Emotional conflict and trauma: the recovery of stolen memory using a mixed-methods approach

The study situates community participation at the center of heritage management, moving from object-centered, expert-defined exceptionality to a holistic, processual approach that embraces community memory, emotions, and participation. Heritage is framed as a multilayered performance that constructs belonging in the present. History education is positioned to include affect through informed memories, with commemorative places of trauma serving as potential heritage for conciliation and reconstruction of local memory. The literature on negative/uncomfortable heritage underscores the difficulties of dealing with painful pasts while highlighting therapeutic communal reflection. Place-based education is proposed as a strategy to engage local ecological, cultural, and historical contexts, fostering civic commitment and identity. The research focuses on Portomarín, Galicia, where the old town was flooded in 1963 under Franco’s dictatorship due to a reservoir, and a new town was built nearby. The study asks: (1) To what extent do inhabitants perceive the forced removal as heritage? (2) What means can the local population employ to incorporate the relocation process into identity? (3) How can heritage education help overcome rootlessness? The hypothesis: a shared identity cannot be built without intergenerational dialogue about the past and a community-led strategy to explain its history. The study engages elderly residents of Old Portomarín (IOP), adults of New Portomarín (INP), and local primary schoolchildren (Sch) to explore how the event figures in autobiographical memory and identity and to test educational strategies for rediscovering and resignifying both the submerged old site and the new town.

The paper draws on scholarship that redefines heritage as a participatory, affect-laden, and socially constructed process (Smith, 2006; Smith & Campbell, 2015). It engages with research on heritage and conflict, traumatic memory, and uncomfortable/negative heritage (Graham et al., 2000; Meskell, 2002; Prats, 2004, 2005; Huyssen, 2003), emphasizing the challenges of heritagising painful pasts and the potential therapeutic role of communal reflection. The concept of uncomfortable heritage highlights elements that meet heritage criteria yet are difficult to activate due to present-day undesirability. The study also builds on place-based education literature (Elfer, 2016; Sobel, 2014; McInerney et al., 2011; Sánchez & Murga-Menoyo, 2019), arguing for its capacity to foster empathy, civic participation, and a sense of belonging. Governance and participation issues in heritage regimes are discussed (Cortés-Vázquez et al., 2017; Quintero, 2011; Sánchez-Carretero, 2012), with attention to power relations, capital, and emotional burdens in heritagisation processes. Memory is framed as a social process of conservation, resignification, and transmission with implications for rights (Maceira Ochoa, 2012), and the work references the Faro Convention’s heritage community principles (Council of Europe, 2005). Prior pilot studies in Portomarín with trainee teachers indicated the transformative power of engaging traumatic local histories in situ for developing empathy and critical argumentation (Castro-Fernández & López-Facal, 2018, 2019), informing the present study’s hypotheses.

Design and hypothesis: Mixed-methods study grounded in the principles of the Faro Convention on heritage communities, testing the hypothesis that without intergenerational dialogue and a community strategy to explain local history, a shared identity cannot be constructed. Focus on real-life testimonies, combining quantitative surveys with qualitative interviews and group discussions, and an educational intervention with schoolchildren. Tools and participants: - Local community: - Old Portomarín (IOP): questionnaires; group discussion (GD); semi-structured in-depth interviews (Ideep). - New Portomarín (INP): questionnaires; GD; Ideep. - Relocated (Reloc): Ideep. - School community (Sch): two pre/post questionnaires; an intergenerational workshop (IW); a school assembly (Sch-Ass); an educational excursion; a home-based family-memory mini-project. - Experts (Exp): two semi-structured interviews with a municipal technician and a regional cultural heritage manager. Instrument validation: Six university experts (in methodology, heritage education, historical thinking, and Francoist repression in Galicia) reviewed form, structure, and content. Strengths included clarity, appropriate length, and usability; improvements addressed coding, terminology clarity, response options, reciprocal viewpoints, and neutral wording. Sampling: - Probabilistic cluster random sampling for questionnaires; purposive sampling for remaining qualitative tools. - IOP: 34 cases; balanced by sex; mostly aged 16–25 at the time of relocation; mean current age 75; reduced sample limits statistical support. - INP: 109 adults; balanced by sex with slight female majority; over half aged 31–45; mean age 42. - Reloc: 3 adults; difficult to locate and low participation interest. - Schoolchildren: 13 pupils (10–13 years; 3 girls, 10 boys) from the only local school, same class. - Experts: 2 technicians (local council and regional government). Procedure: - Phase 1 (Oct 2018–Feb 2019): Community data collection via parallel questionnaires for IOP and INP enabling cross-group comparisons; two discussion groups (INP: 3 men, 3 women; IOP: 4 men, 5 women); 11 in-depth interviews (INP=3, IOP=5, Reloc=3). Registered population in Feb 2019: 1,526. - Phase 2: School-based intervention with pre/post questionnaires. Activities: (1) Intergenerational workshop with three IOP residents sharing oral testimonies, videos, and images; group reflection on emotional impacts; creation of a mural of emotions linked to heritage elements. (2) Educational excursion to the ruins and around the new town to identify elements and build civic identity. (3) School assembly to co-design a heritage itinerary using photographs and QR codes with children’s emotion-linked explanations; guided debate with arguments for/against the removal. (4) Home mini-project to collect family materials (only 2/13 completed). - Phase 3: Expert interviews on integrating the relocation memory into local heritage management and educational strategies. Data analysis: - Quantitative: Descriptive statistics to profile attitudes and opinions across groups, focusing on perceived impacts, narrative transmission, and heritage valuation; comparable yet group-specific analyses given different historical contexts. Schoolchildren’s unstructured data limited sharp contrasts but revealed stable representations. - Qualitative: Grounded Theory-inspired coding combining deductive (from aims and prior knowledge) and inductive (emergent) axial coding across interviews and GDs. Schoolchildren’s data coded in vivo (utterances as units), appropriate given atomized discourse. Analysis emphasized intergroup differences and synthesis of thematic axes (process/trauma, compensation/grievance, narratives, spaces/identity, tourism/Way of Saint James, governance/participation).

- Process and trauma: The flooding of Old Portomarín and brick-by-brick relocation of key buildings dominate collective representations. The event is transversal and multifaceted in participants’ narratives. - Negative consequences: Broad consensus on losses—subsistence activities (agriculture, fishing), rural character, relationship with the Miño River, and sociability patterns—leading to rootlessness and community bond disruption. INP acknowledge these losses despite not experiencing the move. - Perceived gains: INP and Reloc more often note modern services, infrastructures, new jobs, and improved living conditions in the new town; IOP rarely mention benefits and stress they do not compensate suffering. Schoolchildren shifted post-activities from emphasizing new jobs to improved quality of life as the main gain. - Compensation and grievance: IOP widely deem compensation unfair, imposed under the Francoist dictatorship, with feelings of grievance and defencelessness. INP share the grievance narrative but weigh housing/job improvements more. - Attitudes toward trauma and narrative transmission: Predominant attitude is silence among IOP and Reloc, hindering information exchange; INP recognize older generations’ loss of roots and encourage dialogue. Experts advocate therapeutic discussion. For INP, the most impactful elements are forced removal and moving of buildings; for IOP, flooding, forced removal, and older people’s pain stand out. Schoolchildren know the story mainly via family and school, highlight forced removal, feel their knowledge is limited, and show increased curiosity post-activities (majority, 75%, wanted to know more); 54% most valued the visit to the ruins. - Emotional responses to ruins: IOP predominantly report pain and sadness and some avoidance; INP report curiosity more than pain. Schoolchildren’s curiosity about the ruins decreased after the visit (from 92.3% to 75%), while sadness increased (from 53.8% to 75%). - Identity, spaces, and symbols: Many IOP do not prefer the new site (73.5% express no preference), reinforcing rootlessness; INP largely value the new town positively (59.3%). Strong consensus that the moved buildings (notably the churches and medieval bridge arch) are foundational identity elements in New Portomarín and act as reconciling symbols (identification with the new site: 55.9% IOP; 86% INP). Schoolchildren increasingly value built heritage (churches) post-intervention. - Educational intervention effects: Activities moderated schoolchildren’s idealization of life in the old town (desire to have lived there dropped from 92% to 69%). They gained interest in everyday memories of the old town, and their heritage valuations diversified post-test. - Way of Saint James (Camino) dominance: Consensus that pilgrimage tourism is the main economic engine, but it creates dependency, inflates prices, orients businesses to pilgrims, and hampers endogenous identity reconstruction and diversification. Some locals view mass tourism as potentially more damaging than the move. Perceived institutional neglect is linked to rural depopulation and outdated services. - Memory infrastructure: No spontaneous calls for a museum/interpretation center emerged, but when prompted, participants and experts considered such a space (including a potential virtual/digitalized Portomarín) positive for memory restitution and social cohesion, especially if community-driven and empowering. - Intergenerational link: The generations closest to the move see themselves as a nexus for transmitting the traumatic memory; however, silence and lack of consolidated school-family dynamics (only 2/13 completed the home project) impede a shared, connective narrative.

Findings confirm that the community’s narrative centers on pain, loss, and grievance tied to a forced removal under dictatorship, with silence limiting intergenerational transmission. This directly addresses Objective 1 by showing that while all groups recognize the trauma, perceptions of gains differ, and the emotional burden is unequally distributed. For Objective 2, the study indicates that incorporating the removal into collective identity requires rebuilding an integral, shared narrative through intergenerational dialogue, symbolic anchors (moved buildings), and spaces for memory exchange. The ruins and relocated monuments serve as powerful, if contested, heritage mediators. For Objective 3, the place-based educational intervention demonstrated potential to reorient dialogue, activate emotions, and diversify heritage valuations among youth, moderating idealization and stimulating curiosity for everyday histories; yet brief, isolated efforts without robust family engagement are insufficient for sustained identity-building. The dominance of the Way of Saint James complicates endogenous identity reconstruction by privileging economic imperatives over community participation and memory work. Establishing participatory heritage governance and dedicated interpretive infrastructures (including virtual solutions) could bridge institutional policies with community-led memory restitution, enabling a critical, informed, and cohesive identity that acknowledges trauma while fostering shared belonging.

The study identified heritage conceptions in a community displaced by dam construction and confirmed the central hypothesis: without intergenerational dialogue and a community strategy to explain and understand local history, a shared identity cannot be built. Trauma persists among those who experienced the removal, often silenced, while receivers of the fragmented narrative seek information to reconstruct a traumatic history and address grievance/defencelessness. Perceptions of and identification with old versus new Portomarín differ across groups, but consensus coalesces around the moved buildings as reconciling elements crucial to a common identity—especially among INP. In the school community, moved buildings are salient symbols, yet weak emotional attachment to the move hampers historical transmission. Educational activities can surface emotions and increase interest in everyday memories but require broader, longer-term, and family-engaged projects to be transformative. The community should define an internal, forward-looking strategy to select and signify heritage elements within its collective identity. Overreliance on pilgrimage tourism and rural depopulation jeopardize endogenous heritage identity formation. Participatory educational and governance processes can catalyze critical, committed citizenship, activating subjects as heritage agents rather than passive carriers, and preserving community memory through knowing, understanding, respecting, and valuing.

- Sample constraints: Small IOP survey (n=34) limits statistical robustness; very small Reloc group (n=3) due to tracking difficulty and low interest; single-class school sample (n=13). - Temporal limitations: Short duration of the educational intervention; insufficient time for deeper school-family engagement (only 2/13 pupils completed the home project). - Data structure: Schoolchildren’s unstructured data limited clear narrative contrasts with other groups. - Potential biases: Reliance on self-reported memories and emotions; possible social desirability and recall bias; qualitative tools’ openness increased thematic dispersion. - Generalizability: Findings are context-specific to Portomarín’s history and governance environment, limiting transferability without caution.