The childhood memoirs of a Spaniard exiled in Mexico are revealed after more than 70 years.

Still in Mexico , months before ending a fifteen-year exile , the Spaniard Felip Salvador Rosés thought about his hometown, a nostalgia from which emerged fifty stories that, 72 years later, are collected in a book of memoirs .

Eva Santana(@evasantana_autora)がシェアした投稿

When I was a child in Badalona in 1900 is the book edited by Elisenda Puig and Eva Santana – the author's granddaughter and great-granddaughter – in which Salvador remembers what Badalona was like, the city in northeastern Spain where he grew up.

Salvador remained in exile in Mexico until January 9, 1954. That day, he boarded the Andrea Gritti, the ship that took him back from Veracruz to Barcelona, carrying a folder containing 47 stories that made up "an album full of portraits, a few brushstrokes of color" and that now make up the book published by Pont del Petroli.

He had arrived in Veracruz in July 1939 aboard the Mexique, a ship that had departed from Bordeaux that same month with Spanish exiles who had crossed the border into France after the end of the Spanish Civil War.

This was the case of Salvador, who went into exile on foot in February 1939 together with the regional government of Catalonia (the Spanish region where he resided) and arrived in France, where he was held in the Bram concentration camp.

In Mexico he spent almost fifteen years away from his wife (Josepa) and his three children (Josefina, Roser and Joan) , whom he was not able to embrace until he returned to Spain, just two years before he died .

In his memoirs, which are published after so much time, Salvador talks about his hometown, Badalona , and recalls the impression his children had when they saw the first automobile traveling through the streets of the town, trades that are now extinct, or a landscape that has already vanished.

Other passages, accompanied by illustrations by his close friend Jaume Passarell , relate, for example, the opposition of the city's residents to the 1898 call to arms for the Cuban War of Independence.

What Felip Salvador chose not to include in this work is his political career —linked to the Catalan independence party Esquerra Republicana—which led to his arrest in October 1934 and exile after the Republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War.