“Todo paisaje lleva en su interior un rastro de violencia”. Los pueblos de colonización en la narrativa española reciente

Abstract

In recent years, the rise of rural literatures in Spain has renewed scholarly interest in Francoist colonization villages, a legacy of the policies implemented by the Instituto Nacional de Colonización. While officially framed as social justice and modernization, these policies largely served landowners and subjected colonists to control and hardship. This article analyzes three novels: Atravesé las Bardenas (2017) by Eduardo Gil Bera, No queda nadie (2023) by Brais Lamela, and Paisaje nacional (2024) by Millanes Rivas. Although very different in form, these texts converge in their aim to bring to light the hidden faces of colonization. Thus, while the first narrates the forced labor of prisoners in the construction of settlements, and the second contrasts Francoist propaganda with the testimonies of Galician colonists, highlighting precarity, surveillance, and uprooting, the third ultimately makes visible the peasant struggles for land and the bodies buried beneath the foundations of the new villages. Taken together, these texts function as literary excavations that confront official history, demonstrating that, indeed, “every landscape carries within it a trace of violence”, and thereby affirming the need to reconsider (to look at) the land as a political space marked by processes of occupation, expropriation, and resistance.