I’m back in Monterey, California, following up on the story of the Spanish immigrants who settled in this area in the early decades of the 20th century.  I’m constantly surprised both by the ubiquity of photographs, stories, and objects related to the Republic and the Spanish Civil War, and by the relative oblivion into...
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I had the pleasure of visiting the ALBA archives a couple of weeks ago with Alan Levine, a New York-based civil rights attorney with a longstanding interest in the Lincolns.  In the early 1960s, fresh out of Yale Law School, Alan took a job on Wall Street, a decision which he soon regretted.  In...
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En inglés aquí. 1937.  Una gira campestre en Toro Park, a 15 kilómetros de la ciudad de Monterey, California.  Varios centenares de inmigrantes españoles que se han establecido en la Península de Monterey y en el Valle de Santa Clara disfrutan de un ameno “picnic”.  Pero los puños en alto nos recuerdan que en...
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En español aquí. 1937.  A picnic in Toro Park, 9 miles from Monterey, California.  Several hundred Spaniards from the Monterey Peninsula and the Santa Clara Valley enjoy a pleasurable get-together.  But the raised clenched fists remind us that a war is going on in Spain, and that this social gathering 6,000 miles away in...
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On March 27, 1938, Avelino González Mallada, former mayor of the Asturian city of Gijón, died in a car crash on a country road in Woodstock, Virginia.  The New York Times (p. 4) explained on the next day that “Señor Mallada was in this country on a sixty-day permit granted to him by the...
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Tampa, Florida was a sleepy town of just a few thousand inhabitants when, in 1885, the Spanish cigarmakers Vicente Martínez Ybor and Ignacio Haya decided to relocate their “clear Havana tobacco” cigar factories to the area from Key West.  (They had relocated in 1869 from Havana to Key West to avoid both the high...
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Another somewhat unlikely focus of anti-fascist activism during the Spanish Civil War was Barre, Vermont.  The town was home to a significant population of working class Spaniards most of whom had left their native region of Cantabria (Santander) during the first decades of the twentieth century to work in the granite quarries and stone...
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The 2007 museum show and catalog “Facing Fascism:  New York and the Spanish Civil War” broke new ground by focusing on the way individuals and communities in New York city responded to the outbreak, conduct, and outcome of the Spanish Civil War. And while New York was a particularly active site for all kinds...
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Giles Tremlett, correspondent of The Guardian in Madrid, and author of Ghosts of Spain, reviews Paul Preston’s latest book about terrorism and its legacy in Franco’s Spain. “Franco had time to impose his own version of history, which still prevents contemporary Spain from “looking upon its recent violent past in an open and honest...
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I have just read the writ with which the presiding judge dismisses, on the grounds of an expired statute of limitations, the so-called “New York” case against Baltasar Garzón. In this writ of dismissal, as well as in his previous writ of indictment, the judge claims that New York University has concealed or fudged...
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