Restitution from silence

Nela, 1979 by Juan Trejo as a story of filiation and transitional chronicle

Abstract

This article analyzes Nela, 1979 by Juan Trejo as a paradigmatic case of the narrative of affiliation within the framework of transitional literatures. Based on a family microhistory marked by silence, addiction, and loss, it examines how the author reconstructs the absent figure of his older sister, who died in 1979, as part of a postmemorial exercise. Trejo's work is inserted into a narrative tradition that, through archives, subjective research, and the rewriting of trauma, seeks to reconstitute not only an individual story but also the latent tensions in Spain's democratic Transition. The analysis places this chronicle at the intersection of autofiction, testimony, and documentary writing, and in dialogue with the conceptual frameworks of postmemory, the narrative of affiliation, and post-dictatorial political melancholy.