In the face of "falling popularity" and "economic crisis," state television in Spain will begin to air bullfighting after a six-year hiatus, reports the New York Times. This change in policy comes via the conservative Popular Party government, which, unlike many animal rights groups in Spain today, is staunchly pro-bullfighting, and opposes animal...
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Mexico's highest election court has rejected election runner-up Andrés Manuel López Obrador's legal challenge to overturn the results of the Mexican presidential election, which Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI party won on July 1st. Shortly following the election, López Obrador accused Peña Nieto of having "engaged in widespread vote-buying and campaign overspending...
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In his massive novel La noche de los tiempos, Antonio Muñoz Molina crafts an unforgettable fictional character named Judith Biely. The daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Judith grew up in New York, did doctoral work in Spanish Literature at Columbia, and traveled to Spain in the early 1930s to conduct doctoral research. In...
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You are invited to a celebration of the life of Dr. Michael H. Nash Head of Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives Please join Jeanne Nash, sons Raphael and Gabriel, and Mike’s friends and colleagues for a program of reminiscence and appreciation. Light refreshments to follow. Friday, September 28th, 2012 5:30pm to...
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This summer in Chile a group of volunteers has gained notoriety for their documentation of the illegal police activity demonstrated in student protests across the country. The group, which calls itself the "helmets" (members wear blue or white helmets when covering protests), consists of "ordinary citizens of all ages and walks of life, professionals...
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This past week at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, Republicans have made it an essencial goal to finalize a party platform on the issue of immigration. Whereas Mitt Romney has softened his stance towards undocumented immigrants over the past few months (claiming that he would "consider" passing a Dream Act for undocumented...
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This past Wednesday, authorities in Mexico announced that a group of captured criminals confessed to the killings of five journalists in the state of Veracruz earlier this year, reports the New York Times. One criminal admitted to committing an astounding 36 crimes alone. While this initially may seem like a crucial development, human...
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Earlier this week, hundreds of unemployed farmworkers occupied an empty estate in Hornachuelos, Spain (just miles outside of Seville) to protest the way the high rate of joblessness has been handled in Spain during their economic crisis. According to the New York Times:
The resentment here over land that has been left uncultivated at...
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The New York Police Department's decade-long surveillance program targeting Muslim communities is "reminiscent of the logic behind the country's shameful World War II experience in racial profiling, the roundup of citizens of Japanese descent," Alan Levine of Latino Justice writes in the National Law Journal. Levine argues that the program does not pass...
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A century-old Jesus fresco, entitled "Ecce Homo," was defiled in a Roman Catholic church in Borja, Spain this past week. The person responsible for such sacrilege? Eighty year-old Cecilia Giménez. According to the New York Times, "the authorities in Borja said they had suspected vandalism at first, but then determined that the shocking...
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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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