Conceptual History of ‘The Quinqui’. Multiple Jobs, Police, Press and Myth

Abstract

How do you go from the quinquillero to the quinqui? What cultural transit is marked in the shortening of this word? Are quinquis the children of those who worked with quincalla? What do quinqui(llero)s tell us about the turning of a rural and agrarian economy to the Spanish technocratic developmentalism, its consequent unemployment and the UVAs? The quinqui reappears again and again in social discourses in Spain to signal the subjective and labor forms that dissent from mainstream collectivity. This paper investigates the conceptual history of the quinqui before the 1980s, proposing as its main hypothesis that it is in these historical quinquis that we find the discursive and material roots of the young and suburban quinqui. Following press files of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and also sensationalist articles of the sixties and seventies, as well as some investigative textual works, this article seeks to present the archeology of the disciplinary biopolitical operation of exclusion that is configured around the significant “quinqui” and its variants, taking into account its rural, ethnic and labor dimensions within public discourse.