Mester

In 2006, the Congress of Deputies in Spain presented a contentious bill: the Law of Historical Memory – it would be passed a year later. A long time in coming, the law sought to redress the wrongs experienced by victims of both sides of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), offering rights to the victims of the war and to victims of the close to forty-year dictatorship of General Franco. Likewise, the law condemned the Franco regime. Since then, exhumation of the repressed past, in the form of unearthing of mass graves, the granting of citizenship to those who fought on the losing side, or scholarship in fields ranging from political science to history, literature to sociology, has witnessed a burgeoning. The attempt to restore “forgotten” or “hidden” narratives that progressively become part of academic inquiry ought to include not just the notables but also the unsung voices that played a quiet yet equally relevant role in that past. Within this context of historical memory recovery, I propose a study of the unpublished poetry of María Acuña. Throughout her lifetime, Acuña would experience not only Franco’s dictatorship, but the bloodless political transition to democracy in the peninsula, as well as two violent insurgencies in Central America, where she lived for a number of years (and met an early death). First, in El Salvador during the Civil War (1979-1992), then in Nicaragua as the Sandinista Revolution unfolded from the late 1970s into the 1980s. The starkly different phases of María Acuña’s life are reflected in a poetry of great precision, passion, and, above all, a musical fluidity that merges Spanish and castúo (her regional dialect), Europe and the Americas.