UC Riverside

This dissertation undertakes an investigation of specific flamenco places in the urban center of Madrid, Spain, at key points from the early twentieth century through the Franco dictatorship, culminating in the economic crisis of the twenty-first century. I track how such places have negotiated the changing political and economic landscape and how informal flamenco sociality has shifted over the years. Rather than construct an exhaustive linear history of the area, I posthole and wrap my investigations around these different places, events, and phenomena that affected Madrid, presenting a broader layer of general Madrileño history for context. The struggles for places and neighborhoods to maintain a local personality in the face of the encroachment of corporate global forces form the center of my work. In flamenco, the nuance of “the local” becomes even more precise, narrowing from city to neighborhood, to the extent that “the local” in flamenco could be referred to as “the microlocal” to emphasize the degree of geographic specificity. This dissertation focuses on the neighborhoods of Lavapiés and Latina and the Plazas Tirso de Molina and Santa Ana, in Madrid, not only for what they reveal about changes in flamenco connected to regional migrations of people and forms but also about ties to larger economic phenomena. The broad research question pursued here is: how have redevelopment and tourism shaped flamenco social life at the local level in Spain in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? Place, location, and the struggle over urban territory in the face of gentrification and tourism, figure largely in the history of flamenco in Madrid. I use fieldwork conducted in 1996, 1998, 2001, 2013, 2015, and 2017, which involved taking dance classes, attending shows, and hanging out at flamenco bars as well as archival research. I focus on case studies of the dance studio Amor de Dios, bars and tablaos (flamenco dinner theatres) Los Gabrieles, La Solea, Corral de la Morería, Candela, and Casa Patas.