The writer and journalist Raúl Montilla (Barcelona, 1979) recognizes that an enormous number of pages have already been written about the arrival of Andalusians to Catalonia during half the 20th century and the construction of the metropolitan area of Barcelona – who doesn't know about the sorrows of the people who traveled in the Sevillano - but in reality the adventures and misadventures of these people were rarely fictionalized, and on many fewer occasions the women were the protagonists of the paragraphs.
Furthermore, adds the prolific Montilla with a certain resentment, with a touch of boredom, “many times everything was the work of paratroopers who looked at everything from the outside. I wanted to do something from within, a novel from the neighborhood and from the neighborhood, a family saga for 40 years with an epic point where the protagonists were women, our mothers, grandmothers and sisters so often cornered."
Yes, The Daughters of the Factory does not reach the category of cultural reckoning, but it does have a very vindictive side. Because the migratory phenomenon and especially this episode in the history of Catalonia used to be told from the point of view of men, around their successes and failures, their motivations and their concerns. Women always tiptoe around, just as it happened in real life. Who ever cared about those women who cared about everyone while forgetting about themselves?
Those women who took care of their husbands and children, who cleaned the house and made food, who after all sewed piecework so that the family could finally buy an apartment with running water, who set up neighborhood platforms to demand that the regime transform the open fields into parks, open clinics and schools, pave the streets...
And after a while the reader feels challenged, in the end one cannot help but stop to really think about so many sacrifices ignored, that perhaps there is a lot to learn from the altruism, solidarity and dedication of so many women dedicated to caring for others. Maybe if we all learned a little from them... The novel is an act of justice with a lot of elderly ladies who will finally see themselves as protagonists. What did so many men do but worry about their jobs and take their children to the amusement park on any given Sunday, from time to time?
And The Daughters of the Factory is also a kind of Forrest Gump at home. Because we are in Sati, in Ciudad Satélite, in the first blocks that they built in this remote corner of Cornellà de Llobregat, before they tried to dignify it by renaming it the neighborhood of San Ildefonso and later as Sant Ildefons.
Through the vicissitudes of this family, recently arrived from Montilla, in the province of Córdoba, Montilla, whose parents are from there, from Montilla, also tells us about the worker priests, the anti-Franco struggle, the torture in the police station on Via Laietana, the construction of the metropolitan area of Barcelona, the emergence of heroin and citizen insecurity, the coup d'état of Tejero, the Zeleste and the bottle... But don't read The Daughters of the Factory like a history book. Montilla, who before moving to institutional communication was a correspondent for Baix Llobregat in many media outlets for decades, knows well that to gain the complicity of the reader there is nothing like bringing the scenarios of his own life closer to him.
