Abstract
In 1959, Francisco Franco, the then-dictator, and his government opened the country of Spain to allow both the entry of foreign capital and the emigration of Spaniards to work outside the country for the first time since he seized power in 1939. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards left for other European countries, sending remittances back to their small towns. Most moved back to Spain in the years following, but a small community remained abroad. David Divita, in his book Untold Stories: Legacies of Authoritarianism among Spanish Labour Migrants in Later Life, focuses on a Spanish community center for these Spaniards in suburban Paris which offers gathering spaces, creative groups, and supplemental education classes. Divita focuses on the organized groups and classes, and in these, he explores the ways participants discuss (and do not discuss) their pasts in Spain and France. His research spans literacy and computer classes, theatrical productions, and museum trips, all among older adults who identify as Spanish labor migrants. Most of his interlocutors left Spain as youths in the late 1950s and early 1960s during the period in which Spain opened its doors for its citizens to emigrate. They came from small villages all across the country and had lived in France for most of their adult lives.
Based on his research with these interlocutors, Divita argues that the experiences of an oppressive regime and forced labor migration in youth have left lasting impacts on the discursive practices of Spanish older adults in and around Paris. The migrants appeal to disjointed chronotopes in order to remember the past and make sense of their diasporic present. They must resort to these chronotopes, Divita argues, because their past has created habits of silence, habits which make it difficult for these seniors to express their experiences, emotions, and expectations.
Divita offers key interventions in four topics: political legacies of Francoism, diaspora studies, aging and memory, and language and history. Divita recognizes that most studies of Spaniards abroad during and after the Franco years have focused on political exiles rather than labor migrants. Divita’s work offers valuable insight into an under-studied aspect of the legacy of authoritarianism in Spain, as well as new ways to think about those who left but did not flee. In this, Divita offers an important contribution to diaspora studies. Divita’s interlocutors had the opportunity to return (some even did but decided to ‘remigrate’), and yet they decided to stay in diaspora. These older adults discuss the ‘pueblo’ with a nostalgia largely out of time. For them, yearning for home is, in many ways, temporal, a longing for a place that has not existed for quite some time. Furthermore, they view themselves as unable to go back, forever changed by their experiences abroad.
Divita engages the anthropological literature on aging and memory, expanding current scholarship to think not just of textual and expressive culture as artifacts of the past, but of the discursive practices themselves as reflective of the past of the speakers. Divita argues that, for his interlocutors, the repression and poverty of the early Franco years is unmentionable because of the silences imposed by the regime. These silences are thus evidence of the very history his interlocutors cannot tell. Finally, Divita’s deployment of the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope, which Divita (2024: 8–9) defines as ‘the representational ground of time, space, and personhood’ useful for understanding how ‘remembering draw[s] on spatio-temporal frames’, highlights the interaction between language, history, and identity. Divita demonstrates the narrativization of memory by identifying and analyzing chronotopically constructed temporospatial moments and how they are linked to his interlocutors’ identities in diaspora. Focusing on the ‘pueblo’ as a stuck-in-time, nostalgically imagined home, Divita displays how these older adults understand their own identities as Spaniards and as migrants.
Divita’s ethnographic focus on the Spanish community center allows a deep understanding of Spanish labor migrants in continued diaspora. Through his long-term fieldwork, he was able to observe both formal (such as the Dia del Libro play) and informal (such as discussion during the literacy classes he attended) moments of memory narrativization. He was able to compare what his interlocutors were willing to say among friends and colleagues against what they were willing to write down for posterity (Divita, 2024: 57). His deployment of the Bakhtinian chronotope also effectively highlights the imaginaries of which his interlocutors speak; through analyzing chronotopes, he is able to demonstrate the disjunction between what his interlocutors remember, what they experience, and what they long for.
Divita’s deep and widespread evidence supports much of his argument regarding nostalgia and memory, as well as identity in diaspora. The role of silence as a discursive strategy remains slightly underdeveloped in this work. Divita focuses much of the argument in the introduction around the ways in which his interlocutors refuse to speak of their pasts, and yet his proceeding chapters explore nostalgia and memory practices more readily than the practices of silence. He argues that the culture of silence which developed during the Franco years still inflects the discursive practices of the older adults in diaspora. Much of his evidence for this claim lies in the absence of the Spanish Civil War and the early years of Franco’s oppression from the stories his interlocutors tell. He makes note of one interlocutor’s reasons for not including the war years in her written or spoken memories (Divita, 2024: 62), but he does not fully develop this. The role of silence and its expression could have been further explored to better support his theoretical approach.
Overall, Divita’s text is an excellent ethnography of a disappearing population, those who lived under, and left under, Franco. The analysis of memory and nostalgia are important contributions to scholarship of Europe and diaspora. Divita’s work highlights the various ways in which those who have lived under authoritarianism approach and reflect the complicated interplay between identity, violence, and nostalgia.
