Buying into Change: Consumer Culture and the Department Store in the Transformation(s) of Spain, 1939–1982

On the morning of October 4, 1934, readers of the leading Madrid newspaper A.B.C. unwittingly bore witness to a watershed moment in Spain’s history. Hours later, a miners’ strike would begin in the northern province of Asturias, sparking a series of clashes between the Spanish political right and left that would lead the nation to a bloody three-year civil war (1936–1939) and the establishment of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s brutal dictatorship (1939–1975).¹ But that had not occurred yet—it was still morning, and as they paged through the paper, A.B.C. subscribers encountered not reports of worker armies in the industrial north, but something seemingly ordinary: an interview with an as-yet little-known businessman, coincidentally also from Asturias, named José “Pepín” Fernández Rodríguez.

In this interview, Pepín—or as his employees knew him, “Don José”—announced the launch of his new department store, Sederías Carretas, just steps from Madrid’s city center. As the month advanced, more interviews, as well as store ads, appeared in A.B.C., always stressing that this was a new kind of store—that its arrival was anything but commonplace. Pepín promised madrileños “the store they had been waiting for,” a cathedral of consumption that embodied cutting-edge American commercial methods imported from Havana’s El Encanto department store, where the Asturian had learned his trade three decades earlier as a young expatriate. Sederías Carretas, he declared, would treat commerce as something noble, the fulfillment of “a social function and a public service.” Curious crowds had flocked to the store’s grand opening on October 2; emboldened by this early success, Pepín proclaimed the founding an event nothing short of “transcendent.”²

Buying into Change reveals how, between the 1940s and the 1980s, this store and other enterprises like it broadly shaped Spanish society and politics in ways that indeed transcended the world of business—how in a moment of remarkable coincidence, October 4, 1934 witnessed not just a pivotal moment in the coming of the Franco dictatorship, but also the first steps toward an equally dramatic mass consumer revolution that eventually undermined that same regime. More specifically, this dissertation examines how department stores like Sederías Carretas (soon to expand into Spain’s premier national chain, Galerías Preciados), a burgeoning consumer press, new supermarkets, and a rapidly professionalizing Spanish advertising industry all contributed to the development of an internationally oriented mass consumer society in Franco’s Spain. It traces how that this new mass consumption quickly became a sociopolitical space that both the regime and its opponents sought to claim, and shows that this ultimately opened new avenues for at times subversive, often foreign-influenced expression at a time when the Franco regime had foreclosed such opportunities for public life.

During the 1940s and 1950s, department stores and magazines reproduced Francoist mechanisms of social control, even as they also stoked Spanish interest in consumer products and practices then spreading in Western Europe, such as American appliance culture, which began to make inroads in Spain after the normalization of relations with the United States in 1953.³ This international influence only intensified during the Spanish economic boom of 1959–1973, during which Spain possessed one of the fastest growing economies in the world.⁴ In these years, Spain’s first supermarkets, many of them affiliates of the Dutch chain SPAR, exposed ordinary Spaniards to foreign food ways and, alongside department stores like Galerías Preciados, transformed the urban landscape with sleek glassed-in storefronts that spoke of an incipient Spanish rise to a Northern European- and American-coded modernity. Galerías and its competitors sent employees on foreign exchanges, which only deepened these cross-cultural contacts. Later in the 1960s and into the 1970s, a newly arrived foreign department store joined in: the iconic American chain Sears Roebuck and Company, which came to Spain in 1964. The result, I argue, was a network of consumption-mediated relationships...