Author Archive for James D. Fernández

Next Stop: Guernica

March 18, 2011
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Next Stop: Guernica

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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Nueva York (3): Club Julio A. Mella in Harlem

March 8, 2011
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Nueva York (3): Club Julio A. Mella in Harlem

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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Nueva York (2): Langston Hughes on Cuban Lincoln volunteer Basilio Cueria

March 7, 2011
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Nueva York (2):  Langston Hughes on Cuban Lincoln volunteer Basilio Cueria

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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La División Azul. Rusia, 1941-1944

March 5, 2011
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La División Azul. Rusia, 1941-1944

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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Nueva York (1)

March 3, 2011
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Nueva York (1)

Several years ago, when the Museum of the City of New York was gearing up for its show “Facing Fascism:  New York and the Spanish Civil War,” we realized that while we knew a good deal about how some communities or groups in New York had responded to the outbreak of the war in...
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Bob Dylan and the Spanish Civil War

February 28, 2011
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Bob Dylan and the Spanish Civil War

Suze Rotolo, 1943 – 2011 The press is reporting the sad news of the death of Suze Rotolo, the American artist, teacher and political activist who was Bob Dylan’s companion and muse in the early 1960s.  Rotolo is frequently credited with Dylan’s awakening to politics.  According to one obituary she took the “then fairly...
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The Resynchronization of a Regime (1940-1950)

February 28, 2011
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The Resynchronization of a Regime (1940-1950)

In 1940, Francisco Franco, using the pseudonym Jaime de Andrade, authored a treatment for a screenplay, titled “Raza :  Story lines for a film script.”  The following year, the script was made into a feature-length film, produced by the government. The original text and the 1941 film are invaluable documents, as they offer us...
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ALBA: A Laboratory of Experiments in Moral Courage

February 20, 2011
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ALBA:  A Laboratory of Experiments in Moral Courage

The thousands of documents, images and artifacts that make up the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives can mean different things to different people. To the veterans and their immediate friends and family, the Archives are, among other things, a repository of the personal papers and effects of loved ones, a kind of extended and collective...
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Wikileaks avant la wiki (3): Department of State press release, Mar. 4, 1946.

February 13, 2011
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Wikileaks avant la wiki (3): Department of State press release, Mar. 4, 1946.

Opening statement from the US Department of State, from the publication “The Spanish Government and the Axis,” a collection of the wartime correspondence between Franco, Hitler and Mussolini which was discovered in Germany in 1945: THE GOVERNMENTS of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America have exchanged views with regard to...
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Wikileaks, avant la Wiki: FDR on Franco in 1945 (2)

February 11, 2011
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Wikileaks, avant la Wiki: FDR on Franco in 1945 (2)

I recently stumbled across a WikiLeaks-like March 1945 letter by FDR to the new US Ambassador in Madrid, saying that the US government will hold its nose and maintain relations with the Franco regime, but that it repudiates the origins and ideology of the regime. Little did I know that this brief archival document...
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