The socialization and assimilation of second generation children of immigrants promoted by World War II is a relatively well-known phenomenon.  Peter Carroll has argued that for many of the children-of-immigrant volunteers in the Lincoln Brigade, service in Spain was, in a complex way, a path towards Americanization.  This insight is powerfully borne out in...
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Some years ago, a student of mine did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the percentage of Hispanic surnames that are included on the Lincoln Brigade roster, and she came up with the figure of 8% – 12%.  The ALBA archives contain the personal papers of roughly 280 volunteers, or about 10% of the total number...
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Honest archival work is, I think, the most powerful antidote against complacent and arrogant certainty about the past.  I believe that most of us somehow instinctively feel that  the present is immensely complex and hard to grasp, and yet we often allow ourselves to think about the past as being somehow less complicated.  While...
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Today I had the pleasure of introducing the Spanish journalist, Anna Grau, to the treasures of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.  Together, we went through the scrapbook of Bernard Danchik, a young gymnast from Brooklyn, who lobbied for, and participated in, the Olimpiada Popular, an alternative anti-fascist sports competition organized in Barcelona in 1936,...
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Because of its altitude (10,000 feet above sea level), low humidity and minimal light pollution, Chile’s Atacama desert is the site of some of the world’s largest and most powerful telescopes.  The observatories in the desert are privileged viewing and listening posts, where antennae and lenses can capture signals emitted from the most distant...
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The haunting strains of “El Cant dels Ocells” – a Catalonian folk song orchestrated by the great cellist and Spanish Civil War refugee Pau Casals—were the overture to the memorial service for Lincoln vet, Matti August Mattson, held yesterday, March 18, in the auditorium of NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center. The...
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ALBA Board Member Soledad Fox recently sent me this lovely dispatch about an excursion she led of US college students to the town of Gernika in the Basque Country.  A professor at Williams College, Fox is the author of the outstanding book about Constancia de la Mora, In War and Exile:  International Voice for...
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The Club Julio A. Mella in Spanish Harlem was named after the founder of Cuba’s Communist party.  The exhibition “Nueva York:  1613 – 1945” (New-York Historical Society and Museo del Barrio), featured the original of this painting of that club by Henry Glintenkamp, as part of the exhibition’s final section.  In this closing sequence...
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As I mentioned in an earlier post, the curators of the museum show “Nueva York:  1613 – 1945” (New-York Historical Society, Museo del Barrio) used the Spanish Civil War in New York as a kind of provisional endpoint for the exhibition’s sweeping narrative about Spanish-speakers in Gotham.  The exhibition showed how the war brought...
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According to today’s literary supplement of El País (Babelia), Jorge M. Reverte has published a new book in which he reconstructs the history of an important part of Francoist Spain’s support of Hitler and Nazism during World War II. The Spanish falangist José Luis Arrese proposed the name “División Azul”  to refer to the...
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