La Colonia: Spanish Immigrants in New York, 1898-1945, a photography exhibit curated by ALBA Board member James D. Fernández, and co-sponsored by ALBA, is opening this Friday, September 17, at 6:15pm at NYU's King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (53 Washington Square South).
In the early decades of the twentieth century, New York experienced a substantial influx...
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Judge Baltasar Garzón Real, who has been suspended from his post at Spain's National Criminal Court for his investigations of possible crimes against humanity committed under the Franco regime, has been honored with the Hrant Dink Award, named after the prominent Armenian journalist who was assassinated by a Turkish nationalist in January 2007....
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Broadcasting with Democracy Now! from Germany, ALBA Activist Award-winning Amy Goodman interviews the Spanish human rights attorney Juan Garcés, who worked as an advisor to Chilean President Salvador Allende until his death in the 1973 coup, and who was a key player in the 1998 indictment and arrest of General Pinochet, as...
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The Art Daily reports:
Tate Modern will present the first major retrospective of Joan Miró (1893–1983) to be held in London for almost 50 years. Opening on 14 April 2011, Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape will bring together over 150 paintings, works on paper and sculptures...
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Next week at the Cervantes Institute in London: a roundtable discussion featuring Paul Preston and Julián Casanova. Date and venue: 21 September 2010, 6.30 p.m. at the Instituto Cervantes, 102 Eaton Square, London, SW1W 9AN (near Victoria Station). More here.
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Alex de la Iglesia's new Spanish Civil War film, Balada triste de trompeta (The Last Circus), has just won a Silver Lion for direction and the award for Best Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival, Variety reports. See also De la Iglesia's blog (in Spanish).
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The Friends & Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (FFALB) report:
Almost seventy people attended a ten oʼclock screening of “The Good Fight” in Portland, Maine, on August 26th. Sponsored by Activists Forever! Friends & Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (FFALB), it was one of four films shown at...
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A piece in the LA Times calls attention to a series of events surrounding the legendary Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War:
In a serendipitous convergence of events, Siqueiros is having his biggest Southern California moment in decades: Construction of...
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At an improvised press conference last night, Judge Baltasar Garzón denounced the request from Supreme Court Justice Manuel Marchena to have the judicial police investigate his private bank accounts as "lacking all legal foundation" and "very harmful" to him and his family, El País reports. "I have nothing to hide," the Judge...
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Garry Wills and Jim Jump remember the SCW vet and classicist in obituaries for the New York Review of Books and The Independent. Wills:
It is not often that one has a professor who fought guerrilla wars in three different countries (Spain, France, and Italy). To a man left...
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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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