From mourning severed to mourning recovered: Tribute and remembrance strategies for families of the victims of Francoist repression

Introduction

Consideration of the emotional impact of lives snatched violently and prematurely away, the duty of memory and justice for victims, and the forms taken by severed mourning, has deep roots in diverse disciplines.

The “power of absence,” an expression I have borrowed from Roiz (1994), refers to the way in which certain losses condition the lives of the surviving family, and may even affect their psychological equilibrium, particularly when there is a doubt, as in Hamlet—the case analyzed by the author—that the death of loved one is the result of “unnatural murder.”

Those murdered by Francoism who were buried in unmarked graves acquired an ambiguous status—dead without body or burial—which they retained for decades. Any public mention was prohibited, but those absent made their presence felt in a figurative way, as a reminder, as in Shakespeare’s tragedy, that justice had not yet been done for them. And their families lived with the torment—like Antigone—that by not being able to give their loved ones a dignified burial they were unable to guarantee their eternal rest and prevent them from taking on spectral form.

The difficulties of grieving for executed Republicans in Francoist Spain were many. However, victims’ families did not resign themselves to oblivion and many even devised alternative grieving mechanisms as a substitute for conventional funeral ceremonies. The memory of the “disappeared” was cultivated in private by their relatives and sometimes, the sites of common graves were marked with crosses, stones, or other signs to prevent them from being hidden by nature and falling into oblivion. This was a great help locating them when, 40 years after the war, the search for the remains of the executed began.

At the time of Franco’s death, there were clandestine war and postwar graves all over Spain, containing tens of thousands of people who had been shot dead. By contrast, the majority of the victors had been able to dig up and rebury their loved ones. Once the democratic journey got underway, those buried in mass graves regained some of the rights they had been deprived—they could be registered as dead and given a dignified burial and a public tribute. The dead also became generators of rights for the survivors, enabling, for instance, their widows and orphans to receive a pension.

Given the time elapsed between the murders and reburial of remains in cemeteries, these initiatives were led not only by eyewitnesses, but also people who belonged to the next generation. This would explain the huge degree of personal and emotional involvement of this second generation at acts of redress and tribute that took place at local levels during the Spanish transition, and the robustness with which many lay claim to the ideology of those murdered. The relatives of such victims often have an ambivalent relationship to the past. As Jara (2013) explains, “While being the victim of ostracism created scenarios of shame and fear, it was also experienced with a sense of pride” (p. 212), something I have been able to verify in the interviews.

Casas de Don Pedro (Badajoz)

The choice of Casas de Don Pedro is essentially because of its status as the first village to exhume executed Republicans in Badajoz, one of the earliest Spanish provinces to undertake this kind of initiative (Aguilar, forthcoming). This village suffered first from Republican violence in the Civil War and, at the end of the conflict, from much greater Francoist repression. It also has other features of particular interest which enhance its analysis potential with respect to “absent presences.”

First, the exhumations did not only take place in the transition to democracy. On 5 September 1936, just after the war broke out, individuals on the Republican side from outside the village murdered and buried five men in a mass grave. Their remains, as I was told by the priest Antonio Cabrera, the great nephew of one of them (Lorenzo Silveira y Craux), who was the parish priest, were rescued on 24 September 1939 and reburied in the cemetery together—except for one, who was claimed by his relatives and buried in a neighboring village—in July 1940. According to certain notes from the time, handwritten by the priest’s nephew (and father of my informant),

[t]he remains were received at the entrance to the village by the relatives and all the civil and military authorities. Tribute was paid and they were transferred to the church and then the parish cemetery where they rest in the Peace of Christ. ³

A mausoleum in the cemetery is dedicated to these victims, very close to the one erected in 1978 to pay tribute to those executed by the Francoists.

This is the great difference between those murdered on one side or the other. Francoist victims could be rescued shortly after the war ended, major tributes were paid to them, and relatives received the consolation of the authorities in an elaborate and extraordinarily visible symbolic policy. In contrast, the village’s Republican victims had to wait almost four decades—in the best-case scenario—just to be unearthed and buried in the cemetery.

Second, two concentration camps were set up in the vicinity of Casas de Don Pedro—in farmhouses known as Casa Zaldívar and Casa La Boticaria—essentially to detain demobilized Republican soldiers returning to the front (Barrero, 2009a). Many were executed at the end of the war and buried in mass graves alongside executed locals. In the transition to democracy, both these soldiers and the local victims of the village were reburied together in the cemetery because the relatives thought that the fact of having suffered the same fate had created a sort of community among them that transcended the limits of kinship, and this virtually sacred bond should not be altered.

The repressive activities carried out by Francoists in Casas de Don Pedro during the war and postwar have already been narrated in detail by other researchers. Martín (2015: 105–107) refers to 46 victims of Francoism, while Barrero (2009b: 1), drawing on different sources, gives higher figures. Finally, the testimonies also mention two soldiers from Franco’s army who, because they refused to execute the prisoners—who had been tied together in twos—were themselves murdered (Barrero, 2009a: 444).

Secret mourning strategies under the dictatorship

Academic literature has studied the different forms of resistance exercised by those subject to the dictates of repressive power who sought to circumvent it, despite apparent acquiescence. On the one hand, resilience is the ability of those concerned to adapt to external disruptions. Some authors have even established a relationship between the preservation of memory in the family domain and the resilience of survivors subjected to traumatic situations (Cohen et al., 2010). ⁴ On the other hand, research has been done on the many creative everyday forms of struggle undertaken by humble people in their bid to resist authoritarian domination (Scott, 1985, 1990).

As in other conflicts, the

massacres brought crisis to the traditional family-based commemorative practices, partly because the incidents resulted in the enmeshment of human remains unrelated in kinship [. . .]. This material condition of displacement in death is closely associated with the perceived vitality of grievous ghosts of war.

These “political ghosts, whose historical existence is felt in intimate social life but nevertheless traceless in public memory,” were never forgotten in the private kinship practices developed in Casas de Don Pedro (Kwon, 2008: 5, 158). In this section, I am going to focus on the mourning strategies deployed under the dictatorship by relatives of six of the executed: specifically, the Casatejada López brothers (Julián, 19, and Alfonso, 17), ⁵ the García Rubio siblings (Cecilia, 23 and pregnant, and Dionisio, 25), ⁶ and the Talaverano Soto siblings (Petra, although known to all as Eloísa or Luisa, ⁷ 23, and Pedro, 18). ⁸

They were all murdered in Casas de Don Pedro, except Dionisio who was executed by the Nazis in France in 1944. The Casatejada López brothers were buried with many others in Casa La Boticaria, the farmhouse where the first exhumation took place. ⁹ Pedro and his father Celestino were murdered together and buried in a place called El Montecillo, where their remains were dug up at a later stage, whereas the bodies of Cecilia and Eloísa were left exposed and unburied with another woman (Rita Moñino Gómez) and two men, on a site known as “La Paridera.”

According to Cecilia’s brother Juan García Rubio, when they killed the women, they threw them in a ditch with virtually nothing to cover them. He told me that “the dogs dug them up and ate them,” and that a passing shepherd took pity and put some earth on top of them. ¹⁰ That shepherd, moved by a feeling of humanity, and with no small risk to his own integrity, took Eloísa’s bloodied, bullet-ridden shirt to her mother and informed her that they had not been buried. When I interviewed Josefa Miranda Talaverano (known to all as Juli), and Eloísa’s niece, she told me,

So then my grandmother [Eloísa’s mother] wanted to go there but my mother wouldn’t let her, so she slipped out at night. And she wanted to go there to bury her daughter, but of course there was so much fear . . . I have heard them talk about that in my house. That’s what they said, they cried so much, we all cried. Because we never actually talked openly about it. ¹¹

Eloísa’s mother, who lived to be 100, kept that shirt all her life beside her own shroud and, when she died, they buried her with it, as she had requested. The cult of objects belonging to loved ones as a form of mourning— particularly if their lives had been violently snatched from them in the fullness of youth—manifests itself in many other ways and, as we shall see below, has continued to this day. ¹²

Cecilia and Eloísa were both killed because their respective husbands, Santiago Mijarra and Julián Arroba, had escaped execution and fled to the mountains to support anti-Francoist guerrillas. ¹³ In revenge for that escape and to prevent the women from going to join their husbands, just over a month later the women were taken from the place where they had been imprisoned—the Virgen de los Remedios chapel that was sometimes used as a jail—and killed, even though Cecilia was visibly pregnant; indeed, her husband Santiago had saved the lives of right-wing locals by letting them escape on the imminent arrival of a column from outside the village which was suspected to be on its way to kill them. Despite this, Cecilia was not spared (Díaz and Fernández, 2017: 111 ff.).

In some families, such as that of Felisa Casatejada, the trauma was so deep that they stopped celebrating birthdays or any other kind of festivity like Christmas, as if they were living in a kind of perpetual mourning, albeit strictly private, in view of the impossibility of doing so publicly. The father, who had to pass the estate where they were buried every day on his way to work, would always look toward the site and say quietly, “to think you have to be in there, buried like dogs.” ¹⁴ He devoted his last words to them on his deathbed. ¹⁵ Felisa keeps the wires with which she believes her brothers were tied to kill them as if they were some kind of treasure. For her, they are blatant proof of crimes which were denied at the time and also a dearly beloved object because, she believes, they were in contact with her brothers. She has also told her children about the reprisals her family suffered; as her son Celedonio told me,

It was instilled in my siblings and me since we were little; and she showed us whenever we went out into the field [. . .]. It was etched into her mind with blood and fire [. . .]. She knew the estate and when we went that way, she would always say: that’s where they killed my brothers.

One of the intimate forms of paying tribute to the dead consisted in displaying their photographs in the home. This manifestation of private mourning, which has been investigated in detail by Moreno in the case of Spain, often consists of “photo collages into which the disappeared are inserted alongside members of the family in an impossible composition.” This author explains that the families used their photographs as a substitute for the body they were unable to protect:

the image not only operates as obvious proof that the person existed but above all as a site of memory by means of which diverse practices were generated that allowed them to recall and narrate the history of the present.

He quotes Susan Sontag who claims that “a photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence” (Moreno, 2014: 84, 92). ¹⁶

As Moreno explains, the photographs were often adjusted using the bromoil process so the dead would appear in the most favorable possible light (carefully groomed, smartly dressed, self-assured expressions, etc.). I believe this was a way of deleting from memory the pain their violent death must have caused them. As explained by Hirsch (1997), pioneer in the analysis of family photographs linked to processes of violent death and traumatic memory, “photographs locate themselves precisely in the space of contradiction between the myth of the ideal family and the lived reality of family life” (p. 8). Indeed, they often “show us what we wish our family to be, and therefore what, most frequently, it is not.”

In effect, the families had ceased to be what they were, because some of their members had been violently killed and this photomontage enabled them to sustain the illusion that the family remained united. Hirsch (2012), in another of her works, asserts that Spiegelman, the author of Maus, by inserting a number of family pictures in his work (in this case it was not montage), “had allowed photography to reconstitute his nuclear family, a family destroyed by the Holocaust and its traumatic aftereffects” (p. 13, my italics).

In this case in Spain, commissioning the aforementioned compositions, placing them in an appropriate frame and putting them on display in a prominent place was undoubtedly an alternative form of tribute which enabled mourning to commence, despite the absence of a body to bury. Although it may bring some consolation to families, such manipulation is, in my view, somewhat distressing because the dead usually appear smiling and elegant, feigning a happiness they are no longer able to enjoy.

In the following picture, we see Cecilia with her brother Dionisio and their parents (Photo 1). This photomontage is very important because it is a kind of mourning and, at the same time, a private tribute by the parents to their murdered son and daughter, who were, moreover, their eldest children.

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Photo 1.

Escolástica Rubio Vaquerizo, Felipe García Rodríguez, Cecilia García Rubio, and Dionisio García Rubio (courtesy of Manoli, Cecilia’s niece).

In the second picture, another murdered brother and sister are depicted together (Pedro and Eloísa Talaverano Soto) without their parents (Photo 2). As is often the case, the aim is that their attire and poses denote a certain prosperity and, above all, a serenity of which they were deprived by their violent death.

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Photo 2.

Pedro Talaverano Soto and Eloísa Talaverano Soto I (courtesy of their niece Juli).

This montage outraged their mother, as the photographer went so far with the alterations as to put a cigarette between the lips of a boy who had never tried tobacco. The pictures are also implausible, given the ages at which they died (18 and 23, respectively). It is as if they had tried to represent them at the age they would have been had death not taken them away so soon. All of this helps explain why this collage was substituted for another in black and white, and much more austere (Photo 3).

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Photo 3.

Pedro Talaverano Soto and Eloísa Talaverano Soto II (courtesy of their niece Juli).

Another extremely important form of mourning and posthumous tribute I have found in many cases consisted of giving the names of those executed to children and grandchildren in their families, to keep their memory alive. In the Casatejada family, three of Felisa’s siblings (Rafael, Adela, and José) gave one of their children the name of a murdered brother: Julián (in the case of Rafael and Adela) and Alfonso (in the case of José). In this way, they wished to pay tribute to their memory and prevent them falling into oblivion. With respect to the Talaverano family, Eloísa’s younger sister, whom I also interviewed, has the same name as her murdered sister. She was 3 months old at the time and says that, despite her young age, she was put in full mourning dress and when her older sister (Juli’s mother) married 10 years later, she wore mourning dress as well. Juli’s older brother, nephew to Eloísa and Pedro (both murdered), is called Celestino, in honor of his executed grandfather. Another of the brothers is called Pedro, in honor of his executed uncle and his father.

Juan García, one of Cecilia’s brothers, named one of his daughters after his murdered sister. And another of the brothers, Francisco, called his older son Dionisio in memory of his sibling murdered by the Nazis in France. Cecilia’s widower, Santiago Mijarra, who, as we have seen, had fled to the mountains to save his life, eventually gave himself up to the Civil Guard a few years later. After a period of imprisonment, he remarried (a woman called Granada, who had also suffered reprisals) and they called their first daughter Cecilia, after his first wife, in a generous gesture on the part of his new spouse.

Granada and Santiago had four children, but they always maintained close links with Cecilia’s family, and indeed still do. Relations were so smooth that their youngest daughter Petra Mijarra (Petri) told me that as a child she would confuse her immediate family with the family of her father’s first wife. Indeed, for years, she grew up thinking that the woman who appeared beside her father in an old photographic composition was her mother, when in fact it was Cecilia, who was murdered when pregnant with her father’s child (Photo 4). ¹⁷

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Photo 4.

Cecilia García Rubio and Santiago Mijarra (courtesy of the Mijarra family)^a.

Other important forms of mourning and tribute, as I have been able to verify, is that families treasured the personal items of those murdered. In some cases, they even continue to use them. A case in point is Manuela García Fernández (Manoli), niece of Cecilia García Rubio, who, as we have seen was murdered without trial and heavily pregnant. In early 2018, Manoli sent me a photo of a black veil that belonged to her aunt and said in the message that she had used it a great deal “because it reminds me of her and I believe she would like that” (Photo 5).

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Photo 5.

Veil of Cecilia García Rubio (courtesy of her niece Manoli).

Another example is a bedspread pattern Eloísa had designed and which her sisters and nieces reproduced on various occasions over the years. Her mother used the one Eloísa herself had embroidered, shown in Photo 6, to cover her children when they were ill, as if it had protective or even healing powers, and they also displayed it at the village festival in honor of the Virgin in August. The heartfelt and respectful way in which relatives talk about the objects of the disappeared almost suggests a kind of worship, because it enables them, in a way, to forge a connection with their loved ones.

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Photo 6.

Fragment of the crocheted bedspread designed and embroidered by Eloísa Talaverano Soto (courtesy of niece Juli).

The family also kept a blind that had been embroidered by the executed woman in which they wrapped the bones of Escolástica (Eloísa’s mother) when they opened her cemetery niche to add the body of one of her sons. Another item they still possess is the lute Eloísa played at dances.

These personal items have been kept into the present day. Thus, almost 80 years after her murder, Cecilia and Eloísa—like the other people executed—remain very much part of their family. In a figurative way, the dead come to life through the use of their belongings, which is not only a way to keep them alive in the memory, but also a form of tribute.

The democratic mourning

Once the democratization period commenced, it is more appropriate to refer to the “political ghosts” as “posthumous citizens,” an expression taken from Norman (2012), because this is when they begin to abandon their ghostly form, not only because they are recovered from the ground, but also because they begin to obtain a certain legal recognition, albeit slowly and precariously, as a result of various restorative justice measures. With their presence, these posthumous citizens lay claim to a different kind of measure, not only from the State, but also from the community from which they were so violently snatched. As Verdery (1999) puts it, “dead bodies have posthumous political live in the service of creating a newly meaningful universe” (p. 127).

As Kwon (2008) explains, the act of bringing the memory and the remains of the relatives that had been kept out of the community into the public space is both moral, as “the democratization of memory is based in the empowerment of traditional norms about death and remembrance,” and political, “in the sense of recovering the right to have rights” (p. 159).

The exhumations of executed Republicans of the “first series” (before 2000) have only recently begun to be investigated (Aguilar, 2017, 2019, forthcoming; Aguilar and León, 2018; Campos, 2008; Serrano, 2016). With the exception of the magazine Interviú (Aguilar and Ferrándiz, 2016) and the local press (León, 2007), very few media covered them. The removal of bullet-ridden bones in the war and postwar was the very epitome of what they wished to avoid with the pact of oblivion agreed upon during the transition (Aguilar, 2008).

After Franco’s death, many believed the long-awaited moment had come to recover the mortal remains of the dead, take them to the cemetery and pay homage to them in some way. With this end in mind, led by Felisa Casatejada—the undeniable protagonist of this story—the families of Casas de Don Pedro’s Francoist victims coordinated with one another and applied for the necessary permits. They also raised funds to pay for an excavator, buy a piece of land in the cemetery from the Church, build a vault and buy flowers. The first exhumation took place on the Casa La Boticaria farm estate on 13 May 1979. After watching over the remains in the field for two nights, a crowded funeral was held and the remains were placed in the collective mausoleum in the village cemetery (Aguilar, forthcoming).

In order to notify people who no longer lived in the village of the possibility of recovering their remains and giving them a dignified burial in the cemetery, the Casatejada family decided to inform Interviú, a political news magazine with a clearly sensationalist approach and wide circulation. José Catalán, whom I have also interviewed, was the reporter covering the event (Catalán, 1978). José Casatejada, Felisa’s nephew, who contacted Interviú, told me in the interview that they wanted the chance “at least to tell people that they had been executed and in what way.” They chose this magazine because it was “the one that was bold enough to publish things other magazines wouldn’t.” ¹⁸ According to Celedonio, their aim was “for the whole of Spain to be made aware.”

With this report, which was also a form of posthumous tribute, the relatives were able to transcend the local sphere. It fanned a desire for similar actions by showing the whole country that these longed-for initiatives were finally beginning to be feasible. In the subsequent exhumations that took place a few months later in other graves in the area, the procedure was similar, except that in this case, the relatives did not have to put up with the pressure to which Felisa Casatejada was subjected to by the province’s Civil Governor (Aguilar, forthcoming). Another important difference is that, once they had—at least partially—overcome the apprehension caused by the first disinterment and tribute, the families took the step of inviting Julián Blázquez Gil, a Spanish Communist Party (PCE) leader in the La Serena region, to take part in a rally in the cemetery. This does not mean, as we have seen, that the first exhumation was devoid of ideological content. In fact, despite the Civil Governor’s warnings, a large number of Republican, Socialist and Communist flags were on show at the site of the grave (Photo 7).

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Photo 7.

Large Republican flag and Socialist and Communist flags on the three coffins in which the remains from the first exhumation were collected (courtesy of the Casatejada family).

During the first burial, other popular mourning actions of great interest also occurred, such as the reading by Inés Mansilla Espinosa (“la Bolera”), a 74-year-old village troubadour, of a series of poems written by her in honor of those executed, including her own father. ¹⁹

Involving the local leader of a left-wing party, as happened in the second reburial, marked a turning point in the mourning strategy deployed by families, whose intention was to openly lay claim to the ideological motivations of victims and possibly also mobilize current political forces around these issues. The mausoleum, as we can see in the pictures below, was draped with party flags, especially the PCE (Photo 8), and some of those attending sung the Internationale with their fists raised in the air (Photo 9).

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Photo 8.

Tribute in Casas de Don Pedro cemetery after the second exhumations. Communist flag (courtesy of the Mijarra family).

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Photo 9.

Tribute in Casas de Don Pedro cemetery after the second exhumations. Relatives raising their clenched fists (courtesy of the Mijarra family).

Relatives’ wishes for those who have been murdered together to be buried together can also be found in other countries that have experienced equivalent processes of political violence. It is interesting that, compared to the individualization of mourning when death occurs in normal circumstances, this community feeling tends to prevail when people are killed together. As we mentioned, it is sometimes thought that, if they were murdered at the same time and buried in an unmarked mass grave, they have been united forever, and vigils and visits must be conducted together.

The next picture, which is from the second reburial, is highly revealing of the existing bonds between the families of the murdered young people (Photo 10). In the foreground are Granada, Petri’s mother and second wife to Santiago Mijarra, with a mustache and carrying the coffin is Santiago Mijarra, Cecilia’s nephew and son of Granada and Santiago; the man in the jacket on the right is Severiano García, Cecilia’s brother; the person wearing sunglasses and a white shirt is Abdón, Eloísa’s brother; and the second person carrying the coffin, though not see in this photo is Santiago Arroba, ²⁰ Eloísa, and Julián’s nephew. They were all united by a tragedy that helped them to generate mutual affection and get organized to dig the other graves and organize the second homage.

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Photo 10.

Second transfer of remains in Casas de Don Pedro (courtesy of the Mijarra family).

Many relatives of the executed stayed in regular contact with each other, albeit exercising the necessary discretion and caution, and this remained so even when some migrated to Madrid for economic reasons. Many members of the families analyzed were not only forced to leave Casas de Don Pedro, but they lived for a number of years in makeshift houses in shantytowns on the outskirts of Madrid because they could not afford to rent a proper accomodation. Later, they moved into working-class districts like San Blas and Vallecas, where the concentration of people executed from Casas de Don Pedro—and many other villages—was very high.

The emotional bond created among the families of those executed gave them considerable internal cohesion, and their resilience meant that “communities of memory” were eventually forged (Simon and Eppert, 2005) based on preserving the memory of a secretly shared tragedy. In addition to transmitting their ideological loyalties to their descendants, these informal communities helped facilitate the coordination necessary so that, once the political situation changed, they could recover the remains of the dead and give them a huge tribute. Indeed, these three families were pioneers in recovering their relatives’ remains when the country democratized. Some of their members told me that the second disinterments were first organized from Madrid because there were many executed persons from the village and because those who no longer lived in Casas de Don Pedro were much less afraid of the consequences of stirring up the past. ²¹ Juli was in charge of drawing up the first list of people meeting in Madrid to continue the search for skeletal remains.

Even the first exhumation, although led by Felisa Casatejada, was initially the idea of her brother and his son who lived in the Spanish capital. They began paving the way by approaching the Ministry of the Interior, from which instructions were conveyed to the Civil Governor of Badajoz. They were also responsible for taking the reporter from the magazine Interviú to Casas de Don Pedro to write a report on the first transfer of remains (Aguilar, forthcoming). The Socialist, Communist, and Republican flags that appear in Photo 7 were also brought by the relatives living in Madrid. Moving beyond the boundaries of an exclusively family tribute, this gave the second funeral a far more ideological content, in consonance with which part of the literature on trauma has named “political mourning.”

The successful recovery of remains and the celebration of tributes in Casas de Don Pedro should not lead us to believe it was easy to achieve. Quite the contrary. All the testimonies emphasize the fears that had to be overcome, the administrative obstacles, the pressure and even threats to which those involved were subjected (Aguilar, forthcoming). Celedonio, son of Felisa Casatejada, told me,

They made our lives virtually impossible [. . .]. In the summer, they burned our pastures so we couldn’t feed our sheep [. . .]. They set fire to a house [. . .]. After we managed to bury the remains [. . .], they persecuted us terribly.

His cousin José, Felisa’s nephew, told me, “Oh, they really screwed my aunt over [sic] [because] she was the one who stayed in the village [. . .]; it was my aunt who really had it the hardest.” As Felisa was a butcher and had promoted the exhumation, graffiti appeared in the village suggesting she sold “Red bones to make stock.” After nearly 40 years of dictatorship, with the Transition barely underway, the recovery of the bones of the executed that took place in a number of villages was hugely traumatic.

Conclusion

This article has explored different mourning strategies organized by the families of those executed in the Spanish Civil War to pay them tribute. The duty of memory felt by the relatives toward their kinfolk acquired a much more dramatic perspective as a consequence of the restrictions on mourning imposed by Francoism. But the willingness to rehabilitate and provide a proper burial to the executed went beyond the strict limits of kinfolk, to the point of including in the village mausoleum Republican soldiers from different parts of the country that were imprisoned in the concentration camps of the area and killed together with a number of Republican inhabitants of Casas de Don Pedro. As Kwon’s research has also shown, the idea of a “generalized human displacement” (known and unknown remains mixed together in the same grave), far from being disqueting, seemed natural. The community felt that people who had suffered the same injustices fighting for certain ideals should remain together in the cemetery.

The intergenerational transmission of experiences of violence and repression has certain specificities related to other kinds of intergenerational identity transmissions. In one case, for example, the memory of a murder for ideological reasons allowed room for symbolically modifying the traditional conception of the family, with some relatives continuing in the roles they would have had, had the crime not occurred.

During the dictatorship, families often managed to circumvent the dictates of authoritarian power and devised different forms of tribute and remembrance. As they were often forbidden from wearing mourning dress, and placing any kind of object at the site of the graves was considered subversive, they commissioned photomontages and carefully guarded the personal effects of the dead as if they were saintly relics. The “cult of objects” belonging to the deceased was also an intimate form of tribute. They also named their descendants after the executed as a form of posthumous tribute and to prevent their memory from fading.

These and other equally creative strategies were designed to keep their memories alive and to dignify the memory of executed and improperly buried relatives. They are evidence both of the power exerted by these absences in the families of victims, and of the discreet but tireless fight conducted by the kinfolk of the disappeared to defy the silence and oblivion which Franco’s dictatorship sought to impose. All of this encouraged solidarity among the families, enabled the intergenerational transmission of remembrance and ideological loyalties, and created familial resilience, which later proved useful in organizing the exhumation and reinhumation of the remains of their beloved ones.

After Franco’s death, the transition could be made from a mourning that was private and clandestine to one that was public. Improperly buried remains left their spectral condition and took on an aura of charisma and prestige, because in many places, those who had been disgraced by the dictatorship were eventually elevated as heroic upholders of freedom and democracy, engraved on collective mausoleums in many cemeteries. In Kwon’s (2008) words, “[t]he revival of ancestor worship [. . .] contributed to bringing the stigmatized memory of death on the ‘wrong side’ to a realm of genealogical commonality with the dominant memory of death on the ‘right side’” (p. 161).

Those absent continued to be very much present, demanding not only visibility, but also some kind of reparation. The organized exhumations and tributes became forms of reparation in themselves, albeit belated and incomplete, because they provided relatives with an opportunity to bring to light past injustices and to force society to face up to the terrible acts of violence that had been systematically denied and concealed by Franco’s regime.