Image
Sites of Memory of the Victims
Item Details
Exhibit: The Civil War in Galicia
Source:
Date Created: 1950
Extent: 1 item
42.1183, -8.85521
Source:
O Faiado da Memoria, Antonio Caeiro e Margarita Teijeiro (cedida pola familia de Generoso Valverde)
Date Created: 1950
Extent: 1 item
42.1183, -8.85521
From the curve of the nine crosses,
the crimes whistle as if they were gunshots
In the ground, in the mass grave, the magma of memory
(Gonzalo Navaza, 2007)
The drawing of nine vertical lines crossed by a single horizontal one became one of the most enduring symbols of the construction of the memory of the victims in the south of Galicia. They are a testimony of the tangibility of death, a stroke against oblivion, and an act of symbolic resistance throughout the dictatorship. On 15 October 1936, nine men were “taken for a ride” in Baiona ( al Miñor), at the Baredo curve on the highway between Pontevedra and Camposancos, until 1941 the site of one of the largest concentration camps in Galicia. The group of killers which included José Rodríguez, Manuel Aballe, Francisco Lijó, Manuel Barbosa, Felicísimo Pérez, Modesto Fernández, Generoso Valverde, Alejandro Gonda and Fidel Leyenda, all Falangists, was led by Manuel González Pena of the Civil Guard. The nine men were arrested at the handball court on María Berdiales Street in Vigo and sent to Baiona where they were tortured and, ultimately, killed.
As was so often the case, it was the milkmaids who discovered the corpses at dawn and spread the news of the crime the next day. The place that was known from then on as the Curve of the Nine became a recognized site of memory in 2005. Every night during the dictatorship, nine crosses would be drawn in the dirt. Later, they would become blood-coloured inscriptions on rock and bit by bit they acquired a specific symbolic meaning, as if they were a logo of sorts. The documentary about the events and the inscription on one of the monuments erected there to the memory of the murdered men recount this.
The photograph shows one of Generoso Valverde’s children pointing to the nine crosses at the place where his father, along with eight others, was killed. The purpose of the photograph which was taken in the 1950s, was to demonstrate to his mother, who had emigrated to America, the reality of what she thought was a myth.
LFP/CLS