Untold stories: Legacies of authoritarianism among Spanish labour migrants in later life By DavidDivita, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2024. pp. xv + 186
Bibliographic record
Abstract
examines aging Spanish citizens at a community center in France-expatriates who joined a wave of continental labor migration after the implementation of Francisco Franco's National Economic Stabilization Plan in 1959.Through long-term participant observation at the Centro Manuel Girn on the outskirts of Paris, Divita explores the discursive methods through which members of this migrant community make sense of, organize, and manage the past, as experiments of self-fashioning and community making in diaspora.The book's title alludes to these methods of self-fashioning in multiple ways.As Divita introduces the reader to a group of Spaniards whose stories have often gone untold in that country's 20th-century historiography, we see the extent of his interlocutors' refusal to recount certain details of their own histories.Throughout Untold Stories, Divita portrays the act of remaining quiet as willful and layered with meaning.At once, silence is a reinscription of the same "silence which surrounded [their] lives" as children in Francoist Spain in the 1940s (p.65), a commentary on more recent liberal regimes of historicity that have encouraged these memories be excavated (pp.17-19), and a technique for retaining dignity and differentiation amid a community of their peers as they grow into later life (p.112).Throughout the ethnography, Davita insightfully links the significance of silence to elements of nostalgia also deployed by his interlocutors.After presenting the book's theoretical frameworks, structure, and methods, Divita portrays scenes of life at the Centro Manuel Girn in five chapters: Chapter 2 depicts a literacy and writing workshop at the Centro; Chapter 3 describes a theater workshop and public performance; Chapter 4 analyzes a museum visit by members of the Centro; and Chapter 5 depicts a course on how to use computers and the internet.A short conclusion follows.Although each chapter contains insights into the practice of identity-making through remembrance, Chapter 2 illuminates most clearly how nostalgia and silence can work together in discursive acts.Here, Divita analyzes a weekly literacy and writing group for 10 older women taught at the Centro by a twentysomething graduate student named Pablo.With a public recitation of their stories in mind, Pablo encourages the women to write narratives of their childhoods growing up in "pueblos"-rural Spanish villages, the memories of which, to the author, denote a Bakhtinian time-space or "chronotope": "a place and time from the past imbued with the simplicity of family and the natural world" (p.45).This assignment leads to social acts of interpreting, discussing, and writing memory.For the group members, this is
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".