Folklorismo carcelario: ¿identidad nacional o manual de subversión?

The aim of this article is on the one hand, to analyse the presence of folklore in the official prison’s repertoire during the Franco’s regime and the use of this as a contributor to the national identity imposed by the dictatorship; and on the other hand to compare it with the role that it played for the prisoners in the clandestine space. For this reason, it will try to light up some issues such as the fact that repertoires linked to the rural tradition were resignified by the Francoism inside prisons as elements of reeducation through the nostalgic element of the land as motherland, according to the spreading of new behavioural paradigms. Understanding the working of the articulation of musical activity in the official sphere is essential to enter at the same time the subversive responses that emerged against it.

Both realities, in addition to living together, were intertwined in processes of continuous feedback, which must be addressed jointly to rebuild the sound landscape of Franco’s prisons. The refolklorization of rural and traditional music was especially useful for the Regime’s officiality where women and men as political prisoners were considered as punishable ills (Foucault, 2012).

Based on this categorization as well as the recent studies that have shown the need to delve into the prison panopticon of the Franco’s regime to complete the vision of the musical structure during the dictatorship in all its areas (Calero 2016, 2017 and 2018, Pérez Castillo 2014) a sample of nineteen pieces from the official and seventeenth fromthe clandestine domain composed in Spanish prisons between 1939 and 1964 has been taken to analyse the impact of both positions in relation to the uses and modes of composition inspired by folklore.