{"id":2782,"date":"2010-05-27T12:14:38","date_gmt":"2010-05-27T19:14:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=2782"},"modified":"2010-05-27T12:14:38","modified_gmt":"2010-05-27T19:14:38","slug":"peering-into-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=2782","title":{"rendered":"Peering into the past"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"june
Modesta Marin Salto (left) and Maria Luisa Jerez Marin (right), grandmother and mother of Marimar Huguet-Jerez. No photo of Professor Huguet-Jerez\u2019s grandfather exists. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was a bright February morning in Fuente el Saz, a tiny Spanish town just outside Madrid, and Marimar Huguet-Jerez <\/strong>was searching for Calle de la Plaza 3. She\u2019d already found both locations of the local hardware store her grandfather had worked for (now a bar and a Japanese restaurant), but she hoped that visiting his childhood home might provide some yet-undiscovered clue in the mystery she\u2019d been trying to solve for nearly a year now\u2014the mystery of her grandfather\u2019s identity and disappearance.<\/p>\n

She spotted an old man and, aware that small-town elders can be as useful as census records, asked him about the address. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t exist,\u201d he said. \u201cBut only because they changed its name to Martina Garc\u00eda Street. Who are you looking for, anyway?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, a relative,\u201d Huguet-Jerez said, offering up the name but little else.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, yes, of course,\u201d the man said. \u201cI grew up with his sons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jackpot.<\/p>\n

Reconstructing the Past<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

First, a quick review, just in case you were sleeping on the Quad that day of world history class. From 1936\u201339, a bloody civil war raged in Spain between the newly established Frente Popular Republican government (made up of various left-wing political organizations) and the conservative Nationalists, who favored a more militaristic, fascist system and received support from Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussilini. An estimated half-million lives were lost before the Nationalists proved victorious, transforming Spain\u2019s government into a dictatorship led by General Francisco Franco.<\/p>\n

\"huguet-jerez
Professor Marimar Huguet-Jerez, PhD<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Born and raised in 1970s-Madrid, Huguet-Jerez, now an assistant professor of Spanish at The College of New Jersey, always wondered how such a brutal chapter of her country\u2019s history could have faded from national consciousness so quickly. \u201cThe Spanish Civil War is a topic that has always called my attention,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was always very strange to me that a terrible war had taken place in a country that, on the surface, seemed so far away and unaware of it\u2026. If you ask an average Spanish citizen about the war, many would have no clue what it was about [or] why it happened.\u201d This post-war amnesia was so widespread that there\u2019s even a term for it: pacto de olvido (\u201cpact of forgetting\u201d). \u201cThe fear of awakening the violence and horrors of the Civil War and the resulting dictatorship made people on both sides of the political spectrum want to simply forget the past and, with time, ignore the shameful atrocities committed on the innocent victims of the war,\u201d Huguet-Jerez says, \u201cbut you cannot simply forget the past; you have to confront the ghosts of the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her case, that meant confronting a family ghost: that of her grandfather, who disappeared during the war, possibly one of the thousands of civilians killed in the carnage. The little she knew about him\u2014he was named Arturo Mart\u00edn and worked as a doctor in Madrid\u2014was based only on family rumors. Those rumors could be neither confirmed nor denied by Marimar\u2019s grandmother, who had never married him and passed away in 1955; nor by her mother, who was born around the time he died.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you asked my mother who her father was, she had no idea,\u201d says Huguet-Jerez, the youngest of four children. \u201cLooking at my sons, I sometimes thought, \u2018These children exist because of a man who no one knows, a person who is blank in everyone\u2019s mind.\u2019 I\u2019ve been the only person in my family who\u2019s ever shown an interest in my grandfather\u2019s story, but [not knowing] always bothered me, so I decided I was going to do something about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Armed with only wisps of information \u2014and uncertain how true any of them were\u2014she took a yearlong sabbatical from the classroom and set out to uncover her grandfather\u2019s identity and the story behind his disappearance. In the process, she visited medical archives, historical archives, medical schools, and prisons; spent countless hours reading and researching; and fully immersed herself in the history of the war itself, all for the purpose of this markedly personal history lesson.<\/p>\n

Obstacles, breakthroughs, and finding the context <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"streets
Above left: a photo of 3 Costanilla de San Pedro Street in downtown Madrid, taken sometime during the Spanish Civil War. This location is where Huguet-Jerez\u2019s grandfather worked at a hardware store. Above right: the same street seen in a current photo.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Huguet-Jerez describes the literature of the civil war period as \u201cvery rich,\u201d and considering she earned a Master\u2019s and PhD in Spanish literature, she would know. Indeed, well-known writers including Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell wrote about and supported the Republican cause, resulting in classics like For Whom the Bell Tolls <\/em>and Homage to Catalonia<\/em>. As part of her research process, and to help place her grandfather\u2019s story in context, Huguet-Jerez read numerous books from and about the war, and even wrote her own short stories about it. To dive still further into the time of her grandfather\u2019s disappearance, she interviewed several survivors from the war, many of whom now live in Alcorc\u00f3n, Spain, her hometown. (She plans to publish those interviews in some form\u2014possibly as short stories, possibly as a project for the Alcorc\u00f3n City Hall.)<\/p>\n

The survivors shared gripping accounts of their own wartime experiences, stories of parents executed and neighbors captured, but when it came to her grandfather\u2019s tale, Huguet-Jerez had only the basics: his name, Arturo Mart\u00edn. It may sound like helpful information to have, but Spaniards have two last names\u2014the first from their father, the second from their mother\u2014and even more confounding, finding a Mart\u00edn in Spain is like finding a Smith or a Jones in the United States.<\/p>\n

Google searches and archival records became her trusted research assistants, and last summer, at the beginning of her sabbatical year, Huguet-Jerez had a breakthrough while on a trip to Spain. Knowing that her grandmother, Modesta, had become pregnant during the war and left Madrid for Alicante, Huguet-Jerez contacted an archive that stored data about an old Alicante facility for single mothers. There, she uncovered a document that listed Arturo Mart\u00edn and Modesta Mar\u00edn as the parents of her mother, Mar\u00eda Luisa Mart\u00edn Mar\u00edn. \u201cThat was my first useful clue,\u201d she remembers. \u201cMy mother, Mar\u00eda Luisa Jerez Mar\u00edn, had never seen her name written anywhere as Mar\u00eda Luisa Mart\u00edn Mar\u00edn. I felt just like a detective.\u201d<\/p>\n

While it didn\u2019t include her grandfather\u2019s second last name, the paper did mention that a copy of Mar\u00eda Luisa\u2019s birth certificate was on file with the city\u2019s civil registry. Detective Huguet-Jerez tracked it down this past February, and finally had the first piece to her family puzzle: Arturo Mart\u00edn Lopez. Her grandfather\u2019s full name.<\/p>\n

The birth certificate also listed Arturo\u2019s age, hometown, parents, and profession. (It turned out he was a hardware store clerk, not a doctor, as the family rumor had said.) From there, Huguet-Jerez logged on to the digital archives of a conservative Spanish newspaper and found an obituary that stated her grandfather and a handful of other hardware store employees had been assassinated by the \u201cred herds\u201d in October of 1936. (Her mother was born eight months later in June 1937.) \u201cI still don\u2019t know why they were killed,\u201d she says. \u201cI imagine that maybe it was a bomb, but the only bombings in Madrid were by the [Nationalist] Fascists. If that\u2019s true, the paper was false and trying to blame the Republicans for his death.\u201d (She\u2019s found a few old photos of the street that seem to further this bombing theory.)<\/p>\n

Hoping Arturo\u2019s death certificate might offer more specifics, she requested a copy, which arrived in mid-February. That document said that he was \u201cassassinated by the Marxist herds.\u201d Though the statement appeared to reinforce the newspaper article, it\u2019s likely one may have informed the other, and so the big question mark left in Huguet-Jerez\u2019 quest is her grandfather\u2019s political affiliation\u2014something she may never be able to confirm. Still, the certificate contained something equally search-altering: mention of a wife and two children Arturo had left behind\u2014none of whom were Huguet-Jerez\u2019 mother or grandmother.<\/p>\n

Translating the past into the present<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"street
Street name markers from different eras.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So where does she go next? Already, Huguet-Jerez has begun to translate her grandfather\u2019s life story into a book\u2014a historical novel set during the war. \u201cI think real history comes from the people,\u201d she says. \u201cIf it gets published, it would be one more ingredient, adding his personal story to the larger history. Sometimes, you can learn more from listening to someone\u2019s story than you could from a textbook.\u201d<\/p>\n

And thanks to her conversation in February with the elderly man from Fuente el Saz, Huguet-Jerez has confirmed the existence of some long-lost relatives: her grandfather\u2019s two sons mentioned in the death certificate, both of whom are in their 80s now. \u201cI don\u2019t know how willing they\u2019re going to be to meet some family all of a sudden,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m very realistic about it. I wish that they want to meet us, but I have to also accept that maybe they don\u2019t want to deal with it.\u201d Still, she\u2019ll give it a try when she returns to Spain this summer.<\/p>\n

She also plans to continue sharing her grandfather\u2019s story with her students\u2014something she\u2019s always done in the civil war\u2013era literature classes she teaches. \u201cThe minute you mingle a personal story with the history the students are learning about, it makes the class so much more interesting and real,\u201d she says. Thanks to her year of research, the story she\u2019ll be able to share this fall \u201cwill be more complete and documented now; and hopefully I will have the last piece of the puzzle with me by then.\u201d<\/p>\n

While she\u2019d secretly hoped to discover that her grandfather was a heroic Republican freedom-fighter, Huguet-Jerez realizes that she may never know his political affiliation or the reason he was killed. \u201cEven if I never find out what truly happened to him, or even if I find out that he was involved with a political side I was not expecting him to be on, the truth of the matter is that his death added to the unfortunate list of ill-fated people who lost their lives in a war that should have never started,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd that is what saddens me the most.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Haunted by the ghost of her grandfather, who vanished over 70 years ago, Professor Marimar Huguet-Jerez is on a quest to solve a personal\u00a0history mystery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":2785,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-june-2010"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}