Linda Pressly and
Esperanza Escribano,Barcelona
Marina Freixa always knew there was something dark and unspoken about her family.
Her mother had grown up under Spain’s decades-long dictatorship, which ended in 1975, but the details of her childhood were hazy.
Then everything changed one Christmas a decade ago – when Marina was about 20.
That winter’s evening around the table, with a cloud of cigarette smoke suspended in the air and wine glasses drained, Marina’s mother, Mariona Roca Tort, began to speak.
“My parents reported me to the authorities,” Mariona told them. “They put me in a reformatory when I was 17.”
Reformatories were institutions where girls and young women who refused to conform to the Franco regime’s Catholic values were detained – single mothers, girls with boyfriends, lesbians. Girls who’d been sexually assaulted were incarcerated, assuming the blame for their own abuse. Orphans and abandoned girls might also find themselves living behind convent walls.
Marina and her cousins were stunned.
They couldn’t comprehend that their grandparents had arranged to have their own daughter locked up.
Mariona’s memory of telling this story to the youngsters in her family is blurred, she believes as a result of the psychiatric “treatment” she was forced to undergo at the reformatory. But Marina didn’t forget the revelations, and years later, she would make a documentary telling her mother’s story.
Mariona is a survivor of the Patronato de Protección a la Mujer – the Women’s Protection Board. Under dictator Francisco Franco, it oversaw a nationwide network of residential institutions managed by religious organisations. There’s no definitive information about how many institutions were involved or how many girls were affected.
Thursday will mark 50 years since Franco’s death. Spain has since seen a revolution in women’s rights – but survivors of the Patronato are still waiting for answers and are now demanding an inquiry.
Warning: This article contains content that some readers might find distressing
Mariona, the oldest of nine siblings, describes her parents as right-wing and ultra-Catholic. They were so conservative they wouldn’t even let Mariona wear trousers.
But in 1968, when she turned 16, a new world unfolded.
Mariona was tutoring children during the day, and preparing for university at evening classes. There, she says, she met people she’d never encountered before – trade unionists, left-wingers and anti-Franco activists. It was the year of global protests against authoritarianism and the Vietnam War, with mass demands for civil rights. The spirit of revolt was infectious.
Franco had been in power for three decades. Political parties were banned, censorship was universal and young people wanted change. Soon, Mariona joined her new friends on “raids”: a few of them would block off a street, throw Molotov cocktails, hand out leaflets, and when the police turned up, scatter in every direction.
On May Day 1969, one of Mariona’s friends was arrested at a demonstration in Barcelona. There was a risk the detainee would give names to the police – so Mariona couldn’t go home, in case they came looking for her. That night she stayed in the flat of a fellow activist.
Returning home the next day, Mariona was in deep trouble. Her parents were furious, and began to exert far more control over her life.
“For them, it was a scandal, a stain on the family,” she says. “After that, they wouldn’t let me out.”
By the end of that summer, Mariona had resolved to leave home, and travelled to the holiday island of Menorca with some college friends, leaving her parents a note.
They immediately reported her as an underage runaway to the authorities, and the moment Mariona was about to board a boat back to Barcelona, she was arrested.
At the port in Barcelona her parents met her.
They didn’t take her home. Instead, they took her to a convent. Mariona wasn’t given any explanation – she only remembers her parents’ rage.
Days later she flew to Madrid with her father. There, she was driven directly to another convent, part of the Patronato system, under Spain’s Ministry of Justice.
She and the other interned women were categorised and segregated.
Mariona says she ended up on the first floor – reserved for “the rebellious ones – the ones they considered fallen women”.
The Patronato had the power to detain any non-conforming woman under 25. They weren’t criminals – they were females deemed in need of “re-education”. But Mariona never learned the stories of the others she was confined with.
“They didn’t let us talk. It’s quite incredible,” she says. “And you wonder, how did they manage it?”
The internees were only allowed to exchange simple greetings with each other – a form of control, and a way of preventing “bad” girls influencing others.
“What you couldn’t do was really get to know another girl,” says Mariona. “Because then they’d separate you – send one of you to a different dormitory, or even to another institution.”
She thinks there were around 100 internees at the convent. They slept 20 to a room, with a nun at one end, and the door locked. The daily routine was gruelling – prayers, Mass, cleaning the convent, and then hours in a workshop making clothes for local retailers. While the girls sewed, a nun read aloud so that no-one talked.
“There was indoctrination,” recalls Mariona. “So that you should understand you’d behaved very badly. Then once you realised this, you’d ask for forgiveness and confess.”
Mariona never confessed.
After around four months, she was allowed to return home to Barcelona for Christmas, but wasn’t permitted to go out alone. Somehow – and Mariona doesn’t remember how – she managed to escape, but her escape was short lived. Within hours she was bundled into a car with her father and an uncle, and driven back to Madrid.
“We arrived back at the convent at dusk,” she recalls. “I refused to go in. They pulled me up the stairs and gave me a sedative to get me inside.”
Inside the convent, the other young women were warned against talking to her – the rebel girl who had the nerve to try to run away. She grew intensely lonely, and eventually began refusing food.
Dramatic weight loss resulted in her admission to a psychiatric clinic. There, she says she was given two sessions of electric shock treatment, followed by what was called “insulin coma therapy”.
Mariona says she was injected with insulin to induce deep hypoglycemia – a coma-like state caused by low blood sugar. It was believed this could reduce psychotic or schizophrenic symptoms, and somehow “re-set” a patient’s brain.
It was a “therapy” that was being discontinued in many countries for one simple reason: it could be lethal.
Mariona received an insulin injection in the mornings. Later she’d be brought out of the coma and made to eat. Mentally, she began to shut down.
“Everyday, I was more dazed. I started saying things like, ‘I hurt my parents,'” she says.
“I entered this process of submission and acceptance.”
Mariona believes the forced, intravenous “treatment” with insulin irreparably damaged her memory. Suspecting it was causing her to forget things, she began keeping a diary. More than five decades later, this faded, paper document from 1971 would inform Marina’s documentary about her mother’s experience.
Doctors believed the “treatment” would help Mariona gain weight – but that wasn’t happening.
“One day, the psychiatrist decided it was better to try tying me to the bed until I ate.”
Mariona’s despair became so unbearable, she says she thought about taking her own life. Then the psychiatrist gave her a target weight of 40kg (6st 4lb). If she achieved that, they promised she’d be released from the clinic.
Mariona succeeded. In 1972, once she’d grown a little stronger, she returned to Barcelona.
Now aged 20, she vowed to never live with her parents again.
These were the final years of Franco’s dictatorship before his death in 1975. Mariona moved from job to job, eventually forging a career as a TV director. She had children of her own, but her relationship with her parents remained cool.
At some point, Mariona asked her mother why she’d been sent to the Patronato. Her mother only said: “We made a mistake.”
Mariona’s father is in his 90s now.
“We suffered a lot too,” he told her when she asked him about the family decision to have her locked up in Madrid.
For Marina, learning more about her mother’s story has complicated her relationship with her grandfather.
“I can’t force myself to love someone who’s caused so much pain – who treated my mother very badly.”
The short documentary Marina produced about her mother’s experience of the Patronato is called Els Buits – Catalan for “the spaces” – a reference to the blanks in Mariona’s memory. The film has won prizes in Spain, and was nominated for a prestigious Goya Award.
Fifty years after the death of Franco, the film has contributed to a groundswell of calls for the interned women to be formally recognised under the law as victims of Spain’s dictatorship. Spain’s Minister for Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, said his government was open to looking at the case of the Patronato survivors.
Meanwhile, Marina and Mariona are on tour with the film, taking it to community screenings.
“Women come and tell their stories – it’s like a door opened to something unknown, and that’s very powerful,” says Marina. “People think what happened in their own home was an isolated incident. We try to say: this history isn’t individual, it was systematic.”
Her mother Mariona still doubts her memory sometimes.
But, she says, “seeing it all reflected in the film, that gives it the weight of truth.”
