As the war in Spain dragged on, divisions among the Spaniards in New York became more and more pronounced. The pro-Republican paper “Frente Popular” regularly “outed” the city’s Spaniards who were pro-Franco or insufficiently pro-Republic. “Figures of the Spanish Colony of NY, who, because they are fascists are in part responsible for the horrible...
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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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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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Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
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Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
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Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
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The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
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Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
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Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
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Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
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Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
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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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