Abstract: In 2025, the Spanish government marked the 600th anniversary of the Roma people's arrival in the Iberian Peninsula by declaring it the "Year of the Roma People." Despite this symbolic recognition, the Spanish Roma continue to be marginalized and excluded from dominant national narratives, a condition that is exacerbated for Roma individuals with disabilities. This article argues that racial trauma itself operates as a disabling force, shaped by centuries of structural antigitanismo (anti-Roma racism) and sustained forms of historical erasure. Drawing on selected strands of critical disability studies that conceptualize disability as methodology, alongside critical trauma studies and a crip-of-color critique, the article examines how race, trauma, and disability are mutually constitutive in the lived realities of Spanish Roma communities. Epigenetics is approached here as a heuristic framework for thinking about the embodied and transgenerational transmission of racial trauma, rather than as a biological or deterministic claim. Through an analysis of selected artworks by Roma lawyer, author, and artist Séfora Vargas, the study foregrounds questions of access, visibility, silence, and cultural restitution, reading her work as a situated counter-archive that challenges hegemonic constructions of Spanishness. Ultimately, the article advocates for the re-centering of Roma epistemologies and for trauma-informed, antiracist approaches that move beyond purely symbolic recognition toward structural and epistemic forms of reparation.
Abstract: Fernando Franco's 2022 film La consagración de la primavera ( The Rite of Spring ) is the first Spanish mainstream film that portrays sexual assistance for people with disabilities. The movie focuses on the life of a college student, Laura (Valèria Sorolla), who assists a young man, David (Telmo Irureta), with cerebral palsy in masturbating. However, unlike previous representations of sexual assistance and crip politics in Spanish marginal productions, such as Yes, We Fuck! (Antonio Centeno and Raúl de la Morena, 2015) and Vivir y otras ficciones ( Living and Other Fictions ) (Jo Sol, 2016) La consagración de la primavera seems to reinscribe heteronormative conventions and turns its back on the radical possibilities of diverse relationalities. Laura stops seeing David and starts a relationship with her able-bodied, conventionally attractive classmate. In this article, I grapple with the ways in which the movie's final message could also be a radical proposal: a denunciation of an unjust society and a form of advocacy of diverse bodies and diverse pleasures. Fernando Franco said in an interview at San Sebastián Film Festival that he wanted to cast a "mirada más normalizadora" to counter "ciertos prejuicios." By adopting a coming-of-age romance framework, Franco manages to make publicly discussable topics that remain uncomfortable in Spain and to amplify the voices of disability activists, like actor Telmo Irureta. I ask what it means that a lighter storytelling register is required to render disabled sexuality discussable. In doing so, I study La consagración de la primavera not only in its aesthetic and narrative aspects, but also in its circulation in public forums, sparking conversations about disability justice, crip communities, and intersectionality.
