Catalonia
Students at El Morell High School similarly undertook an analysis of the interviews, although in their case it was of audiotaped, not videotaped, interviews. A number of interview excerpts have been selected for presentation in this section, and they exhibit characteristics similar to those observed at ORT school, as students sought to understand everyday life under dictatorship. These excerpts concern the intertwining nature of several aspects of everyday life: traditions and customs, religious festivities and the role of the Church, and sexuality.

Traditions and customs: Josep Vallès Badia and Ezequiel Peñaranda Moratalla
One conclusion that students arrived at is that traditions and customs constitute an important source of information from which they can infer the persistence of silence and forgetfulness with respect to dictatorships. This is illustrated by an excerpt from the interview with Josep Vallès Badia, in which he elaborated on the following definition of “tradition”: “It’s something that has always been done the same way, on the same date or at the same time, within the family, the village or the community. In the past,‘customs’ were more widely celebrated than now. They are becoming less and less important. Nowadays the pace of modern life does not allow for things like that. Maybe it’s because everybody worked in the village then, or in the countryside. Now, with jobs in the industries you just don’t have time.”11 Similarly, Ezequiel Peñaranda Moratalla reflected, “Festivities have changed a great deal, they are not always the same, not for the people. But for me they do remain the same because I continue to be the same. I am the same guy and I don’t change the customs. I’m the same as ever.”12 The “customs” that these interviewees referred to are certain religious celebrations included in the Catholic Liturgical Calendar (St. Anthony’s, Easter, Corpus Christi, among others). All of the interviewees recalled these festivities as an essential part of their lives, pointing to the significance that they had for the population and, lastly, regretting their disappearance. The time being evoked with longing melancholy corresponds to that of Franco’s Rule (1939–1975). Although not overtly manifested, these accounts indicate that the Church played an important part in bringing the community together through those religious festivities. In a time of rigidity and silence, traditions and customs were a clear outlet for rural people’s need to socialize and bond.

The role of the Church: Natàlia Ódena Boix
When students asked about the role of the Church as an institution during Franco’s Rule, they noticed that respondents became insecure and gave evasive answers. An accomplice to the dictatorship, the Church’s influence extended to private life in different forms of moral repression. The students were able to observe that even today, more than thirty years after the end of the regime, elderly people became diffident when the subject came up and were unwilling to discuss the repressive nature of the Church’s role at the time. It must be borne in mind that education in Spain, unlike in Argentina, has been mainly religious and, perhaps due to rural backwardness, it was hard for interviewees to assess and discuss the influence of the Church openly. However, when the students invited them to reminisce about their everyday country life, they were able to point to religious festivities as one of the factors leading to the unity of the community. This characteristic in the recollections evidences a revalorization of the direct relations which developed with the Church. The selective character of memory allows them to vindicate themselves as members of one (though today inexistent) community. As Natàlia Ódena Boix stated, “In the past you knew everybody, you went out in the street to talk to your neighbors, to get some fresh air, as there was no TV, and nowadays you may not see your next door neighbor in two full months. This is a shame. Life has evolved with computers and cell phones. There is no face to face relationship with the neighbors.”13 These interviewees have chosen to recall, most surely unconsciously, the feeling of community and union among the villagers that was fostered by the Church, with no reference made to its repressive nature.

Sexuality: Natàlia Ódena Boix, Marga Cabrerizo Cabrerizo,
Dora Cabré Colet
Sex was yet another topic that was regarded as taboo during Franco’s Rule. When asked to recall topics they would never talk about at home, and amid laughter, which even made the interviewer giggle, Natàlia Ódena Boix exclaimed without hesitation: “About sex! None of it! Don’t, my dear, don’t you laugh! It was taboo! No! We had none of it, at least in my home. My sister, who got married before me, could have explained something to me. But, she wouldn’t!”14 As Marga Cabrerizo Cabrerizo simply put it, “The topic of sex was untouchable. Neither at school nor with our parents was there any education on that subject.”15 Through Dora Cabré Colet’s account students found an especially paradigmatic example of this silence. Throughout the interview she was able to recount her memories with a wealth of detail. However, her ttitude changed when the students asked her about extramarital relations and whether she knew someone who had maintained them. She appeared uneasy, reserved, and hesitant, adopting a defensive attitude. After a long silence, she started, “Oh, Man! Maybe I do, but these are things that I won’t talk about.”16 In the times of Franco, marriage was a religious institution, divorce had been abolished, and only the wealthy could afford annulments from Rome. As a result, the Church was vigilant of chastity, and sex outside marriage was punished with social rejection. However, there may have been an additional reason for Dora’s unwillingness to discuss sex: one of the interviewers was her own granddaughter, which made it uncomfortable for Dora to touch on the subject.
Drawing on these accounts, students were able to analyze how influential the dictatorship was in the interviewees’ childhoods and the extent to which this influence still persists. They noticed that even now, thirty-five years after the return to democracy, most people, and especially those in rural settings, are unable to rid themselves of old fears in order to discuss sex outside marriage, criticize the Church’s complicity with the regime, and the like. Much to the contrary, and owing to the selective character of memory, they continue to uphold the Church as an institution that was fully committed to maintaining unity in the community in times of hardship. They thus remain incapable of observing reality from a more critical perspective, a clear sign of the pervasive and persistent nature of the silence imposed on collective memory during dictatorships.

Conclusions
The ArCa Project has allowed us, as teachers, to draw conclusions about the adoption of oral history methodology in the high school classroom and curriculum. The construction and utilization of oral sources with adolescents has clearly been significant and beneficial. Along with an understanding of the persistence of silence under dictatorships, students derive additional important knowledge and skills.
Oral history provides students with primary sources of their own regional history, a heritage that exists in their own, their neighbors’, and their relatives’ homes. By having direct access to these sources, they are stimulated to build a local memory without losing sight of its links with national history. Thus, “oral history at school helps us bridge the gap between the academic world and the community: it brings history to their home, as it connects the classroom and the textbook with the daily life of the community in which the student lives.”17 History should encourage students to create a critical awareness of their social environment. But this is only possible if we adopt a methodology that promotes the integration of knowledge and a connection between research and teaching, on the one hand, and between the school and the community, on the other.
Oral history also offers an opportunity to recompose intergenerational ties. The interviews bring different generations together, strengthening bonds that have tended to loosen over time, while also contributing to students’ identities, as they establish an open dialog with the past. Parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts become relevant informants. They can prove that their relatives, ordinary men and women, made history, just as they themselves are constructing it.
Oral history helps effect a change in their communication with elders, which is both an educational and a social value.
Moreover, students in the ArCa Project have shown sensitivity, commitment, and respect toward other viewpoints. They are able to understand that the protagonists may have different views on the same historical event, and they learn to respect those opinions. The process of constructing oral sources brings about a strong sensitivity, because they create knowledge from the direct testimonies of the actors of the historical process under study. As a result, they assume a commitment to the project with greater responsibility.
Oral history also allows students to be the scholars, creating historical knowledge. When students conduct an interview, they create a historical source and they thereby adopt the role of historian. They become familiar with the raw material historians use and they soon start to understand the nature of all kinds of historical sources. They recreate history with voices and protagonists that traditional sources tend to ignore. Equally important is the fact that conducting fieldwork and transcribing and editing interviews trains students in research tasks. There is still a conception that historical research is a scholar’s task with hardly any involvement with the object of study. When we examine teachers’ practices, we still find that traditional methods, whereby knowledge is memorized rather than constructed, still prevail. Oral history helps us break with those methods, as it favors participation and the creation of sources that foster the appropriation of historical knowledge. And it is precisely at this point that fieldwork ultimately leads them to “living history itself.” This contribution of oral history has been widely acknowledged: “The most important argument about the value of oral history in the classroom is that such projects are actually real: they ‘make’ something. They produce tangible outcomes with personal and social value and this, more than anything else, explains their particular potential to promote motivation and enthusiasm in the students.”18
We strongly believe that sharing this kind of project and encouraging other teachers to, in turn, transmit their experiences to others can contribute to promoting the utilization of oral history methodology. When more and more of us have noticed the changes brought about in our students, in the community, and even in ourselves, we will be contributing to an awakening in society of the need to recover the past, a past that comes to life in an oral history interview.

Laura Benadiba, a historian specializing in the methodology of oral history, has been a history teacher at ORT Technical School (Buenos Aires, Argentina) since 1990, where she also directs the Oral History Program. She also presides over the oral history association “Otras Memorias” (www.otrasmemorias.com.ar). Her many papers on oral history have been published in books, journals, and on the web, and she has published twelve textbooks on oral history. The ArCa project was awarded Third Prize, the Leandro Colomer Award 2006/2007, from the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. E-mail: lbenadiba@yahoo.com.ar.

* I would like to thank the El Morell High School students, as well as my colleague and friend Professor Tomás Biosca Esteve, for their commitment and cooperation with the ArCa project from the onset and throughout these last seven years. I would also like to thank ORT High School, especially the students who participated in this project, as well the institution itself, for allowing us to develop these collaborative experiences.

11 Josep Vallès Badia, interview by Tomás Biosca Esteve and El Morell students, audiotaped recording, April 29, 2007, Vilallonga del Camp, Catalonia, Spain.
12 Ezequiel Peñaranda Moratalla, interview by Tomás Biosca Esteve and El Morell students, audiotaped recording, May 15, 2007, Constantí, Catalonia, Spain.
13 Natàlia Ódena Boix, interview by Tomás Biosca Esteve and El Morell students, audiotaped recording, June 6, 2007, Catalonia, Spain.
14 Natàlia Ódena Boix interview.
15 Marga Cabrerizo Cabrerizo, interview by Tomás Biosca Esteve and El Morell high school students, audiotaped recording, May 23, 2007, Catalonia, Spain.
16 Dora Cabré Colet, interview by Tomás Biosca Esteve and El Morell students, audiotaped recording, May 16, 2007, Villalonga del Camp, Catalonia, Spain.
17 Thad Sitton, George L. Mehaffy, and O.L. Davis Jr., Historia oral. Una guía para profesores (y otras personas) (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983), 20.
18 Sitten et al., Historia oral, 29.

Source: Oral History Review (2012) 39 (2): 387-397. First published online: July 30, 2012



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