Herencias del 36

Ruth Sanz Sabido’s research on Memory is primarily concerned with local communities and the ways in which they remember.

In her book Memories of the Spanish Civil War: Conflict and Community in Rural Spain (2016), she uses the concept of ‘local memories’ in order to emphasise the importance of events that happened within small communities (for example, events that took place in one specific village) even though they may have been part of a much wider scenario (for example, the Spanish Civil War understood in broader, more abstract terms).

The online archive of testimonies Herencias del 36 (Legacies of 1936) is a map of memories that seeks to recover the voices of those more specific events that took place in smaller communities and are still remembered locally. They are memories about what happened to relatives, friends and neighbours, according to what they can recall.

The number of people who can still narrate these memories is inevitably becoming smaller, so making them available for present and future generations is becoming increasingly urgent. The archive seeks to engage members of the public in two ways: first, by providing a platform for victims’ relatives and survivors to participate in the project and to share their memories, sometimes for the first time; and, secondly, by making those memories available to anyone who wishes to learn more about it.

The project includes a documentary film, also called Herencias del 36, which follows the same principle of recording and highlighting memories in their local contexts. The collection of memories presented in this project (encompassing the book, the archive and the documentary) provides a richer understanding of the variety of experiences that were lived in different locations throughout the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, countering the totalising and state-sponsored narratives that have been favoured in official discourse and history books.

 Check out the archive and a trailer to the documentary here.