Manuel Girona Rubio: A militiawoman in the Iron Column, María "La Jabalina".
Manuel Girona has written an emblematic study of the victor’s merciless and arbitrarily repressive judicial system, which he illustrates with documentary evidence from María Pérez Lacruz’s case, a young woman from Port de Sagunto.
María was 19 years old when the war started. Priror to this, she had contributed to the family income by cleaning as a housemaid and selling vegetables in the town square. The family came from Teruel’s community of Jabaloyas, hence the diminutive - "jabalinas", a nickname given to the women. In the first part of the book, Girona recounts and describes the economic conditions for modest families, as well as the working-class, joyful and life affirming culture – in which political parties and unions played an important part - that María Pérez Lacruz breathed from her childhood. It is not a surprise that she joined the FIJL (Iberian Federation of Free Libertarians), whose offices were next to her home, and that, subsequently, in 1936, she joined the Iron Column as a nurse on the Teruel front. She stayed there for 10 days before being wounded in Puerto Escandón, where her experience of the military ended. After 4 months recovering from an injured leg in the Provincial Hospital of Valencia, she returned to Port de Sagunto to work in the Mediterranean Iron and Steel Company, which had become the main arms factory for the Republic. Shortly afterwards, she moved with her father to Cieza, where a part of the production had been transferred because Sagunto was being continuously bombarded. When the Republic was defeated, she returned to Port de Sagunto where she suffered an unexpected and unfair ordeal.
Interrogated on two occasions, castigated and paraded around the town on 23rd of April 1939 with her head shaved, she paid dearly for her status as a woman at the margins of the nation’s Catholic model, when she refused to certify a declaration that she had signed under duress. She was sent to the prisons in Sagunto and later, to Santa Clara, pregnant with a child that she gave birth to on 9th of January 1940, and who was taken from her at birth.
To the case against her was added a statement - perhaps obtained under torture or with the hope of obtaining benefits during incarceration - of a prisoner who had been at the Teruel front and who accused her of unimaginable crimes, without supplying any further evidence other than his own testimony. The events attributed to her had taken place during the time she was hospitalized, according to Manuel Girona. During the trial, the Court ignored two testimonies provided by right-wing people that were favorable to her defense, in addition to a certificate issued by Valencia’s Provincial Hospital and signed by the head of Traumatology. She was executed by firing squad at Paterna on 8th August 1942, along with six other men. Her mother arrived at the cemetery in time to hear the volley of gunfire that ended her daughter's life and was able to bury her in an individual grave (pit 167). Manuel Girona relates that a short time later, her little sister Manolita died, and that the funeral was attended by many people from Port de Sagunto that came to mourn her, but also to mourn María, given that the dictatorship forbade any demonstration of mourning for people that had been executed.
This rigorous biography, with numerous contributions relating to María Pérez Lacruz "la Jabalina" – who was apparently the last woman shot by firing squad during Franco’s regime – inspired the creation of several different artistic works: a play by the Hungarian Company, created and performed by Lola López: María La Jabalina; a novel by Rosana Corral Márquez: If you forget me; a graphic novel by Cristina Durán and Miguel Ángel Giner María: la Jabalina, and a mural by Sucri and Furyo in the working class quarter of Sagunto.
Pedro Luis Alonso
Translation by Luis Barra