Although the Spanish Transition has been repeatedly reevaluated since the 1978 Constitution, the past decade of economic crisis and political corruption has enabled its defenders to weaponize it against reform. This dissertation challenges the idyllic narrative, arguing that the Transition functions as a constructed myth that obscures exclusion and silences dissenting voices. It examines counter-hegemonic discourses across cultural and political forms, including 1980s Basque Radical Rock and cine “quinqui”, 1990s social movements during the celebration of the World Exposition of Seville and the Olympic Games of Barcelona, and the proliferation of graphic novels in the early 2000s following the 15M protests, to recover marginalized perspectives and reframe the Transition as a contested and ongoing discourse.

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Roberto García Delgado is a PhD Candidate in Modern Peninsular Literature at UW–Madison. His research examines the cultural and political legacies of Spain’s democratic Transition through the lens of counter-hegemonic and marginalized narratives from the 1978 Spanish Constitution to the 2011 15M movement. He holds a master’s in Spanish Literature and Linguistics from UW-Milwaukee.

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