Making a Scene: Movida, Comic Books, Punk Rock, Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture and Creating Democratic Spaces in Franco's Spain, 1955-1984
Abstract
In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the newly installed Franco dictatorship prohibited the centuries-old tradition of carnival, fearful of carnivalesque tendencies that disrupted Francoist constructions of gender, religion, and class. In this period, the dictatorship actively worked to censor children’s textbooks and literature in an attempt to inculcate young people with National-Catholic ideals. While this censorship lasted nearly four decades, in the years before the dictator’s death in 1975, young Spaniards began to build an underground scene that challenged Spanish normativity vis-à-vis creative expression, clandestine gatherings, explicit comic books, street drinking, sex, drugs and punk rock, resurrecting a carnivalesque tradition that became known as the Movida Madrileña, or Madrid Scene. This scene sustained nearly a decade of transgressive behaviour as young Spaniards revived a moribund tradition, bringing the carnivalesque into modernity as a platform to challenge Francoism with what ultimately became a capitalist consumer culture. This dissertation studies the emergence of this punk culture and how it engendered a period of tension between the régime and a new generation that looked toward both Spanish pluralistic traditions of old and to a budding global youth culture. Through a study of youth culture produced by young Spaniards of the period, interviews, and archival research, this research examines the role this resurrected youth scene played in the recreation of a public sphere in Madrid after forty years of dictatorship. ^
Subject Area
European history|History|Urban planning
Recommended Citation
Valencia-Garcia, Louie Dean, "Making a Scene: Movida, Comic Books, Punk Rock, Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture and Creating Democratic Spaces in Franco's Spain, 1955-1984" (2016). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI10125226.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI10125226
