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This article argues that El tren de la memoria, through its emphasis on female witnesses, confronts and “works through” personal and collective memories of Spanish economic migration to West Germany during the Franco regime. El tren de la memoria functions as a mode of witnessing, and mediates between subjective and collective experiences of the migration. The documentary invites us to re-assess the cinematic archive and to rethink the historical past, so we can foreground the political ontology of the documentary image in terms of its historiographical function. I depart from an exclusive sociological focus in order to explore how the migratory is articulated in, and transmitted through, the documentary form. In addition, I ask whether El tren de la memoria enables us to reflect on whether elements of past totalitarian violence could still seep into the sovereign power of capitalist democracies. While El tren de la memoria may seem to be essentially an historical documentary, this article argues that it is far more; it demands a rethinking of migrant subjectivity, which reveals an irreduc-ible alterity always already constitutive of the self. Thus the documentary does not simply reflect reality, but contributes to the imagination or transformation of reality and its structures of discrimination and exclusion of migrants. El tren de la memoria encourages us to imagine a community based on singularities, which share a world inhabited by plurality, a community in which our relation to alterity is based on our common finitude.
