Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain (review)

Carlos Jerez-Farrán and Samuel Amago’s well-conceived and tightly knit anthology, Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain begins with a restitutive impulse dedicated “to those who fought and continue to fight for justice and the defense of democratic rights, arduously gained, perilously maintained” (i) in Spain. The editors of this volume model how serious intellectual work, like the kind showcased here, is as much a part of the delicate process of reconciliation as is the re-burial of the remains of thou sands of Spaniards who indignantly lie in mass graves. The scholarship in this volume highlights how these graves are haphazardly beginning to form part of the fabric of democracy in Spain.

Jerez-Ferrán and Amago begin their introduction recalling Lorca’s words in an uncanny fashion: “a dead man in Spain is more alive when dead than anywhere else in the world: his profile hurts like a razor’s edge” (1). One could debate whether the intensity of the “life” of the dead is a Spanish idiosyncrasy or not, but Lorca does put his finger on how the dead, when victim of political violence, improperly and insufficiently mourned, wound the living, and thereby assault democracy. Fortunately, despite the efforts of an unscrupulous and unpatriotic Right, today that injury is no longer a national secret. Scholars and students of contemporary Spain, of Holocaust studies, of history and cultural memory, of political and cultural anthropology learn from this interdisciplinary volume just how complex and nuanced the study of historical memory becomes for societies coerced into amnesia. Such was the case of the “pactista” and revisionist mentality of the Spanish transition to democracy period of the mid 1970s and 1980s, a time when the governing Right and the emerging Left threw another layer of dirt upon the dead in order to keep the wound from bleeding in public.

Today we understand that the celebrated, peaceful Transition placed Spanish civil society on troubled ground. In a consequential turn, democracy in Spain has evolved from a prior focus on its political structures, agents, and the uprooting of a dictatorship to a question of its moral and ethical legitimacy given the place rightfully given to the legacy of the dead. All of the contributions in Unearthing Franco’s Legacy address this issue in one way or another teaching us, in Joan Ramón Resina’s words, to never underestimate the power of unearthing the past given what it might reveal and announce:

the rush of consciousness and the release of contained expectations turn those remains into our contemporaries. Just as long-buried objects can turn into dust at the slightest aeration, the re-emergence of the ‘secret’ dead annihilates at once the meticulous work of mandated amnesia. But it is not only the so-called peace of Francoism that crumbles with the return of the repressed. Those frail vestiges of the past violence foul a quarter of a century of foul democracy.

(224)

How, then, does one live with the dead, with the dead of the state? How can a society address the stench underlying its institutions? Antigone taught us that the proper burial of the brother was more than a clash between the law of kinship and the law of the state. Her defiance, as Resina aptly points out, makes her more a model or “spokesperson for the political legitimacy that Creon’s arbitrariness threatens. [ . . . ] By turning the scene of horror into one of culture she not only reasserts humanity but in fact turns the state against itself. And in this way she reinvents it” (232). This is the underlying project governing the selection of texts and organization of this anthology, an attempt at finding a new ground for the foundational site of memory (Richards 122) in contemporary Spain.

The impressive set of...