The Great Leather Generation Swindle
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and whose cultural references were both more modem and more global. The
publishing industry reacted to this radical change of their destiny by creating a
literary tendency especially tailored for the “new Spanish readers,” that naturally
promoted young authors whose only required quality was to have been bom no
earlier than 1960. As part of the promotion mechanism, established members of
the literary world—mainly critics and journalists—celebrated the arrival of these
young authors and quickly classified the lot as the new narrative or young
narrative, erasing any possible differences between them in order to create the
appearance of a literary movement. Hence an artificial collective identity was
constructed through the organization of conferences and colloquia, where all the
“young writers” were invited to share their common joys and disappointments,
dreams and ambitions, disregarding the blatant differences of those bom under
Franco’s regime and those who never had the time to feel its repression. For
distribution purposes, the authors lent themselves to this ploy and willingly
participated in the events; therefore, any awareness of belonging to a group or
generation was determined, if not directly forged, by the media for the benefit of
the publishing industry. And even if some of the authors concerned had indeed
something to say, their individual voices quickly became lost among those of
their own so-called generation.
To promote and sell the notion of a collective identity, however false it may
have been, publishing companies and the media identified certain common traits
among the authors who supposedly represented the renewal of modem Spanish
literature; not surprisingly, most of the particulars associated with Leather
Literature referred directly to U.S. cultural icons and artefacts, in their most
commercialized representation, in order to take advantage of a wide, pre
existing consumer base. The success of everything “made in the USA,” very
noticeable in today’s Spanish cultural landscape,4 could be explained by the
eagerness with which the Spanish public embraced the dominant and most
distributed elements of popular culture after 40 years of economic, social, and
political stagnation: Spain was literally catching up with the rest of the Western
world, and consumption seemed to be the fastest track to modernity. And so, the
most popular U.S. commercial icons and a