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From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-rev...@lists.h-net.org>
Date: Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 9:09 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Socialisms]: Braskén on Valencia-García,
'Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism'
To: <h-rev...@lists.h-net.org>
Cc: H-Net Staff <revh...@mail.h-net.org>


Louie Dean Valencia-García.  Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in
Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism.  London  Bloomsbury Academic,
2018.  Illustrations. 272 pp.  $35.95 (e-book), ISBN
978-1-350-03849-3; $35.95 (pdf), ISBN 978-1-350-03848-6; $120.00
(cloth), ISBN 978-1-350-03847-9.

Reviewed by Kasper E. Braskén (Abo Akademi University)
Published on H-Socialisms (July, 2020)
Commissioned by Gary Roth

Youth Against Fascism

Louie Dean Valencia-García shows in his deeply engaging and
analytically eloquent monograph, _Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in
Francoist Spain_,_ _that the study of dissent and protest cultures
remains an intellectually dynamic field of research. The book is
concerned with the Spanish turn from Francisco Franco's authoritarian
regime (1939-75) toward a pluralistic, modern democracy. However, as
Valencia-García demonstrates, the majority of Spaniards of the 1960s
were never engaged in resistance but desired peace in an effort to
avoid directly challenging the power structures of the dictatorship.
Although the regime's legitimacy was founded on the victory in the
Spanish Civil War (1936-39), Francoist Spain favored a sort of
general amnesia and self-censorship that suppressed the bitter
memories and shielded the people of Spain from the recurrence of
violence and bloodshed. Change was, however, incipient with the
arrival of a new generation born in Francoist Spain
that--crucially--had no personal experience of civil war (or the "War
of Liberation" as it euphemistically was named by the dictatorship).
They dared to imagine an alternative future and sought ways to
challenge the dominant authoritarian structures. This book is about
how acts of everyday opposition and dissent emerged within Spanish
youth, and investigates how inventive tactics were employed to
challenge the stagnated "national-catholic" Francoist system.

While previous research has focused on the Spanish transition to
democracy during the late 1970s and 1980s, Valencia-García
convincingly argues for the need to go back to the youth culture of
the 1950s and 1960s to understand Spaniard's push toward a more
pluralistic society. While many scholars have argued for a sharp
shift around Franco's death in 1975, Valencia-García maintains that
democracy in Spain could never have been successfully implemented
merely from above. Such perspectives overlook the agency of young
Spaniards who had been subverting the regime especially through their
everyday lives. Like most dictatorships, Francoist Spain was highly
sensitive to even the smallest forms of critique. This means that
scholars must also be extremely attentive to the smallest signs of
pluralistic countercultures that developed in the margins. These need
to be taken seriously, and although some of these subcultures might
seem insignificant in hindsight, Valencia-García invites us to
reconsider them as crucial societal developments that helped Spain in
its rapid transformation to democracy. Spanish youth managed to
create alternative spaces for cultural dissent, but to survive in
such hostile circumstances, it was of vital importance that they did
not pose a direct threat to the regime. The beauty of a pluralistic
youth culture was its ability to implicitly challenge authority. The
aim of the book is hence to study "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" (p. 2). Valencia-García defines this as an
"antiauthoritarian youth culture" that due to its implicit nature is
best studied through alternative sources that provide revelations
about agency, everyday life, and print culture, including the
production and copying of small newspapers, journals, music,
pamphlets, films, and comic books.

The focus on everyday acts of dissent thus analyzes how "even
seemingly apolitical young people" in fact challenged patriarchal,
conservative, and authoritarian norms. As Valencia-García states,
the _Movidad Madrileña_, or the "Madrid Scene," of the 1970s with
its carnivalesque character and partying in the streets managed to
create a counterpublic or a subculture that through its adherence to
plurality challenged Francoist normative notions of gender,
sexuality, and nationalism. Antiauthoritarianism could therefore be
articulated by basically nonpolitical acts, such as partying in the
streets. This "carnivalesque and pluralistic culture" enabled
ordinary people to subvert ideals of the conservative regime through
"a culture of drugs, sex, drinking and art performed in the streets
of Madrid" (p. 3). As distinctions between private and public largely
collapsed under the authoritarian security state, dissent found new
and unexpected forms and shapes. Indeed, as Valencia-García
thoroughly shows, "the lasting impact of the Movida ... promoted the
creation of pluralistic, autonomous and democratic spaces despite the
Falangist desire for a homogeneous, conservative and Catholic Spain"
(p. 4).

When contextualizing antiauthoritarianism it is of utmost importance
to understand the close entanglement between fascism and
authoritarianism. As the book is concerned with everyday forms of
dissent, the pervasive power of everyday fascism becomes equally
relevant. Although Franco's dictatorship is better described as
authoritarian than fascist, Valencia-García makes an elaborate point
about the endurance of fascist tendencies within authoritarianism.
These tendencies encompass, according to Valencia-García, among
others, the glorification of purity, an obsession with youth, the use
of hegemonic and binary categorizations, fervent nationalistic
ideology, a longing for homogeneity, the idolization of militarism,
the centralization of power, an extensive use of surveillance and
violence, and a general rejection of enlightenment ideology and
democracy. Fascist tendencies, moreover, embraced misogyny and
heteronormativity. Paradoxically, it was queerphobic at the same time
that it idolized the strong male figure and the male body. It rested
on rituals and mystic symbolism; it pushed critical thinking and
intellectualism to the margins of society; and it advanced
chauvinism, nationalism, racism, and anti-intellectualism, while also
imagining geographical expansion and colonialism or expressing a
nostalgia for lost empire. These fascist tendencies provide us with a
blueprint for antiauthoritarian and anti-fascist dissent as they
define the main qualities that the antiauthoritarian youth culture
sought to oppose. By advocating plurality instead of homogeneity,
internationalism instead of racism and purity, feminism instead of
misogyny and heteronormativity, it gives us a taste of the incipient
Spanish culture of dissent.

The reader is also invited to consider the impact of textbooks used
in Spanish schools. Chapter 2 serves as a welcome contextualization
of how Spanish youth was forced to grow up, how they were
indoctrinated and limited in their possibilities to oppose the
system. From elementary schools to universities, conformity and
traditional Spanish values were propagated. However, a young
intelligentsia nevertheless soon emerged that imagined and invented
new spaces for dissent. According to Valencia-García, such tactics
deployed by those without power against a mighty authority were at
the heart of Spanish antiauthoritarianism. When authority controlled
all public space, dissent clustered in the smallest of fissures. A
prerequisite for its existence was to be marginal in order to avoid
repression, but at the same time it showed that no authority was
total, and that in unsuspected spaces dissent could be galvanized in
the margins, where it could prepare and imagine a better, more
pluralistic, and democratic future. In chapter 3 Valencia-García
continues the analysis by revealing how students turned the funeral
procession of philosopher José Ortega y Gasset into a protest. In a
similar way, the rediscovery of Miguel de Unamuno's _Last Lecture_,
originally delivered in October 1936 when he was the rector of the
Universidad de Salamanca, was used by antiauthoritarian youth during
the 1950s as a historically meaningful memory of dissent.

In chapter 4 Valencia-García turns to the topic of banned books, and
especially the role of Superman comic books in the 1960s. It
investigates the underground comic book market and the regime's
partially unsuccessful efforts to stifle the underground comic book
scene. Under such extreme conditions of authoritarian rule, the
reading and trading of banned Superman comics became a part of
everyday dissent. Reading Superman would of course not lead to the
fall of the dictatorship, but it provided, according to
Valencia-García, an important opportunity for Spanish youth to
imagine non-confrontative ways to subvert the authoritarian system.
Chapter 5 looks in turn at the role of political-literary magazines
of the 1960s and analyzes how these recreated the tradition of the
Spanish _tertulia. _In cafés, important spaces for the discussion of
literature and politics emerged, or rather re-emerged, that reminded
Spaniards of their pre-Francoist pluralistic traditions. Still it is
important to keep in mind the limits of this dissent as the
authorities monitored cafés with undercover police and, when
necessary, disrupted developing networks of dissent. Chapter 6 turns
our attention to the independent youth publications of the 1970s,
such as _El Rollo_ or _Vicios Modernos_, that directly challenged
normative constructions of sexuality and incorporated elements from
American and British punk culture. In the final chapter,
Valencia-García continues with an analysis of the underground
cultures created around the punk band Kaka de Luxe and the films of
Pedro Almodóvar and Iván Zulueta.

In conclusion, 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. It makes a compelling--and hopeful--argument that not all
dictatorships need to be toppled in the battlefield but can also be
slowly defeated through dissent articulated in the streets, through
subversive comics, and in the minds of young people. Valencia-García
therefore shows that "fascist tendencies" are best fought in our
everyday lives, be it in Francoist Spain, or today's America. All in
all, this book offers a very welcome addition to the study of
everyday forms of resistance in authoritarian societies. It is a
therefore a pity that the compelling introductory chapters that
discuss in depth questions related to anti-fascism, dissent, everyday
forms of resistance, and the different fascist tendencies in
authoritarianism are not matched by a concluding chapter in the same
high caliber. The all too short conclusions neglect the possibility
of gazing beyond the Spanish antiauthoritarian context and comparing
the results with situations elsewhere around the world. The vast
literature on youth activism within fascist or authoritarian
societies, from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy to authoritarian
regimes of the Cold War period where young people certainly also
imagined relevant ways to subvert their own regimes, would certainly
have enhanced the final analysis. The lack of conclusions and missed
opportunities to advance comparative outlooks partially conceals the
fact that the book also constitutes a significant contribution to the
broader international research field related to anti-fascism,
everyday resistance, and cultural dissent in authoritarian and
fascist societies. Valencia-García's study certainly deserves a
distinct place within that larger historiographical framework.

Citation: Kasper E. Braskén. Review of Valencia-García, Louie
Dean, _Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing
with Fascism_. H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews. July, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53703

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.




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Best regards,

Andrew Stewart
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