‘Revolutionary family’ and childhoods: The testimony as displacement in la casa de los conejos and infancia clandestina ‘Familia revolucionaria’ e infancias: El testimonio como desplazamiento en la casa de los conejos e infancia clandestina

ARGAÑARAZ, MARÍA EUGENIA

Mitologias Hoy

Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

Lugar: Barcelona; Año: 2021 vol. 23 p. 55 - 70

This work focuses on the view that children, during the last Argentine military dictatorship, formed with respect to their militant mothers, members of ´revolutionary or militant families´ of Montoneros. In this opportunity, our analysis will focus on the novel La casa de los conejos (2008), by Laura Alcoba, and the film Infancia clandestina (2012), by Benjamín Ávila. Our analysis will problematize comparatively both works, exploring the relations between the positions that these women occupy in the organized militancy (Oberti, 2015) and those that they occupy in their couple life. The children´s gaze to which we refer finds links with transmissions that allude to conformations of subjectivity itself (Kaufman, 2006) in a family memory and in the conformation of memory works (Jelin, 2002) that the narrative voices that these children carry on with the objective of giving testimony. Finally, the work of Teresa Basile (2019, 2020) will help us to account the types of childhoods that these children develop, leading to what is identified as the Second Generation of CHILDREN. In order to refer to the children?s gaze, we have taken into account the narrative forms in which the works represent the upbringing and mothering in contexts of extreme violence. Both works refer to cultural and testimonial practices. In the novel and in the film, childhoods appear with a border character, in the sense that children grow up and bear witness to that political dimension that they remember and build as the story progresses. All this within militant family nuclei that enable and empower the figure of the infant not only as a witness but as a participant in Argentine history.