Spain’s ‘pact of silence’ and the Removal of Franco’s Statues (original) (raw)
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American Ethnologist, 2018
Four decades after the end of the Franco dictatorship, many Spaniards continue to question their country's claims to full democracy. Although Spain is now governed by popularly elected governments, citizens still experience the coercive effects of the dictatorship's policies in their daily interactions with the built environment, state institutions, and even their fellow citizens. These heterogeneous sites through which the dictatorship makes its presence felt constitute an infrastructure of memory that facilitates and impedes the circulation of past experience. In this context, people enact memory politics not only by contesting narratives of the past but also, first and foremost, by dis‐ and reassembling the physical, institutional, and social entanglements that undergird democratic politics. [infrastructures, cultural memory, democratic politics, forensic exhumations, archives, Spain] Cuatro décadas después del fin de la dictadura franquista, muchos españoles siguen cuestionando la calificación de su país como democracia plena. Si bien los gobiernos de España son elegidos popularmente, los ciudadanos siguen siendo afectados por las políticas de la dictadura en sus interacciones diarias con el ambiente construido, con las instituciones del estado, e incluso con otros ciudadanos. Estas ubicaciones heterogéneas, a través de las cuales la dictadura hace sentir su presencia, constituyen una infraestructura de la memoria que facilita e impide la circulación de la experiencia del pasado. En este contexto, las políticas de la memoria consisten no sólo en disputar narrativas del pasado, sino principalmente y ante todo en ensamblar y desensamblar los enredos físicos, institucionales y sociales que afianzan la política democrática. [infraestructuras, memoria cultural, política democrática, exhumaciones forenses, archivos, España]
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2018
This paper explores the role of silence in Spain's post-dictatorship memory politics. More specifically, the paper examines the forgotten Spanish colonial past in North Africa vis-à-vis the so-called pact of silence that accompanied Spain's transition to democracy after the Franco dictatorship. Drawing on various theoretical approaches in relation to collective memory, traditionally assumed associations between silence and forgetting are questioned. As is argued, silence may nurture and preserve memory just as it may also feed into forgetting. In the former case, silence typically enshrouds a living memory of a past that still weighs on the present, as the pact of silence in Spain clearly illustrates. In the latter case, silence signals a past perceived as already left behind and alien to society's current problems, as is the case of the Spanish colonial past in North Africa. In order to further explore the latter case, the notion of banal silence is introduced. Such notion points to cases where silence over certain contentious historical issues goes unnoticed by society, thus becoming naturalized. The paper concludes with some final reflexions on memory, banal silence and political change. Keywords Banal silence. collective memory. memory politics. history textbooks. Spanish colonialism Memory politics goes far beyond the simple act of retrieving. Shaped by the dialectics of remembering and forgetting (Brockmeier 2002), memory politics imply a struggle over the past which is, in turn, constantly reconstructed (Wagoner 2017) in light of an ever-changing present and competing imagined futures (Brescó 2017; De Saint-Laurent et al. 2018). On occasion, the past can be a burden that hinders new possible futures to be imagined or achieved (Brescó 2010). However, ignoring the past may be something that is unbearable for
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2016
The Franco regime promoted a memory of the war full of distortions and omissions. The silenced existence of mass graves with Republican civilians executed by Francoists was among the most outrageous of these. During the transition, the desire to put aside the traumatic memory of the war led to the neglect of these victims. This was particularly visible in the absence of government policies regarding these corpses. In spite of this silence, a first wave of exhumations took place in the transition period. We deal with its unique exposure in one of Spain's most controversial and successful magazines: Interviú. Despite widespread extreme-right violence and threats, Interviú was one of the very few media that dared to cover this type of information. This article is based on research in Interviú's archives and on interviews with some of the journalists responsible for the reports. We will explain the reasons behind these unparalleled reports and will analyze why, in contrast with what happened many years later, Interviú's efforts failed to unleash a widespread social reaction in favor of exhuming and reburying the remains concealed in these graves. Our study contributes to current debates on the interconnections between the media and complex social memory processes.
Unwilling to Forget: Local Memory Initiatives in Post-Franco Spain
South European Society and Politics, 2017
Abstract It has been abundantly argued that the Spanish transition was based on an implicit ‘pact of silence’ by which the main political forces accepted to leave the thorniest aspects of past behind as the only way to peacefully construct a democratic future. And it has been widely accepted that Spanish society subscribed to this. This article defends a more nuanced version of this state-level agreement by focusing on memory-related initiatives at the local level. By doing so, it poses some challenges to existing literature on the politics of memory in general and the Spanish transition in particular.
Memory Studies, 2015
This essay presents a sociological analysis of what is known in Spain as the “recovery of historical memory” and the politics deriving from this recovery. This process was catalyzed by the exhumations of the remains of victims of Francoism that have been under way since the beginning of the twenty-first century. In order to do this, we will use the literature on cosmopolitan sociology and provide a dialogue between this sociology and recent developments in the study of social and cultural memory using concepts like postmemory, multidirectional, and cosmopolitan memory. The article moves beyond the national context and looks at Spanish memory politics through the theory and praxis of Holocaust memory on the one hand and the memory of the Argentinean victims of the military dictatorship on the other hand. This will enable us to identify the components and problems of a culture and politics of globalized memory.
Spain's Dictatorship and the Control of the Historical Image of Francisco Franco
Approaches to Historiography II. Writing under Dictatorships, 2022
Censors in dictatorial Spain were always on their qui vive when the historical image of the highest state official, Francisco Franco, was at stake. This article checks their attitude and behavior based on four themes: Franco's role in the coup d'etat of 1936, his coming to the highest political and military power, his relations with the Hitler regime, and the monarchist opposition to his position in 1944/1945.
This article breaks new ground by studying the impact of members of the International Brigades in Spain and analysing the ways in which Spanish political groups have been making use of the memory of the Brigades since the end of the Franco regime in 1975. It shows that the veterans of the International Brigades played the role of agents of democracy between 1975 and 1977. Between 1977 and 1988, a time when invoking the past carried political risks, left-wing groups in Spain constructed a memory of the volunteers as proxies, and the memory granted the groups the space that they needed to vindicate their own anti-fascist struggle. With the final crisis and collapse of the Soviet Union, the Left moved away from ideology and, for good measure, made use of ethical reasons to demand recognition for the Spanish victims of General Franco. Increasingly, the International Brigades were remembered not as proxies but as part of a struggle to acknowledge the sufferings of the Spaniards.