UC Berkeley

This dissertation takes dramatic theater and cultural performances as objects of analysis to explore a series of discursive mechanisms by means of which a hegemonic ideal of national identity (essentially Castilian) was rehearsed, reproduced, and naturalized during Spain's Second Republic (1931-1936).

In order to consolidate its power, the newly established Republican State needed actively to orchestrate consent and elicit loyalty among the Spanish people, especially in those areas (rural Spain) that didn't vote for the Republic. Therefore, since almost half of the population in 1930's Spain was illiterate, theater and cultural performances became a privileged instrument to incite the people to imagine the new nation in accordance with the nationalist program of the Republic. The new national ideal was disseminated both deliberately and unconsciously by those cultural agents in charge of spreading the jewels of Spanish culture throughout the national territory.

One of the most ambitious cultural projects fostered by the Republican-Socialist coalition were the so-called Misiones Pedagógicas, by means of which a group of volunteer misioneros traveled from village to village to bring Spanish culture and the “fruits of progress” to the long forsaken members of the national community. Thus, while the republican idea of the nation was staged by the misioneros through different cultural activities, the peasants were being constituted, through this performative interpellation, as new citizens of the old “integral&rdquo Spain. The culture presented to the peasants as “Spanish&rdquo was indeed embedded with many nationalist assumptions that were tacitly naturalized by means of repetition.

The Republican-Socialist coalition also turned to theater and spectacle in order to reach out to the urban masses and integrate them into the nationalist project of imagining the nation along Republican and Castilian-centric lines. These initiatives included the endeavor to create and organize a National Theater and the staging of plays, which performatively commemorated the Republican tradition presumably embedded in Spanish Golden Age Theater and by means of which the construction of an ideal national audience was attempted. More specifically, this dissertation examines the theater sponsored by the Republican-Socialist coalition in contrast to the commercial comic theater that dominated Madrid's main stages.