In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Intimacy of Defeat Exhumations in Contemporary Spain Francisco Ferrándiz A MASSACRE AT VALDEDIÓS Valdediós, Asturias, October 27, 1937. Just a few days after the city of Gijón was taken by the Nationals and the region of Asturias surrendered to Franco’s troops, a tragic event took place in a monastery that was at the time being used as a psychiatric hospital. It was only one in thousands of similar incidents taking place in the recently defeated Asturias and all throughout Spain, as part of a systematic repressive policy involving “the annihilation of the defeated ,” a policy carefully designed to produce and extend a regime of terror necessary to consolidate the emerging political and military power (Juliá, “De la ‘Guerra’” 13).1 Seventeen members of the hospital staff, twelve women and five men, many of them nurses, were shot to death by soldiers in the outskirts of the monasteryhospital , after a “death list” reached the hands of the military authority that was positioned there. The list was read aloud, and those named were separated from the rest. Emilio Montoto, thirty-eight years old, was one of those listed. When they were taken away to be shot, Emilia Carolina Ricca, age thirty-two, ran after them.2 According to what her then two-year-old daughter Esther Cimadevilla was told by her aunts many years later, Emilia managed to see “something” of what happened in a neighboring meadow— something that “traumatized” her to the point of leaving Spain for Cuba about one year later with her three-year-old daughter.3 Emilia’s mother and her two sisters lived in Cuba, where Emilia 304 had met her husband in 1933 before both moved back to Asturias in search of better employment possibilities. According to Esther, the Valdediós killing condemned her family to “stumble around the world.” Six years after arriving in Cuba, Esther’s mother married again. Later, in 1962, as a result of the “political problems ” in Cuba, they moved to the United States (Cimadevilla, Esther’s interview). Esther told me that her mother barely talked about her time in Valdediós or about the killing of her father, and that during a period of about eight years, her aunts told Esther, Emilia had not even mentioned it. “She did not want to talk about it.” She wanted to “block it out” from her memory, “as if it had never happened.” “I could only get occasional glimpses that something strange had happened to my father, scattered in conversations here and there. . . . Even the letters we got from my aunts in Asturias were hidden by my mom,” said Esther (Graveside interview). Until she got married at eighteen, she did not even know that her father had been shot; that her mother and grandfather had managed to obtain in Villaviciosa, home of the monastery of Valdedi ós, a death certificate for her father, which alleged that he had died in a “war accident”; or that her mother had a picture of her father she had never shown Esther. “Before one of my aunts gave me that picture after I married, I did not even know how he was [what he looked like].” Yet her father’s death became an obsession for Esther. Sixty-six years after the shooting, she had traveled all the way from Tomball, Texas, to be present at the exhumation of the mass grave where her father had been dumped in 1937 along with sixteen others. “When I learned that this was going to take place, I had to come. If I had stayed there in the US while this was going on, I would have been agonizing about it forever . I had to make this effort and be present, even if they do not find him, if they do not identify him, in order to rescue and vindicate his memory.” Even after all those years, the traumatic event was neatly inscribed in the landscape. When Esther got to Valdediós in July 2003, the path that came down the hill from the upper meadows made a noticeable turn to the right, avoiding the reasonable, straight line, to prevent passing people and cattle from stepping over what turned out to be the location of the mass grave.4 According to recent historiographical research, the number of people executed by Franco’s troops and collaborators during and after the The Intimacy of Defeat 305 [18.224.63.87] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 10...

Share