![]() Approximately 30,000 people were disappeared. These centers, spread throughout the country, were designed to hold, torture, and murder so-called dissidents. The building was part of Argentina's system of centros clandestinos that operated during the 1976–1983 period of state terrorism. But without these removable details, the concrete first floor with the plain metal doors would blend into the streetscape. Two small plaques and handmade posters, legible only at the pedestrian scale. Above it, a simpler sign: ‘Ex Centro Clandestino de Detención de la Fuerza Aérea, Inmueble sujeto a expropiación por la ley aprobada el 9 de septiembre de 2004’. ![]() ![]() The official-looking sign bears the insignia of Argentina's Department of Justice and Human Rights. Just below it in smaller text, ‘EX CENTRO CLANDESTINO DE DETENCIÓN, TORTURA Y EXTERMINIO “VIRREY CEVALLOS”’. 1).Ī prominent blue sign stretched across the façade disrupts the quiet block: ‘ESPACIO PARA LA MEMORIA Y LA PROMOCIÓN DE LOS DERECHOS HUMANOS’. ![]() Signage at the street level of the building, however, commands attention (see Fig. Above the first story, the building blends in with the surroundings – tall windows with wooden shutters and balconies stretch across the second and third stories, with potted plants that lean expectantly towards the patches of sun not obscured by the shade of the tall trees. One building between the streets Mexico and Chile, however, is marked as different. Although situated just a few blocks south of the bustling Plaza de Congreso that houses the nation's Congress, and the Casa Rosada a few blocks to the east, the ordinary, residential street Virrey Cevallos feels worlds away from the political center of Argentina. The occasional storefront spills noises and smells out onto the street. Two- and three-story attached residences line the streetscape. The streets in the western part of the Montserrat neighborhood of Buenos Aires are leafy. Further, this case study suggests that disrupting haunting requires an intervention that bridges the legacies of the past with reparative justice that attends to place. This research shows that everyday emotional geographies of fear are intertwined with the (dis)continuities of time. Tracing a timeline of this geography from the dictatorship to the present shows the haunting effects of fear, and asks how memorialization, as a material and temporal intervention in emotional geographies of fear, addresses the (dis)continuities of this geography. I develop my analysis with testimonies from neighbors of Virrey Cevallos to follow the endurance of fear leading up to the site's recuperation as a national Space for Memory. I argue that recuperation and memorialization disrupt the haunting of this emotional geography of fear, and that attention to everyday experiences of fear nuances broader discourses on justice. I take the recuperated Space for Memory Virrey Cevallos as a case study of emotional geographies of fear to assess how fear becomes temporally and spatially fixed in the landscape. This article deepens feminist scholarship on emotional geographies of fear via an engagement with haunting and memorialization in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during and after the 1976–1983 military dictatorship.
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