I was surprised to find that ESMA was so close to residential buildings and businesses in the city. I had expected it to be more out of the way, like La Perla. Several of these buildings were there at the time of the dictatorship, so the residents may have even been aware of ESMA being used as a detention center. So many more of these sites were in places where people lived or traveled past than I expected. It was also interesting to learn that under Menem’s presidency, ESMA was supposed to be torn down and developed, becoming just another part of the surrounding neighborhood, all evidence of atrocities committed simply erased. I’m glad activists were able to fight to prevent that and instead to turn it into a memory site, and that their voices were heard. I feel like the site would have likely been built over if it was in the U.S., sadly, as there is a tendency to gloss over any negative history. It is also a contrast to Club Atlético. While also a memory site, it had a highway built over it, in an attempt by the dictatorship to erase the history, whether intentional or not, and seems to not be getting many resources to uncover more of the buried space. 

Walking through the city with a few others as we returned from the artist market, we caught sight of this graffiti featuring “Nunca Mas” and the instantly recognizable headscarf of the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo. We had nearly missed it among the other graffiti covering the walls. I found I have learned a lot about the political climate in Còrdoba and the larger country from looking at the messages left as graffiti around the city, plus it has helped me with reading in Spanish. Seeing this and several similar works while out last night made it clear that the terrors of the dictatorship are still on people’s minds, and it has been woven into the fabric of the city. Graffiti is a valuable way of seeing what is on people’s minds in any given place, and is a good art form for processing experiences and advocating for change. It is seen as disruptive when in many cases, that is the point. It is a creative way for anyone to make themselves heard. In “Sources and Expression of Resilience in Trauma Survivors,” Harvey and Tummala-Narra state that resilience and self-healing, while important, is only part of the story for survivors. They are also fighting for justice and change, so what happened to them will not happen again. The phrase Nunca Mas (“never again”), popularized by the 1984 report, and the fight of the Madres encapsulate the importance of not just resilience but justice perfectly. 

At the women’s prison site today, I noticed lots of graffiti on the columns memorializing the women who escaped the prison and were later disappeared. This one particularly caught my eye because it is something you would expect to see in a high school bathroom, not in a memorial site such as this. A lot of the graffiti was similar, though some had more political messages such as criticizing the police. To me, this demonstrates something I’ve noticed across sites we have visited so far: for the people who were alive at the time, the memories of the dictatorship are still fresh and visceral. For example, a friend of Fernando’s is fighting to receive reparations for her imprisonment at 14 years old in the very prison site we visited today. Many people weren’t able to process what they experienced until later, such as Fernando’s friend or “The Rabbit House” author Laura Alcoba, who detailed the need she felt to wait to write out her experiences until she returned to Argentina, learned more and was able to process her memories. However, to the younger generations, it seems more distant and may not color the experiences of everyday life in the same way. In both sites we have been to, younger people add graffiti and use the areas as gathering space. For them, they’ve become part of the landscape, like any other surface to put graffiti on. It is reminiscent of how 9/11 impacted everything in the U.S. but I, like many people I know, was not even born yet. While younger people of course know about it, it doesn’t hold quite the same significance as we haven’t experienced anything but post-9/11 life. Perhaps though this history surrounds younger people in Argentina, they feel distanced from it. However, on the other hand, this graffiti isn’t all about distance from the history. In many cases, graffiti can be used as a political statement, and much of the graffiti on the women’s prison was political in nature, in particular speaking out against the police. For some people, graffiti may be their way to engage with what happened in the past and relate it to ongoing injustices in the present.