[Linganth] David Divita on Untold Stories

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
  David Divita answers  Cécile Evers' questions about his book, *Untold
Stories: Legacies of Authoritarianism among Spanish Labour Migrants in
Later Life.*

campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: Forgetting about Spain’s civil war (1936–9) and subsequent
dictatorship was long seen as a necessary safeguard for the democracy that
emerged after General Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. Since the early
2000s, however, public discussion of historical memory has awakened efforts
to remember this past through the personal testimonies of Spaniards who
experienced it firsthand.

*Untold Stories* expands accounts of twentieth-century Spain by presenting
an ethnography of an ignored population: the impoverished men and women who
fled Franco’s dictatorship in the 1960s, participating in a wave of labour
migration to northern Europe. Now in their eighties, they were born around
the time of the civil war and came of age during its repressive aftermath
before leaving Spain as young adults. The book features a community of such
Spaniards, who gather regularly at a senior centre on the outskirts of
Paris.

Drawing on concepts from linguistic anthropology, David Divita analyses
conversational encounters recorded among the seniors to demonstrate how a
turbulent past shapes mundane moments of social interaction in the present.
Documenting what is said as well as what is not, Divita reveals through
detailed textual analysis how silence can pervade the creation of social
meanings – such as belonging, authority, and legitimacy. *Untold
Stories* illuminates
the impact of a harrowing historical period on some of Spain’s most
marginal citizens in the early years of the dictatorship.
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