ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Indignados and Podemos as a way to explain the connections between the vernacular and the national popular. It places Indignados in the context of the current economic crisis in Spain and examines some of its discursive and organizational practices to argue that, similarly to Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the group mostly aimed at producing, through communication, a collectively shared field of meanings and practices, which the Indignados saw as the primordial condition for their emancipation. The notion of cultural syncretism as a way to describe the vernacular resonates with Gramsci's perspective on folklore as a given group's conception of world and life that stands aside and in competition with other social groups' vernacularism. In this sense, Indignados exemplifies perfectly the dialectical nature of the vernacular, which builds a sense of a community group's awareness by both resisting the pressure of the ruling group and at the same time affirming its own identity.
