‘Memories I want to remember, memories I want to forget’: Desire-centred Memory Work with Latin American Migrants in Australia

ABSTRACT

Latin American migration to Australia spans over five decades. Despite growing Latin American diasporas in Australia, little is known in public imaginaries about the difficult histories, desires and struggles that have shaped those who fled their countries due to conflict and dictatorships. This article draws from fifteen in-depth interviews with Spanish-speaking migrants from post-conflict and dictatorial Latin America living in Australia. Engaging with decolonial knowledge and scholarship in Latin American memory studies, the article argues for desire-centred memory work in which trauma, damage and deficit narratives are decentred. Through theorising with ambiguity and participants’ voices, I reveal the potential of taking seriously everyday memories of joy, care, and desire to unsettle and nuance normative understandings of difficult histories, including Latin American migration to Australia. In doing so, I also emphasise the importance of engaging with people as epistemic subjects who are doing the difficult memory work by choosing how, when, and where to narrate and share their stories. Ultimately, this article contributes to decolonial, feminist and Southern epistemologies and understandings of memory in the wake of violence that are desire-based (Tuck, E., 2009. Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79 (3), 409–427) and transformative.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• Latin America
• post-conflict
• decolonial
• Southern knowledges

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the people who generously participated and shared their story with me over the course of this research. As a Colombian migrant in Australia who grew up in a context of an internal armed conflict, I feel deeply honoured and moved by the stories people chose to share with me. Thanks to the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation for funding this project, and to Paula Muraca for your research, writing and collaging. Special thanks to Latin Stories, Lasnet, Asla, Yo Soy Collective and the Latin American communities in Australia that gave me access and trusted me with undertaking this careful and important work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The project involved an open call for participants who migrated from any Latin American country to Australia. However, no Indigenous migrants from Latin America chose to participate in the research, which demonstrates a shortcoming in this open call. Most participants were ladinos/mestizos, recognising that each country will have its own terminology for racialised mestizaje experiences.

2 See above note 1.

3 Through the informed consent process of the research, individual participants chose the level of identifiability. Thus, some stories are presented anonymously, and a pseudonym used, while some include participant's real first names. This research was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee at Deakin University, Melbourne 2021-175.

4 Most interviews (fourteen out of fifteen) were conducted in Spanish. The author, in collaboration with a research assistant, undertook the translation of all quotes in this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation: [Grant Number Postdoctoral Funding].

Notes on contributors

Laura Rodriguez Castro

Dr Laura Rodriguez Castro is a Vice-Chancellor Senior Research Fellow and educator at the Faculty of Education's Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education Research Cluster at Southern Cross University. She is also the Secretary for the Association of Iberian and Latin America Studies of Australasia. Her research focuses on Southern knowledges of decoloniality and feminisms, critical public pedagogies, memory studies and rurality. Her work also contributes to methodological debates on arts, visual and participatory methods.