Clipping from the LA Times (Dec. 18, 1936) featuring Janet and her mother.

How the 22-year-old Jewish American dancer Janet Riesenfeld performed flamenco to help raise money for the Second Republic under fascist attack.

With dimmed lights, the wail of a guitar fills up the tiny Madrid apartment that doubles as a dance studio overflowing with dancers, bullfighters, and gitanos—the historical, yet often discriminatory, Spanish term for gypsies or Roma people. The dancer moves slowly, while her upward tilted chin and the loud stomp of her heel reflected a resilient pride. Her arms raised slowly, heels clicking the wood floor, she entices her spectators like a torero taunting his bull. Her pace quickens with each defiant move as the cante jondo (deep song) calls out and inspires shouts of “¡olé, la americanita!”

This is how we might remember the Jewish American dancer Janet Riesenfeld Alcoriza (1914-1998), who performed flamenco to help raise money for the Second Republic under fascist attack during the early months of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

What did dance, and foreign women, have to do with the civil conflict in Spain? The anarchist-in-exile and eyewitness to the Civil War Emma Goldman asserted that a revolution that forbade dancing and the enjoyment of beauty was not the movement for her. The acclaimed dancer and choreographer Martha Graham spent time in Spain, supported the Loyalist cause, and styled her 1938 American Document as an anti-fascist expression. Yet Janet Riesenfeld, who was only 22 at the time, seems to have slipped through the cracks of history, despite the fact that she danced flamenco—the musical tradition woven into Spanish historical identity and at its root is one of Roma resistance— at pro-Loyalist banquets as she developed a fierce political consciousness, forcefully expressed in her 1938 memoir, Dancer in Madrid.

Riesenfeld was one of the many artists, writers, musicians, photographers, and dancers who supported the Republican cause, along with tens of thousands of volunteers who joined the International Brigades. Opposing the democratic world powers’ policy of non-intervention, dance would become Riesenfeld’s vehicle of resistance and the preservation of democracy. Born in New York to the renowned Jewish Austrian composer Hugo Riesenfeld, she recounts in her memoir that she learned Spanish and dance young, but did not care much for the uptight ballet. In the Rivoli Theater, Riesenfeld became enamored with flamenco. After her family moved to California, she met a Catalan man, Jaime Castanys. This first meeting was brief and Riesenfeld married another man. Years later, the nearly divorced Riesenfeld rendezvoused with Jaime in Mexico City, where she performed flamenco under the name Raquel Rojas. They fell in love—her divorce later became finalized during her stay in Spain—and when Jaime’s family business required his return to Spain, he instructed her to wait before joining him across the Atlantic. Impatient and ignoring his direction, Riesenfeld enthusiastically left the US to meet her love in Madrid and fulfill a flamenco concert engagement. Stuck at Spain’s border, she crossed the Pyrenees in the summer of 1936 just as the Civil War broke out by moonlighting as a journalist’s translator.

Riesenfeld’s growing political consciousness began not at the front or in international volunteer units like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, but in the common, everyday spaces of civilian life. During the American’s early weeks in Madrid, Riesenfeld observed in her memoir, normal life persisted despite the fact that the “enemy was only some sixty miles away.” This business-as-usual extended to art and entertainment: movie pictures ran, cafés were full of people chatting over coffee for hours, and the gala theatrical season was in full swing. This desire for entertainment, arts, and sociability can be read as modes of ordinary resistance to the engulfing war. But artists and entertainers also put their talents at the service of the cause. Riesenfeld writes:

Janet Riesenfeld Alcoriza

For a nominal entrance fee, you were able to see all the outstanding artists of Spain. These were benefit performances for the hospitals; in time of peace you could not have seen so many performers in one evening for any amount of money. They worked indefatigably, giving as many as five different benefits a day. As soon as they finished in one theater, they were hurried in cars to appear at another. Seldom have entertainers been so generous in devoting their services and talents.

As Riesenfeld politicized, she performed at Madrid’s Loyalist banquets during the early months of the Civil War. She practiced daily at the small apartment studio run by the Albaicín family, to prepare for a scheduled concert tour. This was an intimate space in which a family of instructors and artists lived, socialized, and welcomed Riesenfeld. She claimed they “were kept busy” and “dancing as often as five times a day at the benefits.” The defense of Madrid transpired in apartments that doubled as dance studios; groups created performances for the stages and streets to support the Loyalist cause in the early months of the war. At the Teatro de la Zarzuela, the largest theater in Madrid and remaining in business through the war, Riesenfeld danced at one of Madrid’s last significant war banquets. A massive crowd enjoyed hundreds of performers and paid homage to Federico García Lorca, the beloved poet who had recently been executed by the Nationalists.

While dance fueled her romanticized view of Spain, Riesenfeld’s support of the Second Republic evolved into a genuine one. As a translator, she made connections in the Ministry of Information. She learned some of the complexities of the Spanish conflict by forging friendships at the Press Building. To be sure, there was a healthy amount of propaganda, which proliferated during the Spanish Civil War on both sides. But through dance and intimate conversations with madrileños the American gained a sense of historical inequality and tensions within a society still somewhat characterized as “feudal” with wide segments of the population oppressed by wealthy landowners. Simultaneously, the dancer recalled Jaime’s characterization of Andalusians’ as in perpetual siesta and Madrid reluctant to industrialism, “We could become a great industrial country with the proper discipline. It would take no time to have the machines and real progress if we had a small and efficient group to run things.” Riesenfeld formed her own perspective. She writes: “I already had found an apartment, seen Jaime every minute he was not working and encountered a growing circle of friends, ranging from colorful and amusing gypsies to the aristocratic business associates of Jaime. I must say I preferred the gypsies.”

Indeed, the dancer spent little time near the front and instead documented ordinary forms of survival and resistance in Madrid: listening to la Pasionaria on the radio, admiring market women haggling over the day’s scarcity of onions and their preparation of hot oil on women’s stoves if Madrid’s citizen-made fortification broke, while children waiting in milk lines became sitting targets for explosives. Dancer in Madrid exposes Jaime’s transformation as well. He had previously referred to himself as a Catalan; now, as the fighting neared, he proclaimed himself a Spaniard and reminded Riesenfeld of her ignorance on Spanish topics. Her love affair with a Nationalist provided her with a unique experience for a foreign woman exposed to various perspectives. Yet, their ideological differences and estrangement provide a glimpse of Spain’s fault lines:

It wasn’t an abstraction, but an elemental, concrete question. Living in Spain meant that our whole life would be colored by the outcome of this political issue. In this generation in Spain even love is dominated by devotion to a social belief. If I, as an outsider, found it difficult to compromise, how could Jaime do so?

With each Nazi-made bomb dropping on Madrid, tensions in the relationship grew. Riesenfeld had already become unwilling to appease Jaime when she discovered he boarded an older woman in her apartment who was later executed on charges of smuggling ammunition to Nationalist snipers. Soon after, the dancer broke up with Jaime. Weeks later, in the middle of the Nationalist siege on Madrid, she identified his body at the makeshift morgue for government assassinations of rebel spies.

Admitting to being a burden, Riesenfeld heeded the Republican government’s call for foreign civilians to leave Spain in late 1936. Back in the US, the dancer published her memoir in 1938 as a plea for the American defense of Spanish democracy. Along with its romance and intrigue, it received warm reviews for her coverage of the civil war. Later, Riesenfeld moved to Mexico, where in 1946 she married the screenwriter and director Luis Alcoriza, a Spanish Republican exile and close collaborator of Luis Buñuel. As a screenwriter and actress in her own right, Riesenfeld worked on more than 50 films.

Riesenfeld’s is a fascinating story of the interwar “modern woman.” It also reaffirms that the war in Spain awakened or reinforced a commitment to transnational anti-fascism—a mission that often carried on in social justice causes such as the civil rights, anti-war, and labor movements.

Maria Labbato is an independent scholar and history teacher at Providence Day School in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her dissertation focused on American women and the Spanish Civil War and her broader research interests include gender and exile in Mexico.