The Spanish indignados movement has often been portrayed as a ’youth movement‘, organized by heretofore rather ‘apolitical’ young people. However, this categorization tends to ignore aspects of political continuities, historical memory, and intergenerational solidarity within the movement. The most telling examples of these aspects are the iaioflautas (in Catalan) or yayoflautas (in Spanish), older indignados activists who define themselves as ‘the generation that fought and achieved a better future for our sons and daughters’ (see their manifesto). This rhetoric of care for the younger generation on the one hand avoids the acerbic right-leftist divisions that characterize post-franquist politics; at the same time, it organizes a generational unit, in Mannheim’s sense. As the only ‘grandparents movement’ to emerge in the European Spring protests, it brings together very experienced activists, some of whom had already organized clandestine resistance under Franco as unionists or members of leftist parties, with political newcomers – older people who had never been politically active before but who can identify with the movement’s framing strategy of intergenerational care in the face of the precariousness of the younger generation. Thus, in recent years yay@ activists with very different backgrounds have regularly been at the frontline of occupations or other anti-austerity protests, marked as yayoflautas by their characteristic yellow vests – and the respective hashtag several times reached the status of trending topic in twitter.
Younger indignados activists organized digital literacy workshops for the yayos, teaching them the use of social media for mobilization. In exchange, yayos taught the younger activist forms of clandestine organization and subversion they had employed in their resistance against the Franco dictatorship. And, by passing on such repertoires of contention, the movement last but not least also endowed the younger activists with a political legacy…. Based on campaign material and life story interviews with yayoflautas activists and their younger supporters, this paper discusses intergenerational relationships within the indignados movement, particularly regarding the aspects of care and temporality in times of ‘wired citizenship’ (Herrera 2014).
