Recording Twenty-First Century Oral Narratives in the Province of Cádiz

Sixty years after Eduardo Juliá Téllez’s publication of his fascist account of the “liberation movement” in Cádiz, the historian Alicia Domínguez carefully tracked the trail of so many gaditanos who, according to the 1944 author, appeared to vanish into thin air. In her meticulously documented 2005 book, El verano que trajo un largo invierno: La represión político-social durante el primer franquismo en Cádiz (1936–1945), Domínguez provides the names, if not the final resting places, of more than three thousand individuals in a 109-page appendix. Following a review of both Juliá Téllez’s and Domínguez’s books, I present equally ground-breaking studies by other Cádiz scholars who have each produced a significant corpus of oral narratives collected from among three generations of relatives. The authors showcase these testimonies gathered during the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, from three different locales in the province of Cádiz. Despite common motifs and narrative threads that unify the three, each also offers a unique approach that serves to enhance the reader’s understanding of both the Franco repression and the expressive means available to commit that violence to popular memory.