Patronato: My mum was a 17-year-old free spirit in Franco’s Spain

Marina Freixa always knew there was something dark and unsaid in her family.

His mother grew up under Spain’s decades-long dictatorship that ended in 1975, but details of his childhood were unclear.

Then everything changed one Christmas ten years ago; When Marina was about 20 years old.

Around the table that winter evening, with a cloud of cigarette smoke hanging in the air and wine glasses empty, Marina’s mother, Mariona Roca Tort, began to speak.

“My parents reported me to the authorities,” Mariona told them. “They put me in juvenile hall when I was 17.”

Reformatories were institutions where girls and young women, such as single mothers, girls with boyfriends, and lesbians, who refused to comply with the Catholic values ​​of the Franco regime, were detained. Girls who were sexually assaulted were imprisoned, taking the blame for their own abuse. Orphans and abandoned girls may also find themselves living behind convent walls.

Marina and her cousins ​​were stunned.

They couldn’t understand that their grandparents were planning to have their own daughter imprisoned.

Mariona’s memory of telling this story to the younger members of her family is blurred, which she believes is a result of the psychiatric “treatment” she was forced to undergo in juvenile hall. However, Marina did not forget these statements and years later she would shoot a documentary telling her mother’s story.

Mariona is a survivor of the Patronato de Protección a la Mujer (Board for the Protection of Women). During the reign of dictator Francisco Franco, he ran a nationwide network of residential institutions run by religious organizations. It is not clear how many institutions were involved or how many girls were affected.

Thursday will mark the 50th anniversary of Franco’s death. Spain has since witnessed a revolution in women’s rights; But Patronato survivors are still waiting for answers and are now demanding an investigation.

Warning: This article contains content that some readers may find disturbing

Mariona, the eldest of nine siblings, describes her parents as right-wing and ultra-Catholic. They were so conservative that they didn’t even let Mariona wear trousers.

But when he turned 16 in 1968, a new world emerged.

Mariona was teaching children during the day and preparing for university in the evening classes. There, he says, he met people he had never met before: unionists, leftists and anti-Franco activists. It was the year of global protests and mass demands for civil rights against authoritarianism and the Vietnam War. The spirit of rebellion was contagious.

Franco had been in power for thirty years. Political parties were banned, censorship was universal, and young people wanted change. Soon Mariona joined her new friends in “raids”: several of them were blocking the street, throwing Molotov cocktails, distributing leaflets and scattering in all directions when the police arrived.

On May 1, 1969, one of Mariona’s friends was arrested at a demonstration in Barcelona. There was a risk that the prisoner would give his name to the police; so Mariona couldn’t go home in case they came looking for her. That night he stayed at an activist friend’s house.

When Mariona returned home the next day, she was in big trouble. His family was furious and began to take much more control over his life.

“For them it was a scandal, a stain on the family,” he says. “They didn’t let me go after that.”

At the end of that summer, Mariona decided to leave home and went to the holiday island of Menorca with some college friends and left a note for her family.

They immediately reported her to the authorities as an underage runaway, and Mariona was arrested as she was about to board a boat to return to Barcelona.

His family met him in the port of Barcelona.

They didn’t take him home. Instead they took him to a monastery. Mariona was given no explanation; he remembers only his parents’ anger.

Days later, he flew to Madrid with his father. There he was taken to another convent, part of the Patronato system directly under the Spanish Ministry of Justice.

She and the other detained women were categorized and separated.

Mariona says she was staying on the first floor, which was reserved for “rebels who were considered fallen women.”

Patronato had the authority to detain any woman under the age of 25 who did not comply with the rules. They were not criminals; they were women in need of “re-education”. But Mariona never learned the stories of the others she was imprisoned with.

“They wouldn’t let us talk. It’s pretty incredible,” he says. “And you wonder how they did it?”

Internees were allowed only simple greetings with each other; it was a form of control and a way to prevent “bad” girls from influencing others.

“What you couldn’t do was actually get to know another girl,” Mariona says. “Because then they will separate you; they will send one of you to another dormitory or even to another institution.”

He thinks there are about 100 trainees at the monastery. 20 people were sleeping in a room with a locked door and a nun at one end. The daily routine was tiring; prayers, mass, cleaning the monastery and then spending hours in a workshop sewing clothes for local retailers. While the girls were sewing, a nun was reading a book out loud so that no one would talk.

“There was brainwashing,” Mariona recalls. “So you would realize that you had behaved very badly. Then when you realized that, you would ask for forgiveness and confess.”

Mariona never confessed.

About four months later he was allowed to return home to Barcelona for Christmas, but was not allowed to go out alone. Somehow – Mariona doesn’t remember how – she managed to escape, but her escape was short-lived. Within a few hours he was loaded into a car with his father and uncle and driven back to Madrid.

“We returned to the monastery at dusk,” he recalls. “I refused to go in. They pulled me up the stairs and gave me a sedative to get me in.”

Other young women inside the convent had been warned not to speak to her, the rebellious girl who had dared to escape. He became intensely lonely and eventually began refusing to eat.

His dramatic weight loss resulted in him being admitted to a psychiatric clinic. There, he says, he was given two sessions of electric shock therapy and then a treatment called “insulin coma therapy” was applied.

Mariona says she was injected with insulin to induce profound hypoglycemia, a coma-like state caused by low blood sugar. It was believed that this could reduce psychotic or schizophrenic symptoms and somehow “reset” the patient’s brain.

This was a “therapy” that was stopped in many countries for a simple reason: it could be fatal.

Mariona was given an insulin injection in the morning. Later, he would be taken out of his coma and given food. He started to shut down mentally.

“I was getting more and more confused every day. I started saying things like, ‘I hurt my parents,'” she says.

“I entered into this process of surrender and acceptance.”

Mariona believes that the forced intravenous insulin “treatment” has irreparably damaged her memory. Suspecting that this was causing him to forget things, he started keeping a diary. More than fifty years later, this faded paper document from 1971 would inform Marina’s documentary about her mother’s experience.

Doctors believed that the “treatment” would help Mariona gain weight, but this did not happen.

“One day the psychiatrist decided it would be better to tie me to the bed until I could eat.”

Mariona’s despair has become so unbearable that she says she is considering taking her own life. The psychiatrist then gave him a target weight of 40 kg (6.4 lb). They promised that if he achieved this, he would be discharged from the clinic.

Mariona did it. In 1972, after gaining some strength, he returned to Barcelona.

He was now 20 years old and swore he would never live with his family again.

These were the final years of Franco’s dictatorship before his death in 1975. Mariona moved from job to job and eventually started her career as a TV director. He had children of his own, but his relationship with his parents remained cold.

At one point, Mariona asked her mother why she had been sent to Patronato. His mother simply said, “We made a mistake.”

Mariona’s father is now in his 90s.

“We suffered a lot too,” he said when asked about his family’s decision to confine him to Madrid.

For Marina, learning more about her mother’s story complicated her relationship with her grandfather.

“I can’t force myself to love someone who caused so much pain and treated my mother so badly.”

The short documentary Marina made about her mother’s Patronato experience is called Els Buits – Catalan for “the place” and refers to the gaps in Mariona’s memory. The film won awards in Spain and was nominated for the prestigious Goya Award.

Fifty years after Franco’s death, the film contributed to growing calls for detained women to be formally recognized under the law as victims of the Spanish dictatorship. Spain’s Minister of Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, said his government was open to examining the situation of Patronato survivors.

Meanwhile, Marina and Mariona are touring with the film, taking it to community screenings.

“Women come and tell their stories; it’s like a gateway to something unknown, and it’s very powerful,” Marina says. “People think that what happened in their own homes was an isolated incident. What we are trying to say is that this history was not individual, it was systematic.”

His mother Mariona sometimes still doubts his memory.

But, he says, “seeing it all reflected in the film gives it the weight of reality.”