Sites of Memory in Spain and Latin America: Trauma, Politics, and Resistance ed. by Díaz de León, et al. (review)

The power of memory—to reclaim, to alter, to challenge, to reshape—links the present and the past in a continuous cycle of remembering, forgetting and reconstruction. In Sites of Memory in Spain and Latin America: Trauma, Politics, and Resistance, editors Aída Díaz de León, Marina Llorente and Marcella Salvi gather a series of essays that aim to inform the present by reevaluating the past, through the recuperation of historical memory. Building on Pierre Nora’s study of lieux de mémoire as well as Maurice Halbwach’s concept of collective memory, this collection explores the plurality of memory sites and their dynamic connection to the past and the present.

The section titled “From the Repertoire to the Archive: Memory in Chile after Pinochet” includes two essays that take a close look at the performative nature of memory in Chile’s past and present. Liliana Trevizán highlights the importance of the practice of democratic ideals, particularly among women’s social movements and political groups, during the years of the Pinochet dictatorship. She finds that the memory of democracy through its everyday performance allowed for a more inclusive post-dictatorial democratic system that has committed to remembering the past and prioritizing human rights. An interview with Ricardo Brodsky, the Executive Director of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile, is included in the following chapter. Brodsky shares with interviewers Oscar D. Sarmiento and Liliana Trevizán the museum’s mission to educate the public by providing a plurality of memories, with the common goal of fostering respect for human rights.

The next section considers the role of literature and other artistic and cultural products in the recovery of “forgotten” memories. Marcella Salvi analyzes how literature, film, songs and other mass cultural products enable the recovery of personal and collective memory in Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás. For Marina Llorente, Antonio Crespo Massieu’s Elegía en Portbou is a literary site of memory, recapturing and recognizing the Spanish Republican exile that was erased from the official collective memory for many years. She explores how the poems locate traumatic memory in Spain by linking it with the exile and death of Walter Benjamin and the haunting monument to him in the cemetery of Portbou, Spain. Reflecting on the role of literary translation in the recuperation of historical memory, Steven White offers examples of his translations of Spanish, Nicaraguan and Chilean poetry. Here, translation is an important tool in preserving literary testimony and revitalizing it. Mallory N. Craig-Kuhn explores how memory and identity are linked in Osvaldo Soriano’s Una sombra ya pronto verás. In post-dictatorship Argentina, because a shared memory of past violence goes unacknowledged in favor of economic development, individual and collective identity are destabilized, as an uncertain future looms in the distance.

The following two essays give voice to those who have been pushed to the margins of collective memory in order to legitimate a particular historical narrative. George Ciccariello-Maher looks back to the Caracazo of 1989 in Venezuela, showing how this event catalyzed a new process of continued struggle and renegotiation that depends upon the preservation of memory, despite the objections of those who would prefer to bury it. Turning to Mexico, Martha I. Chew-Sánchez and Alfredo Limas Hernández examine the nature of contested historical memory as embodied by the Cotton Field Memorial in Ciudad Juárez. The memorial was built by the Mexican state only after it was legally compelled to do so, in the face of a judgment finding the state negligent in its response to the hundreds of women murdered in the city. For the women’s families, the memorial is incomplete in its representation of historical memory, and insufficient as it...