The valuable democracy archive of the University of Alicante turns twenty years old and does so with a prize. The rector of the University of Valencia, Mavi Mestre, presented the Vicent Ventura 2024 awards last Friday, on the centenary of the birth of the Valencian journalist and politician. The Alicante archive was one of those awarded for “its spirit of freedom and fight for democracy”, along with the historian Carmen Agulló and the essayist Josep Iborra (posthumously).
The Alicante Democracy Archive aims to collect, organize and disseminate the documentary memory of the fight for democracy in Spain. It is an entity created by the University of Alicante in 1994, and has become one of the most emblematic projects of the academic institution.
In the numerous funds and collections, in the database, publications, exhibitions, minutes, thematic portals… there appear documentary and graphic witnesses related to the political, economic, social and cultural activity of Alicante, or carried out, especially by Alicante, in the years of the Transition and democratic consolidation.
One of the latest and most important donations has been the hitherto unknown documentation of the Republican politician Juli Just, which after two years is already organized, digitized and described. The personal funds of Antonio Montoro, Ángel Pascual Devesa, Cecilio Alonso and Encarna Marín, Enrique Cerdán Tato and José Vicente Beviá, among others, are available to anyone who wants to consult them.
The archive has a website that gives access to six thematic portals. The first of them – Women of the Transition (1975-1983) – collects the experience of the women who actively participated in the Transition to democracy, between the death of Franco in 1975 and the creation of the Women’s Institute in 1983. It aims to make visible the intervention and protagonism of women in various movements, organizations, citizen initiatives and political parties.
The second -The Republican exile in North Africa-, aims to recover the memory, deepen and disseminate the knowledge of one of the most forgotten exiles, that of the Spanish Republicans in the lands of North Africa, since the end of the civil war, in March 1939 to 1962, the date of Algeria’s independence.
Another of the portals – Franco’s repression in Alicante – includes various investigations into the repression produced during the dictatorship in the province, trying to cover the gaps due to the disappearance of many documents and the concealment carried out during the permanence of the Franco regime.
The fourth section -The Democratic Transition in Alicante- is based on the publication of a work by Francisco Moreno Sáez on the parties, unions and civic associations that played a relevant role in the years of the transition from the Franco dictatorship to democracy, between 1974 and 1982.
This publication includes images (stickers, posters, photos) and full-text documents (brochures, pamphlets, etc.), from our own documentary collection, as well as links to other related web resources.
In 2022, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the death of Miguel Hernández, the archive carried out a study of the documentary collections it holds, in order to compile and structure all the documentation and resources donated for the study of his figure. Publications, brochures, posters, documentation of tributes, dedications and unpublished letters from the poet are some of the most relevant documents found in this space.
Finally, on November 23, 2022 at the XIX Annual Event of the Archive of Democracy, the LGTBIQ Memory project was presented in Alicante, created with the purpose and intention of being the space where the fight and demand for democracy and for human rights from the point of view of a group that is especially punished and repressed.
