UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The transition from democracy to dictatorship affects much more than a country’s political system. Arts, culture and the free expression of ideas are also impacted as the government decides what is and is not acceptable for writers, musicians and other artists to address in their work.
Such conditions existed in Spain and Portugal for four decades in the mid-20th century. How authors responded to the challenges posed by authoritarian regimes is the subject of doctoral work by Ramsés Martínez Barquero, Penn State student and recipient of the 2025 Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Fellowship in the McCourtney Institute for Democracy.
Martínez Barquero is a fourth-year doctoral student in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese who came to Penn State in 2021 after completing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in his native Spain. His dissertation focuses on novels published in Spain and Portugal during the dictatorships of Francisco Franco and António de Oliveira Salazar, respectively.
“Everyone who was not OK with dictatorship left and was in exile,” Martínez Barquero said. “My work explores what happens when we read the novels that were published by the authors who stayed in Spain and Portugal during that time.”
Among the themes promoted by the Franco and Salazar regimes was a focus on a traditional Catholic family structure with a masculine father figure who provides for the family economically and a submissive feminine mother who takes care of children. Martínez Barquero found examples in Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan novels that included widows, orphans, absent fathers and other characters who went against the regimes’ official positions.
“Finding subtle tropes and topics in literature is not new. What’s new in my project is focusing on something recent and putting two countries in dialogue with one another,” Martínez Barquero said,” “It’s not exactly dissident discourse but it’s defying hegemonic discourse. How was life under Franco really? Novels give us a key to answering that question.”
Judith Sierra-Rivera, director of graduate studies in the Spanish program, concurred in her letter nominating Martínez Barquero for the fellowship.
“By examining representations of deviant families in literature published in Spain and Portugal in the mid-20th century, Ramsés uncovers the subtle ways that writers resisted hegemonic ideologies and oppressive mechanisms of the state,” Sierra-Rivera wrote.
Martínez Barquero came to Penn State in part because he wanted to study the history of Spain and Portugal from an outside perspective. As part of receiving the Roosevelt Fellowship, he said he hopes to collaborate with scholars in other disciplines who can shed light on the broader social and political environment in mid-20th century Spain and Portugal. He also is considering a research trip to Portugal to do archival work.
“One of the best ways to study history is to be outside of a place,” Martínez Barquero said. “Distance is important to study things differently and on a deeper level and studying this literature was more viable here in the U.S.”
Martínez Barquero said this research has not been done before because Spain and Portugal did not have truth and reconciliation commissions following their transition from dictatorship to democracy. His interest in dictatorships comes from his family’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Martínez Barquero’s great-grandfather had to disappear and met with his family in secret for many years.
“People would come to my grandmother asking where her dad was … it was the authorities trying to gather information,” Martínez Barquero said. “I never knew about these stories as a kid, but they started coming up when I started asking my grandparents questions.”
The Roosevelt fellowship was established by the late Susan Welch, former dean of the College of the Liberal Arts. Named after one of Welch’s personal heroes, the program began as a summer research scholarship in 2017 and transitioned to a yearlong fellowship after a bequest from Welch following her death in 2022.
Welch, who served as dean of the College of the Liberal Arts for nearly three decades, was a distinguished political science scholar and academic leader. She also was a noteworthy philanthropist; during her lifetime, Welch and her husband — the late Alan Booth, former distinguished professor of sociology, human development and demography — contributed or pledged nearly $3 million to Penn State and the college.