Spanish Civil War Memory Project

Summary

José "Pepe Alarcón García was born to a family of six children. Pepe recounts being six years old at the start of the Civil War. He describes the flight of the people of the Axarquía, a region in the province of Málaga. Pepe tells that his family fled on the highway from Málaga to Almería. His father turned himself in when the Falange falsely promised amnesty and was placed in a concentration camp in Granada for a year. Pepe's father was then imprisoned in Málaga and was executed in 1940. Pepe recalls the hardships that accompanied the loss of his father and the abuse suffered as the child of a rojo (red). He details the hunger, low wages, and hard labor that defined his adolescence. Pepe relates the impossibility of truly mourning the death of his father under a dictatorship that prohibited crying over those executed. He notes that in 1952 he joined the Communist Party of Spain in Barcelona and narrates his militancy as well as the circumstances that surrounded political activity under the dictatorship. Pepe explains that through archival research, he discovered that Francoist landowners still control land they seized from his family