Though I’m a historian primarily of early modern Spain, I pay close attention to modern Spanish politics, as well, and hope that I’ll have the chance in the not-too-distant future to teach a broad course on modern Spanish history from Fernando and Isabel to Zapatero. As someone interested in questions of Spanish identity and nationhood, it’s hard to avoid seeing connections between the sixteenth century and the present. As J.N Hillgarth, Inman Fox, and others have shown, in the twentieth century competing images and interpretations of Spain’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ‘Golden Age’ remained at the center of everything from Francoist propaganda to modern debates about religious minorities and the place of the Catholic Church in Spanish society.
In any case, what has caught my eye today is the Spanish government’s decision to extend citizenship to the descendants of refugees who fled the country during the Civil War of 1936‚Äì1939. From the Reuters report:
As many as 500,000 children and grandchildren of Spaniards who fled the country during Gen. Francisco Franco’s dictatorship can now apply for Spanish citizenship, the Justice Ministry said Monday. Citizens who left Spain from 1936, when its three-year civil war began, until as late as December 1955 — and their descendants — are eligible to apply by producing documents showing that they left the country during those years, the ministry said in a statement.
The decision is interesting not least of all for the impact that it will have on (for lack of a better term) ‘amateur’ historical scholarship on the Spanish Civil War. In my many trips to Spain, I’ve come across a striking number of amateur historians and antiquarians determined to discover, reconstruct, and perserve memories of their town or family which the Civil War, and the post-Francoist “pacto de olvido,” have all but erased. In C??rdoba, for example, I met a young seminarian determined to write a history of the leftist campaign to execute priests in and around his village. In the Archivo Hist??rico Nacional in Madrid, I met an elderly man hoping to unearth evidence that a family member had been executed while a political prisoner of the Francoist regime, in the hope of collecting reparations payments from the state. I can only imagine the number of people I will find on my next trip to the archives…
While democratic Spain has become famous for its unwillingness to deal openly with the legacy of the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship‚Äîmy favorite author, Javier Mar??as, has written searingly of the silence in his newspaper column and his recent novel Tu rostro ma?±ana‚Äîit’s been my experience that policies like this recent decision to extend citizenship to exiles reflect (and stimulate) a lively humus of amateur history and fragmentary commemoration that may be doing the job of settling accounts with the past that Mar??as and others would rather see conducted at a more public, or professional, level.
This is not to say that I agree or disagree with this, or any other, commemoration policy. Rather, it’s just to observe the resilience of historical memory, and the odd ways that it surfaces, in societies whose official stance toward the past seems to be one of studied indifference.
Click here to read the full article in the New York Times.
