Cécile Evers: In the beginning of Untold Stories, you recount an anecdote about a meeting you had with Amalia, an elderly Spanish woman living in Paris, and you insightfully spell out for us how her exclamation of “I could write a book” links her experience of Spain’s authoritarian past, with the present of your meeting, to a speculative future in which she writes a book. We read in the introduction of your own path into writing this book. Could you say something about this?
David Divita: Of course! First of all, the book features a community of aging Spaniards who gather regularly at a senior center on the outskirts of Paris. These people participated in a wave of labor migration to northern Europe in the 1960s, when the Franco regime opened Spain’s borders as part of its attempt to modernize the country. In many conversations that I had with them, they would reflect on their past experiences – of Spain under dictatorship, of migration to France, of Paris in the 1960s and 70s. And on occasion they would interrupt their storytelling, as Amalia did one afternoon over sherry in her apartment, to say, “I could write a book!” It’s an expression I think most of us have heard before. Coming from individuals in later life, it signals awareness of the complexity of their life stories, of how these stories have been shaped by historical circumstances and thus merit documentation. But there’s a subtle paradox embedded in this exclamation. Most of the Spaniards I encountered in my fieldwork could not literally write a book. They’d spent only a few years in an anemic education system overseen by the Catholic church during the early years of the dictatorship, where they acquired little more than basic literacy skills. While writing Untold Stories, I came to imagine it in part as a material proxy for their speculative book.
Cécile: I wonder if you could tell us about where you have taken this research since the book’s publication? I’m curious, of course, about the new directions this research is taking, but also in a way about what Goffman would have seen as the production format of your book and its reception. I see you as animating these Spaniards’ experiences and stories in your book, a poignant fact because, as you write, they were socialized to silence their recollections of the Franco era. How does your book’s reception invite new interlocutors to the table and potentially create new speech chains in which these historical themes are being discussed?
David: Back in May I gave a talk about the book at the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid alongside an anthropologist, Carolina Espinoza, who has done extensive research on Chilean migrants in France – many of whom fled political circumstances similar to those experienced by my Spanish interlocutors in Paris. This was for an audience of non-academics, many of whom happened to be around the same age as the Spaniards I first encountered in the field in 2008. In other words, they had come of age during the 1960s, after the regime had become intensely focused on modernization. For that reason, they had not been socialized in the same way to keep silent about painful aspects of Spain’s past, even though they could immediately recognize the norms around disclosure and omission that continue to govern communicative activity among their forebears today. One of the audience members said she found it surprising that even among those who emigrated and never returned permanently to Spain, the communicative value of silence remained imperative. Exactly! That shows how deeply this value had been inculcated, spreading across geographical space and enduring over time. Even among those who fled the dictatorship decades earlier, their acts of reminiscence in later life were shaped by it.
There were also some younger members of the audience in their twenties or thirties for whom the narrative of migration in Untold Stories echoes aspects of their family histories. They, too, have been affected by the legacy of silence among their grandparents, deprived of the knowledge and affective pull that firsthand accounts of the past often convey. The book, I hope, can accomplish some of that work for Spaniards born during and after the Transition – and indeed individuals elsewhere who are interested in understanding how the historical conditions in which people come of age shape the communicative practices that they carry across the life course. Partly to that end, Untold Stories is now being translated into Spanish and will come out early next year from Postmetropolis, a publisher in Madrid that has an extensive series of monographs focusing on 20th-century history and politics. I’m excited by the possibility of the book reaching a Spanish audience in this way.
Cécile: Your book sheds new light on how people in later age experience transnational aging, though in the case of El Centro members, in ways additionally inflected by particular circumstances— “poverty, dictatorship, labour, migration” (p. 29). Can you say more about how El Centro members’ experience of aging in diaspora, colored by such circumstances, affected their language and semiotic practices?
David: I noticed early on that people at the Centro circulated texts of various kinds – poems, compositions, plays, and songs – that they had written themselves or copied from other sources. Because many of these texts came from or were about the time before migration, they seemed to link the Spaniards to a shared past while also facilitating a sense of belonging in the present. Ways of talking about these texts also revealed potent ideas about “good” language and moral character – ideologies that were particularly salient in a weekly Spanish literacy class that I attended during fieldwork. Analyzing that classroom data, alongside conversational interactions and life-story interviews, I came to understand ideologies about language – in particular, the value of rudimentary literacy practices and the cultural capital that they conferred – as another kind of legacy of the dictatorship. Among the Centro’s members, the acquisition of literacy skills seemed to fill a sense of lack leftover from a childhood conditioned by an authoritarian regime. These skills also legitimated a way of remembering, as the seniors could use them to produce written artifacts about the past that could then be circulated in the future. Moreover, there were affective dimensions to the pursuit of literacy skills – notably, shame and pride – that the class’s participants recruited into ideological projects, such as processes of social differentiation. These processes helped the participants understand themselves in relation to one another within the class, as well as to other communities of Spaniards, such as those who stayed in Spain, or to generational groups, such as their children or grandchildren.
Cécile: Staying with the topic of age, what do you see as the future of research at the intersection of age and language, or of your own research in that vein? Do you think that Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope holds particular theoretical weight for ethnographers wishing to better understand aging communities?
David: I think age is a dimension of identity that often gets overlooked. Maybe particular mobilizations of the chronotope – ones that spotlight temporality? – can help bring this dimension to light. The concept has been used in fruitful ways to analyze semiotic activity in situations of migration and diaspora. In the book, I draw on that scholarship while attempting to incorporate the particularities of later life. For older individuals, their retrospective gaze spans a wider swath of temporal and spatial coordinates. Their practices of remembering reflect a sense of being in relation to time and to the ongoing project of aging with which they reckon in the present. My interlocutors seemed to draw from a shared repertoire of chronotopes among Spaniards – such as the pueblo – as a means of assimilating both their experience of migration and the social position that they occupy as seniors. So yes, I think the notion of chronotope is quite useful for making sense of the semiotic practices of aging communities, and for making sense of the experience of aging in general.
I remain interested in this experience and the semiotic practices through which we navigate it. Recently I’ve turned my attention away from contemporary Spain and toward gay men in midlife. There are different aspects of my research on Spanish labor migrants that will animate this new project in subtle ways. Broadly, I’m curious about how the social and political conditions in which we come of age inform the communicative values and practices that shape the life course. What are the discursive effects of living in time, of living through a particular time? For this group of people with whom the project begins, I’m interested in the experience of coming of age sexually in the shadow of AIDS, specifically among those born in the 1970s, whose lives may not have been directly affected by the epidemic (meaning that their immediate communities were not devastated by the virus), but whose sexual identities were indelibly shaped by ideas about safeness, risk, and mortality. How might this experience inform the networks of kinship forged by those in midlife who lack a clear model for doing so? Much of the literature I’ve read thus far from psychology, public health, and popular cultural criticism tends to approach the experience of queerness in generational terms. This is also something that I intend to draw from my work on Spaniards and contemporary debates about historical reckoning. How are ideas about generations circulated, and what is their effect? What does the notion of a generation make visible? What does it obscure?
Cécile: Throughout the book, and especially in Chapter 4, you open a space to honor the “personal-biographical” mode of knowing the past, which El Centro members embody, in contrast to the “scholarly-historical” (91) mode of documenting the past. I know you teach about Spanish film and have also done research on the Law of Democratic Memory (2022) as well as on debates over how to resignify Franco’s memorial at the Valley of the Fallen. Do you find that your work to disseminate and elevate the experiences of people who lived through the Franco era resonates elsewhere, such as in current initiatives by the Spanish State or in forms of cultural production?
David: In the book I explore how individuals in later life navigate settings of epistemological tension in which their primary mode of knowing – and by that I mean the personal-biographical – is often delegitimized, undervalued, or somehow thrown into question by individuals or institutions that embody scholarly-historical knowledge. The population of Spaniards who can speak in this way about the dictatorship is waning fast, and there does indeed seem to be a sense of urgency among some government bodies and artists to document their experience, as I aim to do in the book. I’m thinking specifically about recent efforts to “re-signify” the Valley of Cuelgamuros (formerly known as the Valley of the Fallen), which you mention – the monumental complex that Franco began building outside of Madrid after the war. The site contains a basilica, a monastery, and vast crypts that contain the remains of people who died during the conflict and afterward – many of whom were never identified. Franco himself was interred behind the main altar there until his body was exhumed in 2019 after a lot of political fanfare. So how do you alter the meaning of a site of totalitarian grandeur – one that is still often recognized as a celebration of Franco and his regime, even though his body is no longer there? Some of the most compelling responses to this question have suggested returning to the monument “some memory of its own genesis,” as James Young (1993) wrote about Holocaust memorials in Europe (p. 14) – in part through the stories of those who helped build it through forced labor, as well as those who have recently solicited the state to find and identify the remains of forebears who were interred there. Their narratives illustrate the abiding emotional resonance of historical matters perhaps assumed by some to have been resolved or neutralized, and thus the affective power of personal-biographical modes of knowing.
As for cultural production, a recent example is Parallel Mothers, a film by Pedro Almodóvar that was released in 2021. (I’m currently teaching a seminar on Almodóvar, which is probably why he comes to mind.) Almodóvar came of age in the 1960s, and he has been making films since the Transition. Parallel Mothers is the first film (out of 23!) in which he engages explicitly with the issue of historical memory. The plot is set in motion when the protagonist asks for help from a forensic anthropologist to excavate the mass grave in her hometown where her great-grandfather and other family members were buried. Storylines then unfold in melodramatic directions (as we might expect from Almodóvar), but in the end the film goes to the pueblo and resolves the protagonist’s initial question about exhumation, representing the arduous labor of such sites and the emotional effect they can have on individuals whose families have been marked by them – not unlike recent reports on the Valley of Cuelgamuros.
Untold Stories has thus come out at a moment when state actors and artists (among other entities) discuss far more explicitly than before the legacies of the dictatorship. I see the book as an artifact that can perhaps illuminate some of these legacies as they manifest discursively. I’ve tried to do that by documenting the lives of Spaniards who experienced firsthand the historical events and processes that are often evoked in current debates about the past and its meaning in the present.
Work cited
Young, James E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press.
CaMP Anthropology 