Trisha Ziff's documentary Mexican Suitcase (review, trailer, website) has been one of thirty feature-length films to be nominated for an Ariel, the Mexican equivalent of the Oscar, Cinemanía reports. The most prestigious film award in the Mexican movie industry, the Ariel has been awarded annually since 1947.
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Agustí Centelles (1909-1985) is one of the most important photojournalists of the Spanish Civil War, and his work should be studied alongside that of Robert Capa, David Seymour, Gerda Taro, Hans Namuth, and Georg Reisner. This much is clear in the wake of the successful exhibit Centelles in_edit_¡oh!, which has been on show...
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On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the International Brigades, ALBA is organizing a get-together on December 9 and a silent auction to benefit the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.
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On a visit to sites important to the Spanish Civil War in October, 2010, Alan Warren took Josie Nelson Yurek, Parkie Parker, and me to visit the Ancient Major Synagogue in Barcelona. Historically, the Synagogue has roots dating back to the middle ages, although now it functions as a Museum in addition to...
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In a recent post in the Spanish-language blog FronteraD, filmmaker and novelist Alfonso Domingo reviews these two new books: Spanish translations of the memoirs of the Lincoln volunteer, James Yates (From Mississippi to Madrid: Memoirs of an African-American in the Lincoln Brigade) and of the complete writings of Langston Hughes about the war in Spain....
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Elizabeth Malkin reports in the NY Times:
The Spanish government asked the United States and El Salvador Friday to extradite 15 former Salvadoran military officers in the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter. The arrest warrants were issued in...
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Judge Baltasar Garzón, recipient of the first ALBA/Puffin Human Rights Award earlier this year, will stand trial on January 17 and 24 for two of the three cases pending against him at Spain's Supreme Court. In both, the principal charge is prevarication, that is, knowingly overstepping judicial boundaries. The January 24 stems from...
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Several months ago, President Zapatero appointed a committee of experts to put together a report with recommendations on the future of the Valle de los Caídos, the pharaonic monument and burial place of José Antonio Primo de Rivera (founder of Spain’s fascist party, Falange) and the Generalísimo himself, Francisco Franco. The committee issued its...
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The plaintiffs in the case against Franco's repression that is being handled by the Argentine courts (see previous Volunteer coverage here) have requested that the judge, María Servini de Cubría, travel to Spain to interview victims of Franco's repression, allowing them to testify. The plaintiffs have also presented a response to the report issued...
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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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