The unit of social analysis we call the nation, with all the cultural assets exalting and dignifying it, is ensured in violent processes of the submission of differences and the systematic and routine eradication of heterogeneities and autonomies. The facts and characters involved in these processes are objects of strong social control, which present themselves to succeeding generations in a ritualized manner, invariably institutionalized in certain forms of perception and narrativities.
In parallel, constructed memories are consistently accompanied by forms offorgetfulness that penetrate the minds of citizens through the most varied and diaphanous forms, even though they have never consciously learned and used such accounts. The construction of national identities thus operates by characterizing certain regions as internal borders versus frontiers, instituting certain social groups as the “others,” re-elaborating the past with the systematic exclusion and re-semantization of historical facts, processes by which distinctions are made, and protagonists are transformed into uniquely distinct characters.