From Fascist Spain to Sunny Spain: Dancing at World's Fairs during the Franco Regime

The theme of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, “Peace Through Understanding,” provided an optimistic counterpoint to the negative reality of the Cold War and it gave some nations the means to rehabilitate their image on the world’s stage.  Spain was one such nation. This fair became a perfect opportunity for the Franco regime to lessen its pariah status in the international arena by re-packaging its national identity for foreign and domestic consumption. The “real Spain” was not repressive, economically stagnant, and mindlessly conformist; instead it was “gay and hardworking, sunny, following the path of her history with faith and optimism.”^_

To achieve this transition from fascist Spain to sunny Spain, the Franco regime created an array of spectacles intended in their totality to dazzle audiences and to reshape their thinking about the country, and, in doing so, to entice tourists to visit Spain and flood it with money.  The Spanish Pavilion offered world-class art, fine food and wine, fashion shows, and dance. I will concentrate specifically on the dance performances in the pavilion to demonstrate the Franco regime’s multi-valent rendering of its national identity. The dance performances by professional flamenco dancers and by amateur dancers of the fascist Sección Femenina’s Coros y Danzas achieved great success, and thus helped to erase the Franco regime’s brutality in the public mind. Cultural diplomacy obliterated the memories of war and replaced them with new images of happy, dancing Spaniards, Spaniards who straddled tradition and modernity.