The Fabrics of Memory: Sites of Violence, Collective Memory and the Jewish Narrative in Palma, Mallorca

In the wake of dictatorship, cultural revival and cultural memory gain poignant political significance, "What should be remembered?" becomes a question of human rights, and, "What should be commemorated?" a question of justice. In this thesis, I look at the xuwefe narrative in Palma, Mallorca, in which the politics of commemoration have surged to the political stage in the wake of a number of political and economic changes over the course of the last half-century. In the years following Francisco Franco's death in 1975, Spain transitioned to democracy, and the politics of religious and linguistic identity moved to the front of the collective political imagination. A group of historically segregated Mallorcans-whose ancestors were dubbed, xuere, derived from the mallorquin word for 'pig,' and similar to the peninsular term marrano----moved to the political stage as government archives were opened to the academic public. In 1986, the Israeli government and the Spanish government worked to establish an Institute for Balearic-Israeli Relations. Architects began to draft memorials to commemorate violence against the xuetes. A small Jewish community almost entirely consisting of 're-converted' xue/es formed and began to flourish. Yet no memorial was ever built-largely at the behest of xuefe descendants. The central research questions I would like to address by examining this case study are: how does the built fabric of a city reflect the collective memory of its occupants? Can the built environment reveal the ways in which a community copes with, represents and codifies histories of systemic violence?