The Little School Essay

The Little School by Alicia Partnoy is an impactful memoir that honors her experiences during the Argentine military regime while she was deemed “disappeared.” The Argentine coup d'état overthrew Argentina’s President, Isabel Perón, and set its intentions towards suppressing any impulses of political dissent. The regime's leaders sought to eliminate leftist opposition and enforce its ideology on the population. They believed that democracy was demagogic and that the notions of the state must be redefined. They felt as if they had a moral obligation to cleanse society, and therefore penetrated the social consciousness of their opposition to instill order.
Partnoy reproduced and distributed information about the economic situation and the repression,

The minute details documented throughout this memoir impact the audience because they portray the effects of this regime on its victims. Partnoy describes how the smell of rain served as a reminder of being alive and reiterates how rolling her bread into balls brought her immense happiness. Even amidst the beatings, fear, and music drowning out the screams of the torture chamber, those were the things she remembered. Those are the things that got her through this horrific suffering. The specific episodes depict Partnoy’s memories and hindsight to fulfill her narrative but also leave gaps in the narrative of the impact of the Argentine regime as a whole. She draws attention to the fact that this is a much bigger problem than she is able to depict through her single narrative. Partnoy warns the audience at the start of the text to “beware” because “in little schools the boundaries between story and history are so subtle that even [she] can hardly find them" (Partnoy,

She acknowledges that her perspective depicts her personal experience, so any reader should approach the story by consuming her personal account within the broader political context to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the impact of the regime. Partnoy says that she “[knows] just one little school” but it is important to realize “there are many ‘schools’ whose professors use the lessons of torture and humiliation to teach us to lose the memories of ourselves” (Partnoy, 18). Through this, she emphasizes that one cannot lose sight of themselves despite political pressures. Her depiction of her time at the little school serves to portray her struggles but also has a broader implication that demands the captors are held accountable for their actions during this