On the Afterlife of Lucrecia Pérez: Literature and Migrant Memory Against Nationalist Myth-Making in Democratic Spain

In Como ser negro y no morir en Aravaca [How to Be Black and Not Die in Aravaca] (1994), Equatoguinean-Spanish author Francisco Zamora Lomboch pays homage to Lucrecia Pérez Matos, a Dominican migrant who was murdered by neo-Nazis in the Aravaca neighborhood of Madrid on November 20, 1992—a killing registered as the first hate crime in democratic Spain. Black Spanish authors Rubén Bermúdez, Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio, and Moha Gerehou also reference this hate crime in their respective works. In all three texts, Pérez’s murder constitutes a fundamental turning point for conceptualizing both democratic Spain and its margins, specifically, migrant populations whose attempted assimilation is countered with ultra-nationalist violence. Anchored in theoretical insights from Saidiya Hartman and Sylvia Wynter, this chapter examines literary works by Black authors who invoke Pérez to conceptualize the clash between Spanish nationalist myth-making and Black, migrant embodiment. This chapter theorizes the role of literature in formulating narratives that contest nationalist histories and logics that unwittingly glorify Spain’s colonial past, marginalize populations from formerly colonized lands, and/or envision Spain through racist paradigms that denigrate blackness. The texts by Zamora, Mbomío, Gerehou, and Bermúdez all explore the interconnected nature of coloniality and migration, thus broaching an important discussion of memory in Spain beyond the continuing debates of how to remember Franco or conceive of his legacy in the twenty-first century. The afterlife of Pérez in contemporary Spanish literature thus complicates understandings of Spain’s Transition and shed light upon the fissures of nationalist myth-making. What’s more, references to Pérez in literature by Black authors evince an awareness about these issues made possible through writing and storytelling.