The 1940s were one of the darkest, most dramatic and ill-fated times of
contemporary Spain. After a long and fierce civil war, the Franco regime achieved
institutional stability and political hegemony through measures of extremely
harsh physical and psychological repression. The purges, summary trials and executions
destroyed the last of explicit resistance and served as a warning to the population. Along
with the memories of war and economic hardship, these acts meant that any explicit dissent
was extremely difficult. However, as has been discussed for some years now, between
collaboration and passivity, between consensus and conflict, there were a set of examples
of discontent and even resistance that, in the long term, would erode the regime but, at
the same time, made it bearable for millions of Spaniards. This article adds a practice to
the list of these daily resistances that has gone unnoticed by most historians, sociologists,
and musicologists: modern popular dances. The period analysed runs from the end of the
Spanish Civil War, in 1939, to the beginning of the Cold War, in 1947.
