Affective Ties, Political Bonds, and Media Visibility: Reclaiming the Spaces of History in Puerto Real and El Marrufo-La Sauceda

I analyze two groups of testimonies that emerged around two sites of mass graves in the Cádiz province: the 2012 exhumation of the remains of twenty-eight victims on the El Marrufo country estate, and the 2016 excavation of mass graves in the cemetery of Puerto Real. In the first instance, I primarily analyze the oral sources that help tell the story of La Sauceda-El Marrufo as recorded in the 2014 video documentary, La Sauceda, de la utopía al horror. In the second, I refer to 2016 interviews that I recorded in the Puerto Real cemetery, as the exhumations themselves were simultaneously in progress. Following patterns of analysis that I have previously established, I trace the complex processes by which unacknowledged trauma histories and concomitant familial sorrows among grieving, subaltern communities of the past, take hold today in the popular imaginary. Transgenerational stories predicated on pure affect, born of the sentiments of mourning and bereavement, are transformed into counter-hegemonic, politicized narratives and actions demanding truth, justice, and reparation. I examine two key concepts that form part of this process. First, I understand emotions, the affective dimension that originates in the traumatic past, as a form of knowledge. Jill Bennett explains that the hermeneutics of affectivity “aims to constitute a language of subjective process (specifically of affective and emotional process) to complement history.” Secondly, I explore how the mediatization of memory—both through conventional platforms like print media and television, as well as digital and social media—may, as Andrew Hoskins explains, bridge the personal and the collective.