The teacher, interpreter, and writer Rosa Maria Duran, one of the reference figures of the Catalan community exiled in Mexico, has died at the age of 99. The National Center for the Arts of Mexico announced her death this Sunday. Duran, born in Barcelona in 1927 and awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi in 2022, dedicated much of her life to keeping the Catalan language and culture alive and the memory of those who had to leave the country after the Civil War.
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The president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, lamented her death and recalled the meeting they had in Mexico in November last year, during the official trip of the Catalan president to the country. “I had the opportunity to meet her in Mexico last year and was moved by her story of uprooting, commitment, and personal and collective reconstruction,” Illa said in a message on X. The president highlighted that Duran dedicated her life to “preserving and spreading the language, culture, and memory of exile, and to building bridges between Catalonia and Mexico.”
Duran had precisely recounted that experience of exile during Illa’s visit to Mexico. At an event held at the Casa del Risco in Mexico City, one of the places historically linked to the reception of Spanish refugees, she summarized her relationship with the two countries as follows: “Our roots are in Catalonia, but our fruits are in Mexico.” Duran had left Catalonia as a child. Her family first took refuge in Montpellier after the Civil War and, with Europe later engulfed in World War II, set out for Mexico in 1942.
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During that tribute, Duran recalled the arrival of Catalan refugees to a country that allowed them to rebuild their lives. “The Catalans who came to Mexico did not die, we came from hell, from the Civil War and World War II,” she explained. For her, exile did not mean erasing one identity to adopt another: “Cultures are not annulled, cultures are added.” Mexico, Illa then defended before the children and grandchildren of the exiles, “saved lives and much of Catalan culture.”
Duran studied Hispanic Letters at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), expanded her postgraduate studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, and worked as an interpreter at the United Nations. Her career and work to preserve the memory of exile and the cultural ties between Catalonia and Mexico were recognized in 2022 with the Creu de Sant Jordi.