The Mobile Nation: España Cambia de Piel (1954-1964)

By Tatjana Pavlovic

 
Recent years have witnessed a surge in publications on Spanish cinema and cultural studies, but the subject of consumer culture in Spain has been neglected until now. Mobile Nation presents the first systematic treatment of this crucial period during Spain’s transition to modernity and highlights the forces that converged during this dramatic decade to change the face of Spain. Drawing from the methodologies of literature, film studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, and history, Mobile Nation explores consumer culture in Spanish media, mass tourism, and the national automobile manufacturing industry from 1954 to 1964 and offers valuable insight to postmodern Spain’s transformation and trends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books Ltd
• Release date: Oct 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781841505411

Tatjana Pavlovic

Tatjana Pavlovic is associate professor of Spanish at Tulane University.

Book preview

The Mobile Nation:

España cambia de piel (1954–1964)

by Tatjana Pavlovi

First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect,

The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press,

1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design: Holly Rose

Typesetting: John Teehan

ISBN 978–1–84150–324–0

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

Contents

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Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter I: La hora del lector: Literature and the publishing industry

Chapter II: Television (Hi)stories: ‘Un escaparate en cada hogar’

Chapter III: Voces de oro: Spain, modernity, and the child-star system

Chapter IV: Spain’s mass tourism: Condenada belleza del mundo

Chapter V: Mobile subjects: La vida sobre ruedas

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Several individuals and institutions have contributed to the making of The Mobile Nation: España cambia de piel (1954–1964). Many ideas incorporated into this book have resulted directly or indirectly from discussions with friends over the several past years. It could not have been written without intense conversations, theoretical debates and the friendship of Anthony Leo Geist, Isolina Ballesteros, John Charles, Marline Otte, Ari Zighelboim, Laura Bass and Henry Sullivan. Henry gets my extra-special thanks for helping to smooth out some rough spots in the manuscript, far-ranging insights and careful judgement. He read the entire manuscript and thoughtfully engaged its arguments. My sense of his personal and intellectual support goes well beyond the pages of this book. I am also grateful to Camillo Penna and Suna Ertugrul for their friendship and for bringing my attention to certain key theoretical texts. Their own relationship to theory and writing has been very important to me during the composition of this book. Above all, I pay tribute to my mother Biljana Pavlović, who originally instilled in me the love of books and reading.

At Tulane University, I am fortunate to be surrounded by talented and generous colleagues who are also true friends. My deepest thanks go to them and to our Chair Marilyn Miller for her consistent support. I also wish to thank my students at Tulane University in a wide range of courses on Spanish cinema, film history and film theory who have listened to early versions of the manuscript and raised many excellent questions. Several scholars working on contemporary Spanish culture have read earlier versions of various chapters and given me valuable critical feedback. Special thanks also go to my colleagues in Spanish Film Studies from the United States, Spain and the United Kingdom who have been remarkably generous in sharing their work and expertise: Marvin D’Lugo, Katy Vernon, Eva Woods, Susan Martin-Márquez, Steven Marsh, and Josetxo Cerdán. Since my student days I have always been inspired by Jo Labanyi and Paul Julian Smith, two outstanding scholars of Spanish literature, film and visual culture. Their work continues to be essential to my own understanding of Spain and its cinema.

This book could not have been written without the help of various institutions in Spain and the United States. The Dean’s Office of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Tulane University provided me a Research Grant in the summers of 2007 and 2009 and a Junior Research Leave during the 2003–2004 academic year. That same office was also generous in aiding Intellect Publishing of Bristol, United Kingdom, with publication costs. Funding from The Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States’ Universities allowed me to spend two summers (2005 and 2006) viewing many films discussed in the book. I am also indebted to Margarita Lobo and other personnel of the Filmoteca Española who have been tremendously helpful in providing me access to the Filmoteca’s collection. At Intellect Publishing, I would like to thank the Associate Publisher, May Yao, for her efficiency, patience and commitment to the project. I am also indebted to Integra Software Services for their diligent copyediting and to the typesetter, John Teehan. In addition, I also thank Holly Rose for the design of the cover, which uncannily captures the spirit of the book and period studied.

Sections from the Introduction appeared in an earlier version as ‘España cambia de piel: The Mobile Nation (1954–1964),’ Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Vol. 5, Issue 2, July 2004: (213–226). A condensed portion of Chapter 2 was published as ‘Television (Hi)stories: "Un escaparate en cada hogar,"’ Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Vol. 8, Issue 1, March 2007: (5–21). I gratefully acknowledge the publishers of these articles for permission to reproduce parts of them in this book.

This book is dedicated to my two great loves: my life-partner Rachel and our son Constantin. Rachel’s keen critical acumen and understanding of the project shaped the way I look at Spanish cinema. Above all, she was my companion in the pleasures of filmgoing and film-viewing. Our shared love of cinema and literature was a main impetus in writing The Mobile Nation. But while this project is now over, she continues to inspire me into an unlimited future.

INTRODUCTION

The Mobile Nation: España cambia depiel (1954–1964) focuses on a period of transition in the history of Spanish culture that has not received sufficient critical attention.¹ Several forces converged in the early 1950s to put Spain on a path of integration with the more developed countries of Europe. Autarkic Spain abandoned its outdated and sluggish economic model developed mostly as a response to Spain’s international isolation following the Spanish Civil War.² It gradually curbed the state interventionism that had been an integral part of autarkic economic principles. Autarky, a type of economic nationalism, had formed part of Franco’s stock rhetoric by which the post-war ostracism of Spain was modified, even eulogized as a self-sufficient, autonomous cultural polity sustained, among other strategies, by an insistence on the superiority of Spain’s ‘blessèd backwardness’ (bendito atraso).³ With this easing of autarkist principles, the government needed to reframe its political tactics, visible in a revision of nationalist rhetoric that now defined ‘progress’ as a technocratic mutation of the prevailing ideology. The regime’s self-justification ceased to be metaphysical and became more frankly material. The insistence on an Eternal Spain with its religious essence and God-chosen destiny was no longer desirable or optimal and was replaced by the language of efficiency, rational thinking and a belief in high living standards. The triumphalist, bellicose discourse of the postwar period now centred on a rhetoric of prosperity and an ever-broadening horizon of expectations. Franco’s regime ceased to be providential and became technocratic. Spaniards would no longerbe preparing for the heavenly paradise, but enjoying an earthly one. A discourse sustained by the old-fashioned values salvaged from the Civil War now morphed and became compatible with the siren call of hedonism. A society of sacrifice become a society of leisure, much more in line with emergent global consumerism.

The period studied in this book includes three overlapping stages of development: (1) the moribund autarky of the post-war era; (2) the technocratic period initiated by the restructuring of the cabinet in February of 1957; and (3) a so-called fraguismo during Manuel Fraga Iribarne’s all-important tenure as Minister of Information and Tourism from 1962 till 1969. The transition from autarky to technocracy was aptly named by those economists who dubbed it the ‘hinge decade’ (decenio bisagra).⁴ The term captures the shift from post-war insistence on moderation, restrictions, hoarding or rationing to the wave of new commodities and, hence, concepts that now entered the market— apartments (apartamentos instead of pisos), televisions (televisores), washing machines (lavadoras), financing (financiacion), parking (aparcamiento)—neologisms that were just then being admitted to the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy (Sánchez Vidal 1990: 156). The impact of consumer durables on everyday life was remarkable, and the percentage of urban households that owned a refrigerator, television set, car, telephone, electric food-mixer or record player soared exponentially.⁵ By 1954, per capita income was approaching pre-war levels, but overall growth still encountered stubborn problems. As Tortella observed:

An economy as backward and capital-hungry as was the Spanish had an inordinately strong propensity for import; in addition, market pressures for both capital and consumer goods, combined with an archaic fiscal structure and a policy of state investment virtually free of orthodox financing norms, provoked price increases that were very soon evident in labor market. The result was a rapid and powerful inflationary spiral. (2000: 450)

Inflation had become so rampant by 1959 that urgent measures were needed. The Franco regime proved reactive rather than forward-looking, and it was the inflation crisis pinpointed by Tortella—rather than any premeditated design—that determined the radical change in economic policy which became the 1959 stabilization plan. A year of unavoidable but salutary recession in 1960 was followed by dramatic economic growth. The whole ethos of the nation began to shift: ‘The new slogans of the sixties were rationality, efficiency, the maxims of the world of the impersonal, competitive business corporation rather than of the comfortable world of family connection and personal favour’ (Carr and Fusi 1981: 80). During Fraga’s tenure, the country was well on its way to a full-scale Spanish ‘economic miracle,’ adopting Western European economic models, modes of material consumption and lifestyles.

The nation was becoming what I am terming more ‘mobile’ and the social consequences of this mobility began to affect all aspects of society. Once more, as in earlier demographic shifts, the countryside suffered a steady depletion as the peasantry abandoned low-paid agriculture and fled seeking new forms of employment or opportunity available in the relatively affluent cities.⁶ An expanding educational system enabled increased social and class mobility, creating a deeper and broader middle class (what has been well called a ‘mesocratization’ of the population), as well as inflated armies of civil servants—even if underemployed in a make-work jobs -crucial to the regime’s capture of human capital and its consequent prosperity. There was also a rapidly expanding white-collar class, related to jobs in the growing service sector (travel agents, tourist guides, new hotels, banks) and blue-collar construction jobs along the coastline (the development of fishing villages into international playgrounds such as Benidorm or Torremolinos) or in burgeoning urban belts of well-established cities (Madrid or Barcelona). Huge foreign investment and massive industrialization testified to a diverse mobility of resources, while the modernization of the antiquated roadways altered transportation patterns, especially once the network of peripheral coastal highways reached completion. Coastal highways provided a necessary solution to the drastically increasing volume of tourists, a European boom that became synonymous with Fraga himself and that was of inestimable importance for Spain’s economic miracle. Mobility exploded as a geographical phenomenon: from depopulated villages to cities (the rural exodus previously referenced, urbanization, etc.), from Spain itself to Germany, Switzerland and France (worker migration) or from centre to periphery (coastal tourism).⁷ As Tortella stated, all these changes were inseparably tied to the post-war European socio-economic trends: ‘The convulsions of Spain’s recent history, although presenting characteristics that are particular and original to this country, plainly fall within the framework of the social transformations that capitalist economic development has introduced into Western Europe’ (2000: 441).⁸ Spain was becoming an industrialized, technological, consumer society. By our terminus ad quem date of 1964, Spain, styling itself a ‘society of well-being’ (sociedad del bienestar), entered an era interpreted by some cultural historians as afranquismo sociológico.⁹ The enforced peace and new prosperity led to a mood of acceptance that carried over to today’s arguably apolitical democracy and a postmodern blend of amnesty and social amnesia gelled in the ‘pact of oblivion ‘(pacto de olvido) (1975–78).

The Mobile Nation is divided into five chapters that examine the following aspects of Spanish consumer society as described above: (1) the connections between literature and the publishing industry; (2) the expansion of Spain’s television network; (3) popular cinema and the making of a child-star system; (4) the development of mass tourism; and (5) the national automobile-manufacturing industry. The study, essentially a socio-cultural history of consumerism, uses a strong theoretical gantry to undergird my detailed survey of the massive expansion of consumer industries in mid-century, several of which have never before been studied systematically.¹⁰ The choices of cultural figures, literary works, films and television shows studied undoubtedly bear traces of my own taste and emotional investments, and I do not claim either that they are exhaustive or exclusively representative of mid-twentieth-century Spanish culture.

The study also explores the relationship between mass-culture industries and the political and economic systems under which they emerged, a dimension that has been theorized since the days of the Frankfurt School.¹¹ However, this study does not propose a direct ratio between Spanish mass-cultural tendencies and Spain’s political system. To quote Tortella once more: ‘The interrelationships between economics and politics are almost always complex and torturous, and especially so in the Spanish case’ (2000: 445). The study therefore examines the imbrication, refractive rather then reflective, between the two phenomena. My approach neither demonizes consumer culture as a harbinger of apathy nor celebrates it as a force of liberation, but looks dispassionately at the ways consumerism impacted Spanish society during the era studied. It examines the co-opting of the benefits of the new mass-culture by the regime, presented now as an outgrow of Franco’s political stability and looks into the intricate capitalist reorganization of leisure time in the Spain of the 1950s. I also pay attention to audiences’ ‘resignification’ of popular and mass forms of entertainment.¹² Examining the formation of the sociedad de consumo, my aim is to show how the conflicts expressive of Spanish culture are inscribed and contested in Spanish popular, mass-cultural and industrial forms.¹³

My first chapter ‘La hora del lector: Literature and the publishing industry’ centres on the disengagement of the publishing industry from the literary model of neo-Realism which ran pari passu with a process of critical self-reflection on the part of social-realist novelists and critics themselves. In particular, the chapter examines the intersections in the literary careers of Juan Goytisolo the novelist, José María Castellet the critic, and Carlos Barral the publisher. The Seix Barral publishing house (that unites them) joined the vanguard of the editorial world and became an active force in the global circulation of cultural capital in the 1960s, thereby altering the course of Spanish literary history. The imbrication of art and market-forces in the creation of Seix Barral would call forth an anxiety produced by this demeaning proximity of culture and economic return. The chapter focuses attention more on the production and distribution systems, therefore, than on sales statistics or ‘reception aesthetics’ (that is, the readers’ reaction and response to the trends described above).¹⁴ It also looks at the emergence of Latin America as a literary world power, such that ‘…the reception of the Latin-American novel was the burning question (la cuestión palpitante) of contemporary Spanish literature’ (Santana 2000:17).¹⁵

The second chapter ‘Television (Hi)stories: Un escaparate en cada hogar’ analyses the tumultuous politics of television’s implementation in Spain. In 1956, the Minister of Information and Tourism Gabriel Arias Salgado inaugurated Spanish national television, invoking Christ and his powers across heaven and earth and insisting that Spanish television would became an instrument of the National Movement’s advocacy of religious orthodoxy. However, a change of government in February of 1957 soon altered the moralizing tone that accompanied television’s start. Television (alongside other novel mass-produced goods) was inscribed in a new discourse of progress mirroring a society oriented increasingly towards consumer values. Though TV was born under the reactionary Arias Salgado, the subsequent development of the medium reflected the influence of the more liberal Fraga Iribarne. The massive spread of TV from 1956 on went hand in hand with a strategic and uninhibited embrace of consumer capitalism. This chapter also explores the connections between daily experience and media experience and traces how the implementation of television modified Spaniards’ experience of time and space.

Chapter III ‘Voces de oro: Spain, modernity, and the child-star system’ explicates the institutionalization of a child-star system in its relation to Spain’s turn to consumerism. Central to this story are the film careers of Joselito and Marisol, figures inescapably associated with Spain’s children’s cinema of the 1960s (in ways similar to the earlier impact Shirley-Temple cinema had on English-speaking audiences). Joselito and Marisol were the first two child actors produced by the making-of-a-star system.¹⁶ This system demanded exclusive contracts, the morphing of personal life into their star personae and the multiple marketing ploys aimed at promoting their image, such as fan clubs, franchises, merchandise endorsements and carefully scheduled ‘impromptu’ appearances. Joselito’s and Marisol’s early films span from the last year of the Falangist grip on power and the technocrats’ entry into the cabinet (Elpequeño ruiseñor, 1956; Saeta del ruiseñor, 1957) to the so-called Plan de estabilización and subsequent Plan de desarrollo (Escucha mi canción, Elpequeño coronel, 1959; Un rayo de luz, 1960; Ha llegado un ángel, 1961; Tómbola, 1962). The chapter examines the various ways in which the films reflected a crisis of meaning and search for new parameters, given the vacuum left after the decline of Nationalist-Catholic discourse and its vacuous rhetoric of Spanish essence and destiny.

The last two chapters ‘Spain’s Mass Tourism: Condenada belleza del mundo’ and ‘Mobile Subjects: La vida sobre ruedas’ centre on two aspects of the ample mobility of human resources into and out of Spain that began in the late 1950s: the rapidly rising tourism industry and Spanish emigration to northern Europe, both which left profound traces on Spanish culture of the time.¹⁷ The emergence of the tourism industry was simultaneous with Spain’s signing of bilateral emigration agreements with Switzerland, Germany and France. On the one hand, tourism, as Dean MacCannel has suggested, ‘is the cutting edge of the workdwide expansion of modernity’ (1999: 184). It was an emblem of the global flows of capital and border crossing, traits which were intrinsically counter to the dictatorial model. On the other hand, during the 1960s ‘tourism became the linchpin of the Franco’s dictatorship’s symbolic structure, not only facilitating the normalization of diplomatic relations with Western liberal democracies, but also affording the regime a previously unthinkable level of political stability at home’ (Crumbaugh 2009: 4). Mass tourism manifested into a form of international relations: from dissemination of information and strengthening alliances to promoting tolerance and even bringing political change. Tourism created a vital impact on the political dynamics and ‘was a form of engagement with democratic Europe, where political pressures prevented close high-level ties to the Franco regime.’ Furthermore, ‘as Spain’s doors opened to millions of foreign tourists, its hospitality industry became an increasingly useful auxiliary to the regime’s formal diplomacy’ (Pack 2006: 11). Tourism proved to be one of the key instruments of socio-economic and political change in Spain of the 1960s.

‘Mobile Subjects: La vida sobre ruedas’ ties emigration and tourism to one of the most significant artefacts of modernity: the automobile, a machine that guaranteed unlimited personal and familial mobility, a dream-turned-commodity of personal freedom. Introduction of the car, a mass phenomenon by the mid-1950s, marked Spanish culture deeply. SEAT (la Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo) showcased its affordable model, the ‘seiscientos’ (Fiat 600) in June of 1957. Cars were inseparably tied to ‘progress’ and modernization. Waldo de Mier, the author of the original España cambia de piel, proclaimed that ‘una población con automóviles sin rasponazos ni abolladuras es una población subdesarrollada’ (1964: 14) and that ‘[ahora que] los españoles han descubierto el placer de ir sobre ruedas caminar se hace como dura obligación o deporte’ (1964: 122). In a similar vein, the 1959 motto of Spanish television was ‘la vida sobre ruedas’ (‘Easy Street,’ or literally ‘life on wheels’). Combining analysis of Spain’s rapid motorization together with tourism and emigration, this chapter highlights a turbulent moment in Spanish modernity that attests to space defined more by mobility than by fixed dwelling.

In terms of theory, this study inhabits different disciplinary frameworks: literature, film and television studies, cultural studies, tourism studies, economics and the broader historical background. Many scholars have influenced me, but I draw particularly on Slavoj Žižek’s radical re-envisioning of mass culture, Michel Chion’s work on voice in cinema, Cathy Caruth’s reading of trauma and history, and John Corner, Anna McCarthy and Lynn Spigel’s individual contributions in television studies. The book is also indebted to Paul Preston, Raymond Carr, Juan Pablo Fusi, Stanley Payne, Carolyn Boyd, and the discriminating editors, David Gies’ and Santos Juliá, for their work on Spanish history, especially the research that focuses on the Franco era. Manuel Palacio’s history of Spanish televison and Gabriel Tortella’s study on Spanish economy proved indispensable.¹⁸ The Mobile Nation also complements and dialogues with several crucial texts in the field of Spanish cultural studies such as Jo Labanyi’s numerous insights on the cultural history of Francoism, Paul Julian Smith’s writings on film and television and Stephanie Sieburth’s book on modernity and mass-culture. Pioneer scholars of Spanish tourism studies, such as Justin Crumbaugh, Sasha Pack, Eugenia Afinoguenova and Jaume Marti-Olivella, have contributed significantly to my own understanding of this key service-industry phenomenon of the 1960s.

The ultimate question my study poses is this: to what extent did the staggered decade 1954–64 constitute a radical departure from the dictatorial past? Or was it, rather, a decisive moment in the reinvention of the dictatorship? My doubts on this whole problematic were first triggered by an eccentric text entitled España cambia de piel by an unknown Falangist journalist Waldo de Mier, whose happy title I borrowed for my own manuscript. The interval between Waldo de Mier’s two books, both entitled España cambia de piel, the first published in 1954 and the second in 1964, marks the time span of this book.¹⁹ De Mier remained so wrapped up in his metaphor that, ten years after the publication of the first version, ‘with his cripple’s orthopaedic leg,’ he revisited the places described in it and entitled his new epiphany—once more—España cambia de piel (but now subtitled Nuevo viajepor la ‘España delMilagro’). His physical impairment had not dampened his enthusiasm for recording and participating in the optimism of incipient development. The dates that frame the study may seem somewhat arbitrary, but they do correspond to crucial moments in cultural transition, dating from the wholesale recruitment of technocrats into the power structure to the unmistakable lignament of late Francoist culture.

Waldo de Mier’s texts perfectly match my own interests in Spanish culture of the mid-twentieth-century. De Mier’s writing was so intensely caught up in the transformation of Spanish society and entirely symptomatic of the drastic changes the country was experiencing. Though a Falangist, De Mier swapped the party’s rhetoric of militarism for a rhetoric of progress celebrating Spain’s entry into the modern European economy. His gradual abandonment of the Falange and embrace of new economic ideals paralleled the technocratic Spanish government’s decisive break with its own autarkist rhetoric and Falangist ideology. Nevertheless, De Mier’s texts are imbued with contradictions and remain intriguing precisely because they lie trapped between these two epistemes (the Falangist/autarkic and the technocratic) and hence epitomize the spirit of the times, while proving incongruously faithful to Spain’s national trajectory.

Significantly, the implausible and high-flown encomium of Rafael García Serrano, a well-known Falangist writer, furnished the Prologue to España cambia de piel:

Toda la vida de Waldo de Mier está relacionada con una honda pasión española, con el afán de salvar a España, de mejorar a España, de hermosear a España, de conseguir una España justa, de trabajar para España, de ver a España, de adivinar España, de cantar España; de criticar lo malo de España; de comer, beber, vivir y dormir con España; de llevar a España en los pulsos y en los pies, en la cabeza, [y] en el corazón. (1964: xii)

García Serrano’s encomium canbe actually taken quite literally: very rarely does one see such a complete symbiosis or merging of an individual’s life into the nation or a political narrative such as this.²⁰ Waldo de Mier’s life was so fused with the trajectory of Spain, the country that he figuratively drank, lived and slept with. Above all, García Serrano’s prologue to España cambia depiel is really a testimony to his Falangist comradeship with Waldo de Mier. Laín Entralgo, a Falangist intellectual, described fascism precisely as ‘a style appropriate to poets writing a vast communal poem ‘ (Labanyi 1989: 38, 39).²¹ García Serrano’s style, like that of several other of his comrades, is laced with virulent rhetoric, emphasizing courage, honour, strength and heroism and exalting themes of militarism, patriotism and nationalism: ‘Yo sirvo en la literatura como serviría en una escuadra. Con la misma intensidady el mismo objetivo. Cualquier otra cosa me parecería una traicion’…‘Nada nos importa pasar por el Mundo sin dejar otra huella que la de las botas de clavos’ (Rodríguez-Puértolas 1987 (Vol I): 237, 508).

In España cambia de piel Waldo de Mier swaps the Falangist rhetoric of imprinting the world with military boots and embraces a rhetoric of progress. Members of the Falange felt increasingly discontent due to the ideological disarmament of their party and the domestication of José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s vocabulary that then became one of the pillars of Franco’s post-war rhetoric. The party was gradually being reduced to external symbols and paraphernalia. Hence, while Waldo de Mier embarked on a path of progress ‘the radical Falangists turned back to the roots of Falangist ideology in the 1898 writers and Ortega in order to vindicate the anti-capitalist platform of their founder, José Antonio, which they felt Franco had betrayed’ (Labanyi 1989: 55). While discontented and nostalgic Falangists were trying to reclaim their place in a Spain that had ‘betrayed’ them, autarkic Spain was irrevocably becoming technocratic.

The tensions in Waldo de Mier’s writing are symptomatic of all the drastic changes that the country itself was experiencing. His texts are caught between promoting the movement of modernity and thwarting threats to the moral traits so long cherished by the autarky. A technocratic articulation of progress is ideologically grafted onto Falangist rhetoric. Despite Waldo de Mier’s ‘evolution,’ España cambia de piel