Maria Lozano Molina

Zaragoza 3 March 1914 – Toulouse (France) 9 February 2000. Involved with the libertarian movement from the age of fifteen, she had links to the Los Solidarios group through family connections and was also in touch with the Alcrudos through the family guesthouse much frequented by comrades. Come the revolution in 1936, she was one of the women who took to the streets and with others briefly took over the town of Alcubierre, only to enlist with the Durruti Column and later became a member of the collective in Sariñena. When the civil war finished she endured the concentration camp in Gaillac in the Tarn department of France and then joined the partisans in Grenade (Haute Garonne) along with her partner Ángel Mombiola (who was killed near Ondes in 1944). In 1944-45 she made a clandestine trip back into Spain in search of her daughter and got into difficulties on the return leg as she got lost in the mountains. Having settled in Toulouse, she kept an open house for libertarian activists and later went on to be active in the Libertarian Youth, CNT and IWA, helping Sabaté and the autonomous assault groups (the MIL and the GARI), was subsequently involved with the CRAS documentation centre (Centre de Recherche sur l’Alternative Sociale, which she chaired up until she died). She mounted a vigorous campaign with the Retonda group against the nuclear power station in Golfech. She was a regular at meetings and rallies right up until shortly before she died. She was a poet.

Notes

Our translator found this reference to an unnamed Mombiola (possibly Angel, Maria’s partner?): after militarisation of the militias “some […] stayed on the front as irregulars like Mombiola of the Libertarian Youth, enrolled in the Durruti Column: he declined a post as battalion commander and then rejected militarisation and then carried on with the struggle as part of a team of dinamiteros up until the collapse of the Aragon front.”
Source: Antoine Gimenez et les Gimenologues: Les Fils de la Nuit (Ed. L’Insomniaque, 2006) p. 37.

The Alcrudo Brothers:
They were two brothers, doctors from Aragon, who meandered through a succession of leftist and avant garde groups in the 1920s before ending up associated with the CNT. Their names were Miguel Jose Alcrudo and Augusto Moises Alcrudo.  Miguel had been a supporter of Alejandro Lerroux in Lerroux’s time as a red hot revolutionary. They were freemasons and republicans and libertarians and Augusto Moises was vice-president of the CNT’s National Federation of the Health Industry. They both joined the CNT Aragon in 1930 and in 1933 they served on the National Revolutionary Committee that sponsored the December 1933 uprising in Aragon.

From: Adapted from http://militants-anarchistes.info/spip.php?article3474 and 'Outline Biographical Encyclopedia of Spanish Anarchism' by Miguel Iñíguez. Translated by: Paul Sharkey.