Tango and Its Dysphoric Narratives in Civil War and Postwar Spanish Prisons

Abstract This chapter focuses on music as a cultural object from which to address both the dynamics of political censorship and propaganda, and those of repression and resistance. The context is the Spanish Civil War and the immediate postwar period, a time of particularly virulent repression of the defeated by the new government that emerged from the victory of the rebels. Specifically, this analysis is situated in the scenario of the overcrowded Spanish prisons of the time, focusing on a genre, the tango, which incorporated both the propagandistic discourse of the new Francoist government’s prison policy as well as the frustration and nostalgia of the prisoners. Based on the concept of the reterritorialization of the primitive Buenos Aires tango presented by Ramón Pelinski, I will consider how these narratives converge in the case of a modest tango and a little-known musician, the violinist and composer Daniel Antón.