The MACMA Youth Network continues with the regional historical memory project, started in 2022, aimed at ESO students from the Public Secondary Schools of the Marina Alta.
This project was born from the different youth departments of the 32 municipalities and 3 EATIMs that make up the MACMA Youth Network, in addition to close collaboration with the different History departments of the public secondary schools in the Marina Alta.
In the first edition, several documentaries were screened about the Republic in the Valencian territory and the experiences of emigrants to the United States during the Civil War.
The Xarxa Jove has offered each History department the screening of one of these documentaries and a subsequent discussion with the author. The documentaries selected for this second edition are:
'El Terrer. A silent village' (2012)
Between 1939 and 1956, Franco's regime shot more than 2.000 Republicans in Paterna. These were years of terror, silence, arbitrariness and the planned and systematic elimination of any trace of progress. The documentary portrays the collective effort of the people of Paterna to recover the memory and dignity of those who died defending democracy, shown from the point of view of the silenced protagonists and those voices condemned to oblivion.
'Women of November. The clandestine graves of Francoism' (2015)
Paterna is the second place in Spain with the most people shot during Franco's regime. The cemetery is full of clandestine graves with more than 2.300 Republicans from all over the State, according to the research of Professor Vicent Gabarda. This documentary tells the story of Josefa Celda, who is looking for the grave where her father, a farmer from Esquerra Republicana, is buried. But it is also the story of the 'women in black', the mothers, wives and daughters who, every November 1, All Saints' Day, went to the cemetery from 1939 onwards to pay tribute to their relatives, sometimes at risk to their lives. Finally, the debate is raised about the convenience of emptying the Francoist graves or turning them into public spaces of remembrance and vindication.
'The seeds that are growing. Pit 22' (2019)
This documentary offers a snapshot of the current state of the exhumations that are being carried out thanks to the Valencia Provincial Council, one of the institutions that supports the recovery of historical memory through a line of subsidies to associations of relatives so that they can recover the remains of their loved ones. The documentary follows the entire process of investigation and exhumation of mass grave number 22 in the Paterna cemetery, carried out by the scientific association Arqueoantro, which has managed to recover 33 of the 39 bodies that were supposed to be buried in this mass grave.
'The War of Always', the third documentary about Valencians in New York
This documentary tells how the emigrants who were still in America and those who had already returned experienced the Republic, the war and the post-war period. The research work carried out by InfoTV has brought to light completely unprecedented facts. One of them is the systematic presence, in most of the town halls of the towns studied, of mayors and councillors who returned from the United States and were elected in the municipal elections called by the Republic. Upon returning from there, they felt the impulse to apply here the improvements in life that they had seen and implemented reforms that affected education, work, taxes... But the war destroyed so many good intentions and in the post-war period they paid a high price for this desire for regeneration.
These projections will allow the corresponding departments to work transversally on this forgotten stage of history, with the aim of strengthening the critical thinking of our youth.
This project, a pioneer in the Marina Alta, aims to bring to the table historical facts that occurred during the Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship, many of them marked by the systematic execution of human rights violations, with the impunity that allows the accumulation of political and military power in the same hands, which relegated the possibility of a trial or a fair trial to nothing.
The historical memory law and the various projects in this line seek to transmit, no longer the version of the victorious side, but to get closer to the reality of the defeated side, through the eyes of those who suffered the repression of the victors in the armed conflict, and who until recently were not part of the official discourse of the most recent part of our contemporary history.
A fundamental project that, beyond working on a specific historical period, allows analysis from different perspectives in order to encourage the critical spirit of students.
