Memoria Viva

Agency and the memory of small things

And it’s the same with us.

We were arrested because we wanted to put an end to a dictatorship.

Young people ask me this. At least, they always say to me, “But how did you fight?”

Because, of course, they have a concept of… “What is a dictatorship? What is it based on?”

Repression, everyday experience and resistance

You can’t tell them, “Look, to fight against a dictatorship, you have to stand there and let yourself be arrested and tortured…”

No, because they did that to us against our will.

We chose the other part. This was a consequence, but we did not choose it.

That’s why I always say, “I went to the DGS because they forced me.”

Dignity and intergenerational struggle

We hold/uphold on to that dignity, no matter what

What does that mean, to hold on to your dignity no matter what?

It means that we have/carry the pride of all the people who came before us

They had to have courage to go with a shotgun and confront such an army, they had to have courage to have fought in the villages, and to have “stood out” and to have defended what they believed in and paid for it. Paid dearly.

Why memory work continues

3.08.50 I wish you could give up, but we simply cannot *(why do you say that you cannot give up)...(you cannot give up because after spending your whole life always on the side of the struggle, knowing that you have to fight to achieve the bare minimum, how are you going to give up now? It makes no sense. So, what you have ahead of you, you just keep going (...)

3.09.26 If we do not achieve it, others will. (...) Because the people they murdered after the war died knowing that there’d be others who would carry their ideas forward.

Most of them wrote it in their letters

The one from the process of 27 September 1975

Fear passed between generations

It is an ancestral fear, it is that trauma that has been passed down from generation to generation, which is very powerful.

Which surprises me because I come from a family that did not give fear wings, despite the fact that they went through it.

My grandfather is one of the disappeared, my uncle (...) I come from a family that has lost, but they did not pass that fear on to us,

and I have always downplayed it, but I have learned (through memory work/activism) that it’s like a weight pressing down on us. And it’s tied to impunity.

The possibilities of action

if I, who was just a little 16- or 17-year-old girl, had the capacity to do these things that seem so extraordinary to them, even though they weren’t…

If I could do it, I had the capacity/was capable, why wouldn't they have it?

Because they are just the same (as us).

I said to one of the girls from the school the other day, you are valuable, you are necessary,

The many paths to memory

But because the Argentine lawsuit is being boycotted at the state level, the State Prosecutor General’s Office gave the order not to cooperate with Judge Servini, and the case was effectively stalled.

So we decided that we should bring the cases here (to Spain).

Because why not bring them within the Spanish state? Some people thought that if we filed lawsuits here in Spain, the Argentine case would be stopped. That hasn’t happened.

And there were also people saying, why even bother doing it here when we already know what the judiciary is like here?

Claims for justice and political memory

It’s true that you sometimes say, “What’s the point of going through everything you have to go through, only for them to tell you that they won’t admit the lawsuit?”

But that’s what political struggle is like. If we had it easy, that’s how it is, otherwise we wouldn’t be where we are