Loss of place, loss of self: musical heterotopias in Franco’s prisons (1938–1945)

ABSTRACT

At the end of the Spanish Civil War, the Fascist Government led by General Franco implemented a regime of extensive suppression over the population. As a result, prisons became overcrowded with thousands of political opponents. From 1938—a year before the end of the armed conflict—to 1943, musical practices were considered a crucial component of the propaganda programmes implemented in prisons to control and re-educate the inmates. In response to this official sonic environment, prisoners also cultivated their own musical practices as a means of preserving their self-identities. The initial section of the article offers a brief overview of the living conditions experienced in Spanish prisons during Franco’s regime. In the subsequent part, I delve into the significance of the unofficial musical practices developed by detainees, examining their relationship to concepts such as space, place, heterotopia, and the ‘construction of the self’. Due to the state’s ability to exert epistemic violence by suppressing individuals and groups’ capacity to speak or be heard, these unofficial musical practices can be regarded as cultural artefacts that emerged as a means of resistance against the propaganda enforced by the Franco government.

KEYWORDS:

• Francoism
• political prisoners
• prisons
• sonic environment
• heterotopia
• identity

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my very great appreciation to Gemma Pérez Zalduondo as my main thesis supervisor, whose expertise and advice in the area has been very valuable to me. Advice given by Professors Erik Levi and Julie Brown during my studies at the Music Department of Royal Holloway, University of London have been a great help in encouraging me to publish in an English journal. I wish to acknowledge the help provided by my British colleagues with the translation of the article. I would like to thank the following institutions for their assistance with the collection of my data: Spanish National Library, Library and Archive of the Spanish General Direction of Prisons, Archive of the Spanish Communist Party, British National Library, British National Archives, Marx Memorial Museum and Worker’s Library and The People’s History Museum of Manchester.

My special thanks are extended to the interviewees for sharing their experiences with me: Marcos Ana, José Ajenjo Bielsa, Teresa Bielsa Martínez, Luis Pérez Lara, José Espinosa, and Eduardo Rincón.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the author. The data are not publicly available because they contain information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Notes

1 All translations from Spanish sources are mine.

2 The numbers associated with political repression in Spain during Francoism is a critical point as the Spanish Government has never published any official information, so the up-to-date information comes from different researchers from the 1980s onwards. For example, Hugh Thomas estimates that 100,000 people were killed by the Francoists during the Civil War (1961: 209–71). Another historian, Michael Richards argues that taking into account people who were killed during the war and those who died in prison, the number of deaths increases to 400,000 (1998: 11). Among those, according to Guy Hermet, 192,000 would correspond to prisoners executed under martial law (1984: 10). On the other hand, the Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances of the United Nations (2014) gives the number 114,000 for those kidnapped by the dictatorship. Among those, 30,000 would be children of jailed mothers, taken while their mothers were imprisoned.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme Juan de la Cierva from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Ministry of Scientific Innovation) [FJC2021-046775-I] and the European Union Next Generation and the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (Spanish National Investigation Agency).

Notes on contributors

Elsa Calero-Carramolino

Elsa Calero-Carramolino is a musicologist of the University Autónoma of Madrid (2014) and holds an MRes Musical Heritage from the International University of Andalusia (2015). In October 2021 she defended her doctoral thesis obtaining the cum laude qualification with international mention. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Music and Art Department of the University Autónoma of Barcelona, where she is developing research about the presence of music in execution trials. Her research interests are music as punishment, repression, and as a torture and subversion device during the processes of forced detention in Francoist Spain (1938–1978).