Jeunesse: Young People, Texts,
Cultures
Volume
12, Issue 2
Winter
2020
Youth
Agency and Ideology: La Movida and the Demise
of the Francoist Regime
Valencia-García, Louie
Dean. Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with
Fascism. Bloomsbury, 2018. 272 pp. $120.00 hc.
ISBN 9781350038479.
Louie Dean
Valencia-García’s monograph Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist
Spain: Clashing with Fascism reflects on the role of Spanish youth during
Spain’s transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic state following
the death of Francisco Franco in 1975. With a specific focus on Madrid,
Valencia-García’s work demonstrates how young Spaniards growing up during the
dictatorship of Franco (1939-75) had nonetheless contributed to the development
of an antiauthoritarian and carnivalesque culture during the last two decades
of the regime. By the early 1980s, this antiauthoritarian youth culture
culminated in La Movida Madrileña (the “Madrid Scene”), or simply the Movida. The Madrid Scene was primarily a cultural
movement, or rather, a countercultural movement that clashed with the fascist
culture promoted during the Francoist regime and, at the same time, accelerated
the nation’s transition to democracy.
The development of this
antiauthoritarian youth culture, as Valencia-García suggests, was largely
related to young Spaniards’ capacity to create and adopt what Michel De Certeau calls “tactics” to subvert the regime’s authority
in spaces where the regime’s power seemed weaker. Tactics, according to De Certeau, are those calculated actions undertaken by the
powerless in their everyday life to undermine the power of the oppressor; they
form “an art of the weak” that, “blow by blow,” chips away at and creates
“cracks” in an existing system of power (37). To illustrate how young Spaniards
managed to identify and make use of such spaces to subvert the authority of the
Francoist regime in their daily life, Valencia-García incorporates an
impressively vast range of sources. These include official censorship [end of page 175] records, surveys, textbooks used during
the regime, comic books read by young people, youth magazines and pamphlets
that circulated during the Movida, as well as
the author’s communications with participants in the Movida.
The rich sources of information collected in this volume enable the author to
distinguish between the overlapping concepts of “fascist youth” and “youth
under fascism.” While the former refers to “how the state saw young people,”
the latter refers to “how young people lived their everyday lives under the
state” (Valencia-García 16). Despite this volume’s focus on Francoist Spain,
Valencia-García’s differentiation of the two concepts could nonetheless prove
useful to scholars studying the development of youth culture in different
socio-political contexts. The realistic picture of youth life during Francoist
Spain achieved through the author’s integration of broad and varied sources
also renders this volume valuable to scholars interested specifically in
contemporary Spanish history and youth culture.
In the introduction,
Valencia-García states that the book will investigate “Spanish youth culture
and queer culture during and after the dictatorship, with an emphasis on that
of Madrid and its role in the transition to the modern Spanish democracy” (2).
Nevertheless, despite the work’s focus on the Madrid Scene, the author stresses
the importance of not considering the Movida
in an isolated manner. Instead, through the preface and the epilogue attached
to the volume, Valencia-García highlights not only the inextricable connections
between the Movida and Spanish youth movements
today, but also the fact that Spanish youth culture forms an essential part of
the development of global youth culture. On the one hand, the antiauthoritarian
youth culture developed during the later Francoist years was heavily influenced
by the burgeoning global youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s that connected
the American civil rights movement, British punk culture, and American popular
and underground culture. On the other hand, young Spaniards’ turn to Spanish tertulia
and carnivalesque traditions within antiauthoritarian culture also made for a
unique Spanish youth culture experience. Moreover, the initiatives undertaken
by young Spaniards during the Movida and their
creation of democratic spaces to voice dissenting opinions, as the author
suggests, has also provided a valuable historical reference for youth movements
today, as young people cope with the current global economic and political
crisis. [end
of page 176]
Chapter 1, “Making a
Scene,” lays out the theoretical framework of this investigation, as
Valencia-García queries, “what prepared young Spaniards for what would become
known as the ‘transition to democracy’?” (9). He argues that the process by which
young Spaniards learned to occupy and reappropriate public spaces as a way of
cultivating pluralism and undermining the regime’s fascist ideology started as
early as the mid-1950s, long before the end of the dictatorship. To investigate
how such a process had taken place, Valencia-García sets up a theoretical
framework that draws from youth studies, urban studies, critical theory, space
theory, queer theory, and the study of everyday life. Rooted in these
conceptual frames, the subsequent chapters trace the daily life of young people
during the later Francoist years, uncovering the process by which young
Spaniards embraced liberal democratic values and prepared themselves for the Movida, despite the repressions imposed by the
regime.
Chapter 2, “To Study is
to Serve Spain,” offers an overview of the fascist education programme promoted by the Francoist government. By drawing
on key textbooks included in the school curriculum, Valencia-García highlights
the regime’s efforts to form its future citizens via a National-Catholic
education that not only provided a biased version of the history of the Spanish
Civil War (1936-39) but also contained nationalist, patriarchal, sexist, and
heteronormative messages (57-58). If, through the examination of the textbooks,
Valencia-García has curated an image of the fascist youth that the Francoist
regime had attempted to cultivate, then the author’s analysis in the subsequent
chapters largely contributes to the retrieval of a realistic image of young
people living under fascism. Chapters 3 through 6 address, in a chronological
order, the everyday life of young Spaniards from the mid-1950s until the late
1970s and highlight the repressions that young Spaniards had to endure during
the Francoist years, including state censorship and surveillance. At the same
time, he also demonstrates how young Spaniards managed to identify spaces, both
physical and virtual, where the power of the Francoist regime seemed weaker and
to reappropriate such spaces to voice and perform dissent.
Based on the works of
Alon Confino and Paul Fussels,
chapter 3, “The Revolt of the Youth,” examines collective memory as one space
that the authoritarian regime could not fully control, regardless of its
promotion of a biased version of Civil War history and its use of coercive [end of page 177] power. Valencia-García argues that the
collective memory of the bloodshed and horror during the Civil War and the
desire to have peace prompted Spaniards to consent to Franco’s dictatorship, as
well as its revisionist version of history, during the post–Civil War years.
Young Spaniards born after the Civil War, however, lacked this memory of the
horrors of the war. Thus, for young Spaniards, the revisionist history promoted
by the regime and the regime’s legitimacy did not carry the same weight as it
had with previous generations. Additionally, with the support of such prominent
Falangist intellectuals as Pedro Laín Entralgo, the pre–Civil War tradition of political-literary
dialogues was revived within Spanish universities during the 1950s. This
revival was achieved mainly through the organization of secret poetic
encounters in the universities, at which anti-fascist authors and their works
could be explored and discussed by students, who then romanticized the history
of the pre–Civil War tradition to legitimize contemporary dissent.
Valencia-García offers two case studies to support this argument. The first
looks at the mythologizing of the Spanish intellectual Miguel de Unamuno’s
stand against fascism in 1936, as featured in Luis Gabriel Portillo Pérez’s
short story “Unamuno’s Last Lecture.” The other examines the Spanish
philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s funeral procession
in 1955, which was turned into a protest by university students. Through these
case studies, Valencia-García illustrates the vital role that the collective
memory of the pre–Civil War democratic tradition had played in shaping student
dissent during the 1950s.
Chapter 4, “Truth,
Justice and the American Way in Spain,” explores young Spaniards’ reading of
banned comic books during the 1960s, with a specific focus on the Superman
comics. The censorship of Superman comics was mainly due to the regime’s
conviction that Superman promoted values and visions of society that
were deemed incompatible with the regime’s National–Catholic agenda. The regime
considered the main characters’ behaviours queer and protofeminist, which contravened the heteronormative and
patriarchal gender stereotypes that it had attempted to establish and promote.
At the same time, notions of democracy and justice as represented in the Superman
comics also alarmed the regime to a considerable extent as such ideas tended to
raise questions regarding the legitimacy of the Francoist dictatorship. The
popularity Superman achieved among Spanish readers, particularly
children and young readers, only further aggravated the regime’s uneasiness,
subsequently [end
of page 178] leading
to their complete ban of Superman comics in the early 1960s.
Nevertheless, as the author illustrates, despite the official ban, young
Spaniards continued to possess, read, and exchange Superman comics
throughout the 1960s. Through their reading of the banned comic books, and
sometimes even roleplaying the characters, young Spaniards not only subverted
the authority of the Francoist regime, but also prepared themselves to embrace
an alternate vision of society.
Chapter 5, “The
Penetration of Franco’s Spain,” examines young Spaniards’ production and
distribution of political-literary magazines in the 1960s, inspired by the
pre–Civil War tradition of the tertulia. Tertulias,
as Valencia-García explains, were occasions for the public to gather and engage
in dialogue and discussion over literary and political issues. Not
surprisingly, disruptions of this practice occurred during Franco’s
dictatorship, as the regime attempted to eliminate dissenting opinions. Despite
the regime’s suppression, the democratic tradition of the tertulia was
reimagined and revived by young Spaniards in the 1960s through the production
and distribution of political-literary magazines. With a specific focus on the
magazine Cuadernos para el diálogo, Valencia-García demonstrates the extent to
which young Spaniards, particularly the educated elite, managed to turn these
political-literary magazines into virtual spaces where alternate views of
society could be explored and criticism of the regime could be expressed,
though still in a subtle manner.
Chapter 6, “Clashing
with Fascism,” proceeds with the examination of the emergence and development
of antiauthoritarian punk culture in Spain in the 1970s. As Valencia-García
illustrates, the development of this Spanish punk culture was heavily
influenced by the burgeoning global youth culture and punk culture of the 1960s
and 1970s, especially that developed in the UK and the US. Spanish punk culture
contributed in turn to the development of global youth culture with a unique
Spanish dimension. Valencia-García demonstrates that, in the course of creating
Spanish punk, young Spaniards managed to combine elements of global punk
culture with the Spanish carnivalesque tradition, despite the latter’s heavy
suppression during Franco’s dictatorship. The formation and development of
Spanish punk allowed young Spaniards to further subvert the rigid societal
norms of the regime through the production and distribution of underground punk
comics and the (re)appropriation of public [end of page 179] spaces such as bars, cafés, streets, and
plazas to perform transgressive ideals. These acts of transgression performed
by young Spaniards from spaces, both physical and virtual, eventually converged
into the Movida. Chapter 7, “Madrid Kills Me,”
concludes this study by exploring some of the most famous symbols of the Movida, including the films of Pedro Almodóvar and
the punk band Kaka de Luxe. It elaborates on the eventual dissipation of the Movida following Spain’s transition to democracy in
the 1980s.
In Antiauthoritarian
Youth Culture in Francoist Spain, Valencia-García offers a comprehensive
and realistic picture of the everyday life of young Spaniards growing up during
the Francoist regime. By adopting the perspective of the young people,
Valencia-García highlights Spanish youth culture as a force that has shaped
political changes in Spain’s recent past rather than a mere component of the
general political milieu—the achievement of a “counter-narrative”
(Valencia-García 27). The author convincingly demonstrates the vital role that
collective memory of pre–Civil War pluralistic and democratic traditions played
in legitimizing and shaping antiauthoritarian youth movements under the regime.
Valencia-García’s construction of this counter-narrative indeed forms a major
strength of the work; however, in his attempt to set this counter-narrative
apart from what he recognizes as the Francoist regime’s perspective of young
people, the contradictions and inconsistencies present within the regime’s
cultural policies seem to have eluded his attention.
Valencia-García
demonstrates the kind of fascist youth the regime attempted to form through its
National–Catholic education curriculum. The author correctly observes that the
textbooks used during the regime are “reflective of their time and place” (50)
and include materials that would be considered racist, sexist, and highly
nationalistic today. Besides this, however, the regime’s textbooks also feature
messages that are often inconsistent and contradictory, which Valencia-García
does not sufficiently address. For instance, in its teaching of the Spanish
Civil War history, although the regime emphasized the importance of children
being obedient and never challenging the status quo, it also attempted to
justify its overthrow of the Second Spanish Republic (1931-39) as an act that
was nonetheless necessary and just. These contradictory messages subsequently
led to the regime’s awkward explanation of its military uprising against the
republican government as an act of revolución
constructiva, [end of page 180] or a constructive revolution, as opposed
to all other kinds of social revolutions that were considered undesirable
(Anonymous 41). Also, in a post-Civil War context, while the regime had
attempted to teach children of the need to extend a fraternal love to all
fellow Spaniards, at the same time, it invited children to reflect on such
questions as whom, preferably, one should love and whether or not one should also
love those considered “bad” Spaniards (Mailló 13).
Given such contradictory messages in the regime’s textbooks, Valencia-García
has missed an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of its
National–Catholic indoctrination in forming his counter-narrative in this
volume.
Although Valencia-García
correctly identifies state censorship as a major suppressive force imposed by
the regime to eliminate dissent, he overlooks the fact that the regime’s
censorship system was primarily a bureaucratic practice that often
involved censors’ inconsistent and arbitrary decisions. The regime’s
arbitrary and inconsistent censorship practices have been explored in detail in
works by Ian Craig, Marisa Fernández-López, Pedro C. Cerrillo
and Victoria Sotomayor, Julia Lin Thompson, as well as that by Georgina Cisquella, José Luis Erviti, and
José A. Sorolla. If, through its National–Catholic
ideology, the regime had attempted to impose a worldview that was supposed to
be coherent and durable, then such contradictions and inconsistencies, as seen
in the cultural policies promulgated by the regime, without a doubt, also
constituted the weak points of the regime’s power. An exploration of whether or
not young Spaniards growing up during the regime were able to recognize such
weaknesses within the regime’s repressive cultural policies and to adopt
corresponding tactics to challenge the regime’s power would have added to the
depth of Valencia-García’s counter-narrative.
Despite the above reservations,
Valencia-García’s informative work contributes a significant dimension to the
study of youth culture during Franco’s dictatorship. By tracing the emergence,
development, and lasting impact of the Movida—a
history that spans thirty years—Valencia-García’s study examines this Spanish
antiauthoritarian youth movement in a way that problematizes scholars’ often
rigid division of a “Franco era” and a “post-Franco era.” The volume instead
highlights the often-overlooked cultural changes that transcended the
artificially divided eras. Further, by constructing a narrative that gives primacy
to the perspective of young people, Valencia-García has shed light on the role
and agency assumed [end of page 181] by
young Spaniards in the process of Spain’s transition to democracy, which tends
to elude historians’ attention in their focus on the general socio-political
landscape of contemporary Spanish history. Moreover, Valencia-García’s approach
in contrasting the image of the fascist youth as encoded in the regime’s school
curriculum with the realistic image of the young Spaniards living under a
fascist state also provides an essential reference for scholars whose works
focus on the relationships between politics, ideology, and the production of
texts for children and young people.
Works Cited
Anonymous. Así quiero
ser: El niño del nuevo estado.
Hijos de Santiago Rodríguez, 1940.
Cerrillo,
Pedro C., and Victoria Sotomayor, editors. Censuras
y literatura infantil y juvenil en el Siglo
XX. Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La
Mancha, 2016.
Cisquella,
Georgina, José Luis Erviti, and José A. Sorolla. La represión cultural
en el franquismo: Diez años de censura de libros durante la Ley de Prensa (1966-1976). Anagrama,
2002.
Craig, Ian. Children’s Classics Under Franco: Censorship of the
“William” Books and the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Lang, 2001.
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of
Everyday Life. 1984. U of California P, 2011.
Fernández-López, Marisa. “Comportamientos censores en la literatura infantil y juvenil traducida del inglés en la época
franquista: establecimiento
de un corpus textual.” Traducción y censura en España
(1939-1985): estudio sobre
corpus TRACE: cine, narrativa, teatro,
edited by Raquel Merino Álvarez, U de León, 2008, pp. 19-48.
Mailló, Adolfo. Camino: libro de lectura comentada. Miguel A. Salvatella,
1963.
Thompson, Julia Lin. “Censorship and the Translation of Children’s
Literature: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Franco’s Spain
(1939-1975).” New Approaches to Translation, Conflict and Memory: Narratives
of the Spanish Civil War and the Dictatorship, edited by Lucía Pintado
Gutiérrez and Alicia Castillo Villanueva, Palgrave, 2019, pp. 113-42.
Julia Lin Thompson is a published author and a
doctoral candidate in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of
Sydney, where she also achieved her M.A. Her research focuses on ideology and
children’s literature translation. Her doctoral thesis examines the Spanish
translations of Mark Twain’s The Adventures
of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885),
produced under state censorship during Franco’s Spain (1939-1975).
[end
of page 182]