Hidden Valencia - Civil War Stories

In late 1937, the war was going badly for the Republic. The North had fallen to General Franco’s forces, and Stalin’s Soviet Union was the only major power supplying arms. The Republic also faced a growing army of hidden enemies as underground Francoists sought to undermine the war effort, a ‘Fifth Column’ that emerged throughout loyalist Spain, especially in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia.

Set in Valencia, ‘Civil War Stories’ attempts to capture this moment and translate it into public history using mobile media. On the Hidden Valencia app, available free on the App Store and Googleplay, in English, Spanish and Valenciano and through links on the HistoryCity website, a situated drama unfolds across the city centre in October of 1937. On one side is a clandestine Francoist or fascist, ‘Maria’. On the other, pursuing her, is ‘Luis’, a member of the Republican military secret police, or SIM.

Both characters, voiced by actors, are critical fictionalisations based on archival research. Maria is a teacher, and – like many Fifth Columnists – a Catholic woman. She opposed the Republican constitution of 1931 and believes she is on a crusade to save Spain from atheistic communism. Luis, also a teacher before the war, is a communist – in Valencia the SIM was dominated by communists – and sees himself as protecting Spain’s fledgling democracy from fascism.

‘Civil War Stories’ thus aims to get inside the perspectives of two ordinary Valencians with very different hopes and fears for Spain. More than that, it is an attempt to use mobile media to present this to the general public as an immersive experience. Both Maria and Luis try to recruit the app user to their cause. Meanwhile, their game of cat and mouse takes place on a geolocated map of Valencia from 1930, surfacing memories of place at eight locations, such as a Civil War air raid shelter, or the convent of Santa Ursula, then a prison. Additional commentary provides vital context, and sometimes corrects the claims of these two, highly tendentious, characters.

The Spanish Civil War remains a controversial subject. The SIM, which had a grisly reputation, is under-researched, and while the role of women in Francoist subversion has been recognised, the dominant image of a politically engaged woman in Republican Spain remains the miliciana. Today, many Spaniards see the roots of their democracy in the Second Republic rather than the 1978 Constitution. SIM agents, seen as Stalinist stooges under the Franco regime, are now steadfast defenders of democracy; Fifth Columnists, once saviours of Spain, are simply fascists. Yet such binary characterisations have provoked disquiet, evidence of Spain’s inability to confront the complexities of its dark past. How to remember people like ‘Maria’ and ‘Luis’ remains a difficult question almost a century after the war began. They may be fictionalised, but the issues raised by their actions and beliefs, and by this experiment in public history, are not.