The Movida Madrileña vs Spanish Punk Culture: Disenchantment, Hedonism and the Youth's Political Commitment During the Spanish Transición

Abstract

The Movida Madrileña vs Spanish Punk Culture:Disenchantment, Hedonism and the Youth's Political Commitment During the Spanish Transición David Vila Diéguez In "The Construction of Youth in Spain in the 1980s and 1990s," Mark Allinson states that the eighties' and nineties' "Spanish youth culture is distinct in that its emergence from the heady excesses of a suddenly liberated post-Franco Spain deprives it of the social signification as deviance or resistance often associated with youth subcultures" (265). This resonates with those scholars who argue that the culture of the Transición was rather celebratory and that it functioned, among other things, as an element of political deactivation and amnesia regarding Spaniards' recent dictatorial past (Labanyi; Subirats; Resina; Vilarós; Martínez; Morán). In addition to this, Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi speak of youth culture during the Transición as the "official image of Spain" (312), placing Spanish youth cultures strictly within the dominant culture of the time and blurring the possibility of imagining the existence of other deviant or resistant subcultural formations. Finally, other scholars such as Nuria Triana Toribio go as far as to state that "movida or Nueva Ola, were the names given to Spanish punk" (275), in a definitive maneuver that cancels any possibility of a deviant punk subculture to have existed in Spain by establishing an ontological equivalence between punk and the mainstream and predominantly middle/upper-class Movida madrileña. Let me advance two of the most common erroneous conclusions drawn from these and other similar perspectives: that the Movida madrileña is the epitome of all youth cultures and subcultures in Spain and that there was a generalized political apathy among most young people during the Transición. Refuting these two conclusions is one of the main goals of this article. In order to do so, I will carry out a comparative study between the Movida madrileña and a another understudied but rather popular youth movement that I will, [End Page 113] from now on, refer to as Spanish punk culture, Spanish punk, or simply punk —three of the main ways in which the individuals involved in this movement referred to it in an attempt to clearly differentiate themselves from the Movida. By comparing these two movements, I aim to reassess the ways in which we understand the youth's political commitment during the Transición. Disenchantment and the Youth's Reaction to It In 1980's January edition of El ciervo, an agricultural engineer named José Antonio del Cañizo reflected on the disenchantment that affected most Spaniards at that time. "Con ser aún tan breve la etapa posfranquista, sin embargo ya pueden distinguirse en ella dos épocas: la de la ilusión por el cambio y la del desencanto" (Cañizo et al. 27). José Antonio viewed with sorrow how the same people that a few months ago "leía periódicos y revistas, iba a los mítines, leía montones de libros sobre política y, en definitiva, mostraba un gran interés por la clase política en general" (27), were now completely skeptical about politics and showed a severe case of "abulia" (27). Specifically talking about the Spanish youth, he regretted how, after running enthusiastically to join different political parties, "ahora se refugia[b]an, desengañados y frustrados en el pasotismo y la indiferencia" (27–28). This disenchantment has been studied by many cultural critics since then. Still in 1980, Jesús Ibáñez spoke of it as the state caused by "la distancia entre lo que [la democracia] pudo haber sido y lo que fue" (194), a perspective that aligns with Pedro Pérez del Solar's understanding of disenchantment as a "desilusión" (16). In a fairly similar vein, Santos Juliá refers to it as a gradual loss of faith in the government that started with the appointment of Adolfo Suárez as prime minister in 1976, "un falangista, católico y con amistades en el opus dei, presidente de una de las pocas asociaciones políticas acogidas a la legislación vigente, la Unión del Pueblo Español, y ministro...