El Cid Campeador between Luzán and Lorca: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Pop-Culture Favorite

Abstract:This article explores the circulation of popular ballads on El Cid in pliegos sueltos of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast to the ballads of the oral tradition, which were said to preserve medieval epic fragments, the texts under consideration here had their origins in the popular culture of the Baroque. Although we know a great deal about what El Cid meant for the literate elite of the Romantic and post-Romantic era, we know little about the knowledge and opinions of non-elites throughout the Spanish-speaking world regarding Spain’s “national” hero between the Enlightenment and the Spanish Civil War. Discussion of these pliegos sueltos and their distribution (to places as far away as New Mexico and Chile) may help shed light on this “pop-culture” Cid, what he would have meant for audiences of the period, especially in terms of religious and ethnic identity.