Memory of the Heart

Suffused with emotion, commemorative events like those practiced by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade are deeply sentimental. “People commemorate emotionally significant events from their public past,” wrote Nico Frijda. “These commemorations rest, to a large extent, on the emotions of those who suffered from the remembered events or who lost people in them. These emotions are still there, or wait for occasions to manifest themselves.” Commemorations of the Spanish Civil War have provided these occasions, and offer a theoretical foundation for General Rojo's field of thought outliving the field of action. Paul Connerton, in How Societies Remember, reinforces this performative linking of past and present: “We preserve versions of the past by representing it to ourselves in words and images. Commemorative ceremonies are pre-eminent instances of this.” Memory and history are preserved through ritualized representation and re-representation. “[I]mages of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by (more or less) ritual performances.” The commemorations serve a particular purpose, citing and maintaining a chosen past.

Many commemorative events recalling the Spanish Civil War have featured scripted dramatic programs, entirely original or adapted from letters, oral histories, news items, speeches, and prose writings, constructing a genre of commemorative theater. Whatever the form, political content has been a constant. Beginning with early fund raising for Spanish refugees by the VALB, advocacy on behalf of political prisoners in Spain, ongoing agitation against US ties to Franco, and their vigorous work on behalf of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, they have made a consistent effort to direct their antifascist activism toward new causes. Recent speakers at commemorative events have included the Cuban attaché to the African National Congress and the American spokesperson for the Zapatistas from Chiapas, Mexico. When Judge Balthasar Garzón spoke at the New York City event in April 2000, he was continuing a long tradition.