Book Note Spanish Immigrants in the US (1868-1945)
Photo courtesy of the Conde family of Canton, Ohio
In a time of great upheavals, among millions of other European immigrants, they were but a drop in the bucket. They arrived and spread out all over the country in search of opportunities.
Together they laughed and cried; together they lived and loved
They got organized. And rallied behind a cause that lost. They were here to stay.
This simple six-sentence story is a composite thumbnail sketch of the lives of tens of thousands of Spanish immigrants who settled in the United States in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The fable structures this book of photographs, co-curated by ALBA board member James D. Fernández, and Spanish journalist and film-maker, Luis Argeo. Each of the six sentences serves as the heading of a chapter, in what Professor José Moya of Columbia and Barnard has called …a veritable kaleidoscope of immigrant lives and memories,” and Francis Lam in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times “a beautiful haunting historical photo album of the Spanish in America.”
Of particular interest are the photos that Fernández and Argeo have rescued from family albums for Chapter V, which documents the intense pro-Republican mobilization of Spanish American communities all over the country.
The book can be ordered at invisibleimmigrants.com
