Narrativas Familiares y Memoria de la Pos-dictadura en Argentina

This article is part of a larger project developed in the years 2006-2008 in the city of Mar del Plata in the province of Buenos Aires, in which we sought to discover the relations which were established between private lives and the terrorist state which had existed in Argentina during the years 1966-1983. A main thrust of the research was to inquire about the importance of family histories, narratives which served to the transmit the past history of families as well as to construct a post-dictatorship social memory. Our concerns were oriented towards forms and meanings which were used to create family histories within the interior of the family space, but in relation to a public political history. The research was focused on the question as to whether the familial memory space could break through the boundaries which delimit the private sphere, and could be recast as part of a political biography that portrays the logic of State terrorism. In which ways has the traumatic experience of the past been transmitted to the interior of the family space, and what new meanings have been ascribed to the identities of new generations? The testimonies selected for our case studies were given by the young activists who affiliated with the citizens’ group called, Children for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silencing/Mar del Plata (HIJOS/Mar del Plata). The selection of activists and former activists had to do our concern with how the narrative of the family experience is reconfigured in the context of the political dispute located in the public arena.