Reyes de la gasolinera

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to open an academic discussion on a marginal but highly popular cultural phenomenon during the Spanish Transition to democracy: the rumba vallecana music subgenre. This study contextualises rumba vallecana in its historical and sociocultural territory and argues how and why the subgenre and its creators enjoyed a privileged, albeit paradoxical, position in order to challenge normalised identity and social constructions under the so-called ‘sociological Francoism’. The paper concludes that rumba vallecana was an essential cultural discourse embedded in the social identity changes that took place in Spain during the 1970s and 1980s.