Paths of coming and going. Trajectories of female commitment in the second generation of republican exile

Abstract

The article presents a reflection on the transmission of family memory during the Republican exile, its impact on individual remembrances and on the political trajectories of women of the second generation of exile. We use the oral accounts of two women, Luisa Libertad Fernández Lafuente and Ludivina García Arias, who lived in a transnational context (France, Mexico and Spain). The main objective is to investigate the subjectivity of these women, formed both by their individual and collective memory, analyzing what kind of transference took place between the traumatic experiences of the war and the exile of their parents to become part of their individual memory and their political culture. We interpret these interviews with a gender approach that allows us to see the contradictions experienced within the family and in public activity, in environments that were theoretically egalitarian in gender relations —such as the Republican collective— but which excluded women in different areas such as politics. We start from the concept of postmemory to interpret the family inheritance of republican and socialist political values in women’s narratives. We first address their life trajectories from childhood, a key period for the transmission of family memories and the construction of memories. Subsequently, the political commitment of the interviewees is seen as acts of affective citizenship that reveal the conflict between their identity as Spaniards and refugees and that resulted in different forms of transgression in their militant life.