Bill Rolston, Amaia Alvarez Berastegi,

Abstract

Each March in Orihuela in the province of Valencia, Spain, there is a festival of mural painting in honour of local poet Miguel Hernández. For long the poet, who died in a fascist jail in 1942, had been publicly unacknowledged, but now his life, his work and his political involvement as a Republican political activist are openly displayed. How Hernández is remembered provides a powerful example of the struggles between memory and forgetting in post-Franco Spain. Faced with the contradiction of a Pact of Forgetting in 1977 and a Historical Memory Law in 2007, memory in Spain has to be carefully exhumed from under layers of fascist policies and culture.

Keywords

Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, exhumation, Historical Memory Law, Miguel Hernández, murals, Orihuela, Pact of Forgetting, Spanish fascism

From: Race & Class 2018 60 (1)

Editor: Wang Yi