CULTURAL STUDIES The Memoryscape in Buenos Aires Representation, Memory, and Pedagogy

HE CITY OF BUENOS AIRES, like any other city, has always been a participatory agent in the construction of collective memories and counter-memories. The grid of the city, the names of the streets, its monuments, the battles for spaces that graffiti and their erasures place in evidence, the ways in which the city’s inhabitants live and circulate, the lines that cross the urban space, and the (hi)stories that shape the city are part of Buenos Aires’s Memoryscape. This is a perspectival landscape of “fluid, irregular shapes ” that does not look the same from every angle, and that is inflected by the “historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors ” (Appadurai, 1990, p. 7).1 All these spaces and happenings point to the ways in which the city partakes in the production and the disruption of particular collective memories of Porteños. Since the mid-1990s there have been enormous efforts by different NGOs linked to Human Rights to open up memorial spaces linked to the last dictatorship (1976–1983) throughout the city. From the time of the 1976 coup, signs of resistance to the dictatorship and the national narrative being imposed onto the citizenry clandestinely appeared on the streets. The democratic opening in 1983 multiplied these occurrences, especially as the horrors of the dictatorship became known to all Argentines through the broadcasting of the trials of high-ranking general