Una historia desamortizada: memoria y posmemoria del etnocidio de las culturas campesinas en la literatura española contemporánea

Abstract

Abstract

The way of life of communal peasant cultures has been erased through a process that was as violent as it was silent, spanning centuries and radically transforming the human and material landscape of villages. In the case of Spain, the final stages of this ethnocide were concentrated in the technocratic period of Franco's dictatorship, when the dismantling of inherited collective practices accelerated. During those years, the last communal assets that had not yet been confiscated or confiscated were finally privatized and parceled out, and consumerist and urban-centric ideology gradually took hold in all corners of the rural world. This process almost irreversibly eroded neighborhood cooperation structures and traditional ways of life based on collectivity, reducing them to a marginal or merely symbolic status. In the following pages, we propose a journey through the traces of this transformation via literature. On the one hand, we focus on the novels of authors who experienced this drastic change first-hand and were able to record it in their work with particular sensitivity—Miguel Delibes, Luis Mateo Díez, Julio Llamazares, and José María Merino. On the other hand, we explore how contemporary writers, from the perspective of post-memory, rescue, reinterpret and reactivate those lost experiences, offering new keys to thinking about them in the present: Millanes Rivas, Irene Solà and Brais Lamela.