“how we built the road”: the politics of memory in rural Galicia

In considering the symbolic constitution of history at a local level, ethnographers are confronted with the way in which memories are constructed around political contests not only for resources but also for interpretations of events. In this article I examine the use of history as a form of “making do” through an analysis of a historical narrative of localism about the 1964 construction of a highway connecting a settlement to the national infrastructure, as told by a group of Spanish Galician villagers. In their accounts, narrators contested the official understanding of economic development projects as delivered to local communities from the “outside.” Although their labor was appropriated in order to complete the road project in 1964, in 1990 they were contesting the meaning of that appropriation. [politics of memory, oral history, “making do,” fascism, Spanish Galicia, western Europe]