Mediating Memory: Mass Grave Recovery and Digital Culture in the Iberian Peninsula

The large corpus of digital and social media on the Web pertaining to the recuperation of historical memory demonstrates how present-day Spaniards continue to grapple with events stemming from the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. In an ever-connected world, there is, not surprisingly, a wave of media inundating the Spanish public that focuses on the recovery of victims from mass graves in the Iberian Peninsula. Digital media and its various modes of dissemination encourage the constant updating of information and provides producers of digital materials and users of social networking sites the means to constantly renew conversations about the recuperation efforts. By cyclically publishing digital texts online that show the rituals and commemorations pertaining to the ongoing reburials, contemporary Spaniards keep the physical sites of memory alive by broadcasting the repeated rituals of exhumation and inhumation as the identification of remains continues. Blogging, website building, and participating in social media circles generates local and regional online communities centered around memorial rites. This article studies the types of media being produced regarding the recuperation of mass graves (photographs, videos, social network site data), how that media is disseminated to contemporary audiences through weblogs, and social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr), and analyzes the performative rituals of searching and reburial, as represented in digital texts. Digital productions allow families and communities of survivors—both physical and virtual communities—to highlight the process of locating the disappeared. The consideration of different genres and modes of representation surface a pattern of ritualistic practices that advances from the search for the missing, to the exhumation process, leading to the reburials and culminating in commemorations honoring the victims.

The array of multimedia elements containing rituals of reburial and commemoration disseminated through the Web give a polyphonic voice to community efforts. Geographic Information Systems (GIS)—also referred to as digital mapping platforms—lends the ability to layer a variety of multimedia elements onto a digital cartographic interface. Thick mapping efforts convert a purely geographic space into a place by imbuing the topography with memories and histories. This article will also discuss how Virtual Cartographies layers data acquired from the Spanish Ministry of Justice of mass grave locations alongside a robust collection of multimedia texts directly related to specific gravesites in order to give depth to spaces of mourning and share various ritualistic practices. The deep layering of multimedia elements lends insights into the histories surrounding the topography. In the case of the exhumations, a thick map that combines information about the geography with digital texts about the spaces, contextualizes the processes undertaken by individuals and communities around the disinterments. By inscribing gravesite locations with the testimonies, videos, narratives, articles, radio program, social network groups, etc. about the exhumations, Virtual Cartographies contributes a thick map that gives depth to spaces of mourning, while creating a framework for analyzing the exhumations and mourning rituals.

Exploring North-South Identities Using NLP: The Image of Spain in the German Weekly Die Zeit

What can the new digital text corpora analysis tell us about history and public discourse? As language is an important source of metaphorical images and meanings, the recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) show that this is a useful tool to analyze social processes that are revealed in language production. Digital tools like DiaCollo enable us to extract information about socioeconomic situations in media datasets like newspapers, historical archives, political discourses and an unlimited number of publications; that is to say anything published or translated in text. This work develops the possibilities of using NLP in humanities using word collocation analysis to explore the image of Spain in the German weekly Die Zeit.

From the Spanish Atlantic Archives to the Classroom in the Arctic: Perspectives on Linking Digital Projects and Undergraduate Research in History

This article discusses the creation, development, and use of a digital archive of early modern Spanish and colonial Cuban sources from faculty and undergraduate student perspectives. The student authors of this essay include members of a digital team, who researched specific topics and aided in the development of the ePortfolio, and students who piloted the digital archive as a resource for the classroom, including for use in research papers. We make the case for using digital tools to broaden access to materials and to help students understand historical research methodologies. We see this as a potential model for faculty, including those at under-resourced institutions, to embed undergraduate research into their courses and other projects.

Introduction

Tropical Medicine behind Cocoa Slavery: A Campaign to Eradicate Sleeping Sickness in the Portuguese Colony of Príncipe Island, 1911-1914

Diseases such as malaria and the sleeping sickness jeopardized the feasibility of the European empires in the African continent in early twentieth century. Among the colonial potencies, there was Portugal, a country with limited economic and military resources, but with significant ultramarine domains. One of its most profitable colonies were the small islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, an important producer of cocoa, which cultivation was assured by shipments of slave workers coming mainly from Angola. The environmental conditions of the islands, as well as the circulation of people from endemic areas for the sleeping sickness, triggered a severe epidemic outbreak of this disease in Príncipe Island, which was also the setting of the anti-slavery campaign led by William Cadbury, a British chocolate maker, in 1908. In light of this setting, a campaign to eradicate the sleeping sickness vector – the tsetse fly – was initiated in 1911 and, in 1914, the island was considered to be free of the genus Glossina, but with significant social and environmental consequences. The purpose of this article is to discuss these consequences and the historical context that determined the creation of a campaign to fight the disease in a small, but relevant, Portuguese ultramarine territory by means of parliamentary documents, health reports and newspapers of that time.

Moving Beyond the Military Revolution

Madre y Matríz: The Politics of Town-Making in Cordoba, 1887-1905

Spain can be difficult to place in contemporary discourses about the economic global north or global south. This ambiguity has a pointed history in moves by European actors on the Iberian Peninsula. In the late nineteenth century, the House of Rothschild expanded their investment portfolio via the mining and rail industries of Andalucia. This paper sifts the results of these activities that produced the rural industrial and mining village Pueblonuevo del Terrible in northern Cordoba province. Drawing on the scholarship on transnational company towns and place making, the essay explores the actions of local miners and shopkeepers that created this municipality. Documents reveal a protracted struggle over numerous issues: the power to draw political boundaries, the Catholic character of Spanish life, the place of migrants in the community, and the status of land-ownership. The parties to these disputes relied on a gendered language of family, especially the notion of a matríz, a founding, original settlement, in order to ground their sense of place and belonging. Over time, however, the language of family broke down and hobbled the political process in Cordoba. The foreign mining company largely disappeared itself from the debate and, finally, in 1905, the administration in Madrid ruled in favor of creating the new town. The essay suggests that the achievement of town status marked a crisis of politics and political meaning as much as it did a successful effort at place making by everyday Spaniards at the peak of international industrial capitalism.

The Ruin of a State is Freedom of Conscience: Religion, (In)Tolerance, and Independence in the Spanish Monarchy

Hispanic clerics, intellectuals, and radicals avidly discussed religious tolerance in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For most, liberty, political independence, and freedom of the press remained paramount concerns. They agreed that religious liberty could not be implemented in the Spanish Monarchy. In this sense, the collective superseded the individual right of worship. Although Hispanic liberals did not include religious tolerance among their foundational principles, they crafted a heterodox ideology that guided the construction of modern Spanish institutions and represented a rallying cry for many on the left throughout the nineteenth century in Spain, Spanish America, and beyond.

Transnational Intimacies: Coloniality and the Environments of Travel Writing in Portugal and Angola, c. 1900-1930

Starting with a critical and sensorial engagement with “Histomap,” a visual comparative timescale for various political spaces around the globe, this paper discusses travel writing in Angola and Portugal in the early 20th century, foregrounding ideas of scale, entanglements, and intimacy. In order to tackle the conceptual challenges posed by objects such as the Histomap or travelogues, I propose recentering the notions of coloniality, modernity, and periphery, as they are elaborated by Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and Boaventura Sousa Santos. I then proceed to the analysis of a selected corpus of primary documents, keeping as my focal point the spaces of intimacy, after a revision of the definitions of critical intimacies by Elizabeth Povenelli and Lisa Lowe. While wide-distribution travel guides serve as a frame of reference to introduce my approach to this archive, the bulk of this paper deals with the travelogues A Fossicker in Angola (London, 1933), by Malcolm Burr, and A Portuguese Somersault (London, 1936), by Jan and Cora Gordon. My reading highlights how scenes of transnational entanglements predicated on notions of intimacy shape the space, exchanges, and relationalities in Portugal and Angola around this period. I suggest that these texts formulate specific ways in which subalternity becomes imaginable through imperial and transcolonial models of space and time.

The Spanish Borderlands Revisited: Engaging the Public in Relating the Place of Spain in U.S. History

Felipe Fernández-Armesto recounts a wonderful anecdote at the start of Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States (2014). Standing before a room of young cadets at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Fernández-Armesto invited audience members to identify the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in United States. No student recognized San Juan, Puerto Rico. Last fall, I witnessed the same question and answer scenario play out among a community of Latino leaders in Denver. Fernández-Armesto’s experience and mine point to the absence of Spanish history as it pertains to the history of United States. This reality owes to several factors, some of them popular and others historiographical. In my paper, I seek to explore of the historiography associated with this phenomenon and offer some useful pedagogical correctives.

Peninsular exceptionalism and an overly national focus have yielded unfortunate consequences that extend well beyond the academy. The failure of historians of Spain to engage with Spanish history on a broader level has confined the legacy of Spanish colonization and settlement of the Americas to Latin America and separated national narratives on both sides of the current U.S.-Mexico border. Historical legacies as diverse as Spanish involvement in the American Revolution and Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean and its relationship to U.S. imperialism remain largely misunderstood or ignored. The disengagement of norteamericanos with the legacy and continued connectivity of the United States with Spain and the Spanish-speaking world has wrought a lack of understanding, which manifests itself in everything from public calls for Latino Americans to more thoroughly assimilate to political discourse surrounding the border wall.

The historical profession has been riven by silos for generations. Graduate-level instruction in history and the academic job market in general have served to reinforce often meaningless boundaries between continents and peoples. As a U.S.-based historian of Spain trained in the United States, I have come to realize that my focus often has been far too European in its outlook, granting attention to peninsular history over the reach of Spanish culture and society in the wider world. My recent involvement in the “Borderlands of Southern Colorado” project, launched by History Colorado, has opened my eyes to the geographic narrowness of “Spanish” history.

To this end, I call for the community of U.S.-based historians of Spain to reengage with the concept of borderlands history. In 1921, Herbert Eugene Bolton published The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest. A revival of the borderlands concept began in 1970 with John Francis Bannon. During the 1980s, John L. Kessell and David J. Weber broadened the parameters of study. More recently, the past twenty years has witnessed an explosion of written work in this same field that has deepened the saliency of Spanish history to the making of modern North America. This scholarship has retold the history of a “Renaissance Spaniard” in colonial New Mexico, recounted Spanish exploration of the Southwest, uncovered the long-term significance of Spanish conflict with Native peoples, and shifted scholarly analysis of slavery in the United States westward to confront the legacy of Spanish empire. In every case, the scholars working in this field have engaged with new historical voices and reevaluated the positionality of Spanish actors. Their work offers insights for better comprehending the broad sweep of Spanish history and presents new and exciting opportunities for teaching and future research.