Citizens of Memory: Refiguring the Past in Post-Dictatorship Argentina

If, as Angel Rama claims in The Lettered City, the city dictates everything one must think, forcing its inhabitants to repeat its discourse, how might shifts in the city’s contours affect the construction of civil society? How might urban designs that facilitate the work of recollection help inform conceptions of citizenship for historical actors emerging from dictatorship? These are the questions cultural practitioners in Argentina address through interventions in the Buenos Aires cityscape that honor victims of state terrorism (1976–83). By analyzing three memorial sites that illuminate the complex relation between space and democratic practices, this essay traces how geography, architecture, trauma, and memory interface in the rearticulation of a collective Argentine national identity. (SRT