Memories of the Spanish Civil War

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

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.

• 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