Contentious Memories of the Spanish Student Movement: Representations of the Spanish 1968 in the Public Memory of the Transition

Abstract

This chapter reproduces in the Spanish context the same analyses that were conducted on the Italian student movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the previous chapter. After a brief reconstruction of the debate on memory in the Spanish context (Sects. 1, 2, and 3), a qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles regarding two very significant events of the student protests of the 1960s and 1970s in Spain is conducted in Sects. 4 and 5. The analysis shows the development over time of the media representations of the student struggles of previous decades, reconstructing the images of the Spanish student movement of the 1960s and 1970s that are predominant in the mass media forum of the public sphere as a repository of memory. These media representations of the past will then be compared, in Chap. 7, with the representations of the same past emerging from the interview with contemporary Spanish activists: identifying analogies and differences between these two sources, as in the Italian case, will allow us to empirically assess the role of the different repository of memories (mass media and movement culture) and the ways in which activists draw on them.