Lorna Scott Fox writes in the London Review of Books about the first criminal persecution in the massive scandal of stolen babies that began under Franco and continued into Spanish democracy:
According to lawyers for victim groups, as many as 350,000 babies were stolen from poor, single or left-wing mothers between 1938...
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On March 27, 1938, Avelino González Mallada, former mayor of the Asturian city of Gijón, died in a car crash on a country road in Woodstock, Virginia. The New York Times (p. 4) explained on the next day that “Señor Mallada was in this country on a sixty-day permit granted to him by the...
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The Instituto Cervantes in New York alerts us to a terrific event to take place on April 12, at 7pm: "Tales from the Lincoln Brigade," a round table discussion to present the first books of the Biblioteca Afro-Americana de Madrid (African-American Library of Madrid, BAAM): the Spanish translations of Langston Hughes's dispatches from the Spanish Civil War,...
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Tampa, Florida was a sleepy town of just a few thousand inhabitants when, in 1885, the Spanish cigarmakers Vicente Martínez Ybor and Ignacio Haya decided to relocate their “clear Havana tobacco” cigar factories to the area from Key West. (They had relocated in 1869 from Havana to Key West to avoid both the high...
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Another somewhat unlikely focus of anti-fascist activism during the Spanish Civil War was Barre, Vermont. The town was home to a significant population of working class Spaniards most of whom had left their native region of Cantabria (Santander) during the first decades of the twentieth century to work in the granite quarries and stone...
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The 2007 museum show and catalog “Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War” broke new ground by focusing on the way individuals and communities in New York city responded to the outbreak, conduct, and outcome of the Spanish Civil War. And while New York was a particularly active site for all kinds...
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Kate Doyle of the National Security Archives, winner of the 2012 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, reflects on the pursuit of justice in Guatemala in NACLA's new Report on the Americas--a special issue dedicated to "Central America: Legacies of War." Other contributors include Greg Grandin (who interviews Noam Chomsky),...
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Alan Warren notifies us of an upcoming event around 22 photographs of the retreats in Aragón, depicting American volunteers, for which research has been able to pinpoint the exact location where they were taken (text and announcement in Catalan, in pdf here):
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Severiano Montero, of the Association of Friends of the International Brigades (AABI), sends a report on recent commemorations and other events:
On February 27, we presented at the Ateneo de Madrid the Fanny Edelman's book "Rebelion militante". Jorge Grela, Vicente González and Miguel Pastrana glossed the human and political significance of this fighter for human...
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A former Guatemalan soldier has been convicted to more than 6,000 years in prison for his role in a massacre of more than 200 people during the Internal Conflict, the BBC reports. Yesterday, also for the BBC, Paula Dear covered the story of the country's quest for justice.
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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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