The Spanish Civil War Memory Project, an initiative of the University of California at San Diego in collaboration with several Spanish civic associations, seeks to build a digital Archive of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist repression. Since the summer of 2007 several teams of graduate students have been recording audiovisual testimonies of...
Read more »

Miguel Domínguez Soler was a talented man of humble origin who lived during tumultuous times, survived many brushes with death, and left a memoir based on the diaries he kept his entire life. He was born on March 1, 1910, in Ayamonte, Spain, across the River Guadiana from Portugal. In 1930, one year before...
Read more »

Buenaventura Durruti was a hero to the anarchist movement, and his death on the Madrid front on November 20, 1936, saw a mass outpouring of grief from Spain’s anarchists. The paper details the development of the posthumous cult of personality of Durruti between his death and the Barcelona May Days of 1937 and their...
Read more »

Between World Wars I and II, the contentious issue of nationalism—how it can be shaped in radical or conservative ways by racially oppressed people; whether it must be embraced or superseded by Black social movements worldwide—was a complex terrain on which members of the African Diasporagalvanized their extended communities. Contradictions abounded in the ideological...
Read more »

Viewing Taro’s negatives of the Battle of Brunete, preserved for seventy years in the Mexican Suitcase, is like seeing a ghost. They constitute a visual record of the last days of her life. Indeed, many of them have a ghostly quality. Whether the negatives have deteriorated over the years or were originally overexposed, many of them have a phantom look to them:...
Read more »

As Judge Baltasar Garzón faces a backlash that may cost him his position in Spain’s judiciary, ALBA invited María Blanco to give the keynote talk at the annual reunion of the Bay Area veterans and friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Berkeley, California, on May 30, 2010. What follows is the full text...
Read more »

War is not all shot and shell and go to hell. Infrequently, it’s play. It was on this occasion, when the Lincoln and Washington Brigades got together after Brunete for R and R—and a baseball game. I was the unofficial athletic director of the ALB, the proud guardian of all the bats and balls...
Read more »

Oliver Law, the first Black American to command white troops in battle, was appointed on July 5, 1937 as commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. According to eyewitness accounts of men under his command, Law died a hero’s death leading a charge against Francoist forces on Mosquito Hill at the Battle of Brunete on...
Read more »

A year ago, film researcher Juan Salas made the startling discovery that a 16mm print of documentary footage in the ALBA Collection of the Tamiment Library was the long lost film made by Henri Cartier-Bresson during the Spanish Civil War, titled With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain. The discovery prompted the decision to...
Read more »

In late summer 1937, former editor of the journal New Theater, Herbert Kline, traveled to Spain with French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and cameraman Jacques Lemare to shoot a documentary about the sanitary services of the American Medical Bureau, an organization created in the United States to aid...
Read more »