THE YOUTH IN THE NO-DO, BETWEEN REACTION AND AMERICANIZATION (1943-1975)

Abstract

This article addresses the Franco regime's plan that, through the Youth Front and the Women's Section, sought to ideologically control young people, in a reactionary attempt to stop the air of modernity that had circulated before 1936. While for the boys a model of camp and pre-military life was proposed, the girls were confined to the private sphere of domestic life, all this under a clearly religious universe in accordance with the principles of national-Catholicism. However, since the United States was the guarantor of the Franco regime, a somewhat paradoxical process took place, in the sense that the Americanization of Spanish social life –something contrary to the postulates defended by the Falange, opposed to capitalist and plutocratic liberalism– meant that youth culture also turned its attention to the novelties coming from North America, a process that can be observed and documented not only with the images of the NO-DO but also in the cinema.