Performing the ‘Anti-Spanish’ Body: Jazz and Biopolitics in the Early Franco Regime (1939–1957)

Through the study of censorship, legislation, the press, recordings and photographs, this chapter examines jazz as symbolic reference and musical practice in Franco’s Spain and argues that it played a contestatory role during the so-called ‘early Francoism’ period (1939-1957). The dictatorship that General Franco established after the Spanish Civil War intensively and systematically used culture and music as propaganda to define its image and shape public opinion. By its connotations and active presence, jazz became one of the main negative references of the new regime against which to define Spanish race and music under the precepts of nationalism, Catholicism and fascism.