Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain ― Clashing With Fascism

This book explores the role of young people 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 punk 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.

Louie Dean Valencia-Garcia is Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University, USA. 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 an editor for EuropeNow, the monthly journal of the Council for European Studies at Columbia University, USA.