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

Abstract

This article considers the different mourning strategies organized by the families of those Republicans executed in the Spanish Civil War to pay them tribute. For relatives, the need to remember their kinfolk acquired a much more dramatic meaning given the restrictions on mourning imposed under Francoism. But families often managed to circumvent the dictates of authoritarian power and devised creative strategies of tribute and remembrance. After Franco’s death, the transition could be made from a mourning that was private and clandestine to one that was public. In many cases, those who had been disgraced by the dictatorship were eventually resignified as heroic upholders of freedom and democracy. The choice of Casas de Don Pedro is essentially because of its status as the first village to exhume executed Republicans in Extremadura, one of the earliest regions to undertake this kind of initiative.