A collection of letters written by Spanish women to Moroccan men, confiscated decades ago, sheds light on the history of forbidden love in the colonial era.
When are you going back to Spain?The somewhat desperate-sounding plea was carefully written on paper, showing how important it was to Carmela.
Tell me, you're not looking at the other women. She wrote in Granada in 1944.
However, the recipient of the letter failed to read the words, and Carmela's transnational love letter did not reach its destination, Morocco.
Instead, it ends up unexpectedly in the depths of the Spanish archives, hidden in hundreds of affectionate messages between Spanish women and Moroccan men.
The mail, which was confiscated between the 1930s and 1950s, documented forbidden intimacy.
For decades, the colonial authorities of Spanish Morocco systematically confiscated the mail.
The letter was full of passionate words. A woman from Valencia wrote: "I'm crazy for you......I'm like a womanizer. ”
Some of the letters also have ** attached. Letters after letters are interspersed with dozens of portraits of women, combed to perfection and posing to remind distant lovers of what they look like. One of them sent her a photo of her riding a bicycle, which is a portrayal of her carefree daily life.
All these documents were neatly filed in envelopes by conscientious and responsible bureaucrats, and then forgotten in everyday administrative documents.
The letters were dusty until they were discovered and published by the scholars Josep Lluísmateo Dieste and Nives Muriel García.
Each letter contains a seductive glimpse into a complete relationship, but they also show the repression that these relationships face. Spain** did everything he could to make the relationship between the two end without a hitch.
As a 1937 directive stated: "As a general rule, Moroccan soldiers must be prevented from marrying Spanish women." ”
Since 1912, Spain has claimed part of Moroccan territory, using it as a protectorate, along with France, to divide Morocco in two.
Fighters from Berber groups resisted. Most famously, in the long and bloody Rif War of 1921-1926, the Spanish army was wiped out by forces led by Abdelkrim al-Khattabi.
In response to this challenge, Spain** increased the number of troops in Morocco and recruited thousands of Moroccans to serve in its army.
By the 1930s, the northern panhandle of the country, which stretched from Asilah on the Atlantic coast to the border with Algeria in the east, was effectively administered by Spain, with its administrative center in Tetouan.
In 1936, it was at this military base in this territory that General Francisco Franco staged a **and** coup d'état, which sparked the Spanish Civil War.
As the war intensified, suddenly, thousands of Moroccan men conscripted into the Spanish army were sent to Spain across the ocean to fight alongside Franco's forces.
In addition to the military, students, businessmen, and other workers joined them and eventually settled in cities and more remote rural areas across the country.
After all, unlike many European colonies, Morocco is just a stone's throw from Spain – at the narrowest point of the Strait of Gibraltar, the Moroccan coast is only 14 kilometers from the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula (85 miles).
Wherever you go, Moroccan men meet Spanish women.
In Salamanca, a woman named Concha met Nasar, a Moroccan soldier stationed nearby.
She fell madly in love with him and wrote to his superiors in 1938 asking for permission to marry him. But for the Spanish colonial authorities, such contact was absolutely forbidden.
They expressed disgust at Concha, calling her old and ugly, "fat like a hippopotamus and a little lame".
They suspect that Nassar showed interest only because Concha happened to own a house, which was exactly what awakened his "volcanic love".
As the 1937 order noted, the official order "set up as many difficulties as possible" to prevent these romances, "rather than openly banning them."
In fact, since the Franco regime relied on the loyalty of Moroccan soldiers, they did not explicitly illegitimate the affair. Instead, they worked out a series of means to make this romance impossible in practice.
For example, if a woman is found to have exchanged letters with a Moroccan man, they will prohibit her from entering Morocco.
On many occasions, they also banned the Moroccan man from Spain, making their romance impossible.
In 1948, a letter written by Carmen from Zaragoza to her lover in Morocco, Abdeseram, was intercepted. The Tetouan authorities immediately barred the two men from crossing the border.
In the letter, Carmen told his daughter that the child would never see her father again when she grew up. But they were indifferent to the child.
Why do they despise these romances so much?Part of the reason lies in the conservative ideology of the ** regime. Franco** is extremely misogynistic, strictly controls women's mobility, and restricts their employment.
It also sees itself as a defender of Catholicism. For religious reasons, a woman who marries a Muslim man is considered "lost faith".
But one of the biggest reasons is what the official call "prestigio de raza" (racial prestige).
In order to continue colonial rule, Spain had to be seen as superior to Morocco.
Since marriage is understood as the subordination of women to men, any marriage that crosses the colonial divide would make the Spanish woman subordinate to the Moroccan man.
If this had become known, it would have undermined the foundations of colonial rule.
In contrast, romances between Spanish men and Moroccan women were very common in Morocco, but did not provoke such widespread scrutiny, as these romances reproduced larger social power structures within an intimate confinement without posing a threat to colonial rule.
This is not a phenomenon peculiar to Spain: the fear of European women falling in love with colonial men was widespread among European colonization**.
In neighboring French territories, ** expressed similar objections to the political consequences of such romances.
The Dutch East Indies and the colonization of British India** considered romances between European women and colonial men to be more threatening than those between European men and colonial women, and managed them.
While the measures to prevent such romances vary from not supporting them to banning them altogether, the basic rule is the same – such relationships are a threat.
However, these letters reveal that beneath the surface of colonial society, encounters between two kinds of people were common, leading to a series of relationships: friendship, courtship, sexuality, and marriage.
It is exciting to open these letters – they are a window into life that is rarely mentioned in official documents. But it is also disturbing because most of the letters never reach their destination. It felt like an invasion of personal privacy, as these people never chose to include their letters in this file.
When Morocco became independent in 1956, the protectorate** in Tetouan closed its doors and its archives were largely forgotten.
Eventually, most of these letters were placed in the archives of the university town of Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, and were forgotten as much of Spain's colonial history in Africa.
Although some of these letters have recently been published, their stories are still little known, and this long-forgotten archive has yet to uncover all its secrets.