Yesterday director Macarena Aguiló's documentary, entitled "The Chilean Building," premiered in New York City. The documentary focuses on an educational program called Project Home, which was created in the 1970s by members Chile's Revolutionary Left Movement and others who opposed the Pinochet regime. According to the New York Times, "these boys and girls...
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Alan Warren writes: An event at Quinto will be held over the weekend of August 31/ September 1, 2012 to commemorate the 75th anniversaries of the Battles of Quinto and Belchite. We look forward to meeting those keen to explore Purburrel Hill and the various locations of the Battle of Quinto aswell as the locations of...
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In a powerful op-ed in the New York Times today, filmmakers Michael Moore and Oliver Stone defend Julian Assange and warn against the consequences of a US attempt to prosecute the founder of Wikileaks:
If Mr. Assange is extradited to the United States, the consequences will reverberate for years around the world....
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Arizona Governor Jan Brewer staunchly defended her position as a stalwart of racism and bigotry in the United States' government this past week, signing into effect an "executive order instructing state officials to deny driver’s licenses and other benefits to young undocumented immigrants who are granted temporary legal status under a new federal program...
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The controversy regarding Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa's decision to grant asylum to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange this morning is growing at a rapid pace. According to The Guardian, Assange "took refuge in the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations of sexual misconduct." Ecuadorian officials are...
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Yesterday young undocumented immigrants lined up across the country to wait for the opportunity to defer deportation. This event marks the official initiation of President Barack Obama's plan to allow some young undocumented immigrants to apply for reprieve, and could affect as many as 1.7 million people, reports the New York Times....
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In Colombia, former workers for GM with various work-related injuries and disabilities have gone on a hunger strike, literally sewing their lips shut until their demands for the company are met. The strike has seen growth and received significant media coverage over recent days, beginning with four strikers on August 1st, and expanding to...
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Since the mid-1990s, Canada has served as a safe refuge for asylum-seeking Mexicans. In recent years however, especially during the violent escalations of Mexico's Drug War, a conservative Canadian government has become increasingly skeptical of these asylum-seekers. As the North American Congress on Latin America reports, "Between the mid-1990s and 2009, almost 50,000...
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Last week over 200 Ch'ol Mayans from the Mexican State of Chiapas went by caravan to Mexico City's Supreme Court to demand their rights to communal lands, which are currently being denied by Chiapan state officials, upsidedownworld.org reports. As Upside Down World writes:
According to the Ch’ol, the Chiapan government has ignored and...
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In the introduction to the North American Congress on Latin America's summer report on the Americas, William I. Robinson discusses the current role of Latin America in what has over the past two decades become an increasingly globalized world economy. Writes Robinson of the "Walmartization" of Latin America, "the new face of global...
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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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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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As a lifelong organizer and a student of history, I knew enough about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to know that JFREJ at least aspires to organize within the tradition that they so distinctly represent. But I've taken the last month to do a deeper dive into that history. And I have been profoundly inspired...
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Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
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Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
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“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
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The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
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The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
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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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