Postmodern Paletos
Subtitle: Immigration, Democracy, and Globalization in Spanish Narrative and Film, 1950-2000
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: December 1, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 260
ISBN-13: 9780838754986
Subjects: Literature: History & Criticism; The Arts: General Issues; Literary Criticism; Pop Arts / Pop Culture; Cinema/Film: Book; Europe; Portugal; Film & Video - History & Criticism; European - General; European - Spanish & Portuguese; 20th century; History and criticism; Motion pictures; Rural-urban migration in liter; Rural-urban migration in literature; Spain; Spanish fiction
Description: "When Spanish dictator Francisco Franco legalized internal immigration in 1947 he unwittingly inaugurated the greatest period of urban expansion and rural de-population that Spain had known. During the next two decades, nearly four million citizens would move from Spain's traditional pueblos perdidos to overburdened urban metropolises.

Along with wooden trunks and baskets of chickens, the immigrants (or paletos, as they were often called) bore on their journey the weight of centuries of ideological meaning tied to the geographic regions they were traversing. To abandon rural Spain had come to signify a rejection of manhood, wealth, Christian values, and even Spanishness itself. Paletos, however innocent they may have appeared, were not ideologically neutral.

In the coming decades the weight and complexity of the meanings behind immigration, the country, and the city would only grow as Spain advanced from economic under development, social ignorance, and political reaction to full-fledged participation in global economics and politics, activities that would reshape what it meant to be an immigrant and paleto both within and across the geographic border that had traditionally defined the Spanish nation."--BOOK JACKET.