“No Mo’ Kings!”

This chapter explores the censors’ objections against the translations of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, due to their detecting, in those texts, information deemed likely to lead the child readers to an understanding of Spanish history that was different from that officially sanctioned by the regime. Specifically, the chapter addresses the following questions: what were the particular episodes that prompted the censors’ objections to the translations for history-related reasons? Why could such episodes not be tolerated in the target culture? What was the role assigned to history in Francoist Spain, and why would children’s access to alternative accounts of history be seen as a potential threat to the power of the regime? Through the analysis, this chapter discovers that the efforts the regime took in ruling out alternative views of Spanish history from texts produced for the young were not prompted so much by its concern that such views may challenge the “facts” included in its revisionist version of history, as by its fear that they may impede Spanish children from acting as the future patriotic citizens of the regime.