No limits: The control of urban space in Surcos/Furrows (Nieves Conde 1951) and Los golfos/The Delinquents (Saura 1959)

Abstract

This article examines cinematic representations of the vast rural-to-urban migration that affected Spain in the 1950s. Madrid, which began its time as capital of Franco’s Spain as a city that had to be purged of its sins, became crucial to the hierarchical, centralized control of the nation, and thus was prioritized over the countryside and provincial capitals. As a result, the segmented, ordered space of Madrid’s urban planning was quickly overwhelmed by the number of arriving migrants who moved from the periphery of the nation to the periphery of the capital. Two films from opposite ends of the decade and of the political spectrum, José Antonio Nieves Conde’s Surcos/Furrows (Nieves Conde 1951) and Carlos Saura’s Los golfos/The Delinquents (), highlight the plight of both recent and more-established migrants to Madrid. The methods that the characters in these films use to gain access to the centre of Spanish social imaginary (i.e., crime and spectacle) are doomed to failure because they are inherently marginal activities. The films frame their protagonists’ movement through urban space to show that the economic modernization of the Franco regime in the 1950s failed to live up to expectations for improving the social well-being of the city’s inhabitants.