Virtudes (e Misterios) and The Inner Memory: Emigration and Return as Identity Fragmentation and an Exercise of Post-Memory in Galician Diaspora

Ana Garrido González

doi:10.3390/h11020038

Abstract

In this paper, we will analyse how Xesús Fraga’s novel Virtudes (e misterios) (2020) and María Ruido’s audiovisual project The inner memory (2002), by creating memory and post-memory of Galician emigration in the 1960s and 1970s, reconfigure the symbolic image of the Galician nation, which has always been defined on the basis of the discourse of mobility and emigration. Both authors, from the fragmentation of intimate memories and through an ambiguous pact with the reader, between the documentary and the fictional, bring us the stories of emigrant women—narratives in which identities are inevitably hybrid, fragmentary and far removed from homesickness as a defining factor of the Galician identity. Emigrant women do not fit into the hieratical traditional identity, which marginalises them because they do not fit the archetype of ‘widows of the living’.

Highlights

É posible imaxinar unha Galicia sen fronteiras, confluencia de culturas e punto de encontro, unha Galicia dinámica e viaxeira, aberta á hibridación, que encontra o seu lugar no mundo
An essentialist image that has served as the basis for the configuration of a Galician identity36, in which there is no room for the failed emigrant that Fraga shows us and which curiously revolves around a concept to which the authors studied in this article hardly draw on, since it is certainly not central in their works, the morriña [homesickness]
Throughout the history of Galician emigration, women have not had an easy time either to emigrate or to return, because they were dependent on male support and were subjected to specific forms of sociability, recognition, and vulnerability

Summary

Introduction

É posible imaxinar unha Galicia sen fronteiras, confluencia de culturas e punto de encontro, unha Galicia dinámica e viaxeira, aberta á hibridación, que encontra o seu lugar no mundo. Perhaps the most obvious comparison to the works of Fraga and Ruido are the stories from the children of ‘the disappeared’ from the time of Argentina’s dictatorship because there, as in Galicia, there are many stories in which children experienced the disappearance of their parents or were forced to live in hiding at an age that allowed them to preserve their own memories of the 1976–1983 period.

Results

Conclusion