Local memories: conflict and lived experience in the Spanish Civil War

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 repression and hunger, and the memories of ideological clashes, class struggles and conflicts over land ownership.