The Catalan writer Montserrat Roig came of age amid the normalized disorder and oppression of Francoist Spain. Born in 1946, she was part of a generation that bore the scars of a painful, brutal Civil War: a conflict of blurred lines, in which both primary factions — right-wing Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco, and left-wing Republicans — perpetrated brutal, senseless violence. Some 200,000 people died from “systematic killings, mob violence, torture, and other brutalities” and the ordeal ended with nearly forty years of dictatorship under Franco, who devoted the rest of his days to realizing a deeply conservative, Catholic vision of Spain. His regime committed limpieza social, or social cleansing, of anyone considered an “enemy of the state,” including liberals, socialists, and other dissidents. They enforced a vast censorship program that not only suppressed liberal ideas, but sought to erase symbols of identity among the country’s culturally and linguistically diverse regions, replacing Basque, Galician, and Catalan with Castilian Spanish. In Roig’s homeland of Catalonia, Franco’s quest amounted to a near-erasure of the regional language and cultural traditions.
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