ABSTRACT
In this text, I propose the existence of a constellation of poets who, faithful to a memory of the Republican world, from 1936 until the democratic Transition, publicly and privately produced impressive work on the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War, thereby challenging the commemorative strategies of the Francoist state.1 Drawing upon the case studies of José Luis Hidalgo and Luis Pimentel, I suggest that the works of these poets dedicated to the war’s graves destabilize widely held beliefs about the functioning of memory, history, and public opinion during the dictatorship. At the height of the postwar period, the mission of this society of poets of the dead was to bear witness to the persistence of the non-sites of memory that are the mass graves. Along these lines, the poets described their effects on the local and national community and on this community’s relationship with the past, the future, the state, and nature. Finally, I defend the need for a cultural history of the mass graves of Francoism that historicizes current debates regarding the recuperation of historical memory. To this end, I analyze the political and cultural context of the 1970s, affirming that the commemorative projects of the postwar poets were displaced by the political configuration of a first democratic regime of memory that was based on the visibilization of the hidden. This was a regime that the current cycle of exhumations interrupts with its insistence on the exhumation of the forgotten.
