Author Archive for James D. Fernández

Las maestras de la República

March 28, 2015
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Las maestras de la República

On behalf of NYU’s Department of Spanish Literature and Portuguese, the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade...
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Untreated Memories: Franco’s Disappeared

March 13, 2015
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Untreated Memories: Franco’s Disappeared

Some 114,000 Spaniards lay in unmarked mass graves strewn all over the Iberian Peninsula. Only Cambodia has more densely populated killing fields. These are not men and women killed at the front during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39); they are victims of systematic extrajudicial assassinations carried out by Francoist forces during and after that...
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The Spanish Republic in Tampa, 1939

April 15, 2013
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The Spanish Republic in Tampa, 1939

On the 82 anniversary of the founding of the Spanish Republic, Appellate Court Judge, E.J. Salcines, tells a wonderful story about the Republican flag at Tampa’s Centro Asturiano. 14 April 2013, Salcines Park, West Tampa https://vimeo.com/64033205
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Host Workers or Guest Workers?

March 12, 2013
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Host Workers or Guest Workers?

A couple of weeks ago, Luis Argeo and I inaugurated a Facebook page that we hope will serve as a kind of dynamic storefront for a more staid and long-term scholarly and documentary project aimed at chronicling the history of Spanish immigration to the United States. This past Sunday, I posted on that FB...
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Combing the Present

March 6, 2013
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Combing the Present

Emilio Silva Faba was born in the town of Pereje (León) in 1892. In 1915 he emigrated to Argentina, where he lived in Ezpeleta, in the province of Buenos Aires. There he worked in a soda factory. Five years later he re-emigrated to the United States. He came through Ellis Island on August 28...
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Same War, Different Battle (2): Ralph Abascal

February 16, 2013
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Same War, Different Battle (2): Ralph Abascal

Ralph S. Abascal (1934-1997), attorney and defender of farmworkers’ rights, argued the case that resulted in the ban on the use of DDT and other deadly pesticides in California’s fields and orchards.  His father, who had wound up in California after emigrating from Cantabria, Spain, lost three brothers to the Republican cause in the...
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Memory Without Borders: ARMH (3)

February 3, 2013
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Memory Without Borders:  ARMH (3)

Jonah Rubin is a young scholar working on his PhD thesis in Anthropology at the University of Chicago.  If all goes well, in a couple of years, his work, tentatively titled  “‘All of Spain is One Big Mass Grave’: Death, Memory, and Democracy Seventy-Five Years After the Spanish Civil War” will take its place...
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Memory Without Borders: ARMH (2)

January 16, 2013
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Memory Without Borders: ARMH (2)

Today the Spanish press covers another success of the ARMH , which to date has carried out 153 exhumations of mass graves and recovered the remains of 1,330 victims of Francoist violence. Spain is second only to Cambodia in terms of the numbers...
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Memory Without Borders: ARMH (1)

January 15, 2013
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Memory Without Borders: ARMH (1)

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of three articles about the work of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), a grassroots Spanish organization helping the victims of Francoism in their pursuit of truth, justice and reparations. Click here for the second and third. In early January, El...
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“I’ll Bring Some Empanadas to the Rally…”

November 20, 2012
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“I’ll Bring Some Empanadas to the Rally…”

Don Harris, founder of latienda.com, an on-line purveyor of fine Spanish foods, recently invited me to contribute a post to his blog.  My short piece, on the foodways of Spanish immigrants in the US, is currently featured there:http://blog.tienda.com/ As I mention in the post, it was while conducting research about how Spanish immigrants in the...
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