Teresa Pla, in an undated image, and when she adopted the name Florencio Pla, in an image provided by the editorial Sembra.Editorial Sembra
"That the Pastor will come and eat you!"
This threat and others like it were a way to scare children into not going to sleep.
They alluded to a particular bogeyman, a coconut with the name of a woman who instilled panic during the Franco regime, especially in the northern regions of the Valencian Community and southern Catalonia.
The dictatorship turned him into a myth after joining the maquis.
He was something of a monster, a ruthless killer who was born with male and female sexual organs.
The press of the time presented him as "a woman with flinty bowels, with a sinister history of crimes, cruel, monstrous and with manly features."
In reality, the Pastora always felt like a man and this was revealed when, harassed and humiliated by the Civil Guard, he went over to the guerilla, chose the pseudonym Durruti and took off his women's clothes.
He was about 30 years old.
He then changed his original name from Teresa to Florencio.
Born in 1917 in Vallibona, a small town in the mountainous interior of Castellón, he was baptized as a woman "due to doubts about his sex due to a genital malformation" and to prevent him from military service and the possibility of being called up after the wars of Cuba and Morocco, points out the historian Raül González Devís, in the prologue of
Florencio Pla, la Pastora.
Stolen dignity
(in Catalan, in the Sembra publishing house), by Elena Solanas.
This is the last book, and the first by a family member, designed to rescue Florencio Pla Meseguer from the myth created by the dictatorship.
He was a victim of Franco's repression, prejudice and ignorance.
A humble man who was orphaned very soon and worked as a shepherd, mainly, in the farmhouses of the El Maestrat region, some of which provided supplies to the maquis.
There he acted in the Levante and Aragon Guerrilla Group, which he joined in 1949 and belonged to for almost 20 months.
“He did not make a political decision.
He became a guerrilla to survive, ”explains Elena Solana, great-niece and author of the work, which reflects his effort to recover the dignity of his family, starting with his great-uncle.
“My grandmother, who lived with us, never wanted to talk to us about her brother;
The author has woven a network of complicity with various associations and entities, has reconstructed the life of Florencia Pla and has done justice for her family.
“They hid it from us.
We were led to believe that she had died in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but this was not the case.
She died in 2004. And I didn't know him.
They have stolen my history, my family.
That is why I have fought to get her back, to tell the truth, to know everything that happened to him and my family, persecuted and retaliated by Francoism just for being her family.
When I started suffering, I understood the silences from before that I decided to break ”, she explains.
Elena Solanas (on the right), great-niece of Florencio Pla, on the set of the documentary 'Valentes', broadcast by À punt.
After fleeing his land and hiding in Andorra, always in the mountains, Florencio was arrested and sentenced to death in 1961, accused of up to 29 murders, and commuted to 30 years in prison.
He spent 17 years in prison until his pardon in 1977. He then went to live in the Valencian town of Olocau, with the family of Mariano Vinuesa, a prison officer with whom he became friends.
Florencio tried to lead a discreet life without disturbing his relatives.
"He was an ordinary man, who had to survive very adverse conditions since he was born and a gender affiliation with which he did not identify", who did not commit "the crimes that were accused of him", points out the historian, a student of resistance anti-Franco army.
The filmmaker and screenwriter Marc Ortiz listened to the threat that the Pastora comes as a child in the town of La Sénia in Tarragona.
He will now direct a feature film about the story of Florencio Pla, for which he has documented himself with testimonies from people who knew him.
The producer is Paloma Mora, the same one that produced the documentary about Pastora from the
Valentes
series broadcast by the Valencian regional channel À Punt five years ago, for which the testimony of her great-niece was obtained.
“Elena Solanas helped us a lot and was happy with the treatment.
She was defensive at first because of the sensationalism and sensationalism of old works, ”says Mora.
This is confirmed in the book by Solanas herself, that she always refers to Florencio as a man, just as he wanted.
The production company also highlights the help of Montxo Armendáriz, who met the Pastora during the documentation for her film about the maquis
El silencio roto
, released in 2001. The Basque filmmaker has been the tutor in the treatment of the script of the project, selected in the first summer campus organized by the Film Academy in collaboration with Netflix and the Valencia City Council.
The town of Vallibona, where Florencio Pla was born, in an image provided by the Sembra publishing house.
Filming is scheduled to begin next February.
The film team, which fictionalizes parts of Florencio's life, is waiting for a well-known actor to confirm his participation as the protagonist.
The project, a co-production with Colombia and France, has been well received at festivals such as Toronto and Berlin, and has received support from the Institut Valencià de Cultura.
The broadcasting rights have been pre-acquired by TV-3 and À Punt.
"The story is very interesting, because it raises a very current question about intersex," says Paloma Mora.
The film and the recent book join the various historical, literary and journalistic research works that, already in democracy, have recovered the memory of Florencio Pla, among other victims of the Franco dictatorship.
The playwright Núria Vizcarro stood out in 2019 with her work
From her Instructions to not be afraid if the Pastor comes,
nominated for two categories of the Max Awards.
The writer Alicia Giménez Bartlett was inspired by the Pastora to write the novel
Donde nadie te encuentra,
which won the Nadal Award in 2011.
In an interview published in 1988 in the magazine
El Temps,
Florencio Pla explained that he always felt like a man and his troubled life.
“And he has returned to Vallibona?
[his hometown] ”, journalist Miquel Alberola asked him.
“Yes, and so bad that they put me and the town turned upside down as soon as I arrived.
They came down from all the farmhouses and there were those who kissed my hand and everything.
Of course, they had never seen me as a man”.
Today, in Vallibona, with 75 inhabitants, a promenade is named after Florencio Pla,
la Pastora
.
Street dedicated to Florencio Pla in Vallibona, in an image provided by Sembra