Luisa Martín Rojo

My name is Luisa Martín Rojo. I am a professor of Sociolinguistics at the Autonomous University of Madrid and the granddaughter of Gonzalo Martín Andérica. I am trying to piece together his revolutionary life and the subsequent repression, despite the many gaps and silences within the family.

He was the head of the Post and Telegraph Office in Barruelo de Santullán, an important mining centre in northern Palencia. He was also elected Justice of the Peace there and became a leader of the Casa del Pueblo, the local Socialist community centre.

He was imprisoned for his involvement in the Asturian Revolution, due to a confusing incident involving a telegram through which he claimed to have averted a massacre by reporting that peace had been restored to the town, thereby stopping the repressive forces from arriving. He apparently withdrew from political life after his release. Following the Popular Front's victory in 1936, he was appointed head of the Post and Telegraph Office in Palencia, a position he held when the military coup occurred. It seems that, in the days following the coup, he did not report for work.

Following the rebels' victory, he was dismissed, demoted, and transferred first to San Sebastián, and then to Oropesa, where he worked as a telegraph operator. It was there that he was caught up in a vendetta, linked to a ruling he had issued as Justice of the Peace, in which he ordered an electric company to pay compensation for an accident that had cost a young man his life. He was then tried by a summary court martial for “high treason”, or what was then considered the same offence, due to his republican ideology and political commitment. The parish priest of Barruelo denounced him himself, stating that he was being tried for “always having been a Marxist at heart and a fervent propagandist of revolutionary ideas”.

He was transferred to the Palencia prison to be tried. As the poet Miguel Hernández described in his letters, this was a particularly harsh place. Sick prisoners lay crowded on the floor of a facility holding far more inmates than it could sustain. They received neither proper food nor clothing, and survived thanks to the provisions brought by their families. These families also shared with those who had no one to care for them, such as Hernández himself.

This is why I chose to display the bread bag kept by his daughter, my aunt, which the family used to carry food to the prison. My grandfather could not endure such inhumane conditions and died before his summary court-martial, where he was accused of crimes including being 'a declared enemy of the Glorious National Movement, and an extremely dangerous subject due to his culture, sagacity, and harmful intentions'.

His death certificate erased all traces of his identity, recording only his first surname, Martín. No profession, no known address, and no relatives were mentioned. The cause of death was recorded as pulmonary emphysema. He was buried beside the prison in the sinister La Carcavilla cemetery, which has not yet been fully exhumed.

His brother, who was a prison chaplain, had to beg and plead for the death certificate to be amended to include his full name, marital status and the existence of his three orphaned children — an indispensable requirement for the family to receive a pension.