The City Council of La Laguna will carry out a research project that aims to document various aspects that occurred in the Civil War and the subsequent Franco dictatorship in the municipality, especially related to the repression of women and the places linked to this time.
The development of the project has received a grant of 10,000 euros from the Cabildo de Tenerife, as a result of the proposal presented by the Department of Historical Heritage.
The mayor, Luis Yeray Gutiérrez, highlighted in a statement that this research project will allow “advancing in the knowledge of the darkest chapters of our recent past, as the first step in a process of moral reparation with the people who unjustly suffered repression in our town”.
“This is an act of justice that as a public administration we are obliged to promote and make known among the younger generations,” says the mayor.
The Councilor for Historical Heritage, Elvira Jorge, abounds that this project “will make it possible to make the truth known and thus begin to contribute to restoring the dignity that was stolen from the victims when they inflicted violence, economic and social repression…” .
The project will also provide information on the most significant places related to local historical memory, added the councilor.
The historian responsible for this research project is the doctor in Contemporary History Luana Studer Villazán who, according to his career in the study of the Franco period in the Canary Islands, will analyze archival, bibliographic, photographic and oral sources to carry out this work on history from La Laguna.
The project will result in two publications. The first of these will be a monographic study on the violence exerted on women by the rebels during the Civil War and the subsequent military dictatorship.
“It is essential, and it is a right of all citizens, to know what happened to the women who in our municipality were also retaliated against, both during the Civil War and in the aftermath of the Franco dictatorship,” says the historian.
Special emphasis will be placed on women belonging to the teaching staff of teachers, of whom it is initially known that “at least twenty of them could be purged in La Laguna,” says Studer.
A second publication will refer to the geographical and patrimonial places of the municipality linked to the Second Republic, the Civil War and the Franco regime.
The Councilor for Historical Heritage maintains that “given the small number of publications dedicated to this period, this research work has a clear informative vocation: it will be a didactic resource to work with educational centers; It will allow visitors interested in tourism of a historical nature to be informed”. And it will inform the citizens of La Laguna in general, “in many cases unaware of the contemporary past of the municipality.”
“It is essential to bring to light what happened so that events such as those that are going to be investigated never happen again,” says Elvira Jorge.
