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Paper short abstract

This paper draws upon my journey in Spain’s historical memory movement confronting the legacy of violence of the Civil War. With few archival traces, I focus on the death certificate for what it can reveal about necropolitical strategies of domination and resistance in a single bureaucratic form.

Paper long abstract

Spain remains deeply polarized over how to reckon with the legacy of violence perpetrated during its Civil War and subsequent dictatorship (1936-1975). In the transition to democratic rule after Franco’s death, political elites agreed upon a “pact of silence.” Archives remained closed, memorializations and research shunned. In the end, it was the earth, littered with mass graves, that became the archive of undeniable evidence with which the grass-roots historical memory movement began in the early 2000’s to seek recognition and dignity for the victims. This paper presents an excerpt from my journey to join that movement investigating my grandfather’s death by firing squad in 1936. Like so many others, my project faced fragmentary evidence, incomplete memories, forged papers, fears and sedimented silences. I reflect on one of the very few and startling archival records I encountered: the legal petition my grandmother had to make to obtain a death certificate for her husband in 1939. A Kafkaesque ordeal, the certificate is testament to the fascist state’s necropolitics, using its legal apparatus to terrorize civilians. At the same time, I propose that when read against the grain, this is also a document of a woman’s refusal to be intimidated. I examine the document’s discursive structure and the doubled voiced nature of my grandmother’s signature, performing both her obligatory assent to the regime and her determination not to give up.