Representaciones del Protectorado de Marruecos y la Guinea Española en las Ferias Muestrario de Valencia (1942-1950). Exotismo, economía y poder colonial

Abstract

During the 1940s, the Valencia Trade Fair made an effort to showcase the riches of the Moroccan Protectorate and the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea and to arouse the interest of the metropolitan public in colonial affairs. To achieve this, the strategy of staging stereotypes of the two territories and their populations was used. In this architectural and human display, the image of the protectorate and the colony was configured dialectically; while Morocco, linked for historical reasons with Spain, was presented as a civilised territory and the Moroccans as fundamental agents in stimulating Franco’s economy and values, Guinea was defined as a territory to be civilised, with the rhetoric of National-Catholicism playing a crucial role in the public discourse that mixed business and missions. A fact that, as we shall see in this essay, is reflected in the texts and photographs that record this episode of colonial memory under Franco’s regime.

Keywords

• Francoism
• colonialism
• Protectorate of Morocco
• Guinea
• “Feria Muestrario de Valencia”