Identity in Aragon, Spain

Commemorating the victims of the fascist regime in Spain presents a number of difficulties for the historian.[1] The primary difficulty in this commemoration lies in understanding the many identities of memories composed by those who experienced the fascist regime. The second difficulty lies in understanding the complex processes that contributed to each identity. Finally there is the very real confrontation that the historian is taking place in the process of constructing an identity for another person, or a group of people. This process, if not addressed with absolute solemnity and with the highest regard for ethical practices, can have devastating consequences. These three difficulties may be overcome in order to provide appropriate space for those whose memories have been repressed to reflect upon their own identity.[2]

In order to begin a discussion of the various identities of the victims of the Spanish fascist regime, it is necessary to understand the processes that were involved in each phase of memory construction. These processes are the pivot points for identity construction. In memorial, they can be understood as filters when an individual tries to understand his or her past. To understand these processes the most important factor is a basic understanding of Spanish fascism.

Stanley Payne, the preeminent historian of national systems in Spain, both dominant and otherwise, posited that though fascism took many faces and forms throughout its reign in Europe, there were several key elements that were present to a greater or lesser degree in every fascist system.[3] Among these were a “positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use, violence” and “Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state based not merely on traditional principles or models.”[4] These two elements have been highlighted out of a much larger list specifically because they found their practical outworking in the processes of memory augmentation. Cenarro argued that the fascist regime in Spain had set up the social welfare structure in the Auxilio Social as a device for rupturing the traditional social structure.[5] Not only did it disrupt existing structures by removing children from homes, but also via a persistent threat to those who were allowed to keep their children home. In doing so the auxilio social in particular, but also other fascist structures, became processes of repression.

The second process was the Spanish fascist use of education. Again, via the auxilio social, but this time in the hogares where children were subjected to harsh conditions of discipline. They were not simply taken from their families and indoctrinated with propaganda, but harshly and brutally treated if they did not conform.[6] Elements of both the positive evaluation of violence as well as authoritarian state principles are present in the hogares. It was the difference between relatively peaceful propagandist indoctrination and violent and harsh punishments that led to competing identities when children left the hogar.[7] The fascists saw the great need in controlling children, for they were the generation that would carry on the tradition of fascism. Competing doctrines had to be expelled. In order to own the people, there was a need to reassign the identities of children: from republican past to fascist future.

Identity begins with experiences which are, immediately after they happen, translated into memory. If those memories can be systematically augmented and reassigned, then the one who augments and reassigns them holds a great power over the identity of the person or group who initially had the experience. In the cases that Angela Cenarro documented there were, prior to the democratization of Spain in 1977, five identities that could be observed among the victims. After democratization there are three more identities.

Since Cenarro focused on individuals who became victims as children, the first identity to look at should be that composed of experiences and memories prior to any sort of victimization. For the sake of simplicity this will be called former identity.[8] The first victimization of former identity and the first divergence from a normal memory development was the process of domestic repression—the fear and intimidation of the Spanish republican families that resulted in a lack of open discussion of events within the home.[9] This process of domestic repression led to an augmented identity called repressed identity. The next process was the cause of the third and fourth stages in identity. It was fascist education. Cenarro discussed this in terms of the hogares, a part of the social welfare system created by Franco.[10] The identities which came out of the hogares were duo parte. There was first the state constructed identity—the identity which the Spanish state had hoped to instill in the children in the construction of the New Spain. The second identity to emerge was what Cenarro referred to as the dissident identity, that is an identity developed based on the harsh reality and cruelty to which the children were subjected in the hogares rather than the constructive message that the regime had intended.[11]

The fifth stage of identity prior to the collapse of fascism was present in at least one case documented by Cenarro, but more importantly it was not the product direct external memory manipulation, but of personal reflection upon the divergent memories from the hogares.[12] This identity will be called disoriented identity. It could be posited that this identity was the one that created the crisis that demanded a shift in government from fascism to more democratic principles. With so many influential citizens with their own internal identity crisis, it would have become impossible to continue the façade that had been built by the fascist party. These children would have begun the quest into their past probably in their early thirties—which would have been around 1960, approximate to the time that Franco began having serious problems within his government. Cenarro saw this as well in “Memory beyond the Public Sphere” where she discussed the shift in legitimization on the part of the fascist regime.[13]

It was likely the disoriented identity and a general feeling on the part of individuals of the time that wished to unite rather than fracture that led to the Pacto del Olvido, the Pact of Forgetting in 1977. The result was an attempt at intentional forgetting that left individuals with the need to create a new identity for themselves—one that had left the past behind. Such identity could be labeled Emergent Identity. For the individual who had experienced such diverse identities it can be inferred—were each identity a lens and each process a filter—that getting a clear image of former identity or repressed identity would be very difficult. Thus for the individual to complete the formation of identity there must be help, something that can bypass the lenses and filters and offer a memory of those things that is not bearing the onus of state agenda. Historical commemoration is that aid.

Historical commemoration is the art of looking past the internally created devices that humans construct to shield themselves from hurt and pain and expressing those forgotten or cloudy identities, without which a person may not be able to really answer the question of who he or she is. This process is not without its dangers; it has the potential to exploit a victimized individual if it is practiced without care. Practiced ethically however, historical reconstruction has the ability to provide the individual victim a singular lens and filter through which to see what or who he or she was. It is imperfect; the lens of historical identity born out of the process or filter of historical construction is bound to be incomplete. Historical identity combined with the emergent identity, processed with personal reflection can achieve the final result of what can be called composite identity. An identity, not necessarily complete, but one that has had opportunity to reflect, mourn, learn and understand. The dynamic relationship of historical identity to emergent identity was seen in Cenarro’s accounting of the story of Elías Górriz who struggled to understand the death of his own father through personal reflection of the disparity between his personal account—having come through so many years of state constructed identity and repressed memory—and the account that was held in the historical construction, a construction that he performed himself.[14]

There are difficulties in commemorating the past for the historian: ethics, care in the reconstruction process, an acknowledgement of an imperfect system. But there are also very constructive purposes for the historical commemorative practice. There are difficulties for the historian that are specific to the Spanish fascist regime and their victimization of many: understanding the many identities and processes that are in between an individual’s current identity and his or her early identity, the identity intended for commemoration. If fascists appropriated such a powerful tool as systematic memory augmentation, then the historian, should overcome the difficulties and should spend his efforts taking back that tool and using it for proper and good identity construction.

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[1] The word “victims” is itself a less than ideal term, but will be used for lack of a better term in such a short work. In this case it will refer to those of the Spanish left whose identity was in some way altered by the Franco-fascist regime that remained in place for thirty-eight years following the civil war.

[2] These ideas and problems, while thematically they may share some attributes with other cases in memory repression, are unique in their specifics and thus the confines must be defined at the outset. Two articles by Angela Cenarro have provided the case studies that inform this theoretical look at memory.  This study is thus confined to particular cases from Aragon, Spain. The articles cited are:

Cenarro Lagunas, Angela. "Memory beyond the Public Sphere: The Francoist Repression Remembered in Aragon". History & Memory. 14 (1/2, 2002). 165-188. (hereafter cited as “Public Sphere”)

-- "Memories of Repression and Resistance: Narratives of Children Institutionalized by Auxilio Social in Postwar Spain". History & Memory. 20 (2, 2008): 39-59. (hereafter cited as “Repression and Resistance”)

[3] Payne, Stanley. Fascism: Comparison and Definition. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1980. 7.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Repression and Resistance, 40-41.

[6] Ibid., 49.

[7] “Relatively peaceful…indoctrination…” This is not intended to suggest that violence was not utilized in the indoctrination process, but simply to produce a reason for why dual competing identities were constructed. The children did receive an education, and that education is viewed by some as a positive experience according to Cenarro.

[8] This is the term used by Cenarro, and for argument here, the term makes sense. Cenarro, “Repression and Resistance,” 45.

[9] Ibid., 48.

[10] Ibid., 50.

[11] Ibid., 56-57.

[12] Ibid., 43.

[13] 173.

[14] Cenarro, “Memory beyond the Public Sphere,” 174-176.