Unwilling to forget: local memory initiatives in post-Franco Spain

Abstract:

It has been abundantly argued that the Spanish transition was based on an implicit ‘pact of silence’ by which the main political forces accepted to leave the thorniest aspects of past behind as the only way to peacefully construct a democratic future. And it has been widely accepted that Spanish society subscribed to this. This article defends a more nuanced version of this state-level agreement by focusing on memory-related initiatives at the local level. By doing so, it poses some challenges to existing literature on the politics of memory in general and the Spanish transition in particular.