Juan Sacristán Ruiz Funes

I am Juan Sacristán Ruiz Funes, son and grandson of Republican exiles in Mexico. (I have written this in collaboration with Javier Elorriaga Berdegué.) My parents are José Sacristán Colás and Carmen Ruiz Funes Montesinos. He, his father and siblings, who were on the losing side in the civil war  caused by the fascist military uprising, left Spain and, along with tens of thousands of other families, crossing from Catalonia into France, into exile. 

There, when they thought that, having left behind the Spanish border, their home, their relatives, their friends, their entire life, they had also left behind the nightmare of the war, persecution, and hunger. However, they found another chapter of this nightmare waiting for them : the  “refugee camps” where the French government interned them. I put the term in quotation marks because they were really concentration camps, or even worse : large beaches  where they were corralled without any more belongings than their humanity, without any infrastructure to protect them from the elements : the cold wind off the sea, or the blazing sun ; the fine sand that got into the eyes, the ears, the nose, into the rags they wore for clothes. Without a roof, water or food, with Senegalese mercenaries and French soldiers on the other side of the wire praying to to their God that a Spaniard would try to escape, so they could shoot him. Thousands died of hunger, thirst and disease on those beaches ; others were killed trying to escape; many returned to Spain and were shot ; and many sent to Nazi concentration camps in Germany. 

Around 500,000 Spanish women, men, and children crossed the border seeking a new life and found those French concentration camps: Gurs, Saint-Cyprien y Barcarès, Septfonds, Rivesaltes, Vernet d'Ariège, and Argelès-sur-Mer, the largest and, sadly, the most famous among them. I name them here so they are not forgotten. My father was in the last of them. He managed to escape, and together with new waves of refugees, went to the Americas : the United States, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Cuba, and thousands, many thousands of them, including my parents, to Mexico, the country that gave them a second chance at life.  

I have created three sculptures to honour my father’s time as a prisoner in the concentration camp at Argelès-sur-Mer. The strength of the burned wood, defeated on the battlefield, but not in life and in history. The barbed wire, of that very dark phase of French and European history. And the box of cigars that my father - reborn in his new Mexican house, invincible in his ideas, his tradition and his teachings to always push on, to not allow oneself to die in the arena - so enjoyed. 

This is one of the homages to him, and to thousands of Spaniards like him, who did not surrender in the face of what life brought them, and who brought new life to this side of the ocean.