The voice, body and ventriloquism of Marisol in Tómbola (Lucía, 1962)

Child star Marisol’s (Pepa Flores) third film, Tómbola (Lucía, 1962), is a retelling of Aesop’s ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ with a sinister subtext that reveals Francoism’s political use of children and the biography of the niña prodigio. Interpreting the character of the ventriloquist kidnapper in Lucía’s film, this article explores ventriloquism as a metaphor of power and the appropriation of the child’s voice, body and subjectivity. Tómbola and Marisol epitomize the greater biopolitics of Franco’s regime as they champion and suffer, respectively, the child’s curbed and directed vocality. This counter-hegemonic reading of the Spanish popular film focuses on how the feature exposes its own biopolitical machinations and, in doing so, dramatizes and reveals the nefarious indoctrination of children by a regime that prescribed child abduction for re-education.