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They are love letters that, unfortunately, never made it to their destination, Morocco. Filled with love and affection, they were carefully written by Spanish women who were madly in love with Moroccan men in the middle of the Spanish colonization of northern Morocco.
Sent between the 1930s and the 1950s, these letters attested to forbidden relationships between Spanish women and Moroccan soldiers deployed to fight alongside Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War. The mails were confiscated by the Spanish authorities which saw these love stories as a stain to the Spanish «prestigious race».
Currently part of the central archives of the administration in the university town of Alcala de Henares, these love letters were read and studied by Arthur Asseraf, a historian of modern France, North Africa and the Mediterranean at the History Faculty at Cambridge.
Seizing these letters was part of official orders to «prevent these relationships without openly banning them», explains Asseraf, referring to an order from 1937.
«Indeed, as the Franco regime relied on the loyalty of Moroccan soldiers, they did not make such relationships explicitly illegal. Instead, they developed a whole series of means to make them impossible in practice», the historian wrote on BBC Africa.
The Spanish regime saw these relationships as forbidden unions, unions that threaten the «prestigio de raza», or «the prestige of the race», as Asseraf translates. «For colonial rule to continue, Spain had to be seen as superior to Morocco», he argued.
These seized letters that were part of the protectorate government archives in Tetouan were later sent to Spain and forgotten for decades, collecting dust on these forbidden yet passionate love stories.
