Introduction: Bridging Boundaries

Abstract

Oral history and related scholarship is thriving in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain. This book is an effort to disseminate some of this work in English. The 11 chapters in this collection represent oral narrative research in Brazil, Mexico, the Southern Cone of South America, Portugal, and Spain. The authors come from the fields of oral history, biographical approaches in sociology, and anthropology, and are both young and established scholars who have not published before, or at least not extensively, in English. While this volume does not pretend to offer a comprehensive overview or a representative sample of the voluminous research on oral narratives in these geographical regions,1 the chapters give access to and insight into how Latin American, Portuguese, and Spanish scholars approach theoretical, methodological, interpretive, and representational issues in their work. These chapters come together around three major themes that have long concerned oral historians: memory, subjectivity, and representation. They reflect current and ongoing research on the relationship of political identities and collective memory, the turn toward subjectivities and the construction of personal and social identities, and the public representation of memory through oral narratives.