When the Past Becomes Part of Us: Collective Remembering Across Family Generations After State Terror in Uruguay (1985-2015)

• In Event: Género, generación y terrorismo de estado en el Cono Sur

Abstract

How are experiences of mass trauma after state terror passed on? What is transmitted, remembered, obscured over time, long after the period of state terror has passed? I will present the results of my in-depth ethnographic and cultural study of gendered and generational modes of transmission of the legacy of state terror across parental-child generations after Uruguay’s state terror—the most Orwellian of the bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes of the Southern Cone—now thirty years after (1985-2015). My study looks at Uruguayan transmission at the intersection of private and public memory, through narrative and embodied, gendered ‘modes’ and ‘trajectories’ of transmissions over two generations in the privacy of families who directly experienced state terror (forced disappearance, long-term imprisonment and torture, exile). I explore these issues in the context of Uruguay’s pacted transition, which has been marked by ‘policies of Oblivion’ (1984-2000), state politics of public silencing in a political climate of institutionalized impunity, and the emergence of public ‘waves of memory’ as the memories of these crimes made an increasingly stronger public re-emergence (2001-2015). The paper is a summary of a book project currently underway on the legacies of a pacted transition in a culture of impunity. I also present a reconceptualization of the intersubjective nature of memory, transmissions, and the enduring memory of state terror in Uruguay today, in a contemporary climate of intense contestation, in particular the domestic reverberations of the Gelman vs. Uruguay case (2009-2014).

Author

• Gabriela M Fried Amilivia, California State University/Los Angeles