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Focusing on the case of post-dictatorship Uruguay, this article reconsiders the term "postmemory," coined by Marianne Hirsch to describe the transmission of memory from Holocaust survivors to their children about events that preceded their birth. It examines two groups: HIJOS, comprised of the offspring of the dictatorship's victims, who were babies and young children during the dictatorship, and Niños en Cautiverio Político, whose members were imprisoned with their mothers as infants or born in captivity. Analysis of these contrasting organizations elucidates postmemory's complexity, revealing the broad spectrum of experiences it encompasses and the role of external factors in the construction of memory.
"Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
INTRODUCTION
Since the onset of the "memor y boom" that began in earnest in the mid- 1990s in the Southern Cone, a myriad of organizations have appeared in Uruguay with the goal of contesting the cultural and legal impunity that followed the 1973-85 dictatorship.1 Associations of former politi- cal prisoners such as la Asociación de Ex Pres@s Polític@s del Uruguay (the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Uruguay-known as CRYSOL) and Memoria para armar (Piecing Memory Together) have joined the veteran human rights organizations such as SERPAJ (Peace and Justice Service) which pre-date the dictatorship, and Madres y Famili- ares de Uruguayos Detenidos-Desaparecidos (Mothers and Relatives of Detained and Disappeared Uruguayans) who came together in response to the forced disappearance of their relatives in Argentina and Uruguay.2 The post-dictatorship organizations, the majority of which are comprised of survivors of the dictatorship or the relatives of Uruguay's detenidos- desaparecidos (detained-disappeared)3 and other victims, now include a newer generation of actors, who can be viewed as part of a continuum of human rights activism which has enjoyed increasing presence in the public sphere.
This article examines two such groups, made up of individuals who belong to the second generation insomuch as they are the offspring of the dictatorship's victims. The members of these groups were either small children or babies at the time of the 1973 coup or...