# Pilar Santiago

Pilar Santiago Bilbao ( Barruelo de Santullán, Palencia, 1914 - Barcelona, June 3, 1998) also known as Pilar Trueta, was a Spanish teacher, militant of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) and exiled in Mexico.

## Trajectory

Born in the province of Palencia, her father, a railway worker, was transferred to Barcelona in 1916. The family settled in the neighborhood of Sant Andreu de Palomar. She studied primary studies, based on the Modern School method, at the Ateneu Obrer de Sant Andreu. In 1929 she entered the Normal School of Teachers and finished her teaching career in 1933. She was a teacher, among other places, at the Ateneo Obrer where she had been educated. She joined the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc, and the union of the Spanish Federation of Teaching Workers (FETE- UGT ). That same year she entered the POUM and there she met teacher Joan Hervàs, whom she married. As a member of the Central Youth Committee of the POUM, she developed an intense propaganda activity alongside Andreu Nin and Wilebaldo Solano. She was part of the Women's Secretariat of the party and worked side by side with Maria Teresa Garcia Banus, known as Teresa Andrade. When the Civil War broke out, she contributed to the magazine Emancipació and participated in numerous meetings. She was also in charge, from the May 1937 Events, of the distribution of the underground newspaper La Batalla.
After the murder of her husband Joan Hervàs on the Aragon Front, in March 1938, in the midst of repression against the POUM, Pilar Santiago was arrested and after going through several checks, she was admitted to the Women's Prison of Les Corts until August 13, when she was released. She moved to Lyon, where she worked as a teacher in an infant school. From 1939 she resided in Paris and established contact with the French Workers and Peasants' Socialist Party (PSOP).
In 1942 she married Rafael Trueta Raspall (doctor and brother of the traumatologist Josep Trueta i Raspall ) and they emigrated to Mexico with their daughter Helena (child of their first marriage), aboard the ship Nyassa, which arrived in port of Veracruz in May of that year. There the couple set up a workshop making dolls and clothing bags, which allowed him to open a practice and practice medicine. Pilar Santiago studied Library Science and Archives at the Escuela Normal Superior de México and later History. After obtaining the degree in 1948, she worked in the mornings at the Madrid College, in the afternoons at the state school "Los Niños Héroes" Her husband Rafael Trueta, seventeen years older than her, with who had had a second son Rafael, died in Cuernavaca in 1958.
From 1984, the year of her retirement, Pilar Santiago often traveled to Barcelona. Among other activities, she advised the film director Ken Loach in the preparation of the filming of the film Terra i Llibertat. She died on June 3, 1998, at the age of 83.
The Barcelona City Council, as part of the plan to feminize the citizen nomenclature, agreed at the Sant Andreu district plenary on May 5, 2024, to dedicate a passage, located in the Sagrera neighborhood, between Carrer Concepció, to Pilar Santiago Bilbao Arenal and Avinguda Meridiana.

## Women of 36 Association

In 1997, the activist Llum Ventura, then councilor of the Ciutat Vella district, together with Pilar Santiago and a group of women older than eighty, ex-prisoners and reprisals, formed the Association Les Dones del 36 with the aim of to remind the new generations that the political and social advances that women enjoy today date from a struggle that became clear in 1931 with the advent of the Republic. Likewise, to try to ensure that history does not fall into oblivion, during the ten years that the association lasted, they held 179 talks in high schools, 35 in universities, 185 personal interviews, as well as interventions in radio programs, documentaries etc.
The association was dissolved in 2006 due to the age of the members.

### Oral testimony

The oral testimony of Pilar Santiago was collected, together with that of eight other women, by the historian Mercedes Vilanova and the anthropologist Mercedes Fernández Martorell. The material was transferred, in 1997, to the Historical Archive of the City of Barcelona and since then, it can be consulted in the Oral Collection "Women of 36".