The Polemics of Breaking the Silence of Family Trauma: Ramón Sender Barayón’s Return to the Scene of the Crime

My analysis of Ramón Sender Barayón’s 1989 Death in Zamora about his 1982 search for signs of identity related to his mother’s life and death, is based on the twin motifs of trauma and mourning that shape the narrative arc of his memoir. This text serves as a riveting case study that exemplifies the efforts of the second generation to comprehend the incomprehensible and to recover the unspeakable—and, in this instance, the long-unspoken—truths and emotional wounds plaguing the lives of those who lost loved ones to right-wing assassins. The second half of my book is largely devoted to examining the features of the oral testimonies of second and third-generation family members of civilian victims, within the temporal parameters of twenty-first century historical memory movements in Spain. With my analysis of the 1989 Death in Zamora, and its editorial “afterlife” over the next three decades, I offer an overview of the evolving socio-cultural reception in Spain of the contemporaneous publication of first-person family accounts of Franco-era atrocities. The author’s memoir charts his recovery of his own family’s traumatic history and simultaneously offers a document replete with representative thematic and discursive coordinates that numerous other family testimonies that I analyze in this book, will share.