Transplanting the people. The contradictions of the modern discourse on the rural world and its validity in the Franco regime

The discourse on the rural world was one of the instruments of propaganda and indoctrination preferred by Franco's dictatorship. The country was used to, firstly, praise the purity of its traditions, while, at the same time, propagandize the 'modernization' that was to end its secular backwardness. This article investigates this contradiction in two ways: firstly, by tracking it in different institutions of the regime (NO-DO, Institute of Colonization, Spanish Falange and its Women's Section); secondly, by tracing its historical genealogy, that is: showing its pertinence to a modern bourgeois tradition which idealizes and at the same time stigmatizes peasants, considering them the 'people' at the core of the essence of the nation, but also some kind of barbarians who must be civilized.