Episode 22 with Louie Dean Valencia-García

The usual interpretation of recent Spain history has been that the country was inoculated against the return of the radical right seen in other European countries because of the memory of the Franco dictatorship.  However, the rise of Vox and other far right parties in Spain in the last couple of years has called this interpretation into question.  Why are these groups gaining strength in Spain now and what links do they have with Spain’s experience with fascism under the Franco regime?  In this episode, Professor Louie Dean Valencia-García puts the recent headlines about the return of the radical right to Spain in historical context and considers how new this resurgent far right really is.

The Episode

The Guest

Louie Dean Valencia-García is an Assistant Professor of Digital History at Texas State University. He studies the intersections of fascism, community formation, youth and queer culture, democratic institutions, and technology. He has been a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University, is a Research Editor of EuropeNow, the monthly journal of Council for European Studies at Columbia University, and is co-chair of the CES’s Critical European Studies Research Network. He is a Senior Fellow at the London-based Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right. He is the author of Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism and the editor of Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories (Routledge 2020). He has held fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the United States Library of Congress, the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, Acción Cultural Española. At Texas State, he teaches in the Department of History, the Public History Program, the Center for International Studies, and the Honors College, and has received several awards for his teaching. He received his PhD in 2016 from Fordham University in New York City.

Suggested Reading

• Aguilar Fernández, Paloma.  Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002.
• Riley, Dylan.  The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870-1945.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
• Muñoz Soro, Javier.  “In Search of the Lost Narrative: Antifascism and Democracy in Present-Day Spain.”  In Hugo García et al., eds., Rethinking Antifascism: History, Memory and Politics, 1922 to the Present. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016.
• Paxton, Robert O.  The Anatomy of Fascism.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
• Stanley, Jason.  How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House, 2018.
• Valencia-García, Louie Dean.  Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism.  Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
• Valencia-García, Louie Dean.  “The Rise of the European Far-Right in the Internet Age.” EuropeNow, February 2018, https://www.europenowjournal.org/2018/01/31/the-rise-of-the-european-far-right-in-the-internet-age/.
• Zúquete, José Pedro.  The Identitarians: The Movement Against Globalism and Islam in Europe.  Notre Dame Press, 2018.