The Colombian government is contemplating the hire of Baltasar Garzón as Human Rights advisor as it sets up a process for transitional justice, ABC and Público report. The Judge has been suspended from his post at the National Criminal Court pending three cases against him at the Supreme Court. Last week,...
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s many of you know, the photo exhibition which I curated, "La colonia: A photo album of Spanish Immigrants in New York, 1898 - 1945," has been up at NYU's King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center since September. I'm delighted to announce that the show has been held over until May.
The show...
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Lito B. Zulueta at the Philippine Daily Inquirer visits the touring exhibit on foreign correspondents covering the Spanish Civil War, currently on display at the Instituto Cervantes in Manila:
the war was above all a propaganda war, or a war of dispatches, waged by Spanish and foreign correspondents who harbored within...
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The renowned social documentary photographer and activist Milton Rogovin died last week, aged 101. From the Buffalo News:
Mr. Rogovin turned to photography not long after being hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1957 for leftist political activity. ... His photography would take him from West Side...
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Celebrated triennially, Cine-Lit is the premiere international conference devoted to Hispanic film and literature and linked with the Portland International Film Festival. This February, Cine--Lit VII will feature a series of lectures and film screenings focusing on the cinematic representation of the role of the Lincolns in the Spanish Civil War. Juan Salas...
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Last night a young Spanish poet, Isabel Cadenas, showed me her blog: nuncafuiagranada.blogspot.com. When I asked her why she chose that line from Rafael Alberti's homage to Federico García Lorca, victim of a fascist firing squad in the first month of the civil war, she replied "Because I've never been to Granada." Alberti...
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In my family's photo albums is this shot of General Miaja (seated with round spectacles) --leader of the defense of Madrid-- in the living room of the Brooklyn home of my grandparents at some point during the Spanish Civil War.
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To the surprise of many, El País reports, the programming for the Berlin Film Festival this February includes a feature-length documentary about Baltasar Garzón by the Catalan director Isabel Coixet (The Secret Life of Words, My Life Without Me), based on a long interview that the novelist Manuel Rivas held with...
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A propos of Susie Linfield's new book on Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and others, Jed Perl reflects in The New Republic on the importance of "great photojournalism":
Photojournalists are yesterday’s heroes. ... Few photographers are any longer seen as providing definitive information about some national or international trouble spot, at...
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Another clip from Facing Fascism:
"No pasarán"--"They shall not pass"--was the antifascist rallying call throughout the war. The phrase referred to the defense of Madrid from the Fascist onslaught. A Spanish cigar maker living in Tampa, Florida, composed a song with those words as the refrain; it was recorded on a...
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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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What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
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Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
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As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
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Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
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The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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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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