Calle de Juan del Risco

Who Juan del Risco was is a puzzle the street-map sources do not solve. No record survives of his trade, his era, or the reason his name ended up on a street in Berruguete, in the heart of Tetuán. The neighborhood grew up in the late nineteenth century as a working-class fringe north of Madrid, and many of its streets took the names of people now hard to identify. The memory that does bind the neighborhood is that of Cipriano Mera, born in working-class Tetuán in 1897, into a family of bricklayers. He started in construction at eleven and followed his family’s trade. That boy from the fringe would come to command the Republic’s IV Army Corps during the Civil War, the bricklayer turned military chief who took part in the battle of Guadalajara. He died in exile in France in 1975, back at the trowel, which he never gave up.