Memories of the Spanish Civil War: Conflict and Community in Rural Spain

by Ruth Sanz Sabido

Overview

The Spanish Civil War left a legacy of destruction, resentment and deep ideological divisions in a country that was attempting to recover from economic stagnation and social inequality. After Franco’s victory, the repression and purge that ensued immersed Spain in a spiral of fear and silence which continued long after the dictator’s death, through ‘the pact of oblivion’ that was observed during the transition to democracy.

Memories of the Spanish Civil War: Conflict and Community in Rural Spain attempts to break this silence by recovering the local memories of survivors of the Civil War and the early years of Franco’s dictatorship. Combining oral testimony gathered in one Andalusian village, with archival research, this ethnographic study approaches the expression of memory as an important site of socio-political struggle.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783483693
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/09/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	210
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.48(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ruth Sanz Sabido is Reader in Media and Social Inequality at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements / List of Illustrations / List of Tables / Participants / 1. Introduction: Memory, Conflict and the Rural Context / 2. Memory, Politics and Lived Experience / 3. Critical Ethnography of Memory / 4. ‘There was no war here’: Repression and the Civil War / 5. Class, Ideology and Local Community / 6. Rojas: Women and the Anti-Fascist Struggle / 7. Final Remarks: From Local Memories to Spain’s Politics of Oblivion / References / Index

Editorial Reviews

In this reflective oral history enquiry into the popular memory of the civil war in Spain, Ruth Sanz Sabido offers us pertinent and fascinating insights into the now disappearing world of village Spain, where the war is still being fought over. But as her study reminds us, this war is not so much the one actually waged in the late 1930s, as the one made and embedded discursively afterwards by the victorious and long-lived Franco dictatorship, a regime whose cultural and social power has lasted into the present day. This theoretically literate but still highly accessible account opens up for us the granular texture of local life and language, while also providing the crucial broad explanatory context to the memory wars raging in Spain today.

Helen Graham

With thousands of books published on the Spanish Civil War, Sanz Sabido’s twist is to preserve memories of residents of the small Andalusian village of Arroyomolinos de León to challenge the war’s contemporary legacy. Using memory studies, critical ethnography, and oral history, 22 in-depth interviews capture ordinary people’s recollections of local events to confront the official, state-sponsored construction of public memory about the bloody conflict. Emotionally charged accounts of active and passive resistance give a rural perspective on Franco forces’ repressive acts of accusations, arrests, internments, and executions. Local customs, traditional moral expectations, and close social networks where accusations and personal grudges mix frame the villagers’ memories of day-to-day struggles to survive the wartime atrocities and years of hunger that followed. Sanz Sabido juxtaposes such local memories with Spain’s Amnesty Act of 1977, which effectively silenced official discussions about such contentious issues to assist the post-Franco transition to democracy. The book’s seven chapters advance hope that the Spanish state will eventually recognize the past and acknowledge its failures of historical memory.

Choice Reviews

With thousands of books published on the Spanish Civil War, Sanz Sabido’s twist is to preserve memories of residents of the small Andalusian village of Arroyomolinos de León to challenge the war’s contemporary legacy. Using memory studies, critical ethnography, and oral history, 22 in-depth interviews capture ordinary people’s recollections of local events to confront the official, state-sponsored construction of public memory about the bloody conflict. Emotionally charged accounts of active and passive resistance give a rural perspective on Franco forces’ repressive acts of accusations, arrests, internments, and executions. Local customs, traditional moral expectations, and close social networks where accusations and personal grudges mix frame the villagers’ memories of day-to-day struggles to survive the wartime atrocities and years of hunger that followed. Sanz Sabido juxtaposes such local memories with Spain’s Amnesty Act of 1977, which effectively silenced official discussions about such contentious issues to assist the post-Franco transition to democracy. The book’s seven chapters advance hope that the Spanish state will eventually recognize the past and acknowledge its failures of historical memory.

Choice