A Testimonial Typology: Charting Franco’s Repression in the Popular Imaginary

I analyze exceptionally detailed oral narratives told specifically by first and second-generation witnesses and documented decades before my own Cádiz-based interviews with third-generation informants began in 2013. I propose to follow the line of inquiry that the Rocío filmmaker Fernando Ruiz Vergara began in the late 1970s in the province of Huelva, Cádiz’s neighbor to the west. Pioneering historians and cultural studies practitioners who came after Ruiz Vergara, recorded countless hours of their own interviews in the same provinces of Lower Andalusia. I limit my study to specific projects completed in the two provinces that border Cadiz, Huelva, and Sevilla. My goal is: (1) to establish the innovative contributions of researchers whose fieldwork in the late 1980s and very early 1990s still form the basis of the current understanding of the topic, before the twenty-first-century explosion of interest among diverse sectors championed the causes of exhumation and commemoration; (2) to categorize key, regularly repeated features linking the oral narratives, establishing a typology of this corpus of testimonies. These narratives—among wide swaths of the population who never met one another—effectively comprise a common, popular language forged in the fires of similar catastrophes, informed by similar expressive tactics, thematic motifs, discursive focal points, and linguistic idiosyncrasies. These components that preserve the memory of the dead and convey the attendant modes of mourning have stood the test of time as an eloquent counternarrative to the languages of State power.