Versos Indignados; Emotions and Social Activism in Recent Spanish Poetry

Several scholars have emphasized the centrality of affects and emotions in the discourse and political practices of the 15M, the popular movement that emerged in Spain on May 15th 2011 as a response to the 2008 economic crisis. The 15M’s rise in public life has been considered an inflection point in the transition from a generalized social state of isolation, fear and despair, towards another characterized by solidarity and a collective sense of indignation against the control exerted by financial elites over social life.

In this paper, I explore the various ways whereby contemporary Spanish poetry moves (in the double sense of emotionally impacting and politically mobilizing) and therefore, can potentially produce, different models of sociality within the context of the 2008 financial crisis. Taking as my object of study the work of Martha Asunción Alonso and Alberto Basterrechea, better known as batania, I argue that their work engages in a fruitful discursive exchange with the 15M that has shaped not only their own poetic expression, but that of the movement itself. Thus, I approach Alonso and batania’s poetry attending not to what these texts mean, but to what they actually do; that is, what are their effects and how they impress on their readers corporeal and intellectually. This analytical task will demand attention to the spatial resources employed by Alonso and batania as they contribute to the re-democratization of public space, through the diffusion of graffiti verses and poems.