La corriente crítica esencialista de la crónica taurina (1965-2002). Antecedentes, desarrollo, auge y desaparición

Abstract

The incorporation in 1965 of Vicente Zabala Portolés to the newspaper El Alcázar meant the birth of the Essentialist Critical Current of the bullfighting chronicle. A process of progressive radicalization of bullfighting criticism in the denunciation of the evils that have plagued the bullfighting festival since the post-war period (the lack of conditions of the bulls that are fought, the extension of the fraud of cutting the pits or "shaving", the emergence of heterodox techniques in the art of bullfighting, and the implementation of subsidized bullfighting information known as "envelope"). The analysis of this period of extreme radicalism in bullfighting criticism would be situated between 1965 and 2002, with four significant stages that situate the four most relevant authors, 1965 to 1976, in which, in addition to Zabala's voice, in 1967 Alfonso Navalón Grande's voice is added to that of Alfonso Navalón Grande; 1976 to 1989, a stage marked by the pen of Joaquín Vidal Vizcarrro; 1989 to 2002 with Javier Villán Zapatero and Francisco Apaolaza Banastier; and from 2002 as the fourth and last stage in which the current disappears almost completely from the national journalistic panorama. The analysis of these four authors allows us to discover the discursive particularities of each one of them. In the same way, the development and evolution of events within the bullfighting panorama during those years allows us to identify a series of historical milestones that give meaning to and explain a good part of this radical essentialist discourse.