 – 22, 520; migrancy 603 – 4; migrant subject 605 – 7;
stereophonic soundscapes of 529 – 40; Viaje a ubiquity of place 608 – 9; uprooting and
la aldea del crimen 522 – 6 unleashing 607 – 8
monoconfesionalism 248 – 57 participatory processes 22
movements, urban 18 – 20 party competition approach 221 – 2, 227 – 32,
multilingualism 634 – 43 228 – 9; and Basque Country 223 – 7; and
multi-sport organizations 304 – 7 Catalonia 222 – 3, 225 – 7
municipalism 17 – 18; and urban movements patriarchy 234 – 5, 242 – 4; plurality and diversity
18 – 20 of family relations 237 – 9, 237 – 8; policy
muse 464 – 6 change and gender equality 235 – 6; women’s
music 656 – 7, 666 – 7, 676 – 8; Camarón de la Isla new role in the labor force 239 – 42, 240 – 2
664 – 6; Carmen 660 – 2; and cosmopolitanism patera literature 342 – 53
669 – 70, 675 – 6; and cultural mirrors peace 184 – 8; peacebuilding narratives 168 – 77
669 – 70; the cuplé 657 – 60; flamenco 663 – 4; peasant societies 34 – 9, 36 – 8

713
 Index

performance 78 – 81, 79 – 80, 586 – 96, 594 – 5, prison abolition 285 – 6, 294 – 5; contemporary
626 – 9 Spanish society 289 – 94; and
periódicos murales 142 – 53, 143, 145, 147, 150 nineteenth-century penal institutions 286 – 8
photography 599 – 603, 602; circumstance 604; privilege 252 – 4
disturbance of the sensible 605; migrancy processes 586 – 96, 594 – 5
603 – 4; migrant subject 605 – 7; ubiquity promises, broken 499 – 508
of place 608 – 9; uprooting and unleashing protest: 8M 366 – 79; Madrid’s 2011 protest
607 – 8; warplanes 134 – 7, 135 camp 625 – 32; see also 15M; Indignados
physicality of flight 518 – 22, 520 public battles 557 – 8; and digital
place 599 – 603, 602; and circumstance 604; democratization 561 – 4 and gender 559 – 61;
cultural geographies 3 – 12; and disturbance and women 558 – 9, 564 – 7
of the sensible 605; and migrancy 603 – 4; public space 28 – 9
and migrant subjects 605 – 7; ubiquity of punishment 289 – 94
608 – 9; uprooting and unleashing 607 – 8 punk 462 – 4, 467 – 9; and memoirs by women
planet Earth 77 – 8, 78, 84 – 7; and COVID-19 469 – 72; and muse 464 – 6
81 – 4; ecocriticism 619; performing the pyro-technical tests 335 – 8
environment 78 – 81, 79 – 80; tourism 8 – 9,
63 – 74, 687 – 8 que concierne (Valero) 502 – 4
pluralism, religious 248 – 57 queer future 393 – 401
plurality: family relations 237 – 9, 237 – 8 questions 131 – 4; the national question 215 – 16;
PNV see Basque Nationalist Party (Partido and photographing warplanes 134 – 7; and
Nacionalista Vasco – PNV) 225 – 7 soldiers 137 – 41
Poblenou district 21 – 2, 26
poetry 499 – 508 racial others 355 – 64
policy/policies 235 – 6; of contemporary Spanish radical squatting 52 – 5, 54; see also squatting
language 274 – 82 radio 529 – 31; and aesthetic spatialization of
politics/the political 502 – 4, sound 533 – 5; mediatic convergences of
571 – 3; Amazon 573 – 6, 574; sound, art, and technology 531 – 3; radio
Defooooooooooooooooooooorest 576 – 8, voice 537 – 40; and the telecomedia 535 – 7
577; and digital materiality 580 – 4; of realignment 367 – 8
flooding 618 – 21; and football 310 – 21; Real Madrid 310 – 13, 320 – 1; and the Franco
of historical memory 93 – 103; political dictatorship 313 – 17; transition, democracy
competition 227 – 31, 228 – 9; political ecology and globalization 317 – 20
of tourism 66 – 8; political history xxxi–xxxv; reconciliation 180 – 1, 184 – 8; chaos or stability
political strategy 221 – 227, 231 – 2; political 181 – 2; exemplary transition 183 – 4;
subject 44 – 5; Word Market 578 – 80, 579 forgiveness and reconciliation 188 – 90
“Pop Flamenco Dancer” 663 – 4 recognition 447 – 8
popular imagination 513 – 18, 514 – 16; and the regulatory policies of contemporary Spanish
physicality of flight 518 – 22, 520; Viaje a la language 274 – 82
aldea del crimen 522 – 6 religious landscape 254 – 7
popular mobilization 427 – 37 religious pluralism 248 – 57
popular music 656 – 7, 659, 662 – 4, 666 – 7, renationalization 212 – 13
669 – 70, 677 – 8 representation 106 – 14; and food practices
Portugal 180 – 1, 184 – 8; chaos or stability 689 – 90
181 – 2; exemplary transition 183 – 4; repression 116 – 17
forgiveness and reconciliation 188 – 90 Republic, the see Second Republic
post-pandemic city 23 – 4 restorations 155 – 64, 311 – 13, 427 – 37
power 234 – 5, 242 – 4; plurality and diversity of returns 451 – 8
family relations 237 – 9, 237 – 8; policy change revisionism 95 – 8
and gender equality 235 – 6; women’s new revolution 180 – 1, 184 – 8; chaos or stability
role in the labor force 239 – 42, 240 – 2 181 – 2; exemplary transition 183 – 4;
precarity 499 – 508 forgiveness and reconciliation 188 – 90; and
print media 530 – 2 political culture of apocalypse 614 – 18
prison: in contemporary Spanish society right, the: right revisionism 95 – 8; see also
289 – 94; nineteenth-century penal institutions Spanish far right
286 – 8 rights 252 – 4

714
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Rosalía 656, 664, 667; see also popular music social responses to material inequality 487 – 96
ruins 106 – 14 soldiers 137 – 41, 138
rupture 180 – 1, 184 – 8; chaos or stability 181 – 2; sound 531 – 3; spatialization of 533 – 5
exemplary transition 183 – 4; forgiveness and soundscapes, stereophonic 529 – 31; and
reconciliation 188 – 90 aesthetic spatialization of sound 533 – 5;
rurality/ruralities 34 – 40, 36 – 8; cosmopolitan mediatic convergences of sound, art, and
40 – 4, 42 – 3, 44 technology 531 – 3; and radio voice 537 – 40;
rural Spain: the change from peasant societies and the telecomedia 535 – 7
to modern rurality 34 – 9, 36 – 8; one space/spaces xxxvi–xxxvii; bullfighting and
hundred years of social change 33 – 4; COVID-fighting 77 – 87; cultural geographies
rural gap and new political subject 44 – 5; 3 – 12; housing activism 49 – 60; normative
rural-urban hybridization and cosmopolitan interventions in/of digital spaces 278 – 80;
ruralities 40 – 4, 42 – 3, 44; towards a new public 28 – 9; rural Spain 33 – 45; shared
rurality 39 – 40 626; spatialization of sound 533 – 5; tourism
rural-urban hybridization 40 – 4, 42 – 3, 44 63 – 74; urban landscapes and construction of
the commons 17 – 29
Sant Antoni 22 – 3 Spanish Civil War 213 – 15, 311 – 13; criticisms
schools: “Edad de Plata” 264 – 7; ghosts of and backlash against memory campaign
science and education 270 – 2; liberal times 124 – 5; evolving memory laws and legacy
261 – 4; and war 267 – 70 of memory movement 126 – 7; impact of
science, colonial 325 – 7, 338 – 40; exhumations 123 – 4; limitations and setbacks
and intelligence tests 327 – 35; and to memory campaign 122 – 3; mass graves and
psycho-technical tests 335 – 8 mass silences 116; national and international
scientific institutions: “Edad de Plata” 264 – 7; legal frameworks 121; periódicos murales of
ghosts of science and education 270 – 2; 142 – 53, 143, 145, 147, 150; photographing
liberal times 261 – 4; and war 267 – 70 131 – 41; post war repression and memory
secessionism 221 – 2, 231 – 2; and Basque Country politics under Franco 116 – 17; recovery of
223 – 7; and Catalonia 222 – 3, 225 – 7; and historical memory and exhumation of mass
political competition 227 – 31, 228 – 9 graves 119 – 21; transition to democracy and
Second Republic 311 – 13, 427 – 37; assessing the pact of silence 117 – 19
legacies of 155 – 64; criticisms and backlash Spanish far right 195 – 204
against memory campaign 124 – 5, 125; Spanish language, regulatory policies and
decentralization 212 – 13; exhumation of institutions of 274 – 82
mass graves 119 – 21, 123 – 4; legacy of the spectacle 629 – 32
memory movement 126 – 7; limitation and sport 297 – 8, 310 – 13, 320 – 1; and the
setbacks to memory campaign 122 – 3 Franco dictatorship 313 – 17; multi-sport
secularism 254 – 7 organizations 304 – 7; periods of institutional
self-orientalism 444 – 5 growth 298 – 304; transition, democracy and
Sender, Ramón 522 – 6 globalization 317 – 20; see also football
sensible, the 605 squatters 52 – 5, 54
shared histories 142 – 53, 143, 145, 147, 150 stability: and democratization 181 – 2; and
shared space 626 violence 184 – 8
silence: mass silences 116; and transition to state-church relations 249 – 52, 257
democracy 117 – 19 state narratives 173 – 5
Snow White 403 – 12 State of Autonomies 216 – 17
social change 33 – 4 stereophonic soundscapes 529 – 31; and aesthetic
social history xxxi–xxxv spatialization of sound 533 – 5; mediatic
social landscapes: the change from peasant convergences of sound, art, and technology
societies to modern rurality 34 – 9, 36 – 8; 531 – 3; and radio voice 537 – 40; and the
one hundred years of social change 33 – 4; telecomedia 535 – 7
rural gap and new political subject 44 – 5; streetscapes 21 – 5
rural-urban hybridization and cosmopolitan subjects, migrant 599 – 603, 602, 605 – 7; and
ruralities 40 – 4, 42 – 3, 44; towards a new circumstance 604; and disturbance of the
rurality 39 – 40 sensible 605; and migrancy 603 – 4; and
social movements, aesthetics and politics of ubiquity of place 608 – 9; uprooting and
flooding in 618 – 21 unleashing 607 – 8

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subjects, urban 414 – 22 transversal community 625 – 32

substate nationalisms 210 – 12 Tsunami Democràtic 620 – 1; see also Feminist
Superblocks 17 – 18, 20 – 5 Tsunami; mareas ciudadanas
supersizing 23 – 4
ubiquity of place 608 – 9
tactical urbanism 22 urban areas 33 – 4; housing and democratization
Taro, Gerda 131 – 4; soldiers 137 – 41; warplanes 49 – 52; and a new political subject 44 – 5;
134 – 7; see also Capa, Robert and a new rurality 39 – 40; peasant societies
Tea Rooms (Carnés) 478 – 81 and modern rurality 34 – 9; political ecology
technology/technologies xliv–xlvi, 531 – 3; of tourism 66 – 8; rural-urban hybridization
auditory culture 529 – 40; cinema 543 – 54, 40 – 4, 42 – 3, 44
557 – 67; digital art 571 – 84; flight in the urban grammar 25
literary and popular imagination 513 – 24; urbanism, tactical 22
performance 586 – 96; photography urban landscapes 17 – 18; BUITS Plan 20 – 1,
599 – 609 25 – 8; public space as thresholds 28 – 9;
telecomedia 535 – 7 Superblocks 20 – 5; urban movements and
tenants 49 – 52, 59 – 61, 60; and housing new municipalism 18 – 20
financialization 55 – 9, 57, 59; and radical urban movements 18 – 20
squatting 52 – 5, 54 urban subjects 414 – 22
terrorism 168 – 77 urban voids 17 – 18; BUITS Plan 20 – 1, 25 – 8;
testing projects 327 – 35 public space as thresholds 28 – 9; Superblocks
thresholds, public space as 28 – 9 20 – 5; urban movements and new
time 393 – 401 municipalism 18 – 20
Tisselli, Eugenio 571 – 6, 578 – 9, 582 – 3
Todos los ruidos de aquel día (Borrás) vacancy 25 – 8
535 – 7 Valero, Julieta 502 – 4
tourism 63 – 4; and cheapening strategies 69 – 74; vedettes 658 – 60
and critical infrastructure studies 68 – 99; Veneno 393 – 401
critical tourism 74; and cultural studies Viaje a la aldea del crimen 522 – 6
64 – 6; and urban political ecology 66 – 8 violence 184 – 8
traces 106 – 14 visions, apocalyptic 613 – 22
tradition 676 – 8; and cosmopolitanism 669 – 70, voice, radio 537 – 40
675 – 6; and cultural mirrors 669 – 70; and voids 17 – 18; BUITS Plan 20 – 1, 25 – 8; public
Francoist pop 670 – 3; and musical culture space as thresholds 28 – 9; Superblocks 20 – 5;
during the Spanish transition 673 – 5 urban movements and new municipalism
transformation of marriage and families 234 – 5, 18 – 20
242 – 4; plurality and diversity of family
relations 237 – 9, 237 – 8; policy change and warplanes, photographing 134 – 7, 135
gender equality 235 – 6; women’s new role in web materiality, critical 571 – 3, 578, 580, 583
the labor force 239 – 42, 240 – 2 whitewashing 442 – 4
trans identities 393 – 401 women 131 – 4, 132, 234 – 5, 242 – 4, 462 – 4,
transition/Transition 155 – 64, 317 – 20, 462 – 4, 467 – 9; 8M movement 366 – 75; and cinema
467 – 9; to democracy 195 – 204; and memoirs 558 – 9, 564 – 7; memoirs by 469 – 72; and
by women 469 – 72; and muse 464 – 6; and muse 464 – 6; new role in the labor force
musical culture 673 – 5; and the national 239 – 42, 240 – 2; plurality and diversity of
question 215 – 16 family relations 237 – 9, 237 – 8; policy change
translation 634 – 43 and gender equality 235 – 6
transnational narratives 656 – 7, 666 – 7; Word Market 578 – 80, 579
Camarón de la Isla 664 – 6; Carmen 660 – 2;
and the cuplé 657 – 60; flamenco 663 – 4 yellowface 442–4

716