“My family could not abide by fascism”: Catalan researcher Mireya Folch-Serra on exile from Spain to France to Mexico to London Ontario
“I was born in the middle of nowhere,” says Mireya Folch-Serra, an emerita professor of geography at Western University whose research focuses on diaspora and exile. She was born on November 14th, 1937, in the midst of the Civil War that led to Franco’s 39-year military dictatorship in Spain. Her mother, the daughter of philosophy professor and rector of the University of Barcelona Dr. Jaume Serra i Hunter, feared giving birth beneath the bombs in embattled Barcelona. She fled to her father-in-law’s cottage in Tarragona. “My grandfather – the father of my father – was a medical doctor. They had…