The Spanish Arcadia

Abstract The aim of this article is to explore the Franco dictatorship's policy of agrarian colonization and its effects on the lives of the Spanish population. It examines not only the measures taken by the Francoist authorities but also individual and collective agencies and the memory of colonization. For this purpose, special attention is paid to the spatial dimension, analyzing, on the one hand, the policies by which the Franco regime sought to control villages and, on the other, the experiences and memories of those who inhabited them. The first section of the article analyzes the impact of Franco's domestic colonization policy on postwar agrarian society as part of the regeneration policies promoted by the dictatorship. The second section explores the mechanisms used by the dictatorship to invade private space, its capacity to control daily life, and the nationalizing potential that these policies had on the inhabitants of new settlements. Finally, the article examines the popular memory of these new settlers and their descendants in two colonization villages in Granada (Andalusia). Based on their testimonies, the article argues that the experiences of the inhabitants of these colonization settlements were markedly different from the official discourse of Franco's dictatorship.