12. Milicianas: Female Combatants on the Screen—Oblivion and the Recuperation of Memories

Gabriela Jonas Aharoni

Documentaries involve a specifc point of view, embodying the subjectivity of creators who express themselves through their camera lens; in that sense, they have a moral purpose. Following authors like Rabiger or Nichols, documentaries thus serve an intrinsic social function of respecting ethical values.[1] Due to their subject matter, historical documentaries have been associated with the expository mode, often due to the use of an unidentifed omniscient voice-over narrator.[2] This is how Milicianas, a 2019 documentary by flmmakers Tania Balló, Jaume Miró, and Gonzalo Berger, begins. In ffty-two minutes, they use a photograph to reconstruct the execution of fve volunteer nurses from the Red Cross on the island of Mallorca.[3]

The flm intermingles features of a historical documentary with techniques of historical research. It adapts its language to reach both expert and nonexpert audiences without rejecting new perspectives on some historical events that build a bridge between the past and the time of the flm’s production, even though some have already been discussed in previous documentaries.[4] I am referring to the debate that began in Spain in 2000, when people began asking new questions about the history of the civil war and demanding the recognition of its victims, especially after the approval of the Law of Historical Memory in 2007.[5] This new sensitivity toward historical memory was complemented by the introduction of the issue of gender equality into the political agenda, with several laws and measures initiated to promote it; this in turn favored the support and fnancing of projects to recover the memory of women—projects like Milicianas.

MILICIANAS: WOMEN IN THE LINE OF BATTLE

Part of the signifcance of the Miliciana phenomenon lies in its uniqueness in Spanish history. While a limited number of Spanish women had participated in combat prior to the Spanish Civil War, this war was the frst time that many women not only took up arms but also became part of the fghting force on an equal footing with men, at least in the early stages of the confict. However, the Milicianas stirred mixed feelings within the Republican side and among women themselves. They were accused of going to the front as prostitutes, assuming male roles that were foreign to them, disguising themselves as Milicianas, and adopting a working-class aesthetic while wearing high heels and makeup with their uniforms.[6] There are several distinctions between the Milicianas who fought on the front lines and those in the rearguard, and Lines has therefore discussed these topics separately.[7]

The Milicianas on the front lines were, save for a few exceptions, part of the Republican fghting forces as members of mixed-gender combat units. There were some all-female combat units, such as the Female Combat Unit of the Fifth Regiment of the People’s Army, and there were even women who were integrated into the regular army once the militias were reorganized. The Milicianas in the rearguard were integrated into combat units made up exclusively of women who were trained in to use weapons in case they were needed on the front or had to defend their cities, such as during the defense of Madrid in November 1936.

Lines highlights that women had to bear a double burden: performing tasks considered feminine such as sewing, cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes while also caring for the wounded.[8] Gutiérrez Escoda explains that the establishment referred to the women incorporated into the Republican forces as Milicianas, which falsely implied that women continued to be part of a voluntary fghting force rather than the regular army.[9] Most of the Catalan Milicianas were members of the Unifed Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC) and the General Union of Workers (UGT). Gavina Viana was one of the leaders and organizers of the Female Militias. On August 16, 1936, the frst century of the Female Battalion left the port of Barcelona for Maó, a town located east of Menorca in the Balearic Islands. The fghters were organized into three groups: Rosa Luxemburgo, Bolxevic 31, and Aida Lafuente.[10] During the civil war, a series of documentaries was produced highlighting the role of women as heroines of the rearguard. This was a form of propaganda to inculcate its viewers and exemplify the role of women in the war, propaganda that, according to the communist ideology, preferred to highlight this role and not that of women fghting on the front lines.[11]

Beginning in the 1990s, television and flm documentaries signifcantly contributed to both the debate on the memory of Franco’s oppressive regime and to the shaping of democratic identity.[12] At the start of 2000, various documentary flms began to highlight the active role played by foreign women in the International Brigades. This is the case for the flm Mika, Mi guerra de España,[13] based on the 1976 autobiography by Mika Feldman Etchebere, the only woman with military rank during the civil war and the only Argentine woman who fought on the battlefeld. The documentary focuses on the fgure of Mika Feldman Etchebere, and the story is reconstructed by members of her family and by Mika herself from archival material of recorded interviews. The format of the flm is circular and follows the tradition of the documentary road movie. The flm leads the viewer through the diferent stages of Mika’s life and transforms them into sites of memory. These lieux de mémoire are like memory workshops for the reconstitution of the past, understood as social products with particular cultural and political contents, where memory materializes and results in specifcity. However, in contrast to Pierre Nora, the sites of memory, or stops, in this road movie are constructed and materialized not from the institutional but from the personal and subjective, representing a particular worldview dictated by the commitments and ideology of the subject of analysis.[14]

Another flm is Into the Fire: American Women Into the Spanish Civil War, directed by Julia Newman, which reconstructs the story of eighty women, nurses, writers, and journalists who, defying the US government, joined the International Brigades. In this flm, sixteen of them reconstruct their personal history, part of an unwritten story about the role these American volunteers played in the Spanish war. The flm is a traditional documentary that reconstructs historical events from interviews with the protagonists, archival documents, photographic and audiovisual material, and “voice-over” storytelling from writers such as Josephine Herbst and the journalist Martha Gellhorn. The flm gives voice to persistent criticism of the USA and its position of “neutrality” in Spain. This criticism becomes more intense as the war lurches toward its tragic (from a loyalist and anti-fascist perspective, at least) conclusion. Newman chooses to narrate Into the Fire exclusively through the words of the women volunteers. There is no third-person perspective or detached, omnipresent voice to tell the audience what it all means. There are contemporary interviews with the featured women, but the flm mostly relies on recitations from articles, letters, notes, and diaries written at the time. The interviews and recitations are illustrated with archival photographs and flm footage, as well as original artwork by Mildred Rackley, one of the volunteers. Narrating the flm in this way articulates the diversity of the experiences among the American women who went to Spain and resists the temptation to consolidate those experiences into a single, authoritative story that could easily be isolated and put into its so-called proper historical place—on the sidelines of the “real” fght.[15]

Unlike the two documentaries mentioned earlier, Milicianas focuses the story on the identity of these fve Catalan women executed in Mallorca. It goes on to tell the story of their movement based on photographs, testimonies of the victims’ families, images from audiovisual archives,[16] epistolary documents, interviews with historians (mostly Catalan experts on the matter), newspaper and periodicals libraries, local and national archives, and other sources.

Context

On September 5, 1936, dozens of Republican Milicianos and Milicianas, including fve volunteer nurses from the Red Cross, were arrested by Franco’s troops on the beach of Sa Coma. The “Balearic Column,” led by Captain Alberto Bayo, had retreated to Valencia a day earlier, leaving dozens of them on the island to be shot by Franco’s forces.[17] The photographs that show the Milicianos and Milicianas before their execution are particularly striking: nameless faces and forgotten memories that Milicianas seeks to recover.[18] The fve nurses were raped, tortured, and publicly executed in the town of Manacor. These acts of physical violence that degraded and humiliated the sexual identities of female bodies in wars were constant and almost regular practices during the civil war. These vicious practices arose from discourses on violence conditioned by national culture, by feelings of belonging, by the experience of the war, and by the manifestation of ideological, political, social, or sexual identities. What is more, they were cultural constructs that determined how their contemporaries perceived reality at the time.[19]

A diary kept by one of these women, which describes the campaign in Mallorca, and a photo of the group taken shortly after the women’s arrest are the starting points of the investigation, which aims to recover the identity of these anonymous women whose memory has been forgotten. The diary begins on August 16, 1936, with the departure of the group from the port of Barcelona and ends on September 4 of that same year, their last day alive in Mallorca. The manuscript reveals the names of four of the executed women: sisters Daría and Mercè Buxadé Adroher, eighteen and twenty-two years old, respectively; María García, approximately ffty-three years old; and Teresa, whose last name is unknown. The flmmakers arrive at the name of the diary’s author almost by a process of elimination. It is interesting to note that the diary was published in a Manacor newspaper, Arriba, perhaps with the intention of showing the criticism of its author toward the ideological inconsistencies within the Republican forces. Titled “Diario de una Miliciana Marxista” (Diary of a Marxist Miliciana), it was published together with “warning statements” urging readers to minimize all criticisms toward the national troops.

The Documentary: A Construction of History?

In audiovisual productions, historical discourse can be approached through both fctional and documentary works. Milicianas is a documentary, as it is a form of discourse aiming to depict reality through original historical, photographic, cinematic, and video images, relying on testimonial memory, written documents, direct sound, and voice-over narration.[20] In this way, the documentary genre reconstructs reality from its constituent elements, not only basing its discourse on history but also adding new meaning to it through its own features (shot selection, camera angles, movement, framing, and editing). History is rewritten through multiple and diverse interactions between family and ofcial archives and between space and memory.[21]

The opening scene of Milicianas is not particularly communicative or explanatory: a pan across the shelves of an archive, interspersed with interviews with relatives of the protagonists. The camera lens slides out of focus over the photos but stops on the faces and the bodies of the photograph that becomes the starting point of this historical documentary and journalistic investigation. This investigation will bring together the pieces of this puzzle, the pieces of memory, that were forgotten and hidden from the relatives and descendants of the young women who knew nothing about the details of this story: their story.

I stop at the photograph taken before the execution of these fve women, standing in a row, aware of their fate: four of them look in diferent directions, their glances flled with sadness, resignation, and even apathy. The defant look of the Miliciana on the far left of the photograph stands out. It is a punctum, according to Barthes, or that which draws attention in an image, like a sting: it “is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”[22]

The identifcation of the Buxadé sisters, the letters sent by Daría and Mercedes to their families, and the testimony of their nephew Joan reveal their membership in the Female Militias, an organization that “not only sought to assign Catalan women to the rearguard, but also had a section dedicated exclusively to fghting on the front lines.”[23]

The photographs Joan shows to the flmmakers, which depict everyday events in the lives of the Buxadé sisters before they became Milicianas, demonstrate how the use and meanings of family albums have changed through history and allow us to refect on the later lives of these images that, on the one hand, uncover their afective dimension,[24] and on the other hand, prove to be of documentary value to the flmmakers.

The departure of the Battalion is portrayed in various photographs that include the women of the iconic photo, the starting point of the documentary. The picture published in Life magazine on November 23, 1936, a close-up of Mrs. García, the oldest of the fve Milicianas, stands out. It was taken by Hungarian scientist, writer, and activist Edith Bon, who traveled and documented diferent battlefelds. Bon went to Spain in 1936 with her friend Felicia Browne to take part in the International People’s Olympiad, an event held to protest the 1936 Olympics but canceled due to the outbreak of the civil war. Bon, a member of the English Communist Party, participated in establishing the Unifed Party of Catalonia and documented the action on several fronts in the war as an amateur photographer.[25] The training of these women was also portrayed by renowned photojournalists Gerda Taro and Robert Capa; their pictures can be found at the International Center of Photography in New York. As Susan Sontag explains, the Spanish Civil War was the frst war to be “covered” in the modern sense: by a corps of professional photographers at the lines of military engagement and in the towns under bombardment, whose work was immediately seen in newspapers and magazines in Spain and abroad.[26]

After confrming that the fve women who were shot were Milicianas, the flmmakers visit the National Archive of Catalonia in search for new clues regarding the identities of the two remaining women in the photo. At the archive, they fnd more than 19,000 documents pertaining to grants given by the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias to the families of the militia members as a kind of salary.[27] After months of searching in the archive, the flmmakers confrm the identity of María García Sanchis and identify two more women: Amalia Lobato Rosique and Teresa Bellera Cemeli, from the town of Roda de Isabena in the province of Huesca Aragón. It was in Roda de Isabena where Josefna Bellera, Teresa’s sister, and Angelita Ballerín, a childhood friend, confrmed that the young woman was a Miliciana. In the old, now uninhabited family home, the flmmakers fnd an old portfolio with letters that Teresa sent to her family after enlisting with the Republicans. “We didn’t know anything about Teresa until you came,” admitted Josefna, revealing how her family had “practiced” oblivion for over forty years.[28] This practice was the result of a specifc political determination to prevent the recovery of memory in the future. There is also another aspect of oblivion: silence. It is this enforced silence, like the one imposed by Franco’s dictatorship, that productions such as Milicianas seek to disrupt and transform into a source of living and meaningful memories.[29] Thus, memory and oblivion come together in a fragile balance regarding the changing interpretations of the past, which ultimately always respond to questions of the present and projections of the future.[30]

María García’s story reveals her coherence and commitment to the cause. The grant records reveal not only where she lived but also that she was married to Agustín Alfonso Castells and had a son, Florían, who also enlisted as a miliciano and died in the war. Descendants of the Paniagua family, who shared a home with María and her family in the town of Sabadell, remember that María used to read books: “she did nothing at home,” organized rallies, and knew a lot about politics. She and Agustín “were very revolutionary, very involved in politics,” recalls Josefa Villa Paniagua, daughter of María’s close friend.

The faces of the four identifed women match the names of the Milicianas recorded in the diary. This indicates that the ffth woman, who remains to be identifed, is none other than the author of the diary, the one looking defantly into the camera without fear or despair. However, after cross-referencing the information, the flmmakers confrm that the ffth woman in the photo is not Amalia Lobato Rosique, as they had thought. And another clue leads them to the family members of Ramona Soldevila Cirés, who believe they can identify her in the photo taken before her execution. Ramona was a correspondent for the newspaper La Vanguardia and was later hired by the City Council of Manresa. The documents found confrm her ideological commitment: “she defended the rights of workers against despotism,” was afliated with the Republican Left of Catalonia party, and was a member of the board of the women’s secretariat of the city. All these qualities and activities describe a personality matching the one expressed by the writer of the diary that the flmmakers found. However, this was debunked by an unexpected turn in the investigation, since Ramona Soldavilla’s name appears on the city council’s payroll until 1938. The identity of the ffth woman, the author of diary, is still unknown. However, the flmmakers’ research saved from oblivion hundreds of Milicianas who had been sent to Mallorca. They will no longer be part of the anonymous combatants murdered during the frst months of the war; they will have names and last names, photos of their past, and a clear place in family and collective memory. The fnal words of the documentary’s narrator are remarkably eloquent and underline that the work in the archives made it possible “to identify hundreds of women who were silenced and forgotten in the graves, a task that becomes even more diffcult as time passes.”

Conclusion

Milicianas is part of a group of documentaries that reconstruct a part of recent Spanish history. In my view, it complements the work of historians and highlights the importance of both archival documents (minutes, letters, articles, etc.) and audiovisual documents (photographs, documentary flms, and testimonial interviews). As part of the untold stories of the Spanish Civil War, the flm reconstructs the identities and names of women who were shot and buried in mass graves, unmarked and forgotten. It reveals the policies of “dismemory,” of not remembering, and of the diferent forms and functions of oblivion,[31] including conscious amnesia, enforced for political reasons. It also engages with the memory processes applied by the Spanish state over the years. During the transition, a period in the Spanish political system that began in 1975 after the death of Francisco Franco and ended in 1978 with the creation of the current Spanish Constitution, a pact of silence was reached regarding issues related to the civil war and the dictatorship. Therefore, this period is seen as being marked by social amnesia. At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, descendants of victims murdered during Franco’s regime began to seek concrete answers and formed a social movement outside of political parties that demanded reparations for victims and the adoption of memory policies. On December 26, 2007, the Historical Memory Law was passed, recognizing and expanding rights and establishing measures in favor of those who sufered persecution or violence during the civil war and dictatorship.[32]

Milicianas, as a cultural production, thus contributes to the formation of a historical memory that, based on the accounts of diferent witnesses—brothers, nephews, close friends—guarantees the continuous transmission of that memory in the future, referred to as postmemory by key theorists in this feld. Using this concept, Hirsch analyzes the transgenerational inheritance of memory and trauma in children of Shoah survivors. In this way, the photographs and stories that circulate within families, as well as the modes of relation between generations, can strongly connect grandparents, children, and grandchildren through time. Even if they are second-hand memories, the memories of the ancestors are transmitted to the descendants with such vivid emotion that they have the value of memories themselves. But since the connection with the past occurs indirectly, the distance must be bridged through imagination, projection, and creation. In this sense, the past can also be an oppressive burden for the children and even grandchildren of the victims, who feel so committed to the past of the parents that they run the risk of setting aside their own lives in favor of theirs.[33]

Milicianas is part of cultural memory: the memory that is no longer transmitted through the accounts of direct witnesses but rather through cultural recreations based on the preserved accounts of witnesses, which in turn ensure the continuous transmission of that memory into the future. And since the documentary is free to watch on the internet and is part of a larger project like the Virtual Museum of Women in War, the flm reinforces cultural memory, generating a series of temporal disjunctions that make it possible to reinterpret the past, articulate the latencies of memory, and challenge the hegemonic versions of history.[34] At the same time, the analysis of archival materials as well as the interviews with indirect witnesses, historians, and experts on the matter allow for metahistorical and metamemorial refection on the (re)construction of memory and historical “truth.”[35]

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Berger, Gonzalo. Milicianas: La historia olvidada de las combatientes antifascistas. Madrid: Arzalia Ediciones, 2022.

Bermúdez Briñez, Nilda. “El documental histórico: una propuesta para la reconstrucción audiovisual de la historia petrolera del Zulia.” Omnia 16, no. 2 (2010): 113–31.

Colmeiro, José F. Memoria histórica e identidad cultural. De la post-guerra a la posmodernidad. Barcelona: Anthropos, 2005.

Corcuera, Laura. “Las cinco rosas de Mallorca.” Diagonal, June 17, 2016. www. diagonalperiodico.net/culturas/30610-cinco-rosas-mallorca.html.

Estrada, Isabel M. El documental cinematográfco y televisivo contemporáneo: Memoria, sujeto y formación de la identidad democrática española. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013.

Floeck, Wilfried. “Representaciones escénicas de la Guerra Civil española y del franquismo.” In Trauma y memoria cultural. Hispanoamérica y España, edited by Roland Spiller, Kristen Mahlke, and Janett Reinstädler. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020.

Gutiérrez Escoda, Esther. “Las mujeres militares en la Guerra Civil española. Política, sociedad y Administración Militar de la II República (1936–1939).” PhD thesis, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 2022.

Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory. Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Hristova, Marije. “La lucha por la memoria histórica en España: más allá de la genealogía y de las generaciones.” Por la Paz 38 (2020): 1–8.

Huston, Shaoun. “Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War.” PopMatters, July 7, 2002, www.popmatters.com/into-the-fre-american-women-in-thespanish-civil-war-2002-2496232555.html.

Jelin, Elizabeth. Los trabajos de la memoria. Madrid: Siglo XXI Editores, 2001.

Joly, Maud. “Las violencias sexuadas de la Guerra Civil Española: Paradigma para una lectura cultural del conficto.” Historia Social 61 (2008): 89–107.

Jonas Aharoni, Gabriela. “Mika, mi Guerra de España: Ideology and Commitment.” In Armed Jews in the Americas, edited by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021.

Jonas Aharoni, Gabriela. “Women in the Civil War: Ideology, Compromise, and Courage.” Paper presented at the International Workshop “Untold Stories of the Spanish Civil War”, Freie Universität, Berlin, May 12–13, 2022.

Lines, Lisa. “Female Combatants in the Spanish Civil War: Milicianas on the Front Lines and in the Rearguard.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 10, no. 4 (2009): 168–87.

Mangini, Shirley. Recuerdos de la resistencia. La voz de las mujeres de la guerra civil Española. Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1997.

Nash, Mary. Rojas: las mujeres republicanas en la Guerra Civil española. Madrid: Taurus, 1999.

Nichols, Bill. La representación de la realidad. Cuestiones y conceptos sobre el documental. Barcelona: Paidós, 1997.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary, 1st ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Pla, Joan. “El conde Rossi (retrato de un fascista).” Memoria Civil 36 (1986). www. fdeus.com/memoria%20-%20rossi%20-%20pla.htm.

Porcar Orihuela, Juan Luis. “Políticas de Memoria en España.” Barataria, Revista Castellano-Manchega de Ciencias Sociales 20 (2015): 61–77.

Rabiger, Michael, and Courtney Hermann. Directing the Documentary, 7th ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2020.

Roncero Moreno, Fernando. “La visión de la mujer republicana en el cine documental de la Guerra Civil Española.” Quaderns 5 (2010): 85–92.

Saban, Karen. “Memorias colectivas y culturales. El trauma y sus representaciones.” In Trauma y memoria cultural. Hispanoamérica y España, edited by Roland Spiller, Kirsten Mahlke, and Janett Reinstadler. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020.

Seydel, Ute. “La constitución de la memoria cultural.” Acta Poética 35, no. 2 (2014): 187–214.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of the Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003.

Torricella, Andrea. “De viajes teórico-metodológicos y mapas. Bitácora de una travesía entre la noción de representación visual como refejo hacia la de práctica y su aplicación en un caso de estudio con fotografías familiares personales.” Empiria. Revista de Metodología de Ciencias Sociales 40 (2018): 41–64.

Veliz, Mariano. “Archivos, familias y espectros en el documental latinoamericano contemporáneo.” Culturales 8 (2020). https://doi.org/10.22234/recu.20200801. e453.

Waldman, Gilda M. “La ‘cultura de la memoria’: problemas y refexiones.” Política y Cultura 26 (2006): 11–34.

Filmography

Balló, Tania, and Jaum Miró, dir. Milicianas. Madrid: Nina Producciones, 2019.

Newman, Julia, dir. Into the Fire: American Women into the Spanish Civil War. Woodbury, NY: Exemplary Films, 2002.

Olviera, Javier, and Fito Pochat, dir. Mika, mi guerra de España. Buenos Aires: Motoneta Cine and INCAA, 2013.

Websites

Archivo Central de Cataluña. https://patrimoni.gencat.cat/es/coleccion/archivonacional-de-cataluna.

LibraryThing (online library catalog). www.librarything.com/author/boneedith

Memorias en segundo grado. Posmemorias de la Guerra Civil, el franquismo y la transición democrática en España. https://posmemoriadelfranquismo.wordpress. com/el-proyecto/.

Museo Virtual de la Mujer Combatiente. www.mujeresenguerra.com/.