Spain has the largest highway network in Europe, the second largest high-speed railroad system in the world, and the highest number of water dams per capita globally. Geography alone cannot account for such high level of infrastructural development. More answers lie in the political, economic, and ideological forces shaping Spanish transportation, telecommunication, and power delivery networks. In the last decade, economists have studied the mobilization of public works projects for political centralization purposes (Bel, Infrastructure and the Political Economy of Nation Building in Spain, 2012); historians have documented the advancement of totalitarian views of landscape (Camprubí, Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime, 2014); and geographers have linked environmental alterations to Spain’s need to form transnational geopolitical alliances (Swyngedouw, Liquid Power, 2015). Infrastructures afford a salient prism to analyze the operation of systems of power in modern Spain, a prism attuned to nation building efforts while not losing sight of transnational flows of capital, a frame that attends to specific interventions and the discourses underpinning them.

Critical attention to Spanish infrastructures within cultural studies has mostly focused on the production of space in major cities—e.g, Larson (Constructing and Resisting Modernity, 2011), Fraser (Toward an Urban Cultural Studies, 2015). Given the extraordinary impact of infrastructure projects in rural Spain, this panel builds on existing scholarship across disciplines to interrogate how literature and film have contributed to visualize and obscure issues of power in the industrial transformation of the countryside. Panelists will examine works focusing on three understudied Spanish regions—Navarra, Asturias, and León—across different historical junctures in the belated process of industrialization in Spain—from the 1880s to the 1960s. Special emphasis will be devoted to how cultural production focusses, refigures, defamiliarizes, and otherwise calls attention to the role of infrastructures in exerting and subverting sociopolitical control in rural contexts.

To promote discussion, we propose a panel with three presenters limited to 15-minute papers. Óscar Iván Useche will begin by charting the contradictions of Spain’s modernization as represented in Ortega Munilla’s novel El tren directo (1880), which describes the dramatic events around the engineering and implementation of a railroad line nearby a small village in Navarra. By exploring the low passions—ambition, greed, envy—that an infrastructure-based development promoted in the local population, El tren directo proposes a pessimistic critique of the encounter between tradition and progress. Useche shows how, in portraying a morally decomposed society, Ortega Munilla finds the elements to evaluate the problematic assimilation of technological change into collective imagination and its multiple incompatibilities with national identity.

The subsequent presentation also examines affective responses to industrial development. Luke Bowe explores dread and nostalgia in turn-of-the-century literary representations of rural Asturias, whose traditionalistic depictions were later on coopted by the totalitarian regime of Francisco Franco (1936/39-1975). Bowe’s paper begins by discussing Alas’s 1892 short story “¡Adiós, Cordera!,” where a telegraph pole and train tracks herald the dawn of a new industrial age that will connect the region to broader national trade and politics. Those same “devilish machines called locomotives” signal the arrival of foreign capital and destruction to the Arcadian village in Palacio Valdés’s 1903 novel La aldea perdida (127). Bowe contrasts these condemnations of extractivism with texts and films portraying the massive infrastructural projects that transformed the region into one of Spain’s most important centers of heavy industry under Franco. In doing so, Bowe analyzes the dissonant messaging of the regime, which upheld folkloric representations of Asturias while championing an aggressive growth of industry that eroded those same rural spaces and values.

Lastly, Carles Ferrando Valero will trace the dissonance between governmental discourses and actions as well, in this case by discussing the construction of water dams during the Dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who presented the projects as a solution to the irrigation needs of agricultural Spain but devoted most reservoirs to the generation of hydro-electrical power to meet growing industrial demand. Ferrando Valero’s paper examines how Llamazares’s novel Distintas formas de mirar el agua (2015) resorts to a fragmentation to best account for the stories of the thousands of people from León who had to abandon their villages to make way for water storage and electrification. Forcefully displaced and silenced, Llamazares’s characters register the paradoxical nature of development as both coercive and progressive, whereas their different conceptions of nature center the issue of environmental impact—likewise addressed in the rest of presentations. Ferrando Valero argues that the novel’s splintered mirror aesthetic succeeds in exposing cracks in Francoist official imaginings of the Spanish nation.

Panel followed by a 25-minute discussion with the audience.