Tyler Goldberger

On the one-year anniversary of the Republican defeat by the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, Dictator Francisco Franco declared that a memory site would be built to honor those who fell for “our Glorious Crusade.” In the construction of this monument, known as the Valley of the Fallen, Franco privileged the memory of those who sacrificed their lives for a Nationalistic-Catholic Spain by inscribing symbolic meaning into the monument itself while actively erasing the narratives of Republicans. This monument became more nuanced once Franco was interred in the center of the Valley upon his death in 1975 alongside victims he had targeted during the war. Forty-four years after Franco’s burial in the Valley in late October 2019, the Spanish government exhumed Franco’s body and relocated his remains to a public cemetery. Even so, over 33,000 victims remain interred in the Valley privileging Nationalist memory, over 12,000 of whom remain unnamed and unidentified. This presentation will demonstrate the politicized nature of the Valley and how it interacted with national politics in order to remove Franco’s body from a memory site that supports the Nationalist narrative over a more inclusive one. Through engaging with the contemporary news cycle in covering news related to the Valley, this paper will show the shift in public consciousness of this memory site and question whether the monument, after removing Franco’s remains, still represents a skewed memory of the Spanish Civil War.

Tyler Goldberger is a first-year M.A./Ph.D. student in the History Department at William & Mary. His research focuses on the role of historical memory following dictatorships and human rights atrocities in the twentieth-century Spanish-speaking world. He holds a B.A. (History) from Duke University.