Film Review Blog Cine Quinqui and the (Un)Archived Transition: A Critical Reading of Gitano Representation
by Dr. Ismael Cortés
Emerging in the 1970s and gaining cultural prominence during Spain’s democratic transition, Cine Quinqui has come to function as a form of cultural archive—an aesthetic repertoire through which the tensions, contradictions, and symbolic ruptures of a society in transformation are both captured and constructed. However, like any archive, this one is not ideologically neutral. It demands critical interrogation. What does it include, and what does it exclude? Who are the subjects it chooses to represent, and through what narrative frameworks are these representations structured? Crucially, how do these cinematic narratives intervene in the production of collective memory at a pivotal historical juncture? This article engages these questions from an anti-racist perspective in order to ask: what has been the impact of Cine Quinqui on the representation of the Gitano people during the Spanish Transition?
Although often cloaked in the language of realism and documentary authenticity, this cinematic genre constructs a cinematic framework in which Gitanos´ agency is effaced, and they are reduced to criminalised, nihilist figures, situated beyond the limits of civic life. Through its recurring focus on youth delinquency, drug use, and incarceration, Cine Quinqui reproduces and consolidates racialised and classed stereotypes. Films such as Perros callejeros (De la Loma, 1977), Navajeros (De la Iglesia, 1980), Colegas (De la Iglesia, 1982), and Deprisa, deprisa (Saura, 1981), depict Gitanos as criminal figures portrayed as threats to the social order—out of step with Spain’s path toward democratisation.
In Bourdieusian terms, symbolic power refers to the capacity to impose a particular vision of the social world—a dominant doxa that is misrecognised as natural, inevitable, and beyond contestation. This power is unevenly distributed and structurally inaccessible to most. It is monopolised by those agents and institutions endowed with the requisite forms of cultural, economic, and institutional capital, as well as privileged access to the technological means of symbolic production. This asymmetry enables the exercise of symbolic violence: a mode of cultural domination through which subordinated groups are misrecognised, delegitimised, and dispossessed of the authority to speak on their own behalf or narrate their historical experiences.
Viewed from this perspective, Cine Quinqui must be understood not merely as a cinematic genre, but as a cultural field in which struggles over representation, recognition, and legitimacy are continuously (re)negotiated. Although it aims to document social marginality, the genre systematically excludes Gitano voices from the narrative design, particularly those rooted in the politicised lifeworlds of marginalised urban peripheries. These experiences are not represented from within, but are mediated through an external gaze that strips Gitano subjects of political agency. Their visibility is limited to tropes of deviance and criminality, while their actual civic participation and social engagements are rendered structurally invisible.
This logic of representation profoundly undermines any claim to realism. Cine Quinqui, far from offering a neutral depiction of social reality, it normalises the political invisibility of the Gitanos´ civic initiatives; positioning them outside the symbolic coordinates of Spain’s democratising project. It reinforces a cultural order in which racialised subaltern groups are cast as residual or abject, rather than as agents of political transformation. In doing so, it consolidates dominant schemas of perception and misrecognition.
Against this aesthetic regime, I argue for a re-signification of Gitano history—one that foregrounds the democratic, anti-fascist, and community-based initiatives led by Gitano individuals and organisations during the Spanish Transition. These histories of resistance, solidarity, and civic engagement have been systematically elided in dominant cultural discourses. Resisting such erasure entails confronting the hegemonic narratives that stigmatises an entire people and replacing them with accounts that reflect the political complexity and diversity of Gitanos lives.
Cinematic narratives, after all, are not transparent reflections of social reality. They are aesthetic constructions shaped by the social position of their producers—their class, ethnicity, gender, and access to symbolic capital. Like all cultural artefacts, films carry within them the unconscious prejudices, affective investments, and epistemic limitations of those who create them. Under the guise of gritty realism and aesthetic authenticity, Cine Quinqui manufactured an exoticised and reductive image of Gitano communities. In doing so, it obscured the very real forms of political engagement and community organising that characterised many Gitano neighbourhoods during the democratic transition.
The genre’s representational gaze failed to engage with the political environments in which many Gitanos were active—spaces shaped by Marxist and Christian Left movements from the 1960s through the 1980s. Instead, it constructed an imagined alterity tailored to the desires and anxieties of the emerging middle class—the primary audience for these films. Within this cinematic imaginary, the urban periphery is not depicted as a locus of political consciousness or collective struggle, but as a spectacle of transgression: a zone of vice, violence, hypersexuality, and precarious pleasure. The marginalised subject becomes an object of voyeuristic fascination rather than a participant in historical transformation.
This misrepresentation has created a critical lacuna within the cultural memory of the Spanish Transition. By favouring the legibility of stereotypes over the complexity of lived experience, Cine Quinqui contributed to the symbolic erasure of Gitano political subjectivity. In the interstitial spaces where class and ethnicity intersected—Spain’s impoverished urban margins—far more took place than these films were willing or able to represent.
It is, therefore, imperative to undertake a cultural critique of the representational logics through which Cine Quinqui has shaped public perceptions of the Gitano people. These reductive portrayals have obscured the historical contributions of an entire community to Spain’s democratic evolution. Revisiting and revising this archive is not simply an academic task—it is an ethical and political necessity. Only by restoring the complexity, diversity, and agency of Gitano experiences can we begin to inscribe them into the broader narrative of Spain’s modern democratic history.
For a deeper engagement with this topic, I invite readers to explore my article, "Gitanos and Subalternity in Cine Quinqui: The (Un)Archived Spanish Transition", in Mladenova, Radmila (2024): Counterstrategies to the Antigypsy Gaze. Heidelberg University Publishing.
Dr. Ismael Cortés
Ismael Cortés is both a scholar and a hands-on policy analyst with direct experience on the front lines of politics. His work bridges the gap between academic research and policymaking, tackling historical and structural discrimination through rigorous analysis and tangible legislative and policy action. Currently, Dr. Cortés continues to shape the discourse on equity and inclusion as a Romani Rose Postdoctoral Fellow at the Research Centre on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University and as an Associate Professor in the International Master’s Program in Peace, Conflicts, and Development Studies at Universitat Jaume I—where he mentors the next generation of global scholars and professionals dedicated to human rights.
