The Production of Madrid in Early Franco Spain Adam Lee Winkel
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Zones of Influence: The Production of Madrid in Early Franco Spain Adam Lee Winkel Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Adam Lee Winkel All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Zones of Influence: The Production of Madrid in Early Franco Spain Adam Lee Winkel Within Spanish cultural studies, urban studies have become increasingly popular in the last twenty years. While this literature covers a wide range of Spanish locales and historical periods, there are still few comprehensive analyses of the production of Madrid’s urban space between the Civil War and the economic boom of the 1960s. This dissertation contributes to the field through the examination of the symbolic production and use of Madrid during the first decades of the Franco dictatorship. I argue that the disciplining of Madrid’s urban space was a means of organizing the capital’s citizens into ordered subjects during a time of transition. This process was carried out primarily through the creation of expectations of how the spaces around the urban subject were best lived. My analytical approach is based on case studies and close readings of films, novels, and official documents such as speeches, maps, laws, and urban policies that were produced during the 1940s and 50s. It is an interdisciplinary study of the disciplining of Madrid and its inhabitants. The dissertation is organized spatially; each chapter focuses on a different aspect of Madrid’s urban fabric, which extends outward in a series of concentric circles. My first chapter, “Home Life: Domestic Struggles in Comedic Film,” deals with the most intimate human space, the home. Four films, Esa pareja feliz (dir. Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis García Berlanga, 1951), El inquilino (dir. José Antonio Nieves Conde, 1957), La vida por delante (dir. Fernando Fernán Gómez, 1958), and El pisito (dir. Marco Ferreri, 1959) illustrate how pressures of ownership transformed the home into a powerful tool of control and homogenization by blurring the lines between public and private space. In Chapter 2, “A Wandering Man: Fragmentation and Discipline in La colmena,” I show that this tension spread to the city streets portrayed in Camilo José Cela’s novel (1951), where fragmentation and separation worked to break down the threat of collective action and caused individuals to search for a productive role in society. In the 1950s, the push of hunger and the pull of industrialization drew migrants to Madrid in search of jobs and material comforts, only to find themselves displaced to the periphery of the capital, reinforcing their marginal status. This demographic transformation forms the basis for my third chapter, “No Limits! The City in Surcos and Los golfos,” in which I analyze two key films from the decade, José Antonio Nieves Conde’s Surcos (1951) and Carlos Saura’s Los golfos (1959). Finally, Chapter Four, “‘Ya se aburren de tanta capital’: Leisure, Language, and Law in El Jarama” examines Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio’s novel (1956) to explore how citizens looking for relief from the pressures of city life in the surrounding countryside only found that this leisure space was under the control of its own disciplinary forces. The novels and films that I include in this study demonstrate how the discipline of the Spanish capital extended to all of the city’s zones to create a model of urban citizenship that blurred the lines between public and private space and between individual and collective subjects. Table of Contents List of Illustrations ii Acknowledgments iii Introduction. Zones of Influence 1 1. Home Life: Domestic Struggles in Comedic Film 35 2. A Wandering Man: Fragmentation and Discipline in La colmena 79 3. No Limits! The City in Surcos and Los golfos 118 4. “Ya se aburren de tanta capital”: Leisure, Language, and Law in El Jarama 161 Conclusion 200 Works Cited 207 i List of Illustrations Figure 1. Plan General de Ordenación de Madrid (Plan Bidagor) - General Map 7 Figure 2. Plan General de Ordenación de Madrid (Plan Bidagor) - Map of Green Zones 162 ii Acknowledgments I wish to thank a number of people whose guidance and support made the completion of this project possible. First and foremost I must express my deep gratitude to my advisor Alberto Medina, who arrived at Columbia just as I was looking for someone to guide me through this process. He is a demanding, erudite, engaged, and (thankfully) rapid reader who constantly challenged my assumptions and expanded my views. Wadda Ríos-Font and Gonzalo Sobejano have been professors, committee members, and mentors, and I am honored to have had the chance to form relationships with such esteemed scholars. The same can be said for Jo Labanyi and Graciela Montaldo, who have generously agreed to serve on my dissertation defense committee. All of you have been inspirational to me as I begin my career and think about what kind of professor and scholar I want to become. Thank you for being such astounding models. When I enrolled at Columbia, the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures was still known as the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and my evolution as a person and as a scholar owes much to the department’s concurrent transformation. Carlos J. Alonso and Eunice Rodríguez Ferguson have always been generous in their support and friendship. Elizabeth Amann was a reader of my comprehensive exams, and many of the ideas that I have developed in this dissertation originated in conversations I had with her. One of the few constants at the department during this transition was Kosmas Pissakos, who was helpful to me from my first visit to Columbia as a potential applicant to my last day before leaving for North Carolina. I am also very pleased to be able to thank Carole Head, Hayden Carrón, Claudia Femenías, Michael McCully, and my colleagues at High Point University for their patience, support, and friendship as I finished this project after having already begun another. Thank you iii to Dean Carole Stoneking, Provost Dennis Carroll, and the HPU administration for a generous Doctoral Completion Grant. My friends and family are the principal reason I never suffered the isolation and desperation that seems to plague so many doctoral students. Thanks especially to James Uden, Erik Hamer, Brendan Lanctot, and Simon Taylor for the many hours we spent together discovering how to do what we do while managing to lead full, balanced, enjoyable lives. Thank you to Pamela McCorduck for demonstrating how a writer thinks and for encouraging me to do it. Thank you to my family for their unwavering love and support: my brother Nicolas, my sister Katherine, and my parents, David Winkel and Angèle Tremblay. Finally, thanks to Jill Bender, for appearing in my life right when I needed her and accompanying me through to the end of this project. Here’s to the completion of many more. iv To the memory of Leon M. Winkel, who hung lights on the Brooklyn Bridge, and to Amelia Winkel, whose first-grade teacher would not call on her when she raised her hand. v 1 Introduction. Zones of Influence During the 1940s, in a reflection of the Franco regime’s national autarkic politics, Madrid was isolated from the rest of the country. This time, however, rather than the walls that had been erected to repel invaders in the city’s Muslim and medieval Christian periods, the capital would be surrounded by a ring of industrial zones and “green belts” proposed as buffers against migrants from the rural areas of Spain. Much of this urban planning was highly influenced by members of the Falange, Spain’s fascist party. The Falange’s social policy depended quite heavily on imposing limits on a population that it considered largely out of control. Its hatred of democratic politics stemmed from a distrust of the masses’ capability to maintain their own “order,” and its economic views lay mainly on bases of statism and control (Payne 296). Not coincidentally, an overwhelming part of the rhetoric used by the regime to justify the Civil War itself was to reestablish an order that had been lost in Spain’s recent liberal past. The regime believed that Madrid had to “pay for its sins” as the heart of the abominable Second Republic and as the last holdout of resistance to Franco’s Nationalist armies: “arrasar, por la muerte, la hoguera y el derribo, cualquier recuerdo de lo que había sido el Madrid proletario, profesional y republicano de los años anteriores” (Juliá, Ringrose, and Segura 548). Paradoxically, the regime also recognized that as the seat of a very centralized power, the city needed to reestablish its position within the nation by reinforcing its capitalidad. Madrid was segmented, restructured, and rebuilt in order to protect the administrative heart of the capital, and the city was remodeled to eradicate the recent past and return it to its glory as capital of the Spanish “empire.” This push to reform would have lasting effects on the city’s development during the following decades, but would also encounter resistance from a variety of sectors. 2 This dissertation is an investigation into the disciplining of the public and private urban space of Madrid during the early decades of the Franco dictatorship, especially the 1950s. This discipline, I argue, was the main element of an evolution in the position of urban space within the social imaginary of Franco’s Spain. As migration and economic modernization transformed Spain’s capital, the discourse surrounding urban space also changed. In using the term “discipline,” I am referring to Michel Foucault’s description of disciplinary power as a force that “trains the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces into a multiplicity of individual elements” (170).