Nicole Iturriaga. Exhuming violent histories

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Nicole Iturriaga (UC Irvine)

Exhuming violent histories: Forensics, memory, and rewriting Spain's past

Many years after the fall of Franco’s regime, Spanish human rights activists have turned to new methods to keep the memory of state terror alive. By excavating mass graves, exhuming remains, and employing forensic analysis and DNA testing, they seek to provide direct evidence of repression and break through the silence about the dictatorship’s atrocities that persisted well into Spain’s transition to democracy.

Nicole Iturriaga offers an ethnographic examination of how Spanish human rights activists use forensic methods to challenge dominant histories, reshape collective memory, and create new forms of transitional justice. She argues that by grounding their claims in science, activists can present themselves as credible and impartial, helping them intervene in fraught public disputes about the remembrance of the past. The perceived legitimacy and authenticity of scientific techniques allows their users to contest the state’s historical claims and offer new narratives of violence in pursuit of long-delayed justice.

Iturriaga draws on interviews with technicians and forensics experts and provides a detailed case study of Spain’s best-known forensic human rights organization, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. She also considers how the tools and tactics used in Spain can be adopted by human rights and civil society groups pursuing transitional justice in other parts of the world. An ethnographically rich account, Exhuming Violent Histories sheds new light on how science and technology intersect with human rights and collective memory.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nicole Iturriaga is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine, and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute Center on Religious and Cultural Diversity.

Transcript

Speaker 1: Back at the grave, Rosa had a red earring resting on her cranium. All four victims still had their wedding rings. I was removing the top soil from Rosa's feet due to the dryness of southern Spain. The soles of the victim's shoes were well conserved. Some locals from the village came by. They whispered that Rosa had been eight months pregnant at the time of her death. Speaker 1: I kept working, all the while, thinking about what they had said later while uncovering her soles. It dawned on me that Rosa and I were the same exact shoe size. I even held my shoe near hers to check. I then quickly scaled myself alongside her, and discovered that we had the same build and stature. I was looking at myself in a mass grave. Speaker 1: I was just paraphrasing from the book, Exhuming Violent Histories. The subtitle is Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain's Past, Columbia University Press 2022. The author is Nicole Iturriaga. And Gail Kligman of this volume says Exhuming Violent Histories is an engaging ethnography of how forensic and genetic sciences are being deployed to recover and reframe literally buried histories in post-Franco Spain. Speaker 1: Through their painstaking work, human rights-oriented forensic specialists and human rights activists are together challenging the necropower of the state and revising the official history of the Franco era. Welcome to ethnography podcast, the first installment. I'm very fortunate to be able to speak to the author of this great book, professor Nicole Iturriaga. She's on the faculty at the university of California, Irvine. Welcome, Nicole. Nicole Iturriaga: Thank you so much for having me. Speaker 1: So, could you tell us about the path that led to you being there, removing the top soil, and doing this study? Nicole Iturriaga: Sure. I was volunteering with the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory as part of my dissertation field work. They are a scrappy activist group that due to lack of funds, and I think also part of their general philosophy, incorporate volunteers in their exhumation technical work. Nicole Iturriaga: And so, if you're volunteering at the right time of the year, they'll train you in the basics of forensic anthropology, forensic archeology, and throw you into the field work. So, in that case, with Rosa and her family, we were in the southern part of Spain, where the team had been actually many times looking for graves in this area. Nicole Iturriaga: They've spent many years searching for the... the south part of Spain has a lot of mass graves, and this was the first time they had actually found anybody. So, it was a really big deal. The town was ecstatic, and that's how I ended up there, even though I am by training, a sociologist, not an archeologist. Nicole Iturriaga: So, I ended up having about a year of actual in-the-field field work experience. So, it doesn't count, I guess, without it being attached to an official degree, but yeah, been part of over 10 exhumations. Speaker 1: And so, I learned a lot about this from the book. I had a very vague understanding of these things, but essentially as I learned, there are a lot of mass unmarked graves in Spain. Second, only to- Nicole Iturriaga: Cambodia is what the Spanish activists like to say. Speaker 1: Okay. And these are people that in Rosa's case, this was someone who had been executed in 1936. Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah. Yes, that's right, right after the coup. That would've been about two months. The coup started in July. They were executed in September. Speaker 1: Right. And so, I didn't realize any of this. Do you have a great first chapter, which reviews the history here. But essentially, for readers like me who might not know the history, there was an election in February 1936 of progressive government elected. And then, within the year, there was a military coup, one of the generals was Francisco Franco. Speaker 1: And there was a, I guess, a war period, which lasted until '39. And then, the Franco regime lasted all the way until 1975. And then, you've had silence after that, or so that we're talking about someone who had died 80 years prior or had been executed 80 years prior. Nicole Iturriaga: That's right. Speaker 1: Now, when you started to do your dissertation, did you know that you wanted to do ethnography as your method? Nicole Iturriaga: I did. Yeah, I did. My master's was also in ethnography, but it was the Tea Party movement, the Far-right movement here in Southern California. And I was pretty comfortable with that methodology. And so, I wanted to continue doing ethnography while also, I mean, in both, I use interviews as well, but yeah, ethnographic observations, I thought would be an interesting modality for this topic. Speaker 1: Fascinating. I agree with you. Now, how did you get interested in ethnography? Were there certain books that really intrigued you? Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah. I'm trying to remember exactly which books really got me interested in ethnography. I got really into sociology in my undergrad years at Cal UC Berkeley and I was a transfer student. So, I was a little late. My path was a little laundering. And so, I was a little older, and I think that actually allowed me to really enjoy, and take my time with learning. Nicole Iturriaga: And so, I was really interested in family sociology. And so, I was reading a lot of those ethnographies, like Promises I Can Keep, I think by Edin and Kefalas, which is about working class and poor women having children, as opposed to other advancements, and what we only think of as adult progression, like getting a degree, buying a house. Nicole Iturriaga: And so, I remember thinking that data was so rich because of the ethnographic graphic observations that interviews can lend you one part of the story, but really observing people in their everyday lives, really observing an organization, brings so much more nuance, and this is my larger critique. Nicole Iturriaga: And I'm not trying to start a war with the quant people, but that can only give you so many metrics of a social problem or social phenomenon. To me, what's way more interesting is seeing what people are actually doing, as opposed to what they say they're doing. Speaker 1: Right. So, when we're talking about ethnography, we're talking about still using interviews, but they're more open ended, as opposed to closed. And they're more on site, as opposed to someone's filling out a form, and then you're analyzing them. Nicole Iturriaga: So, for me, in this study, I had to get very creative in terms of how I was using interviews. So, I used informal interviews. So, I did both. I was doing more of a semi-structured interview format with a tape recorder in a private location, with different actors in these fields. And then, I found that to talk to locals who came to the exhumation site, trying to do anything formal would scare people off because of the social context that this is happening in. Nicole Iturriaga: And I do a lot to try and ground how terrified a lot of the people are in Spain, especially rural Spain. Pulling out a tape recorder, and then being like, tell me about your thoughts, about state terror is a great way to watch people disappear. Speaker 1: You're right. Yeah. Nicole Iturriaga: So, realizing that really quickly. I think what's also the beauty of ethnography is it can be very fluid, and you have to be really good with your instincts, on how to connect, build rapport, maintain privacy, while also allowing the social context to be a guide in some ways. So, the informal interviews, I have my interview guide memorized. I knew what questions I wanted to hit and which ones to start with. Nicole Iturriaga: It was beneficial to me in my positionality, in the field to be a foreign woman, because that made me seem very naïve, and sympathetic, and people wanted to help me, I think, understand. Yeah, they were teaching me exactly. So, I have a very Spanish last name, but I'm not Spanish. My father is from Chile. Nicole Iturriaga: So, I think I also had this like, "Oh, she speaks Spanish. She's American. She's got this really Spanish last name." But I don't have any kind of dog in the fight, which I think someone explained that to me, actually, when I was there at one of these informal things. It's like, "Oh, it's so cute that you have this last name, but you don't know anything. You don't have anybody in the war." Nicole Iturriaga: So, it was like, I was a somewhat neutral person as the ethnographer who was just asking questions naively. And they were trying to explain them to me. And so, there was still the fear, but pulling out a tape recorder, as I said, was also just not happening. So, I'd write everything down if I could in a moment or reconstruct it immediately after. Nicole Iturriaga: And I found that to be... or I would record after they were gone into my phone or recorder and recount. And that was just a lot later of me writing notes, and then coding them, and then coming back to all of that. But yeah, I had to get very creative in this field. Speaker 1: I once read a book about interviewing, The Craft of Interviewing, I think it was called. And I think that the author said, as I recall, that when you're interviewing someone, they often have a story they want to tell. They already have an idea of what they want to say. And one of the things, as I recall, you want to do is let them tell whatever that story is. Did you have that sense? Nicole Iturriaga: Absolutely, yeah. And I think what's interesting about Spain and this particular topic is that the story that a lot of people initially start telling is the state line story of civil wars are bad, brother versus brother, leave the past in the past. But if you push just a little bit back, well, according to the association, this is just about returning families. So, family, where does that fit in? Nicole Iturriaga: And then, you start to see more of a negotiation with the actual person's perspective. And so, I think allowing the safety or the, okay, I've heard you say the safe answer. What's one you're actually thinking of? And in the book, I tell about a waitress who started with that. And then, in the further conversation revealed that her grandfather was in a mass grave. Nicole Iturriaga: And that he had been killed during the war, and had been on the Republican side, and how it would be nice to get him out of the ditch. But she started with leave the past in the past. And if I had just left it at that, I wouldn't have gotten this much more interesting history of someone who is, I think, a perfect embodiment of what the transition period really instilled in the population, which is like, we're leaving it alone. And if you don't leave it alone, it'll be bad for you. Speaker 1: Right. Yeah. So, just for listeners who wouldn't know, so the Republicans would be the more progressive side, the people who were, I guess, leftist, Marxist, anarchists, communists, a wide variety of- Nicole Iturriaga: And pro-democracy even. Speaker 1: Pro-democracy. Nonfascist. Nicole Iturriaga: Nonfascist, yeah. Speaker 1: Right. And then, the nationalist was the military fascist side, right? Nicole Iturriaga: That's right. Speaker 1: Yeah. I was thinking, it's clear in that it must be difficult for those people to have, on the one hand, even privately, they have their private thoughts, and then they have what they can say. And you would imagine that since there's only something that they can say, that seeps into what they actually think. Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah. It was really interesting to watch people do that dance. Speaker 1: So, you say that you're doing an ethnographic exploration of how social actors, like the AR image are using a variety of tools and tactics to... one of the things they're doing is fighting for control over collective memory. The book is so interesting because there's so many different levels to this. For example, in some cases, it seemed like the memory was already known. Speaker 1: It was known that there was this mass grave out there, and that they had been executed. And what was really happening was more like a bringing to the surface or literally, bringing to the surface, but also a processing. You might think of someone in psychotherapy who had trauma and was now bringing it out. It was like this facing and speaking. Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah. Witnessing even, storytelling, witnessing, I think is absolutely, yeah. I think larger to the global movement of forensics-based human rights, you have examples like Argentina, where you really didn't know what happened, the disappeared, the desaparecidos. They just vanished. And the science there really helped fill in gaps. People really didn't know what went on. Nicole Iturriaga: And there's other examples of that too. But in Spain, yeah, people knew, it wasn't like they were like, "Are they still alive?" No. Everyone knew that these people who went missing were dead. And most of the time, a general idea as to where they were, I think in some ways, the seizing or the attempt to see its collective memory is how those deaths are remembered and what the state's role is for that remembrance. Nicole Iturriaga: And they just passed, and I'm not well versed in exactly what's in this bill, but the new memory law that just passed in Spain a couple weeks ago, I don't think anyone thought was possible, even when I was in the field, or when they exhumed Franco. Nicole Iturriaga: There's been these big shifts in Spanish culture that I don't think would have been possible without the work of the association and forensics-based human rights in Spain, constantly forcing this conversation, this witnessing of sadness, and death, and the responsibility of state for the terror that it imposed during the war and during the regime, because a lot of people were killed by an outside-of-the-war context. Nicole Iturriaga: And the stories of the repression of this regime have been so successfully buried for a really long time. So, I think most of their job was just making it okay to even mention it. And then, they've been making these moves to be like, "Okay, well, now that we can talk about this even existing, what are we going to do about it?" Speaker 1: Right. Yeah. I was thinking the same thing. I guess there was one example where there was one person came, approached who was very angry about it. And another person was with her who was more sheepish. Do you recall that? Nicole Iturriaga: I feel like that happened a lot. Speaker 1: A lot. Okay. Nicole Iturriaga: I don't remember that specific example, but yeah. A lot of initial reaction is anger, but I think the anger as being a secondary emotion coming from fear. Speaker 1: Right. And was there a sense that if you look at people now, maybe there's a left and a right in this area, and maybe the people on the right were thinking they were going to be identified with the fascists, and that that was part of what was going on? Nicole Iturriaga: It's funny. I think that would be in a place like Germany, who were being associated with the fascist or the Nazis is just a bad thing. Where it's like for the good portion of the 20th century, it was great to be affiliated with a fascist. Speaker 1: I see. Interesting. Nicole Iturriaga: And so, I think there's still a deep clinging to, I'm not going to apologize, and we were right, and we saved Spain from communism. Part of that also has to do, I think partially, with the amount of businesses and money that were seized from the Republican side. Nicole Iturriaga: If you start opening that door, you might start opening the door to reparation, and some of that money being returned. And I think there's a very vested interest to make sure that doesn't happen because they make a lot of money at this point. Speaker 1: Actually, as you raise that, there's another interesting thing about this is that as just... I don't know whether I'm typical for American, but I know more about Germany than about Spain. I hardly know anything about Franco, except that he existed, until this book. Nicole Iturriaga: Most people I've talked to didn't know Franco existed at all. Speaker 1: Yeah. And it comes through very differently. And sometimes I'm assuming that the case is similar to Germany and it's not... that that's one example. But it did seem that it was something about, at least for the family members, for people who identified themselves as family members of someone who had been executed, it was about not just here are the facts, and not just about processing, but it was also about holding your head higher, having a public recognition. Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah. I think that's totally accurate. If we put that in context, the victim, the losing side were horrifically repressed and shamed. To the point, especially, in those immediate post-war era, they couldn't hold certain jobs. They weren't allowed to travel. They were rendered very much so second citizens, and so were their children. And they were heavily, heavily stigmatized, punished and othered. Nicole Iturriaga: And that went on for decades, and even into the '80s, '90s. So, you've got generations of you should feel bad and shamed for having any connection to the reds. And so, I think this movement really offered those families the ability to go, "I didn't do anything wrong. What was wrong was what happened to us." And so, I think that's an extremely powerful offering of this movement is to reclaim the humanity of the victims, in this case. Speaker 1: Yeah. And you see that so often, again, to take it to the individual level. Someone who clearly was victimized by a crime somehow is the one that ends up feeling shame about it. Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah, yeah. And that, if we take just Rosa from the beginning, the introduction chapter, she was pregnant, and was with her family, and they were leaving a party. And from that class at the foot of the grave that the lead archeologist gave... so just to back up, the association, when they do exhumations, will invite people to come, and see a class at the foot of the grave, it's what they call it. Nicole Iturriaga: And they walk them through the process. And most of it starts with science, and then it leads into these critiques of the state. And the one that he said at her class was what did this woman do to deserve summary execution on the side of the road? And then, on top of that, to be rendered silent and in a ditch for 80 years., or that we, as the citizens of Spain should never learn about her. Nicole Iturriaga: Not only did you execute her, leave her in a grave for a really long time, but insist that no one learn about this violence. It's just compounded insult on top of insult. And it's so upsetting. Speaker 1: Yeah. So many different levels to it. Boy, I've never seen a grave opened up, much less a mass grave. Nicole Iturriaga: It's intense. I describe it in the book as exactly like, they are exactly how they were left. So, it's a very effective tool, if you will, a pedagogical tool, but just there's nothing left to your imagination, really. You know exactly what happened. They're lying there like that, you can just imagine, oh, the movie plays in your head easily when you're looking at a mass grave. Nicole Iturriaga: Especially, if they're really well conserved, like the ones in Rosa's case, or there was one over there with a bunch of men layered on top of each other. The skeletons do all the talking. You don't have to explain anything. Literally, a child can... and there were children who came to these exhumations who could just totally get it. Speaker 1: Right. Yeah. In the book, you have a picture of one of the skulls with a gunshot wound, with a whole through it. So, right, there's the story. Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah. You don't have a guess as to why, they didn't die of a heart attack. Speaker 1: Yeah. That was really fascinating. And just a whole intergenerational, we might think, "Well, what would I care about my grandfather?" Well, I'd care quite a bit about my grandfather, actually. Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah. That's funny. A lot of people have brought that up. Well, I wouldn't care. And I always think on that of, but you don't know because that's not you. But also, even if it's not related, you don't know this person, they're most people, I would say, a good majority of people who would never met a grandparent if they knew they were in a mass grave, who would want to get them back. There's something about the obligation of care too at that Speaker 1: Yeah. It just seems wrong. Even though we know it's a corpse, it's not a person, it just still seems a betrayal or something. Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah. And for me, in the field, especially trying to observe and be participating in these exhumations. My first one was that when I was describing with the men who were on top of each other, I believe the picture with the bullet wound is from that exhumation. I was working, it was my first one ever, and I was so terrified of breaking something. Nicole Iturriaga: And I had no idea what I was doing that I didn't realize that I was uncovering the cranium of what turned out to be a 15- to 17-year-old kid. Someone went, "Oh, is that the head?" And the archeologist went, "Yeah." And then, I was so overwhelmed by that, and I just screamed. This is not in the book, but I remember just touching the cranium, and being like, "We found you, and you're okay. Nicole Iturriaga: It took a really long time, but even if we don't your people, or they're not around, at least we found you." It was this very profound moment for me that I just felt so protective of this kid. Died alongside his dad. He was just wrong place, wrong time. And it was very moving to me as just a person in the field. But also, as the ethnographer, this is extremely powerful. And I feel connected to you. I don't know your name, but here we are together. Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm just thinking off the top of my head, but you don't... maybe we're so distant from death, and dead bodies, and burials that, but then, now you're right there. Nicole Iturriaga: Yes. Literally, staring death, I guess, and a version of death in the face. It's just this skeleton, and there's very obvious signs of violence, and you know that it's a kid, the kid is a minor. It was just, yeah, I feel like the United States has a really sanitized relationship to death. We don't really do, we embalm. There's so much distance. And then, I'm in a literal grave with bodies, and I'm digging them up. Speaker 1: Right. That's really fascinating, right. Now, that has really came across in the book. So, I was interested in the way that this came to Spain from, do you use the term global south? Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah. Speaker 1: Could you tell me about that term? I just hadn't- Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah. The global south, it's a way around saying developing a third, second, first world. That's the global south versus the global north. Speaker 1: How did this, I guess, forensic-based human rights movement get to Spain? Nicole Iturriaga: Actually, to me, I think such a really fun example of how a movement can start on the other side of the planet. And then, another one could piggyback off of the gains of that. So, I will try to be brief, but in Argentina, there was a military dictatorship that ruled that country for seven years. And in the process, disappeared around 30,000 people. Nicole Iturriaga: They also stole the children of the people they were disappearing, and they illegally adopted them out by stealing their identities. So, when that regime fell, after the very disastrous Falkland Island war with the UK, they were trying to do the distract everyone. And they just like major fuck up there on their part. But all of a sudden, there was a lot of questions. Nicole Iturriaga: What happened to all these people who went missing? Where did these children go? Some of these disappeared, people were pregnant women. What happened as a fetus? Things like that. The interim president invited people from the global north to help with these questions. And one of them was Clyde Snow, who is a forensic anthropologist out of Oklahoma. Nicole Iturriaga: He'd been really famous for identifying people from plane crashes. He also identified Dr. Mengele's skull. And so, that was how we knew what happened to Dr. Mengele. He goes there. He does a presentation on this very topic. A man comes up to him afterwards and goes, "Is it possible for an infant to dissolve?" And he goes, "What?" Nicole Iturriaga: And that man's story was his daughter apparently had died in a shootout with the police. Everybody died, including all the kids. And the coroner said when they went to bury the infant, that she was so delicate, she dissolved like water. And that is not how that goes. Clyde Snow asked to do an exhumation. He studied the remains. Found that they did not die in a shootout. Nicole Iturriaga: They died within a 30-centimeter execution style death. And that the remains that were... the pieces of bones that were in the infant's coffin, came from an adult foot that decomposed somewhere else, which suggested that that baby never was in that coffin, and was probably somewhere else possibly alive. Nicole Iturriaga: So, this opened up a whole world of, okay, so every state narrative we have about either potential deaths of people or all of these bodies that showed up has no names in municipal cemeteries might be these disappeared people, or also bodies that were washing up from the river plot, which is right there in Buenos Aires. Nicole Iturriaga: And that comes from these death flights, where they would load people they were done torturing, drugged, and then dropped them alive into the water. Some of them would wash up. So, they started doing all these exhumations. And that was this burst of this forensics-based human rights movement, where they were able to say, we know these people died this way. Nicole Iturriaga: That is completely opposite of what the state is saying had happened. And then, you have a second line there, where these women who had been protesting throughout the regime, the mothers and the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who are demanding answers about like, where did that baby go? Or some of these women that were found after they had been killed. Nicole Iturriaga: So, if you give live birth, it scars your pelvic bone. And so, that they can tell this person had a baby. But if there's no baby or fetus, now the question is, where is it? So, this kept happening. And so, you have a second line where the grandmothers had been asking international scientists to figure out blood testing. Nicole Iturriaga: And at that point, we didn't have DNA yet. DNA doesn't come out until 1989. This is 1986. You have a legal testing that can do paternity level testing, even to grandparents. And so, they start using that, and then DNA blows up, if you will. And so, then they're able to definitively prove that a child they suspected was stolen, was stolen. And that changed everything in Argentina. Nicole Iturriaga: Because then, they were no longer able to say that never happened. I don't know if you guys are crazy, you're making this up. And that was a massive watershed moment. And it was the first time that DNA and forensics was used to officially go you're lying and stop it. And so, that really changed everything. And then, they started this team, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. Nicole Iturriaga: Clyde is now a new student. And then, they went around and started setting up labs in other places. So, for those of you who don't know, the Southern Cone, so South America was distilled with dictators in the '70s and '80s, and there was a lot of human rights abuses. So, they went around to these different states to help set up independent forensic labs. Nicole Iturriaga: And the benefit there would be, you don't have to rely on a state that's probably hostile to you/involved in the violence. So, you have this separate unit that's set up by an outside force that trains people how to do this. They did one in Guatemala, Peru. They did, I think, some work in Chile. And then, we're getting into the early '90s, the Soviet Union falls, you have the wars in the Balkans. Nicole Iturriaga: Moved to Kosovo, they helped set up the lab there. And also, Bosnia Herzegovina. Bosnia have a massive genocide. They're setting up that lab. They move over to Cypress. There was a war there in the '70s, [inaudible 00:30:42] militarized zone where there's a UN-backed lab, also set up by the Argentinians at the same time, same timeline. Nicole Iturriaga: Spain, Franco dies in '75. So, the Argentinian regime starts in '76. He dies in '75, Spain transitions into '78, '80. So, we're getting into the end of the Argentinian regime. '80 to the late '90s, Argentina is going off and setting up all these other labs. 1998 comes, and Baltasar Garzon, who's a judge finds out that Pinochet, back to South America, who is a former dictator is vacationing in the UK. Nicole Iturriaga: And he goes, "I'm going to get you with universal jurisdiction." And universal jurisdiction is this idea that any state can hold another state's human rights abusers accountable outside of the territory. So, he goes, "Got you." Sends out an arrest warrant to Interpol. The UK freaks out and goes, "What do we do?" And this is a big, I don't know if you remember this in '98, people are freaking out. Nicole Iturriaga: People from Chile are coming over to UK, they're protesting. And it took two years for them to figure out what to do. Pinochet eventually had to pretend that he had dementia so he could get a humanitarian relief, and they sent him home, and then he lived another 10 years or something, and died in his bed. But what that did in Spain was a bunch of people went, "Wait a minute. Why are you going after Pinochet when we have 40 years' worth of fascist of our own?" Nicole Iturriaga: And this guy named Emilio Silva, who started the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, writes an article and says, "Hey, my grandfather was also a desaparecido. Why aren't we talking about that?" A forensic anthropologist who had been working in this world outside of Spain goes, I can help you find your grandfather. And that's exactly what they did. In 2000, they did the first exhumation in Spain. And that's how we get... I was trying to make that short. It's never short. Speaker 1: Did they actually find his actual grandfather? Nicole Iturriaga: They did. Speaker 1: Wow. Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah. They did DNA testing and he was found. Speaker 1: Yeah. And I remember the Pinochet stuff in the news, but it's one of those things where it's in the news and it's in the news. It's nothing that I'm attached to or that I... it's just something that is surface level. Nicole Iturriaga: In the background, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. So, it goes to Spain and the big difference is the huge time, the time gap now. Nicole Iturriaga: Absolutely. Speaker 1: So, that it's not being driven by the mothers who lost their kids. I understand that there are some grandchildren around and that were involved in this, but it seems like it's more... my sense from your book, well, there are lots of different levels. There were some grandchildren and there were some individual people, but it also seemed like it was more of a community drive. Nicole Iturriaga: I would say, Emilio Silva, he's the grandson. There're still a few children of the victims that are, at this point, pushing and they're in their 90s. Yeah, they would to be, right? Unless they were killed during... their parents were killed in the repression of the late- Speaker 1: In the repression era. Nicole Iturriaga: ... the '40s, '50s era. But even still, they're older. So, it's mostly, I would say run by grandchildren, great grandchildren, but it's gotten bigger than that at this point. A lot of people, especially in the newer teams, I don't know if they have any relationship the disappeared, if you will. But are just motivated by... I heard this once in the field of how can we claim that we have a democracy when our countryside is littered with mass graves? Nicole Iturriaga: And I think that's a great point. So, I think there's a movement amongst younger Spaniards, some younger Spaniards that feel an obligation to democratic ideals, and to the beliefs in science that this should be more of a priority than it was to previous generations. But yeah, it's still, I would say family victims, family members of the victims are very much involved. Speaker 1: So, you've mentioned both of these things as we've been talking. But I think if you think about someone coming into a community, and I'm going to touch on this issue of mass graves, and I'm going to actually dig them up. You're thinking, "Well, that's pretty hot and we need to cool this down." Speaker 1: And it seemed to be able to do it, you're going to have to lower the temperature here. And the two ways they did it were the framing in terms of this is just science, in terms of science and also in terms of human rights. Well, you can speak to that. Nicole Iturriaga: So, especially, in those beginning years. And so, they started this movement in 2000, I popped in there around 15 years later. So, those early years were extremely hard. People were very aggressive. I heard a lot of stories of people would come, and steal their tools, or would come and yell. And then, they would have to really work to cooling that situation down. Nicole Iturriaga: I don't think anyone was ever physically attacked in the association, but maybe the attention was there. And I think that's where this push towards really depoliticizing. There's also a lot of groups that started doing this in the early 2000s. And some were extremely political, bring out communist flags. They were associated with the communist party, would sing songs. Nicole Iturriaga: Not exactly a depoliticized approach by any means. And there's a lot of criticisms against the depoliticized approach. And I think some of those are valid, but I also think it's like, what do you want out of this situation? Do you want to be successful or you want to be right? And it doesn't mean just because you're successful that you're not also making a lot of headway. Nicole Iturriaga: And I think the depoliticized approach has won in many ways, a lot more success than being overtly political, as frustrating as that might feel. But I think coming in and being like, we are here, this is also a very Catholic country, even just culturally speaking. So, the idea of not doing death rituals is offensive in some way. And that was absolutely the point. Nicole Iturriaga: Franco did this with that in mind because he was such a Catholic. The point was that they wouldn't be buried in consecrated ground. The point would be that they were buried faced down. There's a point that they wouldn't have grave. So, things that were important to Catholic death rituals, they were meant to be insulting. And so, I think- Speaker 1: And shaming. Nicole Iturriaga: And shaming. And so, with that in mind of, do you think that this little abuela over here doesn't have the right to recover her dad and give him a mass if she wants to, is very powerful in that context. It's a certain level of a monster to be like, "No, screw her and screw her dad." That's bad politics, especially now. Now that media, they're way savvier in some ways. Nicole Iturriaga: Talk about Asuncion at the end of the book. And she was 92, and she was exactly that. She was this little old Spanish grandma, all she want... and she was so cute and so smart, in terms of her activism. I was like, she played right into that. Like, "I just want my dad back. You're going to tell me I can't have my dad back?" Yeah, exactly. What do you say to that? No? Nicole Iturriaga: So, there's that level of it's just about giving people their family members back, which is depoliticized. And then, you also have the, we're just doing this from science perspective. And we're trying to help this lady get her dad back, how we're doing that is through science. That it's the medium of our trade, and science doesn't have an agenda. Science doesn't have politics. So, whatever comes out from this, it's not our fault. We didn't do this. It's just what the science says. Speaker 1: No, absolutely. Nicole Iturriaga: So, if this person was tortured, I don't have to tell you. That's just what the body says. Speaker 1: Right. I was thinking and I was reading it that the depoliticized approach worked for this issue, this place, this time, this culture, but who knows in another- Nicole Iturriaga: I would say in the Balkans, in Bosnia, from what I understand, so Sarah Wagner is an expert in that field. We were in a conference together and she was like, "No." And I did interviews there too, which didn't make it into this book necessarily. I think it does maybe a little bit in the beginning, but it was like I was doing so much research or field work at that time. Nicole Iturriaga: And I had this whole other chapter that I had to drop just to be able to graduate on time. But when I was there, I was like, "Oh, this does not apply here." It does and it doesn't. It worked for the HEG in holding people accountable legally for genocide, which was proven through the forensics. But in the local levels, that is not happening. Speaker 1: No. Right. Nicole Iturriaga: And so, if you want to read more on that, I would say read To Know Where He Lies. It's also an ethnography by Sarah Wagner. It's excellent. And really gets into why this is a lot more complicated depending on the context you're in. But also even that, it's different. They worked legally. Speaker 1: Right. And I was just thinking in terms of today in the US, science doesn't... if you want to get attention, you need to be political and outrageous, not- Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah. And forensics is certainly, I get this question a lot too, is why forensics is this outlier in terms of science that the public believe? Speaker 1: That's true. That's true. Nicole Iturriaga: And I do think it's different than climate change or even vaccines in a certain way, because it is so accessible. As we were describing earlier, if you see a gunshot wound in a skull, you don't have to go, well, humans create bullet club whether or whatever. But also, it's the science of the state. And that's how trials are done. Do you believe in DNA? And it's also huge part of media. Speaker 1: Yeah, no doubt. It's fascinating. And people are sending in their saliva to find out what- Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah, the ancestry testing, which I would urge caution on. But yeah, I'm about to go to Tulsa in a couple weeks because they've been doing exhumations there. Speaker 1: Yeah, I was going to say that was- Nicole Iturriaga: And I don't know, I think how that's going. Because they're also doing a very depoliticized rights of the family's approach. It's almost identical to Spain. It's a long time ago. So, it's over a hundred years ago. But the context is the United States, the case has to do with racial... white terrorism, basically, on a black neighborhood. Speaker 1: The Tulsa race massacre. Nicole Iturriaga: Like the Tulsa race massacre. So, they've been doing exhumations. They started last year, and I'm going with a research team to see what the impacts have been, very similar. Almost all use the same, exact, slightly modified interview guide there, but I'm anticipating it to be very different in some key ways. Speaker 1: Yeah. It sounds be interesting, right? Yeah. Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: Right. Well, I knew that the problem with this interview was I had way too much to talk to you about. So, I should end it now, but it's just a great book. I highly recommend it. Exhuming Violent Histories, Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain's Past, Nicole Iturriaga, Columbia University Press 2022. Thank you so much. Did I get all that right? Nicole Iturriaga: Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: Okay, okay. Thank you so much for speaking to me. It was really interesting. I really love the book and- Nicole Iturriaga: Thank you so much for having me. This has been great. Speaker 1: Okay, great. Nicole Iturriaga: Cool.