Hispania Nova is the first on-line Contemporary History journal in Spanish language. It publishes original research articles and book reviews on different topics of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was founded in 1998 by Ángel Martínez de Velasco and Julio Aróstegui and it is distributed electronically via the Open Access system. It is published once a year, in January, as a dossier with original, unpublished research articles and book reviews. Its goal is to promote greater knowledge in this field and to encourage discussion amongst historians and social scientists worldwide. It focuses on a comparative and multidisciplinary approach and presents a critical and rigorous view of History. All articles published are assessed by a peer-review, double-blind system. License Attribution-NonComercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 Spain de Creative Commons (CC BY-ND-ND 3.0)
HISPANIA NOVA is a journal duly registered, with ISSN 1138-7319 and legal deposit M 9472-1998. The texts published in this journal - unless specifically stated- are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No derivative Works 3.0 Spain license. They can be copied, distributed and publicly communicated as long as the author, journal and institutions publishing the works are quoted, not use the material for commercial purposes and no derivative work is made. The complete license agreement can be found in https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/deed.en
Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in Repressive Regimes
Studies on Argentina's last military dictatorship have seen enormous academic development. However, most have focused on urban subjects located in the center of the country. With the aim of making visible and problematizing the presence of victims rarely seen in academic research, this pa per aims to address the territorial configuration of dictatorial repressive networks from the perspective of gender, ethnicity, and class. In this regard, from an intersectional theoretical perspective and a "history from below" perspective, this paper analyzes the state repressive practices deployed against rural workers of Creole and Indigenous origins, as well as common criminals and prostitutes. On the other, we examine the class, gendered, and racialized nature of the scales and temporalities of local repressive networks. This approach will be based on oral sources of our own creation, period diaries, and information from the judicial system.
Introduction. Present, Past and Future of Argentina’s Last Dictatorship
The Last Argentine Military Dictatorship. Problems and Controversies
The last military dictatorship has been a widely present topic since the democratic transition until today, both in public and political debate and in historiographic reflection and production. Its study and interpretation has gone through different moments and has been influenced by the complex situations experienced by the country from the recovery of democracy up to the most recent years, by the controversies in the public and political sphere and the changes in the social perception of the period, by the development of the process of memory, truth and justice, as well as by the rhythms of historiographic production. This article presents a critical and updated balance of the studies on the last dictatorship, identifying problems, debates and interpretations, seeking to put into dialogue with the changing contexts of the last decades.
The Last Argentine Dictatorship as a School Content in Forty Years of Democracy
The teaching of the last dictatorship has been one of the strongest challenges facing the Argentine education system. And if at some point that historical process appeared unquestionably interpreted as a stage in which “state terrorism” was deployed, a closer exploration of the past reveals some tensions while a look to the future shows renewed challenges. Focusing on the secondary level, and through the differentiation of successive stages marked by political, judicial and memorial movements, the paper will show that this school question had a direction marked by the State -with lights and shadows- but also had various appropriations by institutions and teachers.
Performing Theater under the Dictatorship
A growing body of recent research demonstrates that theatrical productions and performances were not only subject to repression and subject to censorship during Argentina’s last military dictatorship, but also served as spaces for the expression of dissent. In the case of the city of Santa Fe and its conurbation, it is possible to appreciate how individual and collective actors in the theatrical field navigated a constant interplay of restrictions and authorizations with local and provincial authorities. Building on the approaches undertaken in previous works, this paper aims to study the strategies followed by some members of the Santa Fe cultural space in the face of public policies and offer conceptualizations that allow for their understanding.
Protest and Organization in Dictatorial Times
This article addresses the repressive violence, labor conflict, and the first attempts at union re organization experienced by the banking staff of Buenos Aires during the first years of the civil-military dictatorship (1976-79). From an approach that considers the dimensions of class and gender, it analyzes the changes that occurred in labor conditions and in the modalities of repressive action exercised on the union, as well as the strategies outlined by the workers to confront the conditions imposed by the dictatorship. Likewise, based on a wide range of sources –including publications, archival documents, and oral interviews–, it investigates the situation of bank workers within the union space. In this way, by recovering the agency of the workers, it seeks to shed light on a little-explored period of the history of banking unions in the City of Buenos Aires.
The Argentine Economy under the Dictatorship
How did the military dictatorship reshape the Argentine economy? For more than half a century, this question has been answered primarily in macroeconomic terms. The restructuring of the local economy promoted by the military left behind a dismantled industry, a more unequal social structure and an enormously multiplied public foreign debt. However, the effects of this reform program were not limited to the economic structure. Household economic practices were also affected, as a result of the combination of the state’s deregulatory impulse with the conditions created by continuing economic problems and longer-term trends. One expression of these changes was the growing importance of the financial system for household economies; the other was the incorporation of the dollar into various markets and into the financial repertoires of different social groups. This article focuses on the analysis of both processes.
The Struggle to Project a Positive Image of Dictatorial Argentina
This article reconstructs the ‘external front’ of Argentina’s last military dictatorship by analysing the state structures created to project a positive image abroad amid divisions within the military leadership. On the one hand, we show that this image had multiple facets and structures. On the other hand, we show that the issue of the disappeared detainees took some time to affect the country’s external image. Finally, we analyse two cases of great international impact - that of Elizabeth Käsemann and that of Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet - in order to understand how the different factions of the dictatorship implemented changing strategies to clean up the image discredited by the allegations and to avoid a rupture in bilateral relations.
This article explores the characteristics of state repression in twentieth-century Argentina, through its continuities and changes, with the aim of in serting the State terrorism of the seventies into a deeper historical weft. On the basis of an exhaus tive bibliographic survey, added to the results of our own research, different keys to analytical reflection are studied, through a series of temporalities, in the long, medium and short term. In the different sections, the historical processes of construction of the “internal enemy”, the violent responses of the State, the mechanisms of exception and the growing power of the Armed Forces in internal politics, in articulation with their role in repression, are addressed. The article aims to make a contribution to the development of future proposals and lines of research on the history of repression and extreme violence in Argentina.
A Flat Circle? Recurrences and Differences in Memories of the Last Dictatorship during the Rise of Argentina’s Radical Right
Javier Milei’s victory in the 2023 presidential election challenged the established consensus that had prevailed since the democratic transition in several ways, for example by officialising what until then had been a counter-memory of the last military dictatorship. This paper takes as a star ting point a set of meanings of terms reclaimed by the libertarian discursive formation to refer to the 1970s, such as “war”, “terrorism”, “there were not 30,000” and “curro (theft) of human rights”, and aims to rebuild the layers of meaning that overlap in this configuration of memory by considering its historical lineage. On the one hand, following Foucauldian notions of origin and emergence, it analyses the course of historical and political events which contributed a plexus of meanings from the years before the coup up to the present. On the other hand, it examines the growing tensions and disagreements that contributed to the pervasiveness, dissemination or obliteration of such meanings in the public debate.
Tourist regionalisation of popular music and peasant resistance
This article tells the short history of the Parado de Valldemossa, the traditional music, dance and costume group that was born as a tourist show in 1915 and established itself as the official model of Mallorcan regional dance in the 1930s. Firstly, it explains how the convergence of the tourist de-sires of travelling celebrities with the political interests of the local elites led to the proposal of an apolitical paradise of social harmony from which to prevent the politicisation of the peasantry at a time of anguish and profound instability. Secondly, it explains how this imaginary transcended into social norm through its bodily performativity in a dance show amid a process of governmental officialization and nationalisation. Finally, it tells how the local popular classes, who were forced to performativise the stereotype of the conform-ist and apolitical peasant, resisted assuming this assigned identity and managed to reproduce their own political subjectivity in an autonomous way.
music, tourism, regional cultures, national construction, peasant resistance, performativity
Theorizing on the methods of territorial insertion in clandestinity
The following pages contain a study whose obﾭjective is to investigate and theorize about the mechanisms of territorial insertion of the New Left groups. For this work, the OMLE and PCE(r) as groups linkedto GRAPO are taken as analytical basis. The selected chronology corresponds to the creation phase of the political element of GRAPO until thefirst years of the PCE(r) 1968-1977. As a result, three insertion patterns were obtained. All three have similar characteristics. One of them diﾭffers, and it is the one that contributes the denoﾭmination to the insertion: on what type of group or people it acts.
territorial insertion, New Left, PCE(r), OMLE and communism
The Meaning of the 1978 Constitution in the Spanish Transitional Process and the Post-Treatment
The despective expression “regime of ‘78” has highlighted the relevance of the Constitution as a referential and foundational myth of the period of our political transition from Franco’s dictatorship to democracy, its main place of memory. Above all, for those who have impugned the transition process as a model and have become the scourge of a change of regime that frustrated expectations and ended up becoming the origin of the main problems that afflict our current democracy. Despite this, the 1978 Constitution is the focus of all attention in the face of these and other possible alternatives, and its iconic character is recognised, but this qualification is not compatible with certain characteristics that we will analyse in this text. These are inconsistencies or ambiguities that have gone unnoticed for years and which historiography has not paid much attention to on the occasion of its forty-fifth anniversary.
constitution, Transition, Regime of 78, historical memory, democracy
Spanish musical diplomacy in the United Kingdom
The cultural power that Spain has possessed and still possesses has been used by different governments and regimes to improve the international perception of the country. One of these tools was music, whose characteristics made it possible to overcome language barriers and easily reach other societies. During the Francoist period, Spanish classical compositions and flamenco occupied a privileged place in the artistic projection in the United Kingdom, as the English audiences always well received these melodies. This work will analyse the changes and permanencies of the characteristics of Spanish musical diplomacy and its connection with the political transformations at a national and international level.
musical diplomacy, flamenco, classical music, Spain, United Kingdom
This article examines how Spanish folklore was reinterpreted in the service of two ideologically opposing projects during the 1960s: the provincial volumes from the Francoist "XXV Years of Peace" propaganda campaign and the Anthologie Sonore de l’Espagne by socialist exile Ambrosi Carrión. While the dictatorship used folklore to construct and promote an official image of Spain as a symbol of unity and modernity, Carrión presented it as a tool for resistance and cultural diversity from exile. Both projects share formal characteristics, such as the combination of text, images, and music, but diverge radically in their purpose. The study addresses the instrumentalization of folklore for political ends, highlighting tensions between authenticity and spectacle, and how the dynamics of patrimonialization and touristification were integrated into these projects.
Francoism, exile, Folklore, cultural identity, tourism, Ambrosi Carrión
Hymns and patriotic songs were a fundamental vector in the construction of political subjectivities in revolutionary Europe, particularly due to their ability to forge collective identities through an intensely emotional language and to become political symbols that appealed to collective action. The article draws on the cultural history of politics and the history of emotions to analyze the impact of the Himno de Riego both on the political struggles of the Spanish Liberal Revolution (1833-1843) and on the emotional construction of the political subjectivities of the period.
spanish liberal revolution, political subjectivities, history of emotions, political cultures, patriotic music, Himno de Riego
Explosions of Patriotism with a Firm Step
In 1898, amid the growing wave of wartime patriotism in Spain, the Marcha de Cádiz became an omnipresent sound in urban public spaces, frequently mentioned in the press. Originating from the zarzuela Cádiz (1886), with music by Federico Chueca y Joaquín Valverde, the march transcended the theater and resonated in social gatherings, bullfights, and military ceremonies. This article examines its role in the construction of national identity, analyzing how it contributed to the creation of nationalist phonospheres in urban environments. The piece functioned as a sonic force that was both unifying and controlling. The study contextualizes its widespread dissemination through the press (1887–1898), highlighting its performative impact in generating patriotic sentiment and its role as a nationalist propaganda tool that also silenced dissent through its repeated performances in celebrations, political mobilizations, and acts of social cohesion.
Marcha de Cádiz, phonosphere, nation-building process, mediatization, press and propaganda
Music, Politics, and the Construction of Identity in Contemporary Spain
The Invisible Reality of Women in Secondary School Textbooks
This article analyzes the presence of women in secondary school textbooks from the dictatorship to the democratic transition in Spain. Based on this objective, a sample of forty textbooks corresponding to the subjects of History, Geography, Language and Literature in the stages of BUP (High School Education) and COU (University Foundation Course) established by the General Education Act of 1970 has been selected. The approach adopted is mixed, combining historical-educational methodology from a perspective of gender, and critical discourse analysis through the implementation of the qualitative software Nvivo version 12. The results obtained indicate two opposing female identity models that underlie the school textbooks of this period: one traditional and the other modern. Both models, built on discourses, images and cultural representations that shaped and articulated the identity construction of the school population.
didactic material, manual, female identity, Democratic transition, Spain
The serious economic and social situation in which the Spanish peasantry found itself during the last moments of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th produced different riots and tumults in ci-ties throughout the country. One of them was the one found on March 15th 1913 in Toledo after the murder of the young Antonio Campuzano. After this, a crowd burned the booths where taxes were collected and demanded that the authorities put an end to the abuses. This paper tries to analyze this fact the social exaltation of the days after the mur-der through the chronicles collected in local, regio-nal and provincial newspapers.
riot, peasantry, consumption, taxes, Toledo
The ‘Delegación de Información e Investigación de Falange’
The study of the Delegación Nacional de Infromación e Investigación can serve as a basis for determining the evolution of an information system based on a political organisation. The system was born as an aid and guarantor of a political movement whose survival was not guaranteed. Initially, it evolved from being a complete information service with police powers, evolving into a political counter-es-pionage service in its second phase with the aim of propping up the regime, to be finally absorbed and diluted by it. The service died a slow death due to a lack of resources and the regime’s lack of interest in its survival. This study analyses the creation, evolution, functions and end of a largely unknown service, but one that was of great importance in sustaining the Franco regime.
Falange, Intelligence Service, espionage, counter-espionage, repression
Our research on Ramón Merino Gracia provides new sources of study from his record of his dismissal as a national teacher by the Francoist authorities of the AGA, from the press and from ego documents. Our study is part of the new historiographical perspective of political history. This article is an approach to the political career of Ramón Merino Gracia (Cartagena, 1894-Barcelona, 1966). This primary school teacher, linked to the pedagogical innovation promoted by Freinet, went from leading the socialist youth, to being a communist leader, to later become a member of the “libres”, the trade union linked to the emergence of the first Spanish fascism, to join Primo de Rivera’s Unión Patriótica, to promote a laborism political option during the Second Republic, to join the CNT during the Civil War and to overcome Franco’s purge to continue his teaching activity during Franco’s regime.
Ramón Merino Gracia, turncoat, communism, “Libres”, crisis of liberalism
José Luis Agudín Menéndez, El Siglo Futuro. Un diario carlista en tiempos republicanos (1931-1936), Zaragoza, Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2023, 538 páginas
The end of the Franco dictatorship opened up a whole series of questions about how its cultural legacy should be dealt with in the public space. The social movements during the Spanish political transition carried out organised and com-mitted work in Barcelona to change the names of the city’s streets, a task that was taken up by the new democratic institutions, but not without difficulties. This text shows how the Francoist nomenclature was implemented and how, during the transition, neighbourhood mobilisations and the Catalan Culture Congress were organised to demand the return of the Republican names and their Catalanisation. On the other hand, we will see the different reactions of the city council until it carried out the renovation of the street directory and created the Ponència del nomenclàtor, the municipal instrument in charge of managing it.
nomenclature of streets, Street naming, transition, memory policies, collective memory, Barcelona, public space
The executions of Valdediós (Asturias, 1937)
In the early morning of October 27, 1937, when the Spanish civil war had already concluded in Astu-rias with the victory of the coup side, members of a battalion of the Francoist army shot eleven women and six men employed in the Republican psychiatric hospital that had been temporarily installed in the convent of Valdediós. The majority were nurses who had moved with a few dozen patients from the Oviedo Provincial Psychiatric Hos-pital, that was evacuated a year earlier. The paper presents the circumstances in which the crime took place, documents the arduous journey that allowed the excavation of the grave and the reco-very and identification of the victims, and reviews the questions and conjectures that exist about those ultimately responsible for the massacre.
Spanish Civil War, psychiatric hospital, asylum, executions, grave