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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
No, a new film by Pablo Larraín on the 1988 referendum that ended the Pinochet dictatorship, premiered to great acclaim this week in Santiago de Chile, after winning the Art Cinema Award at Cannes in May. Based on a play by Antonio Skármeta (of Il Postino fame), and starring the Mexican actor Gael García...
Read more »
In a long interview with Natalia Junquera in El País six months after his disbarment, Judge Baltasar Garzón opens up about his work with Julian Assange, his determination to fight the Supreme Court decision ending his career, his work in Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador, Argentina, and Seattle, and the foundation he started...
Read more »
A recent article by Canada's Time Colonist journalist Cory Ruf explores the history of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, its survivors, and how it has (not) been remembered.
Read more »
Suzanne Daley, writing for the New York Times, profiles José A. Lorente, a Spanish expert in forensic genetics whose work has helped families worldwide find their missing children:
He has made headlines around the world helping to identify the remains of Christopher Columbus and Simón Bolívar, and bodies found in mass graves...
Read more »
Norman Markowitz, writing for People's World, mourns the death of his long-time friend Mike Nash, the director of the Tamiment Library who passed away unexpectedly late last month:
The son of New York City school teachers - his father a victim of the post World War II firings and blacklisting, his mother a trade...
Read more »
Today from 3:00-4:00 p.m. WNYC AM 820 aired an interview with Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran James Benet. The interview was aired as a segment of PRI's "The World". Read and listen to the program here.
Read more »
In an op-ed for The Guardian, Michael Ratner wrote yesterday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whom he represents, is right to fear prosecution in the United States once he has been indicted from the United Kingdom to Sweden in relation to a case of alleged sexual misconduct. "There are several unambiguous signs that...
Read more »
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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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,...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
“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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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
Search the Database