(In)visible Acts of Resistance in the Twilight of the Franco Regime

Front matter

Aurora G. Morcillo

(IN)VISIBLE ACTS

OF RESISTANCE

PART 2 Intro Part Il

Chapter 7

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Appendix Il

Appendix W322: TC 327

This book is dedicated to my mother, Aurora, and all the strong and valiant women of Spain.

Acknowledgements

In the course of writing this book, Aurora’ suffered a tragic accident. She passed away on March 3" 2020. This book is the culmination of many years of hard effort. Itis in many ways the defining work of her illustrious career and the natural followup to her previous two books on women under Franco: True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco's Spain, and The Seduction of Modern Spain: The Female Body and the Francoist Body Politic. This third part of the trilogy was especially important to Aurora because it involved women she knew personally—mentors, aunts, her mother, neighbors—who had had a profound effect on her development as a person and a scholar. This work also allowed Aurora to delve into the areas of philosophy and literature which she deeply loved, and to expand the discipline of history to include, not just those previously outside the grand narrative, but different ways of doing history.

It falls to me, her husband, to write the acknowledgements to the many people who were instrumental in the making of this work. Aurora used to say that a book has one mother but many relatives. There may be some “relatives” I do not acknowledge because of my ignorance, but for those who are left out, know that Aurora appreciated your contributions nevertheless.

First, thank you to all the women who agreed to open up their hearts and memory vaults to give us their insight into the turbulent times of the late Franco era. Reliving these difficult times could not have been easy. Thanks also goes out to the women who were interviewed for this project but were not included in this volume, and to a larger generation of women who keep this history alive by passing down their own stories.

While writing this book, Aurora had the opportunity to spend a term at Exeter College, Oxford, as a visiting scholar. While there, she was able to present early versions of these chapters and learn from colleagues in the Oxford Centre for Life Writing and the History Department. The three months she spent at Oxford were

1 Aurora Morcillo Memorial Fellowship: https://history.fiu.edu/graduate/fellowship-opportunit ies/aurora-morcillo-memorial-scholarship/ some of the happiest in her life. Thanks go out to all her colleagues and friends there who made this such a rewarding and productive period.

Aurora grew into the internationally known scholar she was thanks in large part to her university, Florida International University in Miami. She thrived in the competitive but supportive environment of the history department in the Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs. Thanks go to Department Chair Victor Uribe and the rest of Aurora's history colleagues for their support of Aurora and this work. A special thanks to Dean John Stack and his office. Dean Stack was an early supporter of Aurora and her scholarship, and was there for her always.

Aurora was deeply committed to her students. Many of the ideas for this book came from discussions with them as she put forth a different approach to thinking about history. Thank you all for being a big reason she worked so hard on scholarship like this.

Aurora was able to present widely many of the ideas for this book thanks to invitations from a supportive network of scholars in both America and abroad. She truly valued your intellectual fellowship, but more importantly your friendship.

Transcript Verlag had the courage to publish this unconventional work of scholarship when others wouldn't. Thanks go to Jakob Horstmann and all those at transcript Verlag for working with Aurora and me to get this important work into print.

Family always came first for Aurora. She may have left Spain physically, but emotionally she remained in Granada. Thanks go to her mother and father, Aurora and Manuel, who always encouraged her to study, to take risks, and to never set limits on what she could accomplish. Her brother Jose and sister Emilia were constantly in her thoughts and provided important feedback on this very personal work. Her niece and nephews in Spain were a source of never-ending pride.

For their help in editing the manuscript, I would like to thank my chief copyeditor Angélica Sanchez-Clark who labored many hours getting this manuscript ready to print. Also, thanks to Cayce Wicks, and June Pilsitz for all your help in editing different versions along the way. This was truly a team effort, and all made this a better manuscript. A special thanks goes out to Aurora’s great friend and colleague Jo Labanyi, who agreed to write the forward to this book and gave me much needed feedback and support as I put together the final draft.

And finally, I would like to thank our son Carlos who knew, first-hand, how valiant and strong are Spanish women. Carlos has been my greatest support over these difficult months and was his mother’s inspiration always.

Acknowledgements

Carlos and I would like to further Aurora’s legacy. We have set up a fellowship at Florida International University to support young women scholars studying abroad. We encourage everyone who reads this book to visit the fellowship webpage to learn more about Aurora and to support the next generation of Spanish Historians.

Charles Bleiker

Foreword By Jo Labanyi

I write with a complicated mix of feelings: sorrow at Aurora's tragic loss but gratitude to her husband Charles Bleiker—who has finalized the preparation of Aurora's manuscript for publication—for inviting me to write this foreword. This project was very dear to Aurora's heart. She talked about it when we met in her hometown of Granada during several summers, and she gave a wonderful paper on it at the panel I organized on "Alternative Histories" for the 2014 MLA Convention in Chicago. In that memorable paper, she declared that her aim was to condense each life story of the various women she had interviewed in a haiku—she offered a few examples. The point of the haiku was to appreciate the silence around the words.

The most original feature of Aurora's book is her intercalation of poems in her analysis of the life stories that comprise each chapter. One poem comes near to the brevity of the haiku—an evocation of the hunger that marked her mother's postwar childhood, which Aurora read at the 2014 MLA convention. In addition to the poetic chapter titles, each interview is prefaced by one or more poems, taken from an impressively international range of authors, with several by Aurora herself. The manuscript was to have ended with a concluding poem by Aurora, which sadly we do not have. Aurora talks of “the poetics of oral history,” for oral history is a medium, like poetry, that conveys its meaning through what lies in between, behind, and beneath the words. And all poetry, even when it is considerably wordier than a haiku, makes us aware of the blank space around the text, just as oral histories—especially when recalling lives that have not been given their due, as is the case here—are also a mesh of what is said and what was not or could not be said before, and may remain unsaid even now because of the difficulty of acknowledging it (something that Aurora is particularly sensitive to). Hence the book’s title, (In)visible Acts of Resistance.

Above all, poetry conveys emotions whereas prose is, for the most part, a vehicle of information. Aurora acknowledges her debt to Spanish Republican exile philosopher María Zambrano's concept of “poetic reason.” There is a noticeable difference between the interviews analyzed in Part I—conducted in 1989 with former anti-Franco student activists, subsequently professors at the University of

Granada—when Aurora was a history student about to take up a doctoral fellowship at the University of New Mexico, and those analyzed in Part II—conducted after the year 2000, by which time the history of the emotions had become a burgeoning field of inquiry, emerging out of memory studies in which oral history has been so important. Interest in the emotional textures revealed by oral history is what inspired Aurora to return to those early interviews and to conduct further interviews with working-class women in Granada, several from her own family. By the time of the second batch of interviews, Aurora's interest had shifted to lives that are marked not by overt political activism but by everyday acts of resilience which, Aurora argues, should also be seen as acts of defiance. While the interviews in Part I are important for their information content, reminding us of the risks involved in being a student activist under the late Franco dictatorship, it is the emotional content of the working-class life stories in Part II that clearly engages Aurora's poetic imagination.

The majority—but not all—of the life stories presented here are of women. Aurora’s career as a scholar, as everyone familiar with her work knows, was devoted to documenting the ways in which the Franco dictatorship constrained the lives of Spanish women. This volume is an important complement to her earlier books in that it does not focus on what the regime did to women, but on how women resisted the imposition of power through daily acts of micro-resistance—by refusing to play the role of victim, by surviving and fighting for their loved ones. It is also an exploration of Aurora's own subjectivity via the emotions and memories that the interviews awoke in Aurora herself. The book is an explicit homage to women—her professors in Part I, family members and acquaintances in Part II—who shaped her life and made her the feminist historian that she became. The final chapter was to have analyzed the interview that Aurora conducted with her parents, Aurora and Manuel; sadly, this chapter remains unwritten. However, her tribute to her family is present in the Intermezzo “Aurora's Trinity" that narrates the story of the three Auroras in her family—her grandmother, her mother, herself—as the basis of a theorization of experience as becoming.

This book is an account not only of the becoming of the individuals interviewed by Aurora, but also of the becoming of Aurora herself as a creative and caring historian.

Jo Labanyi

New York University

PART 1

Movement must be at the very heart of listening.

Eudora Welty’

Time passes, moves through us, conferring an evanescent quality to our lives. Listening to each other is “stirring” for the heart, as time and space converge. The oral historian turned illusionist embarks on a journey to past unseen things, transforming them, through language, into visible transubstantiations. The space where historian and informant meet is filled with a tempo, a rhythm, a revelation. Movement is at the heart of it all.

Since the beginning of my career some thirty years ago, my historical analysis has been informed by an exploration of the shadows. Using the lens of gender to identify and illuminate the dark interstices of time and place, I began by exploring gendered official discourses as expressed in the laws and decrees of both the Francoist state apparatus and the Catholic Church. In my first book, True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Francos Spain,” 1 focused on the Francoist university and the various Catholic women’s organizations that represented the ideal notion of what I called “True Catholic Womanhood.” Building on this ideal in my second book, The Seduction of Modern Spain: The Female Body and the Francoist Body Politic,? 1 sought to further understand how gender ideology informed the state’s tight control of public morality through the censorship and repression of popular culture. This work delved into the somatic metaphors used in National Catholic rhetoric to better understand the correlation between the gendered human body and the Francoist bio-power. In this new book I paint the third panel in the tryptic by focusing, not on official state discourses or mass communication, but on the counter discourses articulated by ordinary people experiencing the twilight of Franco’s regime.

1 Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 11.

2 Aurora G. Morcillo, True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco’s Spain (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000, 2008).

3 Aurora G. Morcillo, The Seduction of Modern Spain: The Female Body and the Francoist Body Politic (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010).

In Part 1, I focus on the stories of middle class, well-educated college student activists in the 1960s and 1970s. In Part 2, I shift to the narratives of women from working class families with little or no formal schooling. Together, these two perspectives form a more complete, balanced picture of everyday resistance to the regime's control. I title this work (In)visible Acts of Resistance to highlight the pervasiveness ofthe struggle to break through the strictures imposed by Franco's regime, and the heroic acts of ordinary people made in the name of survival. The weight of so many individual acts of resistance by those portrayed in this work, and the many more just like them, helped break down the regime's control, and set the tone for the successful transition to democracy that was to come.

The interviewees are individuals outside of mainstream history. Their stories represent the substratum of what Miguel de Unamuno, in his work En torno al casticismo (1902), called intra-history:*

The newspapers say nothing about the silent life of millions of men without a history who, at all times and in all parts of the world, get up with the sun and go about their obscure, silent, eternal daily work in the fields, the work upon which, much like the sub-oceanic reefs, the islets of history are erected.”

As Javier Krauel points out, Unamuno's concept of the intra-history affords us a new sense of personhood, which downplays political and economic aspects of the superficial historical narrative in favor of an intra-historical exploration of a more authentic being in time.

Therefore, this study aspires to shed light on ordinary acts of resistance rather than headline-grabbing events that typically serve historical narrative. As Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin point out, Walter Benjamin's intent in The Arcades Project was to show a “primal history” only possible to realize through “cunning”:

[I]t was not the great men and celebrated events of traditional historiography but rather the “refused” and “detritus” of history, the half-concealed, variegated traces of the daily life of “the collective;” that was to be the object of study.

Oral history is the tool of choice in this study to aid in the “cunning” process of unveiling the visible and invisible strategies of self-empowerment utilized by ordinary people in spite of the Francoist regime’s attempts at control in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The theoretical and methodological rationale used to examine the informants’ narratives draws from philosophy, but also includes urban, literary, and

4 Peggy Watson, Intra-historia in Miguel de Unamuno's Novel: A Continual Presence (Potomac, Maryland: Scripta Humanistica, 1993).

5 Miguel de Unamuno, En torno al casticismo (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2000), 40.

6 Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, “Translators’ Foreword,” in The Arcades Project, by Walter Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), ix.

gender studies. The notes that follow address oral historiography from the perspective of autobiographical and memory studies, utilizing the vectors of time and space. Oral history represents an apt instrument of analysis to better understand how space and time collide in the construction of historical narration.

I draw from urban theory as proposed in the work of Henri Lefebvre's (1901- 1991) Critique of Everyday Life to analyze the lives of citizens affected by the changes in demographics following the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Spain's rapid urbanization led to the proliferation of shanty towns on the edges of major cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao. Neighborhood associations with their ad-hoc governing councils sprang up and would later become legitimate political voices for the labor movement. Urbanization was also a response to the transition from post-war economic isolation (autarky) to an open consumer economy fed by American dollars (Ihe Pact of Madrid in 1953). Mass migration after the civil war, both inside and outside the country, added to the growth of Spain's urban centers and the dislocation of its people. The examination of the layout of the city of Granada in the late 1960s and early 1970s is used to show the meaning of space as conceived and experienced over time.

The stories should be read as creative non-fiction, or ficto-critical narrations, following María Zambranos focus on emotions and the invisible connections they articulate among us, which guides the analysis of the narration.” The stories are not just told plainly, but *poeticized." Ficto-criticism is particularly fruitful in the realm of autobiography within cultural studies. As Anna Gibbs explains:

Fictocriticism does not illustrate an already existing argument, does not simply formulate philosophy (or anything else) in fictional terms. It is not translation or transposition: it says something which cant be said in any other way: because it is not reducible to propositional content. It is, in essence, per-formative, a metadiscourse in which the strategies of the telling are part of the point of the tale.

The goal is to prioritize a lyrical narrative to better capture the emotional landscape of late Francoism. The interviews uncover how people creatively resisted and trespassed figurative and physical boundaries set up by Franco's Cold War, a technocratic, modernizing project.

7 Anna Gibbs, "Bodies of Words: Feminism and Fictocriticism- Explanation and Demonstration,” Text 1, no. 2 (1997). See also on art-based research: Thomas Barone and Eliot Eisner, Arts Based Research, 1st ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2011); Heather Kerr and Amanda Nettelbeck, The Space Between - Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism (Perth, AU: UWA Publishing, 1998); Elizabeth Pattinson, "Discovering the Self: Fictocriticism, Flux and Authorial Identity" http://www.aawp.dreamhosters.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Pattin son2013.pdf.

8 Gibbs, “Bodies of Words.”

Finally, the last aspect to consider when reading the narratives is my own autobiographical narrative, placed strategically throughout the book.? These provoked memories, rooted in the spatial and temporal remembrances of the informants, transported me back to the point in time in which they occurred. Time and space, like a fresh water river meeting salty ocean in a brackish delta, mix and merge in my writing. When shaping each individual’s story, I was unable to avoid my own presence as a young girl, bearing silent witness to their struggles.

In the final analysis, the oral history practice opens the door to a new historical pursuit, one that leads to a creative historical ontology in which the history we learn is a history of becoming rather than being. The collected interviews expose how both college students and homemakers articulated their resistance in the comings and goings of daily life. Identifying the tactics and practices ordinary Spanish women used to survive the regime makes visible their micro-transgressions of conventional norms. But these women did more than just survive; they also calculatingly worked to better the odds of their daughters overcoming limited expectations and opportunities. They did this by instilling in them a sense of independence, desire, and even defiance.

There are three methodological lenses applied to the analysis of the narratives in this book: 1) Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life through what he called Rhythmanalysis of the urban space; 2) Maria Zambranos “Poetic reason” through creative non-fiction or ficto-criticism; and 3) Auto-biography/life writing as intrinsic to the oral history process. The ultimate goal is the exploration of oral history as a valuable, humanistic tool to better understand the role of time and space in historical writing when the primary sources at hand are oral interviews and our own DNA.

The Purpose of History: A Creative Historical Ontology

In his book The End of History, Lefebvre questions history's master narratives or les grands récits. He instead speaks of le sens de l'histoire. The term "sense" in French implies both directional and semantic connotations. The directional connotation is

9 Ronald Grele calls it “conversational narrative,” as it is the result of the exchange between the interviewer and the informant in which both shape the outcome of the conversation. While the informant provides the story, the ultimate author of the narrative resulting from the interview is the interviewer. See Ronald Grele, “Private Memories and Public Presentation: The Art of Oral History,” in Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History, ed. Ronald Grele (New York, London: Praeger, 1991), 257-58. See also: Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010); Miren Llona, ed., Entreverse: Teoria y metodologia practica de las fuentes orales (Bilbao: UPV, 2012); Pilar Dominguez, Rina Benmayor, and Maria Eugenia Cardinal de la Nuez, eds., Memory, Subjectivities, and Representation: Approaches to Oral History in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

understood as the “end of” or “purpose of” history, while the semantic connotation is understood as the meaning or signification of the historical process. History is chaos without a purpose or meaning.'?

Turning the historiar's task into a pursuit of understanding of our human condition endows it with a “sense,” a “purpose.” The traditional positivistic History might hence be overcome and radically altered. In other words, the sense of history (directional and semantic) resides in an exercise of cunning interrogation towards introspection and empathy.” The historical importance of ordinary actions carried out by “insignificant” people is what this book is all about. Therefore, in searching for historical signification, this book puts oral history in conversation with philosophy (Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, Maria Zambrano), and cultural, literary, and urban studies from a gender perspective. Intersecting all these vectors brings to light issues of periodization and location—time and space—entangled in the historical unfolding as becoming rather than being in time.

I propose to dwell in the “moment” when time and space traverse each other. To freeze a moment in time through narrative retelling allows us to gain insight into the actions and choices made by people living unspectacular lives. Spanish historian Miren Llona proposes the notion of “memory’s enclaves” or anchors as privileged mental sites (moments) to which individuals return to peek down and feel past emotions. These memory enclaves act as mental repositories of images that over the individual's lifetime have merged with their sense of self in relation to particular personal past experiences. Llona further explains how the memories stored in those enclaves are recurring and resilient to oblivion. No doubt, forgetting is intrinsic to remembrance,” an essential element in organizing fragmentary

10 As Stuart Elden explains: “There is a plurality of times, of physical, biological, social, cyclical and linear times, which overlap and conflict in various ways. [...] If there is nothing fundamental about time then history is a fiction [my emphasis] or an abstraction.” Lefebvre bases his argument on Nietzsche’s understanding of the modern world and his notion of “civilization” which would imply a radical break with “historicity, the historic, the past and its knowledge as useless excess, burdens on the memory, more and more sterile inventories of the accomplished. The birth of this civilization implies a radical break, a total discontinuity, a renewal of methods of knowledge, and a repudiation of historical thought.” Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (London: Continuum, 2004), 176-77.

11‘ The discipline of history emerges simultaneously with the rise of nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century. But Lefebvre actually identifies its origins in Ancient Greece, just as the city-state is born. History develops from “insignificant tales, [du récit anecdotique] annals, and epic poems to talk about the constitution to tell of the struggles of the city state.” Therefore, he suggests that “history did not just emerge to tell any story, but a particular one, that of the state” and its power. Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, 177-78.

12 On forgetting and the importance of oblivion see: Harald Weinrich, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting recollections into a coherent narrative. Therefore, it seems imperative to apply an analysis of those repetitions, of those (eternal) returns to the “memory enclaves” (or moments), both linear and cyclical rhythmic returns, which in the moment of the interview come alive. But I would further propose that the way the informant revisits the enclave is also in every instance unique.? We construct our life stories anew every time we retell them because their meaning is always chasing the context in which they are told.

The individual reconstructs her life’s story from the social and collective parameters in place at each historical juncture; however, the meaning of the collective story can only gain depth through an analysis of the individual récit anecdoques. As Max van Manen points out, “what makes anecdotes so effective is that they seem to tell something noteworthy or important” about the quotidian. The anecdote serves as an example of a concrete moment in place when the agency of the informant is revealed.

What everyday practices allowed women to sustain and fulfill individuality and agency under dictatorial rule? Were these women able to have an impact on the opportunities and self-esteem of their daughters? Listening to their evaluation of their own lives reveals subtle truths. Instead of just passively going along with the regime, they calculatingly taught their daughters to have greater expectations than they would dare allow themselves. Instead of indoctrinating them in the limiting role of the true Catholic woman, they were inoculating them against its harmful effects.

The Visible: Space’s Rhythmanalysis

The rhythmanalyst [..] will be attentive, but not only to the words or pieces of information, the confessions and confidences of a partner or client. He will listen to the world, and above all to what are disdainfully called noises, which are said without meaning, and to murmurs [rumeurs], full of meaning -and finally he will listen to silences.

Henri Lefebvre, Elements of Rhythmanalysis (2004)'*

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006); Marc Auge, Oblivion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 13 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

The Francoist regime’s longevity is inextricably tied to the economic developments of the 1960s. Therefore, it makes sense to study the social and political dynamics emerging from that modernizing moment. The industrialization and urbanization unleashed a radicalization of the opposition to the dictatorship, coalescing around the labor and student movements. The study of these movements in the Spanish context provides a deeper understanding of the global social unrest that unfolded in what has been called the long 1960s.

Henri Lefebvres multidisciplinary work puts in conversation a variety of disciplines: geography, history, sociology, literary criticism, urban studies, and philosophy. Regarded as one of the godfathers of the 1968 French student movement, he was at the time a professor in Nanterre and had developed a close relationship with avant-garde groups like Cobra, Situationists International, and Letterist International. Ultimately, Lefebvre's critique of everyday life in post-World War II European cities offers us methodological tools to help uncover the workings of capitalism. Lefebvre identified the urban environment as the site of both control and resistance to alienation. Therefore, Lefebvre’s framework will help illuminate the means used by the Francoist regime to maintain power. By pivoting to the West in the aftermath of the Second World War, Franco ensured his relevancy to the outside world and protected his regime’s power from outside meddling. His new role as benign dictator opening his country up to the West and fighting the common Communist enemy helped satisfy the conscience of his new American partners, who saw Spain as having democratic possibilities. Authoritarianism replaced fascism, as the American dollars and military aid flowed in. Although Spain was originally excluded from the Marshall Plan, or the European Recovery Program, in 1948, its strategic importance to Cold War anti-Communist policies made it a natural partner. Only five years later, in 1953, the Pact of Madrid was signed by the two new allies. This newfound friendship was further consecrated by an embrace between President Eisenhower and dictator Francisco Franco when the US president visited Spain in 1959.

Industrialization and its ensuing urbanization, helped by United States economic aid, was at the heart of the regime’s international rehabilitation but also central to understanding the dynamics of social interaction in the urban environment. The urban transformation came with problems of overcrowding, as rural mass migration to the developed industrial urban poles (Barcelona, Bilbao, and Madrid) exploded. The Ministry of Housing and the Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI) became key agencies in the deployment of the capitalist economy orchestrated by the Opus Dei’s skilled technocratic planning. Space turned into a crucial site of power for the regime. As Lefebvre makes clear, space is crucial to understanding the transition from a “use-value city” to one where the priority is exchange and

14 Henri Lefebvre, Elements of Rhythmanalysis (London, Oxford: Continuum, 2004), loc 301 of 1306, Kindle.

consumption—what he calls “exchange-value city.” That change is clearly manifest in the Francoist transition from autarky (self-sufficient post-war economic isolation) to capitalist consumerism, and from pseudo fascist to National Catholic to better fit the international propagandist image of “Sentinel of the West.” Lefebvre points out how “capitalist leaders treat everyday life as they once treated colonized territories: massive trading posts (supermarkets and shopping centers);> absolute predominance of exchange over use; dual exploitation of the population in their capacity as producers and consumers." Technocracy turned out to be the new means to create a rationalized conformity, representing modernization without compromising state control of space(s), both symbolic and physical. While Franco reluctantly agreed to the Americanization of the economy, his tight technocratic urban planning offered the promise of continuity of order, conformity, and ultimate authoritarian control.

In The Production of Space (1991), Lefebvre elaborates a dialectical triad of space to understand its fluid nature: first, what he calls “conceived space” or representational space produced by urban planners and economic technocrats; second, “lived space" or spaces of representation involving hidden symbolism; and third “perceived space” or spatial practices where individuals implement their own autonomous movements in between reestablished zones. College students would trespass physical and symbolic boundaries in their daily comings and goings, as they moved from their middle-class enclaves to working-class neighborhoods to recruit and educate, and in and out of their symbolic roles as students and activists. Female students more specifically would be in the university and at the same time be “out of”!” Even the spaces and hours of the day were gendered, male or female, friendly or threatening.