By Melissa Kindma
Photo by Melissa Kindma
W
ith the arm of her daughter, Gemma Pascual, grasped in one hand and a cane in the other, Ángeles Domínguez-Barberá shuffles her way through the outdoor tables of Café Lavin as she heads to a quieter place. She greets everyone around her with a warm smile, a silent message of connection and kindness. Her nails, painted an iridescent white, subtly glimmer in the sun. At 97 years old, she clearly still takes pride in the way she looks. She wears a brown and white, patterned blouse, tastefully accented with gold jewelry. “I made this shirt many years ago and it’s still perfect,” Ángeles, who goes by Angelita, says. Her clothes are a testament to her youthful spirit, unchanged by time. She became a skilled seamstress after the Spanish Civil War. She says that before the war, her family was one of the most important families in Spain and one of the wealthiest in all of Europe. They developed a packaging company that became the first leading producer of burlap sacks during World War I. The sacks were used to carry loads of potatoes and other items, edible and not, across the continent. Everything However, everything changed for Anchanged for gelita when her father and her brother, Pepé, were kidnapped in 1938. Angelita when The introduction of the Second her father and Spanish Republic gave rise to the Combrother were munist Party of Spain, a coalition of leftkidnapped ist in political forces, who were the elected government before the conflict began. 1938. They fought against the right-wing Nationalists with fervor in what came to be known as the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936-1939. During the war, the political climate in Spain was thick with tension, pitting neighbor against neighbor. The Communist Party of Spain was notorious for invading Spanish cities, burning churches, and murdering members of important nationionalist parties. Angelita’s family was one of those targeted, belonging to a political party known as “El Partido Popular” (translated to mean “The People’s Party”). When her father and brother were taken to jail to be killed, she did everything she could to save them. She prayed to God and beseeched her closest friend, “Please help them. They are going to die.” Her friend, the daughter of an important Communist leader, pleaded with her own father to release Angelita’s family from jail. Against all odds, they were freed, but not without a cost. The Communist Party of Spain took everything familiar to them -- their home, their business, their livelihood. For Angelita, it marked the beginning of a life that was unrecognizable in comparison to her first 16 years. To avoid further conflict, Angelita and her family took refuge in a small town south of Valencia, called Agres, where the houses hung precariously on the side of a steep mountain. Even in the countryside, they felt the effects of war. She stayed in a house with Photo by Savannah Tindall four floors; she and her family lived on the second.
Doña Angelita
la historia de una Valenciana The bittersweet tale of a woman with nearly a century’s worth of memories
Angelita DominguezBarbera and her daughter, Gemma Pascual.
4 Nomadic Noles // Summer 2019
