Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism

by Louie Dean Valencia-García

Overview

How did kids, hippies and punks challenge a fascist dictatorship and imagine an impossible dream of an inclusive future? This book explores the role of youth in shaping a democratic Spain, focusing on their urban performances of dissent, their consumption of censored literature, political-literary magazines and comic books and their involvement in a newly developed underground scene.

After forty years of dictatorship, Madrid became the centre of both a young democracy and a vibrant artistic scene by the early 1980s. Louie Dean Valencia-García skillfully examines how young Spaniards occupied public plazas, subverted Spanish cultural norms and undermined the authoritarian state by participating in a postmodern punk subculture that eventually grew into the 'Movida Madrileña'. In doing so, he exposes how this antiauthoritarian youth culture reflected a mixture of sexual liberation, a rejection of the ideological indoctrination of the dictatorship, a reinvention of native Iberian pluralistic traditions and a burgeoning global youth culture that connected the USA, Britain, France and Spain.

By analyzing young people's everyday acts of resistance, Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain offers a fascinating account of Madrid's youth and their role in the transition to the modern Spanish democracy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350139527
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/28/2019
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Louie Dean Valencia-García is Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University, USA and Senior Fellow at the London-based Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. He has taught at Harvard University, USA, and held fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the United States Library of Congress and the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. He is Co-Chair of the Critical European Studies Research Network for the Council for European Studies at Columbia University, USA, and is a Research Editor for the CES's monthly digital jourbanal, EuropeNow.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Preface: Indignant Youth
An Introduction
1. Making a Scene
2. To Study is to Serve Spain
3. The Revolt of the Youth
4. Truth, Justice and the American Way in Spain
5. The Penetration of Franco's Spain
6. Clashing with Fascism
7. Madrid Kills Me
Epilogue: Today: Uncertain Times
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

[Valencia-García's] informative work contributes a significant dimension to the study of youth culture during Franco's dictatorship … [His] 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.” —Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures

“Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain is a stimulating book. Its longue-durée approach to the emergence of the Movida Madrileña is refreshing, and its analysis of the Spanish youth's role in the transition to democracy invigorating. It is an important contribution to the growing body of literature that seeks to reassess the role of culture in twentieth-century Spanish history.” —Jourbanal of Modern History

“[A] lively and innovative contribution to the body of scholarship that explores the origins of the democratic transition in Spain in the emerging civil society of the Franco dictatorship … The book is engagingly written and sprinkled with short biographical sketches of protagonists and descriptions of events that help flesh out the parameters of a cultural shift that is mostly teased out from between the lines of a creative variety of sources.” —Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies

“This book makes a significant contribution to the history of youth cultures and to the scholarly consideration of “the youth” as a crucial political and social category with its own agency.” —H-Socialisms

“Valencia-García's book constitutes an insightful, very original and much-needed study of a series of cultural practices and artefacts that allowed young Spaniards to develop a counterculture that eroded the fascist foundations of Francoist Spain.” —European Comic Art

“Highly readable, provides a wealth of detail and analysis on not-so-well-known initiatives and cultural agitators and skillfully dissects the cultural and political contributions of the multifarious comic and graphic novel world to the transformation of Spain's cultural life ... A necessary addition to current research on modern Spain that will expand readers' knowledge of the convergence of popular culture and the arts at a time of political and social turmoil.” —Jourbanal of Spanish Cultural Studies

“Far from the hackneyed clichés and stereotypes, from the clichés about this time of those who did everything and everything, this book endows its protagonists with political intelligence, through an unconventional way, that is, through their own tastes and provocations. Something, it must be emphasized, very difficult to do and achieve in a historical research book.” —Context and Action (Bloomsbury translation)

“An important debate about the ways of looking at and making history around the recent Spanish past ... endows its protagonists with political intelligence, through an unconventional way, that is, through their own tastes and provocations. Something, it must be emphasized, that is very difficult to do and achieve in a historical research book.” —Revista Contexto (Bloomsbury Translation)

“This is what I've been waiting for – a colorful and creative exploration of youth resistance under the Franco regime. From Superman in Spain to naked pro-democracy protesters, Louie Dean Valencia-García uncovers it all. And given the recent emergence of authoritarianism in the United States and Europe, this book couldn't have come at a more opportune time.” —Hamilton M. Stapell, Associate Professor of History, State University of New York, New Paltz, USA

“This is a highly original study that investigates for the first time youth culture and the practice of everyday life in Spain under the late dictatorship and transition to democracy. In a series of brilliant chapters, the author examines a wide range of little known and less studied sources, often culled from archives: school textbooks, comics, nightclubs, and fanzines. From National-Catholic ideologies to Pedro Almodóvar via Superman and punk, this book offers a lucid and compelling account of a fascinating multimedia field.” —Paul Julian Smith, Distinguished Professor, City University of New York, USA

“An extremely lively and stimulating contribution to the much-neglected social and cultural history of twentieth-century Spain. It offers a reconstruction of antiauthoritarian youth culture that delineates not only the intersections between dictatorship and democracy, but also the hitherto unexplored interstices of the transgressive, underground and counter cultures of the two regimes.” —Nigel Townson, Senior Lecturer in Spanish History, The Complutense University of Madrid, Spain

From the Publisher