ABSTRACT
This chapter examines popular protests in the Spanish eighteenth century as a critical attitude and opposition to power characterized by chaos, disorder, and instability in its ways of expression. The two objectives seek to explore the notion of protest outside the intellectual elite and enlightened culture. The first objective is to approach a self-consciousness and a tentative performance of identity of its subject of enunciation, the pueblo or the common people. The second objective is to trace the socio-political atmosphere of this historical period by way of an ephemeral genre that has been barely studied: that of transitory oral, written or printed materials – pamphlets, street signs, libels, lampoons, pasquinades, and coplas or popular songs – that are not meant to be retained and preserved but that served to legitimize a new political subject. This new subject demands not only a voice with which to speak and be heard, but also the right to be seen and not ignored, and the agency with which to make decisions in the public sphere.
