Remembered and Recovered: Bethune and The Canadian Blood Transfusion Unit in Málaga, 1937

Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies, 2016

The winners of any conflict often try to impose their views on the defeated. Through official and unofficial mechanisms, most of which operate under the aegis of the state and other agents that work on its behalf, the voices of the defeated are silenced. One important counter-mechanism that is available, the one that may serve to resist the imposition of the victors' History, is frequently found in the collection, analysis and publication of oral testimonies, which give expression to, and magnify, silenced and oppressed memories. Orality therefore provides us with a window into past events or, rather, with multiple windows that allow us to see and take account of the myriad histories of which the past is actually composed, according not to the state-imposed version, but to the ways in which people remember it. Through an ethnographic study of local memories in one southern Spanish village, this article examines some of the ways in which the Spanish Civil War is remembered, focusing particularly on the lived experience of hunger and repression, and the memories of ideological clashes, class struggles and conflicts over land ownership.

Nature Anthropology 2024, 2 (3), 10013, 2024

For more than 80 years, Spain has had a human rights problem. Since the 18th of July 1936, when military personnel and fascists staged a coup d'é tat against the democratic government of the Second Republic, thousands of victims remain missing. We will examine how the victims have been treated by the State and how civil society has led the process of recovering democratic memory. We will focus on its impact in the Bierzo region, in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, and its importance in this process. We will also look at how scientific efforts continue to search for missing persons. History, archaeology, physical anthropology, and genetics join forces to repair the victims of the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship.

Memory Studies, 2016

This article examines the resilient strategies of those people who were politically or ideologically repressed during Francoism. In total, 57 individuals were interviewed in depth in order to establish the strategies that they adopted to overcome adverse situations. The memories of the interviewees not only bring to light the diversity of resources used to face repression, but they also show how their individual strategies of resilience were linked to a collective resilience framework involving a large segment of the population who are still alive or who have handed on their experiences to their descendants. Past memories are consequently connected in the present with the (re)creation of a common identity and the restoration of dignity to the victims, who were classified as criminals in historical and legal archives and also suffered a process of social stigmatization. However, the aim of this article is not to resurrect the conflict in a society that has been ideologically divided ...

PhotoResearcher (special issue "175 Years of Photography in Spain"), 2014

Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, 2015

2018

JOURNAL OF IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, 2021

Thousands of Spaniards contributed to the defence and the libera- tion of France as military contractors, legionnaires and soldiers between 1939 and 1945. This paper focuses on three elements of their contributions. First, it investigates the importance of French internment camps for Spanish refugees that became key recruit- ment grounds for soldiers and labourers. Secondly, it will analyse the importance of the military background Spanish volunteers acquired in both Spanish and French ranks. Thirdly, it will analyse the features of Free French Spanish volunteers and their fighting itineraries as transnational soldiers. Despite its importance, politi- cians in both France and Spain only recognised Spanish contribu- tions to the French resistance after the Second World War. This is a fourth aspect of the entangled Franco-Spanish history of the Second World War that this article analyses. By incorporating the accounts of French Gaullists, Communists and Spanish Francoists, it demonstrates how the context of the Cold War, which reinforced these interpretations, left little room for the study and commem- orative inclusion of these “outsiders”.

2016

Since 1989, Spain has gone through a process of re-emergence of the memories of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and Francoism (1939-1975). These newly produced memories challenge the official reading of the civil war, as established during the transition to democracy, as a “collective insanity.” As part of this process, the last three decades have produced numerous novels, documentaries, and journalistic accounts that have brought to the fore the untold stories of the repression during the civil war and its aftermath. This dissertation offers an analysis of the influence of transnational frameworks on the reconfiguration of the cultural memory narratives of the Spanish Civil War. The selection of post-Cold War Spanish cultural texts – narrative fiction, documentary film, photography and journalism – being analyzed in this dissertation, is framed by three emblematic “spaces of transnational memory.” These are: the wars in former Yugoslavia; Forced Disappearance in the Southern Cone; and the remembrance of the Holocaust. Each of these spaces highlights a different contemporary site of agency in the production of memory, namely contemporary civil war, mass grave exhumations, and testimony. In addition, this dissertation posits affect and emotion as important mechanisms in the production of transnational memories. This research argues that these transnational contexts of remembrance serve to reimagine Spain, proposing alternative and more “inclusive” forms of national memory and identity, often in opposition to the current Spanish “constitutional patriotism.” Transnational memory is located within the margins of the nation-state, a space of entanglement between the national and the transnational, and inhabited by those who were excluded from Spanish national identity through the forging of the Spanish nation-state. Full version: https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/portal/en/publications/reimagining-spain(a299cf3f-d2e7-4b4b-bdc5-f1dbc4f99de2).html