Remembering against forgetting: Everyday memory practices in a site of Francoist repression in Spain
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2024-10-31
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en
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Persecuted during Franco’s dictatorship (1936–1975) and purposely omitted after Spain’s democratic transition, thousands of everyday memory practices have been performed by relatives of victims of the regime along with memory organisations in the many sites throughout Spain where repression took place. However, despite being done for decades, trauma-addressing practices have seldom been considered by the few reparatory policies concerning Francoist crimes that the central Spanish government has adopted to date. As a result, almost fifty years after the death of dictator Franco, legislation directed to tackle past injustices continues to fail to meet victims’ needs.
This masters’ thesis follows an everyday justice lens to investigate how everyday memory practices have been used to address dictatorship trauma by focusing on a representative site of Francoist violence: the mass graves at Guadalajara cemetery. To this end, a qualitative approach involving bibliographical research, photographs, and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders connected to memory practices at Guadalajara was carried out. The work concludes that remembrance was done largely in private during the dictatorship whilst becoming a public activity from the mid-seventies onwards, merging recently with inter-scalar memory stakeholders as memory organisations, the local municipality, or an Argentinian lawsuit demanding the exhumation of victims’ bodies.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen