Description
Forgetting about Spain’s civil war (19369) and subsequent dictatorship was long seen as a necessary safeguard for the democracy that emerged after General Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. Since the early 2000s, however, public discussion of historical memory has awakened efforts to remember this past through the personal testimonies of Spaniards who experienced it firsthand.
Untold Stories expands accounts of twentieth-century Spain by presenting an ethnography of an ignored population: the impoverished men and women who fled Franco’s dictatorship in the 1960s, participating in a wave of labour migration to northern Europe. Now in their eighties, they were born around the time of the civil war and came of age during its repressive aftermath before leaving Spain as young adults. The book features a community of such Spaniards, who gather regularly at a senior centre on the outskirts of Paris.
Drawing on concepts from linguistic anthropolog
