Spanish Civil War Memory Project

Summary

Mota was born on August 7, 1940 in Medina de Campo, province of Valladolid. His parents, who were working class Catholics, moved to Madrid soon after the Civil War. His father supported Franco, while his mother sympathized with the left, holding political views rooted in her own mother's socialism. Mota left school at age eleven to work in a mechanics shop. He relates childhood memories of food rationing and repression, including neighborhood bosses who created a climate of fear. He did not recall people talking about the Civil War during his childhood. A self- styled kid from the streets, Mota describes the acceptance of prostitution during the Franco period. As there were no books in his house, Mota stole books from the Instituto Internacional de Boston, an English school where his mother worked as a cook. The stolen books included an old edition of Don Quixote, but also works banned by the Franco government. Mota's first exposure to the Communist Party occurred when he entered military service in 1961. For the first time he counted university-educated women among an enlarged circle of friends. He shares many anecdotes about his clandestine work throughout the 1960s, printing and distributing "Mundo Obrero" and other Communist Party propaganda. Mota was detected by the police on January 17, 1973, sentenced to eight years, ultimately serving three years at Carabanchel. He gives a valuable and detailed account of prison life within Carabanchel, including the relative freedom of expression for political prisoners, time to study and read, day-to- day prison economics, clandestine contact with the outside, and periodic hunger strikes. Mota was "Madre en la Comuna" for the Communists in Carabanchel, a position of some responsibility charged with administering the collective finances of political prisoners that were members of the Party. Other prison topics include a system of receiving and hiding literature and propaganda, use of a hidden transistor radio for rotating all-night listening sessions with the BBC and Radio Español Independiente. He describes how homosexual inmates lived segregated in the prison; he witnessed two suicides among the gay prisoners. Mota discusses how important outside events, such as the assassination by ETA of Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco in December 1973, affected the morale of political prisoners. He describes the "gran alegria" of the prisoners at Carabanchel when they received the news of Franco's death. Mota was freed within days after Franco's death. He also talks about adjustment to life immediately after release, walking the streets obsessively, continued friendships with fellow ex-political prisoners, and maternal-like closeness to his daughter. During the attempted military-led coup d'état on February 23, 1981 (23-F) Mota was in Valencia attending a toy fair for his business, when he heard military bands playing and saw tanks in the street. He expresses strong support for the effort to recoup the historical memory in a modern-day Spain that, according to him, suffers from a national amnesia concerning the atrocities under fascism. Finally he reflects on the current worldwide economic crisis, criticizing the Socialist government in Spain as woefully ineffective