I Will Return and I Will Be Millions: Vernacular and State-Sponsored Memorials to Argentina’s Desaparecidos

This work investigates the construction and continual revisions of collective memory in contemporary Argentina. I analyze efforts by the State and human rights groups to create memorials to the desaparecidos via the reclamation of sites where atrocities were committed and the development of the new Parque de la Memoria. Sites such as the former ESMA, after much effort, have been reclaimed as memory sites, indelibly asserting the memory of the Dirty War in the cityscape. As the names of desaparecidos are engraved in noble materials of granite and bronze, collective memory of the 1970s and 1980s is challenged and revised. Remembrance is personal at these sites, as intimate loss is expressed. It is also formalized and codified. As a contrast, memory is also political, as is clear in the stenciled graffiti on walls and sidewalks throughout the city. Through their spontaneity and placement, such stencils are vernacular commemorations -- as Chandra Morrison noted, they are "the interplay of, transience and residue." their presence and persistence evidences a new freedom of expression following the fierce repression of the Dirty War, as well as a means by which state power and authority may be challenged, mocked, and at times supported. As stecileros remind us, the disappeared will "return," and with those who struggle for human rights, "we will be millions." Through their insistence on challenging convenient social and political silences, the stencils have become voices for the cityscape, changing its face through spray painted words, marks, and designs. My work analyzes their contribution to the present conversations on justice versus impunity, memory versus oblivion.