Itineraries of Protest in El vano ayer: Isaac Rosa on the Page and in the Streets

Abstract Isaac Rosa’s El vano ayer (2004) is a historical metanarrative that deconstructs both literary discourse and everyday spatial constructs in order to document the perpetuation of the Francoist past in the “democratic” present. The juxtaposition of El vano ayer as a novelistic form and Isaac Rosa as a social media presence mediates, facilitates, and produces narratives and pathways through and about rhetoric and space; specifically spaces of resistance in Madrid. This article explores how El vano ayer and Isaac Rosa as a public intellectual create an itinerary of counter-hegemonic protest. This itinerary describes and then reformulates the historical consciousness realized through the lexical and the concrete, as in the streets and monuments in Madrid that contain vestiges of the Francoist government.