Held on March 23, 2016
In this event, Professor Soledad Luque Delgado and Drs. Aránzazu Borrachero and Aurora G. Morcillo presented their research on women’s experiences during the thirty-six year Francoist dictatorship in Spain. Professor Delgado, who teaches phonetics at the Ortega-Marañón Foundation and Middlebury University, spoke from her experience as President of Todos los niños robados son también mis niños (All The Stolen Children Are Also My Children) about the disappearance of an estimated 300,000 babies under the dictatorship. Dr. Borrachero, Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Queensborough Community College, CUNY, shared findings from her web-based oral history project on Spanish women who became adults and mothers during the dictatorship. Dr. Morcillo completed the panel by arguing that women were powerful agents of change in the modernization of Spain.
Dr. Aránzazu Borrachero is Professor and Deputy Chairperson of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of Queensborough Community College, CUNY. Her areas of research include Spanish Cultural and Gender Studies. She has co-authored with Dr. Karl McLaughlin a critical and annotated edition of the poetry of Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán, a 17th century writer (Obra poética, Editora Regional de Extremadura, 2010). She has also published a study of sexual violence in contemporary Latin American narrative by women writers (Ética y estética en la narrativa femenina hispanoamericana contemporánea, Pliegos, 2011). Since 2011, Dr. Borrachero has been developing a web-based oral history project that gathers, preserves and divulges the life stories of Spanish women who became adults and mothers during the thirty-six year Francoist dictatorship (www.mujerymemoria.org).
Professor Soledad Luque Delgado teaches phonetics and conducts research in the area of linguistics at the Ortega-Marañón Foundation and Middlebury University. She is also president of the association Todos los niños robados son también mis niños (All The Stolen Children Are Also My Children), which she founded to mobilize civil society about the disappearance of an incalculable number of children under the Francoist dictatorship and part of the ensuing democracy. Prof. Luque Delgado also serves as spokesperson for CeAQUA, a collective of more than one hundred associations of victims of the Spanish dictatorship that in 2010 presented a complaint of genocide and/or crimes against humanity in an Argentine court under the principle of universal jurisdiction. She represented CeAQUA and All The Stolen Children Are Also My Children at the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances in 2013 and 2014.
Dr. Aurora G. Morcillo was a Professor of History and Director of the Initiative for Spanish and Mediterranean Studies at Florida International University. Dr. Morcillo was a scholar of Francoism, and had special interest in the relationship between the sexes as the backdrop for much of her analysis of Spain’s recent past. She authored En cuerpo y alma: Ser mujer en tiempos de Franco (Siglo XXI, 2015), The Seduction of Modern Spain: The Female Body and the Francoist Body Politic (Bucknell University Press, 2010), and True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco’s Spain (Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), as well as was the editor of Memory and Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War: Realms of Oblivion (Leiden, 2014).
True Catholic Womanhood by 
The Seduction of Modern Spain by 
Gender, Citizenships and Subjectivities by 
Gendering Spanish Democracy by