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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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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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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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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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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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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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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(English version.) Publicada el 6 de marzo de 2010 en la edición en línea de The Volunteer, como una versión extendida de la entrevista que apareció en el número de marzo de 2010 de la edición en papel de esa misma publicación. Traducción de Sara Plaza (civalleroyplaza.blogspot.com.es/) “Contar grandes historias a través de las...
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Mike Nash, the director of New York University’s Tamiment Library, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives and ALBA board member, died unexpectedly on July 24. He was 66. A well known and accomplished archivist and historian, he came to NYU in 2002 from the Hagley Museum and Library, after working at Cornell University and the...
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The Spanish on-line paper El Plural is reporting a rather shocking story from Madrid. “The State Secretariat of Information has decided that the news conference planned for next week by the Circle of Foreign Correspondents in Spain with former judge Baltasar Garzón “is not appropriate” (“no es idóneo”), and it has denied permission for...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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Nobody remembers Lloyd Mallan. I came across his name while writing a book on poet- playwright Federico García Lorca’s iconic afterlife. Mallan’s piece on the poet’s assassination, published in 1939, was instrumental in spreading to the U.S. and Canada a highly embellished narrative of poetic martyrdom that helped shape the public image of Lorca....
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For an English translation of this article, see here.
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On May 30, 1937, the Republican freighter Ciudad de Barcelona was hit by a torpedo fired by a lurking Nationalist submarine. The torpedo tore a gaping hole in the ship and it rapidly sank. A Republican seaplane drove the submarine away with a depth charge attack, then landed and began rescuing men in the...
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Dr. Irving Busch (1896-1960), a graduate of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, volunteered to serve in Spain with the American Medical Bureau. In Spain, he served with the Republican Medical Services. Both before and after Spain Busch was an amateur photographer and he carried his camera along with him. After his death...
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The picture of a young man in a jaunty hat and a big smile stared out of the 1978 issue of The Volunteer. The photo was accompanied by a request for information about Sidney Lorraine who died in Spain during the course of The Retreats. There is no evidence of any replies. Sidney Hotchkiss...
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Many American veterans went on to serve in WWII and Korea. This list is a work in progress. Those marked with an “*” were killed during the war. Office of Strategic Services Aalto, William Oliver WWII US Army, joined December 1941 served as 1st SGT transfer to OSS April 12, 1942; Dismissed after he...
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Eddie O’Neill was born in the same County Tyrone neighborhood as the poet Charlie Donnelly (1914-1937), who was killed in action at Jarama while serving as a platoon leader with the James Connolly Section of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. Inspired by the sacrifice of his fellow countryman and fellow Irish Socialist Republican, Eddie set...
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“A prominent competitive player in the United States gave a series of lectures and played over famous games from the past. To hear him talking—in our squalid surroundings—with such knowledge about a game once played by Napoleon on the island of St. Helena, was an uplifting and inspiring experience.” In his memoir To...
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With the submission of the August batch freedom of information act (FOIA) requests ALBA will have filed for over 1,000 passport records of American volunteers. Due to the ongoing pandemic responses to the submissions have been minimal. However, we did receive three responses this week. This is only the second batch received in the...
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A short video of the graves visited in 2021. Memorial Day is the day traditionally set aside to remember Americans who served in the military. And, yet, Americans who went to Spain to fight fascism are rarely, if ever, included in the remembrances on this day. The Lincoln Battalion Memorial...
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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