Contribution short abstract:

My presentation will describe my efforts to produce an intimate ethnography (Waterston and Rylko-Bauer 2008) of the Spanish Civil War through an assemblage of materials from archival photos, postcards, forensic and state documents.

Contribution long abstract:

A decade ago, I began a project to research and write about the historical memory movement in Spain – a grass roots movements initiated by victims of the Franco regime. It was a movement in which I had very personal stakes as the daughter of refugees from the Franco dictatorship. I conceptualized my approach as an “intimate ethnography” after Waterston and Rylko-Bauer (2008), neither memoir nor history, but rather the pursuit of an historical reality as seen through a personal lens. My presentation will describe my efforts to write from the shards, silences, clues, and erasures that were the results of my own attempts to unravel the disappearance and traffic in my grandfather’s body. I will present my efforts to both inhabit and craft a narrative form that remains true to my frustrations, uncertainty, and fluctuation in subjectivity as granddaughter and ethnographer. I offer an unwriting of a dark family history via an assemblage of visual materials, archival and family photographs, postcards, stories, forensic, and state documents. And I reflect on what this unvarnished and decidedly fragmentary material archive allows me to express about the multifaceted and emotional dimension of a personal journey that I share with so many others descendants of this terrifying past.