Academic Publications

This video essay combines footage from over 90 films to demonstrate the changing culture of Spain between 1940-1975. I discuss how the dictatorship's economic development program transformed Spanish culture to depend on automobiles. We see how the films of that era praised or critiqued this shift in economic, feminist, and ecological terms that resonate today.

Published in Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays, among many other people's videos. Watch here.

The first chapter of my dissertation, shorter and in Catalan. The poetry collections Sol, i de dol (J. V. Foix, 1936) and Elegies de Bierville (Carles Riba, 1943) share themes of human subjectivity, the natural world, spirituality and transcendence, and words. Through ecofeminist theory, I show that the poetry of Foix aligns with the modern philosophies of transcendence and Cartesian human subjectivity separate from nature, while Riba portrays human subjectivity as formed in heterarchical relationship and based in the natural world and social engagement. These texts illustrate a postwar literary shift to ecological postmodernism.

Catalan Review, read here.

In these five chapters, I analyze an ecological pattern in the literature and film of postwar Spain (1939-1975): ecological postmodernism, caring about the "other" as "another" like us. I analyze...

Literature:
Sol, i de dol (J.V. Foix, 1936)
Elegies de Bierville (Carles Riba, 1943)
Los niños tontos (Ana María Matute, 1956)
Entre visillos (Carmen Martín Gaite, 1957)
Presente profundo (Elena Quiroga, 1973)
Retahílas (Carmen Martín Gaite, 1974)
El mismo mar de todos los veranos (Esther Tusquets, 1978)

Film:
Raza (Sáenz de Heredia, 1942)
Condenados (Mur Oti, 1953)
Murió hace quince años (Gil, 1954)
Ha llegado un ángel (Lucia, 1961)
Aguaespejo granadino (Val del Omar, 1955)
The early films of Joaquim Puigvert
El espíritu de la colmena (Érice, 1973)
Novio a la vista (Berlanga, 1953)
El cochecito (Ferreri, 1960)
Se necesita chico (Mercero, 1963)
La ciudad no es para mí (Lazaga, 1966)

Read the PDF here!

The acclaimed documentary The Silence of Others (Carracedo and Bahar, 2018) follows the recent efforts of victims of persecution during the Spanish Civil War and subsequent dictatorship (1936–1975) to achieve justice measures. This article demonstrates that the documentary employs melodramatic conventions to establish the plaintiffs’ cause as just. These conventions include utopian gardens and dystopian prisons, Christian imagery, a vow of silence, and a climactic public recognition of virtue. However, this melodramatic framework simplifies the film’s historical content, avoiding nuances such as the “Law of Historical Memory” and the complicity of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español in democratic Spain’s history of forgetting. Likewise, the documentary offers only a minimal discussion of exhumation funding and essentializes but does not distort the Second Spanish Republic. This film exemplifies how melodramatic narratives can illustrate a utopia, in Paul Ricœur’s terms: an idealized ideology that generates counterhegemonic political knowledge.

Hispanic Review, read here.